Word: communings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Only 600 yards across the West River from the Portuguese colony of Macao lies a Red Chinese people's commune on Lappa Island, and across this narrow stretch of water last week could be seen a chilling glimpse behind the Bamboo Curtain...
...inhabitants of Wanchai, a sleepy town opposite Macao's inner harbor, were summarily herded last July into 50 bamboo-and-nipa barracks, put to work building roads and a causeway to connect their island to the Red mainland. The Lappa commune's day starts at 5 a.m. when shrill whistles split the dawn. From 5 until 8, the men and women do calisthenics and military drill (with wooden rifles). After a 15-minute break for breakfast, the commune marches off in formation to work on the causeway. With the exception of two other 15-minute breaks for meals...
Until last week, Lappa seemed a normal anthill commune. The docile and resigned women lived in the barracks nearest the water's edge; men lived further removed from the temptation of liberty, and Communist gunboats, constantly patrolling the river, discouraged anyone who might try to swim to freedom...
...after dawn one day last week, residents of Macao's waterfront were wakened by an uproar coming from the commune. Silhouetted against the southern sky, Communist troops were moving on the double across the causeway. Macao people reported hearing the bark of rifles, the chatter of machine guns, followed by screams and a deadly silence...
Tartars & Tonnage. For Red China's agricultural planners the commune system has obvious advantages: constantly under the eye of the commune's "activists," Chinese peasants will no longer be able to evade forced deliveries of crops to the government. More important, all of China's farmers can be forced to adopt improved techniques, such as deep plowing (as much as 3 ft.) and massive use of natural fertilizer, which have given Communist experimental farms per-acre rice yields twice as big as Japan's highest...