Word: communings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Volunteers. To feed so many mouths, and to get work out of so many bodies, Mao decided on the ruthless and revolutionary device of the people's commune-a system of forced collectivization of human beings which the Russians abandoned as impractical in 1933. Rural people's communes, the first of which appeared in Honan province last April, sometimes have as many as 300,000 members, in most cases absorb the whole population of a county-peasants, traders, students, officials and professional men. Upon "volunteering" to join a commune, members turn over to it virtually all their private...
Gone, too, is any notion of personal life or freedom of choice. Instead of a share of what they produce, commune members get wages fixed by a ruling committee of party activists. At Sputnik Commune, 260 mess halls have been set up where members are fed free rice. These communal kitchens, plus communal nurseries and "mending brigades," relieve the wives of members from "dull and trivial housework," transform women, too, into all-purpose laborers. (The sole concession made to femininity: pregnant women get a month off work with half pay.) Even the old folks, for whom the commune has established...
...year-old lady had her secretaries build a small furnace in the garden of her Shanghai home. There-said Radio Peking-the secretaries now toil blithely from dawn until evening, producing as much as 341 Ibs. of good-quality steel a day. Last week, according to commune knowledge, the lady joined the workers in the garden, saying: "Making steel also tempers people." As vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, sister of Nationalist China's Madame Chiang Kaishek and widow of the founder of the Chinese Republic, she is an alloy herself-Madame...
...more intimate account of life in the commune came from a young mother who managed to escape to Hong Kong, hollow-cheeked and scaly from bad diet. At 5 each morning, she and her husband were aroused for "mass sports" (i.e., calisthenics). Their only meal together with their two sons was breakfast. Her husband was sent off in one direction to work all day, she in another. They put their young sons in a common nursery (which charged for the privilege), and the children's 70-year-old grandmother worked on a "mending brigade." Among other conveniences...
Private life, too, is not to last for long. Some communes are already planning to tear down' the houses of their members and use the salvaged brick, tile and timber to build communal barracks. In Honan two-thirds of the province's 10 million children are now being cared for in communal nurseries, and in some of the older communes "people's mess halls" have already become, the Reds boast, "almost the only place one can eat." Instead of turning to his wife when his trousers need mending, the good commune member now takes his problem...