Word: ration
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...great leap was .accompanied by a mighty fumble. Last month, despite a claimed 102% increase in staple food crops, the grain ration was cut in China's cities and the lowly cabbage was put on the ration list for the first time. Since then, laundry soap has been added to the list and the monthly sugar ration has been slashed to slightly more than half a pound per person. In the great port of Canton there is a shortage of fish; in Shanghai, meat is all but unobtainable...
...Westerner recently returned from Peking suggests another reason for the paradox of record crops and ration cuts. He reported that the citizens of Peking, fearing the day when they will be herded into people's communes, have started hoarding food and gorging themselves in the city's renowned restaurants. By withholding food, the Reds are squeezing the city dweller into the communal mess hall. "When the private food hoards are gone and people cannot buy much on the local markets," the Western visitor reported, "they will be forced to eat in the community kitchens...
...bogged down lugging pig iron for the nation's new steel industry; the bureaucracy is making a mess of distribution. Last month the people of Canton, who live next to a sea of fish, could get no fish; Shanghai residents had to take half of their rice ration in sweet potatoes...
...best job was done by a radio station tied to a good newspaper-the New York Times's WQXR. Department editors went on the air to read stories; other staffers chatted conversationally among themselves on topics of the hour. Taped interviews with Timesmen overseas gave listeners a Timeslike ration of international affairs. Every day Theodore M. Bernstein, the Times's able, shirt-sleeved assistant managing editor, patiently and expertly filled for his audience, column by column, an imaginary Times Page One-and emerged as a radio personality in his own right...
...shakedown bed under the stairway of an unheated Moscow tenement house. There he received anonymous gifts of food, rather like a Hindu holy man before whose hovel little dishes are placed by unseen hands. During the Terror of '36-'37, he lost his "living space" and food-ration privileges. When Red Army Marshal Tukhachevsky et al. were executed, Pasternak was asked to sign a resolution of approval, and refused: "My wife was pregnant. She cried and begged me to sign, but I couldn't ... I abhorred all this blood ... It was, I was told later, my colleagues...