RED CHINA: The Rice of Socialism

For Chinese, their grain is rice, and their meat is pork. Last week, under their Communist masters, they were getting less of both.

In the wake of the country’s worst combination of floods, drought and famine in nearly a decade, Communist administrators had taken to including sweet potatoes in weighing out the daily pound of rice. Farmers, with a bitterness that only a Chinese can fully appreciate, had coined a saying: “Sweet potatoes and noodles are the rice of socialism.”

Pork rationing, long in force in other cities, was extended to Peking itself. Farmers were unrationed, but they were getting less than half the pork they had eaten in the past; the state bought their pigs at fixed low prices through the purchasing monopoly, sold them back through the state sales monopoly at a price few peasants could afford. In the cities there was often not enough to fill even the ration. In Shanghai people got up at 3 a.m. to get at the head of the queues in the pork market.

Where had the pork gone? The answer was that the government was exporting the pork to Russia to pay for industrial imports—a fact the government keeps quiet for fear of angering its hungry people. But in Shanghai, when a batch of frozen pork is rejected by the Russians for inferior quality, the Chinese are allowed to buy what the Russians will not take. And once in a while, a Communist newspaper makes a slip. Example: one Cantonese newspaper impressed on its readers that 22,000 Ibs. of frozen pork can be exchanged abroad for one tractor.

The Communists are obviously intent on maintaining pork production. Country newspapers recently praised extravagantly a farm woman whose cooperatively owned sow died while still suckling half a dozen little pigs; the woman saved the pigs by feeding them at her own breast. Some 3,000,000 Chinese students have been taken from their studies and sent into the fields. Last week the New China News Agency complained that some had arrived with the idea of becoming “a new kind of temporary peasant,” but had lost enthusiasm when they learned they had been assigned to farm work for life.