CHINA: Frank Admissions

“Enrich yourselves!” the Bolsheviks told Russia’s peasants in the rosy first dawn of the Revolution, when the large estates were divided up with Marxist equality. The peasants enriched themselves, but equality did not last long. So Stalin drove the peasants into state collective farms, or kolkhozes.

The old Soviet pattern now seems to be at work in China. In 1946, the peasants in Shansi province, in the northwest, were among the first in China to be violently communized: landlords were liquidated and everything was divided equally, not only the land but hoes and scythes. Even farm animals were slaughtered so as to be divisible. Last week Mao Tse-tung’s Reds made public a study of what happened to 600 Shansi peasant families in five villages during five years of agrarian reform. The report was full of standard propaganda touches—”Drowning of girl babies has stopped,” and “Sexual promiscuity has been reduced by 74%”—and it talked glowingly of increased production and increased education, but it contained some frank admissions.

A sixth of the families have illegally sold some of their land to pay for weddings and funerals. At the other end, about as many family heads have increased their holdings, and some have even begun lending money to the nouveau poor at interest of 60% a year. All in all, 20% of the peasants have become poor, while about 20% have become “obviously wealthy.” Lamented the Red report: “Some peasants show no interest in politics . . . They think that the revolution has been completed.”

Far from it. The report notes admiringly: “Some peasants have undertaken to adopt the pattern of an agricultural cooperative. Under this system the land would be collectively cultivated and the produce distributed according to the members’ contribution of labor and land.” Obviously, the 42.3% of the peasants who still prefer to “work by themselves” and “yearn for the capitalist way of getting rich” might profitably remember what happened to the Russian kulak.