RED CHINA: The People’s Communes

It used to be said of Red China that it was repeating, stage by stage, Russia’s Communist development a third of a century later. But the evidence coming out of China is that Mao Tse-tung is engaged in a more drastic experiment than Stalin or Khrushchev ever tried. The official name for it is “the people’s communes” movement.

In Inner Mongolia, reported New China News Agency, peasants “marked the occasion with revelry that included singing, dancing, and decorating their houses with lamps.” In Kiangsi province they beat drums and gongs and shot off firecrackers. Cause of all this merriment: formation of two new “people’s communes”—the most determined attempt yet to reduce human beings to the status of ants.

90% Herded. Red China’s first “people’s commune,” a single unit of 9,300 peasant families organized along military lines, was set up in Honan province six months ago without fanfare. Early in September, apparently pleased with the results of the Honan experiment, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party gave the go-ahead for a nationwide switchover to communes. By last week Peking was boasting that already 90.4% of China’s 500 million peasants had been herded into 23,393 communes.

The life that faces Red China’s peasantry in the communes is regimented beyond the dreams of ancient Sparta. Each commune, averaging about 21,000 inhabitants, is ruled by a party committee that controls everything from food distribution to funerals. Organized into work brigades, the inhabitants of the communes mostly have no set jobs, can be shunted on a day-to-day basis from farm work to military or industrial duties. Ultimately, private property is to be utterly abolished and already the most “advanced” communes have compelled the peasants to surrender the personal garden plots they were allowed to keep when they were forced onto “cooperative farms” three years ago. (The problem of individually owned fruit trees, says the Central Committee tolerantly, can be left for settlement later.)

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 to the “sewing brigade.” The result, declares Peking, is that 20 million women in seven provinces now find themselves “freed” to contribute the family pots and pans to a scrap-metal drive and turn their attention from housework to such progressive tasks as “road building, tree planting and ditch digging.”

Ball Bearings & Bureaucracy. It is Peking’s dream that the communes, by using men as interchangeable parts, can convert China’s peasantry into a part-time industrial proletariat. Already, according to Communist propagandists, the communes have established 1,000.000 new “factories.” In fact, most of these factories are simple workshops or smelting furnaces. British Laborite M.P. Richard Grossman, one of the few Westerners to get a firsthand look at the communes, reported recently in London’s New Statesman:

“On the Yangtse, where there is opencast mining, I saw 220 peasants hacking iron ore out of an open hillside and breaking it to pieces with hammers. Another 460 were busy constructing a dozen primitive blast furnaces and preparing a steelworks as well. ‘Next year we shall make our own farm machinery,’ I was told, ‘buying the engine but doing the rest ourselves.’ In Honan … I saw 170 peasants busily making primitive agricultural implements—including handmade ball bearings for the wheels of their carts.”

The Heavy Cost. Grossman himself is a left-wing British Socialist who edited The God That Failed (TIME, Jan. 9. 1950), a damning indictment of Communism by former party members and fellow travelers. Taken on a conducted tour by the Chinese Reds, he was somehow persuaded that formation of the communes was actually “spontaneous and unforeseen by the State Planning Commission.” Yet even the establishment of the far milder cooperative farms met with considerable opposition among Red China’s peasants. In Kwangtung province alone 118.000 peasants and their families deserted cooperative farms in 1956. Peking itself admits that the establishment of the communes has produced “vacillation” among the “upper-middle peasants.” Stalin’s forced collectivization of Russian agriculture in the 19305—3 program less radical than the establishment of the Chinese communes—was achieved only at the cost of more than 10 million Russian lives. Whether Mao can succeed without resistance on a similar scale in China remains to be seen. The success or failure of Mao’s big gamble will obviously influence the audacity or caution of Peking’s foreign policy diversions.

Already Peking ideologists are predicting that when the communes come into full flower, six years or so from now, China will have achieved true Communism, as Russia has not—thus furthering Chairman Mao’s bid for ideological pre-eminence in the Communist world.