Above the harsh noise of Communist China's
bold new effort to reduce an entire people to the level of robots
came the nightingale song of Radio Peking: “The
people's communes are paradises. Manpower and material resources are
more than in heaven. Industry and agriculture leap forward together,
and one year equals thousands of years in the past.”In Shantung, boasted the New China News Agency, 200,000 common messhalls
and 190,000 nurseries have freed 6,700,000 mothers for work in the
fields. In Honan 7,000,000 more women are now happily working away on
dams or collecting manure. Peking recently predicted that during 1958
steel production and agriculture would double. But in between the
glowing reports—of efficient mass dormitories, reveille at 5 a.m., and
the bracing daily militia drills —even the Communists have been dropping
hints of discontent in paradise.In Russia itself and in the Eastern European satellites the Communist
press seems to feel that the less said about Chinese communes the
better. But the coffeehouse Communist intelligentsia of Warsaw, hearing
of the communes, are repeating an old Polish Communist wheeze: “Thank
God for the Soviet Union. We are lucky to have a buffer state between
us and China.”Red China itself admitted a little dissension. In the province of
Liaoning, reported the People's Daily, “shock teams” and
“treasure-digging teams” who collect scrap iron—and are supposed to
turn in their own no-longer-needed kitchenware—”took away steel rods
on public buildings, underground drainpipes and iron railings, and
handed them over to the authorities as scrap iron.” In Honan, it added,
peasants complain bitterly about the common messhalls, which prevent
them from having friends at home for dinner. In Hopei they worry about
having no kitchens of their own or a brick oven to sleep on during the
winter.A 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” . 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
, and the children's 70-year-old
grandmother worked on a “mending brigade.” Among other conveniences at
the commune was a common grave—a pool filled with a special chemical
to help turn bodies into useful fertilizer.
