The Road to Collectivism

"A step forward is necessary," said Peking's People's Daily, ". . . to combat this spontaneous capitalist trend of the peasants." Peking has long complained that China's peasants are slow to hate their "class enemies," i.e., the surviving landlords who still own an acre or more. Judging by the reports of travelers reaching free Hong Kong and by the hysterical tone of Communist reprimands, masses of peasants are refusing to sell their crops to the government at the fixed low rates prescribed by law. The peasants, squeezed by taxes, "voluntary patriotic contributions," and high living costs, are also letting farm production lag; they do not want to produce themselves into higher tax brackets or extend their tiny plots, for deathly fear of becoming landlords.

One Communist newspaper admitted that peasants are smuggling high-priced grain in false-bottomed bags to black-marketeers, who tempt them "with honeyed words and cigarettes." Another said that peasants are dumping vegetables into the rivers, "because purchase prices are too low."

Red China's reaction to this "spontaneous capitalism" was more socialization, more coercion. Peking radio announced last week that the first, far-famed "agrarian reform," which theoretically gave small plots to poor peasants to own and work for themselves, was now proving "unstable . . . weak . ... unable to weather natural calamities." Instead, the peasants' "individual economy" will be transformed along Russian lines: 35,800 collective farms will be set up before this year's harvest, 800,000 by the end of 1957.

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