Failure in the Communes

In Hong Kong last week, experts on Red China read and reread this statement: "To speak of greatness in a man is not to say that he is always correct." What lent fascination to this seemingly innocuous sentence from Peking's New China SemiMonthly was the fact that the Chinese word it used for "greatness" is one the Reds usually reserve for Mao Tse-tung. With customary bafflegab. Peking was publicly admitting that Chairman Mao has been forced into a humiliating retreat by the stubbornness of "The Old Hundred Names"--Red China's faceless peasant masses.

Fifteen months ago, when Mao first began to herd his subjects into the slavery of agricultural communes (TIME, Oct. 20), Red China's bosses joyfully proclaimed that the Marxist millennium was at hand. "We were told," said one refugee who made it to freedom in Hong Kong. "that once the commune got under way it would provide free meals for all. pay wages to all, take care of young and old and bring to the people many other blessings." But within weeks the food stocks that the government had hoarded in order to get the communes off to a good start began torun out--and the peasants' disillusionment began.

Deprived of such land as they had under the collective farms, paid largely in kind rather than cash and denied extra pay for extra effort, many peasants saw no incentive to work. "The well-to-do middle peasants." admits Peking's Journal of Humanity, "said, 'Now that everything is communal, let us make believe we have lost our property in gambling.' "

Efficiency fell off so badly that in Shensi province, members of four communes assigned to reap grain left nearly 300 tons of wheat to waste in the fields. Inevitably, too. the peasants lost interest in selling their crops; according to the Peking People's Daily, the amount of produce kept by China's peasants for their own use jumped 146% last year.

Who Cares? Along with loss of incentive went gross mismanagement by party activists in the communes. Dutifully heeding Peking's clamorous cries for concentration on grain and on backyard steel production (since largely abandoned), commune bosses neglected vegetables, cloth and fiber crops. The result was a severe crimp in Red China's once booming export drive (TIME, Aug. 3), and a vegetable shortage so severe that last month China's cities were informed that henceforth they would have to grow all their own food except grain (TIME, July 13).

Worse yet, young Red "agricultural experts" set impossibly high production quotas for the communes, drove man and beast so hard that abnormal numbers of cattle and water buffalo began to die of overwork. As for the peasants, reported Canton's Nan-fang Duily sadly, "quite a few commune members were found not to care very much about production quotas." By last June. Agriculture Minister Liao Lu-yen found himself obliged to report that, so far in 1959, land planted to food grains was running 1,300,000 acres behind 1958--a fact that promised to cost China's already hungry populace at least 14 million tons of grain this year.

Money Is Nicer. Eight months ago the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, already smelling bad trouble, ordered a "tidying up" of the communes (TIME, Dec. 29). But as discouraging statistics continued to pour in, Peking was obliged to switch from a tidy-up to an all-out housecleaning. Step by reluctant step, Red China's bosses retreated from the communes' nearly complete abolition of private property to something closer to the mixture of private and communal enterprise that had existed on the old collective farms. Two months ago, in an effort to increase China's supply of its favorite meat (and prime source of fertilizer), Peking decreed that "individual commune members must be encouraged to raise pigs," and should get plots of land on which to grow feed for them. To restore the peasants' incentive, it was decided that they would be allowed to keep all the money they earned from such sideline occupations as pig raising, would also get individual overproduction bonuses--including, in some communes, retroactive bonuses for 1958.

Out of Peking came a snowstorm of directives reminding Communist cadres in the communes that they should "consult the masses and make use of their experiences." When the cadres did consult the masses, they made some dismaying discoveries. In one commune the peasants firmly announced that they preferred to be paid in cash rather than food, because "money may be used the way one likes." In Hong Kong last week, a Chinese merchant, recently returned from his native village near Canton, reported that the communal mess hall had been closed down, individual food rations restored and the 4 a.m. quasi-military parade to work abandoned. "People still have to work from morning till night to fulfill their quotas," he said, "but there are no more compulsory working hours."

The Nightmare. In Formosa, rejoicing at such news, Nationalist China's Premier Chen Cheng last week declared that Mao's government was "on the brink of total collapse." Western specialists in Hong Kong (a sizable community) did not agree that Peking's plight was by any means that desperate, but the encouraging fact remained that Mao's nightmare effort to reduce 650 million human beings to the status of draft animals had had a stunning setback.

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