Communes for the Cities

Sixteen months ago, when Red China's "great leap forward" seemed in danger of ending in an ignominious sprawl (TIME, Feb. 16, 1959 et seq.), Peking's planners decided that for the time being they would concentrate on forcing the nation's peasants into the hive life of the new "people's communes." "In the cities," explained the Central Committee of China's Communist Party, "bourgeois ideology is still fairly prevalent among many of the capitalists and intellectuals; they still have misgivings about the establishment of communes--so we should wait a bit for them."

Last week, as Red China's rubber-stamp National People's Congress met in its spanking new Peking headquarters, Mao and his henchmen changed their tune. With the rural communes so solidly established that 400 million Chinese peasants now eat in community mess halls, the Red commissars were ready to crack down on city dwellers. To the chorused cheers of 1,063 Congressmen, Liu Chieh-po. vice president of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, triumphantly announced that communes had been established in most of China's cities, had been successfully imposed on the majority of urbanites in the three populous northern provinces of Heilungkiang, Honan and Hopei. All told, boasted Liu, no fewer than 20 million city folk were now members of communes.

No Time for Trivia. Unlike rural communes, which often take in a whole county, those abuilding in China's cities are generally organized around a single factory, government bureau or city neighborhood. To pave the way for urban communes. China's rulers have long been pushing the establishment of neighborhood mess halls, nurseries and housecleaning services, thus relieving women of "trivial housework'' and freeing them for industry. Thanks to this program, 220,000 ex-housewives in Peking alone are now employed in newly established "street industries"--small workshops or factories operated by 30 or 40 inhabitants of a single city street and capable of turning out light consumer goods or industrial parts. To break down the resistance of women who might be so bourgeois as to want to stay home and cook, Peking food shops now give the neighborhood mess halls priority over the thinning ranks of private customers.

The All-Purpose Boss. Ultimate goal of the urban commune organizers is the complete fusion of personal and working life. One of the first and most publicized of city communes was at the coal-mining center of Yangchuan in Shansi province. At Yangchuan. according to the Peking People's Daily, "living quarters were readjusted so that cadres, workers and their dependents are housed according to their pit, shifts, sections and teams." That done, "political, cultural and physical-culture activities were organized . . . Each person is a worker-soldier, as well as a student, whose living quarters are workshop, barracks and classroom."

The results, reported the Peking paper, were almost miraculous. In the old days, some Yangchuan workers "raised questions of grade, pay and amenities . . . Many workers and their dependents developed hedonist attitudes, were fond of good food and clothes." But with the coming of the commune, both men and women suddenly acquired "a high degree of organization and discipline, both on duty and off"--a development presumably closely related to the fact that "the head of a mine is responsible for production and simultaneously is company commander of the militia and head of a row of rooms in the living quarters."

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