Time of The Three Loves

On the grounds of the old Imperial Palace in Peking, rows of plebeian cabbages crowded up to the foundations. In the city not a taxicab could be found because the drivers were out collecting manure. Canton schoolchildren scurried out of class to plant vegetable gardens in vacant lots. To a foreign newsman, Premier Chou En-lai moaned that China this year had been visited by the worst combination of natural disasters in the century. No fewer than 133 million acres (one-half of the arable land) had been blistered by drought, tattered by storms or chomped bare by grasshoppers.

For the third year in a row, Red China's agricultural output had fallen disastrously behind target. And with 15 million more mouths to feed, Red China would be hard put to hold off hunger this winter.

Changed Dream. More than the people's diet is involved The hard realities of nature had forced Peking's planners to recognize that despite all their emphasis on new steel plants, and the heady dream of transforming China overnight into a powerful industrial nation, China was still what it had always been--a country whose very livelihood depended on agriculture. Agricultural exports are still the major source of the foreign exchange that the Communists desperately need to buy machinery and tools. That recognition had brought about, almost unnoticed, a basic shift in Peking's official line.

Until recently, party papers sang the glories of worker comrades who spent their lunch hours in the factory tool shed inventing new equipment. Last week the new Communist hero was the tiller of the soil. Exhorted Peking's People's Daily: "The foremost frontier of socialist construction lies in the villages. If we relax the rapid development of agriculture and isolatedly stress the privileged development of heavy industry, the whole national economy will be hindered." More than 6,000,000 high school and college students have been routed out of class and sent into the country. More than 40,000 "leadership cadres"--toughened, indoctrinated young Communists--have been put into overseers' jobs.

Four Togethernesses. Last year the slogans were designed to speed up industrial production. There were the "Four Highs" (high speed, high production, high technique, high quality) and the "Five Too Manys" (too many meetings, too many cadres, too many organizations, too many reports and too many forms to fill out). Now the emphasis is on the "Three Loves" (love country, love commune, love labor), "Four Togethernesses" (cadres and commune workers eat together, live together, work together, consult together) and "Five Samenesses" (cadres eat the same fare as peasants, do same work, get same pay, receive same criticism and their dependents are treated the same way).

Apparently, Red China is even preparing to make major changes in the three-year-old commune system, until recently depicted as a brilliant Peking shortcut to pure Communism. In the authoritative Red Flag, Finance Vice-Minister Chin Ming proposed scrapping the formula "to each according to his needs" and instead enforcing the "underlying principle of more income for more work." In espousing "individual" incentives, Chin Ming said, he was not taking a backward step toward capitalism but only demonstrating "creative socialist distribution."

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