Where Khrushchev Fears to Tread

The tremendous effort that the Mao Tse-tung despotism is making to complete the regimentation of China’s rural population in a matter of months—not just here and there, but throughout the whole vast area of China simultaneously—is naturally being watched with great interest by all of Red China’s neighbors. All recognize that it is the most desperately risky program that the Mao regime has yet undertaken in its efforts to tighten its control over an enormous mass of sullenly non-cooperative human beings.

Enough has already been published in this country so that little need be said about the program as Peiping has advertised it. The whole country is to be divided into “Communes.” Collective and cooperative farms are to go by the board. Farm families will lose the last semblance of a title to their land, their animals, their tools and household utensils, and their individual homes. All will be housed in barracks and fed in big messes. The women will do no cooking, no household chores and no sewing. Clothes for all will be made in small state factories. All small children will be taken from their parents and cared for in public nurseries, so all women will be free for such full-time employment as is assigned them in fields or factories. And those who want to eat, male or female, will work hard or fail to get the tickets that entitle them to such provender as the mess halls serve. Even conventional civil government will be abolished as superfluous; for Communist Party functionaries will be the absolute masters of these communal establishments, with armed forces at their command.

RG

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Rodney Gilbert

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The tremendous effort that the Mao Tse-tung despotism is making to complete the regimentation of China’s rural population in a matter of months—not just here and there, but throughout the whole vast area of China simultaneously—is naturally being watched with great interest by all of Red China’s neighbors. All recognize that it is the most desperately risky program that the Mao regime has yet undertaken in its efforts to tighten its control over an enormous mass of sullenly non-cooperative human beings.

Enough has already been published in this country so that little need be said about the program as Peiping has advertised it. The whole country is to be divided into “Communes.” Collective and cooperative farms are to go by the board. Farm families will lose the last semblance of a title to their land, their animals, their tools and household utensils, and their individual homes. All will be housed in barracks and fed in big messes. The women will do no cooking, no household chores and no sewing. Clothes for all will be made in small state factories. All small children will be taken from their parents and cared for in public nurseries, so all women will be free for such full-time employment as is assigned them in fields or factories. And those who want to eat, male or female, will work hard or fail to get the tickets that entitle them to such provender as the mess halls serve. Even conventional civil government will be abolished as superfluous; for Communist Party functionaries will be the absolute masters of these communal establishments, with armed forces at their command.