Chungking Prepares for Summer

''The [Chinese] people's modes of living are becoming more complicated, more disorderly and with fewer standards than ever before," said Dean Chen Kuo-fu of the Central Political Institute at Chungking. "This situation must be remedied."

Urged by Dean Chen, the Chinese Government as a partial remedy moved to revive rural China's ancient festival days, last week stuck a batch of these into its New Style Calendar. Next chieh-chi (traditional festival) will be Li Hsia (Summer Commences) on May 6. The festivities: "Finding out weights of family members. Eating of beans."

Other festivities at chieh-chi later in the year: "Presentation of wheat delicacies by married daughters to their parents. . . . Sacrifices to ancestors. . . . Mothers giving summer clothes to married daughters. . . . Tasting the season's fruits. . . . Playing with singing insects and fire-bees. . . . Appreciating lotus flowers."

While Dean Chen busied himself trying to revive in Free China such chieh-chi, the seasonal cloud bank which has shrouded Chungking and the upper Yangtze valley since last autumn (effectively preventing Japanese air bombing) began fatefully to lift last week. In Chungking squads of police, under stern orders from Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, worked down street after street driving out of Chungking and into the suburbs thousands of Chinese whom they hoped thus to save from the expected bombs. Many Chinese merchants, restaurant keepers and singsong-house proprietors vigorously protested that they were doing a fine business in Chungking, preferred to stay and chance the bombs. Shushing them, the Generalissimo's police boarded up their premises, permitted to remain in Chungking only citizens with papers certifying their presence in the capital to be "indispensable."

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