Spoiled Heroes

Red China's "Patriotic Emulation Drive," like its Russian prototype, the Stakhanovite movement, has created a glamorized class of "labor heroes." Among other favors, workers who speed up production get vacations at the best resorts, or trips to Peking. Last week, with a fanfare of propaganda, 70 labor heroes from Shanghai went off to beautiful West Lake at Hangchow, as the Russian speed-up kings were sent off to the sunny Crimea. At West Lake, the Chinese Stakhanovites were lodged in villas that once belonged to wealthy merchants. "These houses," reported one Chinese newspaper, "have stained-glass windows, beds with springs, and silk quilts, tiled bathrooms with flush toilets, facilities for chess and pingpong, flower-bedecked gardens, radios and books. There is always, too, a Thermos bottle on the table filled with boiled water. Such things were never before within reach of workers in China."

But it seemed that such luxuries had gone to the heads of some of the labor heroes: the Red press was full of warnings to the pampered patriots. Peking's People's Daily chided Labor Hero Wang Chung-hao, a Manchurian, who "became so arrogant and lazy, following his being named a labor hero, that his team subsequently turned in a very miserable result." Equally guilty was Shen Chao-ai, who got so involved with meetings, discussions, and visits from admirers that he stayed away from work for 90 days last year and had to be fined 2.7 piculs (360 lbs.) of cereals for backsliding. Complained the People's Daily: "Some of these heroes become self-centered and self-satisfied, drifting away from the masses and actually causing harm to production . . . [They] go back to their homes and look down on their villages and their local governments, just because they have visited . . . Peking and have shaken hands or dined with Chairman Mao."

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