The Ways of Paradise

Above the harsh noise of Communist China's bold new effort to reduce an entire people to the level of robots (TIME, Oct. 20) came the nightingale song of Radio Peking: "The people's communes are paradises. Manpower and material resources are more than in heaven. Industry and agriculture leap forward together, and one year equals thousands of years in the past."

In Shantung, boasted the New China News Agency, 200,000 common messhalls and 190,000 nurseries have freed 6,700,000 mothers for work in the fields. In Honan 7,000,000 more women are now happily working away on dams or collecting manure. Peking recently predicted that during 1958 steel production and agriculture would double. But in between the glowing reports--of efficient mass dormitories, reveille at 5 a.m., and the bracing daily militia drills ("shooting three times before every meal and three times after")--even the Communists have been dropping hints of discontent in paradise.

In Russia itself and in the Eastern European satellites the Communist press seems to feel that the less said about Chinese communes the better. But the coffeehouse Communist intelligentsia of Warsaw, hearing of the communes, are repeating an old Polish Communist wheeze: "Thank God for the Soviet Union. We are lucky to have a buffer state between us and China."

Red China itself admitted a little dissension. In the province of Liaoning, reported the People's Daily, "shock teams" and "treasure-digging teams" who collect scrap iron--and are supposed to turn in their own no-longer-needed kitchenware--"took away steel rods on public buildings, underground drainpipes and iron railings, and handed them over to the authorities as scrap iron." In Honan, it added, peasants complain bitterly about the common messhalls, which prevent them from having friends at home for dinner. In Hopei they worry about having no kitchens of their own or a brick oven to sleep on during the winter.

A more intimate account of life in the commune came from a young mother who managed to escape to Hong Kong, hollow-cheeked and scaly from bad diet. At 5 each morning, she and her husband were aroused for "mass sports" (i.e., calisthenics). Their only meal together with their two sons was breakfast. Her husband was sent off in one direction to work all day, she in another. They put their young sons in a common nursery (which charged for the privilege), and the children's 70-year-old grandmother worked on a "mending brigade." Among other conveniences at the commune was a common grave--a pool filled with a special chemical to help turn bodies into useful fertilizer.

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