The Remolded Ones

A year had passed, and as the 44,000 civil servants and intellectuals trooped back to their desks in Peking, the Communist press could scarcely find words rapturous enough to describe the change that had come over them. The 44,000 had just completed a "year's tempering in productive work." Translation: they had been ideologically "remolded'' by a year's forced manual labor in the country.

The intellectuals, burbled one Red newspaper, "braved wind and snow, traveled at night, lived in thatched huts built with their own hands. Sometimes it was so cold that the comrades could not sleep. The comrades would make a fire and sing around it." So happy were these "heroes of the high mountains" that they forgot their "individualism, bureaucratism, and subjectivism and acquired labor conception, mass conception, and collective conception. How the cadres love labor and have changed their mental outlook!"

Scarves & Parades. In Hong Kong last week, one escaped cadre member had a different sort of story to tell. Lo Chih-ching was nine when the Communists took over Peking, and his first memories of the new regime were of wearing a gay red scarf and marching proudly in parades. By the time he was eleven, he was lecturing his parents on the virtues of Communism. Then, one night during a government anticorruption campaign, a band of party members broke into his house and ransacked it on the pretense of looking for "hidden treasure." It was Lo's first jolt, and soon there were others.

His mother was forced to attend a public meeting at which her husband was denounced. A classmate denounced his own brother, and the brother was executed. A 14-year-old girl denounced her father, and the father killed himself. A professor was denounced, went mad, and ended up "living in a pig sty." Lo himself was subjected to weeks of public criticism for reading pre-Communist novels rather than progressive ones. Then came the directive ordering all politically suspect students and intellectuals sent to the country to reform through manual labor.

"Friendly Emulation." In Peking, Lo had heard much about what the government had done for the peasant, but the peasants in the village where he was sent had apparently been overlooked. They lived in mud huts, got bread only when they worked, got seven feet of cloth a year with which to clothe themselves. Bitter and resentful, they never complained, for "everyone is afraid in China." Lo worked 16 hours a day, slept in his clothes to keep warm, did not take a bath for three months. Finally, he hit upon a way to escape.

He decided to show his superiors how "positive" he was by challenging his comrades to "friendly emulation in work." He was so successful that one day he was permitted to walk to Peking for a holiday. There, he wrote a letter full of subtle hints to some relatives in Hong Kong. The relatives got the hints, later sent him a cable saying his father was dying. Lo was by now so trusted that he was allowed to go to Hong Kong.

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