Down on the Farm with Marx and Mao

Since coming to power in 1949, Mao Tse-tung has time and again extolled the discipline to be learned from manual labor. Over the years, China has periodically conducted "down to the countryside" campaigns, in which millions of city residents go off to work on farms for six months to three years or more. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a party member's willingness to "integrate" himself with the masses by doing manual labor became a test of his ideological purity. Professors, government bureaucrats and white-collar workers all spent time, often punitive, in what came to be called "May Seventh schools," combination collective farms and political-indoctrination workshops that took their name from Mao's letter of May 7, 1966 to Lin Piao, then Minister of Defense. In the letter, Mao declared that "every field of work should be made into a great school for revolutionization." TlME's Diplomatic Editor Jerrold Schecter recently visited a May Seventh school near Peking. His report:

Slim green poplar saplings line the dirt road to the Hsuan Wu May Seventh Cadre School, 30 miles from Peking along the banks of the Tsao Pai River. Orchards of apples, pears and peaches are neatly marked off, surrounded by a fresh red brick wall. Rice shoots are be ginning to sprout in well-irrigated fields, and the hogs are fattening. It seems like a typical commune, except that the farm hands are all from the city -- 200 schoolteachers, office workers and party cadres who have gone off to the countryside for six months of consciousness raising, Chinese style. The encounter groups center about the works of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Chairman Mao.

Students are indoctrinated with the prevailing government positions, for example, on who is or is not imperialist (the Russians are currently regarded as more imperialist than the U.S.). A kind of group therapy is offered in "struggle-criticism" and "transformation sessions," in which specific actions by participants are critically examined and corrected. Above all, there are long hours of hoeing, heaving manure and helping in the communal kitchen.

It is difficult to compare May Seventh schools to anything in the West or, for that matter, in other Communist countries. Even the late Edgar Snow (The Long Revolution) found an Alice in Wonderland quality about the schools, calling them "reform schools for reformers." With memories of the Cultural Revolution fading fast, the schools have become institutionalized. No longer does a suspect cadre get sent to one for an indeterminate stay to learn to serve the people. The tensions, as well as the physical abuses that Mao himself lamented, have also ebbed. Today, May Seventh schools combine aspects of a Marxist religious retreat and a voluntary labor camp.

Some party cadres come to the school because it has been suggested in their group sessions at home that they can do with a little ideological honing. Others apply simply because they want to. "I think my Marxist-Leninist level is quite low," explains Chao Kuei-wu, 46. "I need more practice in the fields to do more labor." Chao, who is married and has four children, receives his regular $35-a-month salary as the manager of a Peking canteen while attending the May Seventh school. He goes home once a month for four days to visit his family.

Small Bed. Life at the school is spartan. Ordinarily five cadres share a small concrete-floored room. Each person has a small bed and a towel, which hangs from a clothesline stretched across the ceiling. The only decorations are the regulations and daily schedule pasted to the wall. There is a bookcase made from wooden boxes filled with Marx, Lenin and the collected works of Mao. A small table in the middle of the room serves as the study center.

Students awaken at 6 a.m. and do their laundry and personal chores before sitting down to a breakfast of steamed bread, porridge and tea. Depending on weather and seasonal conditions, their days are about evenly divided between study sessions, field work and paramilitary drills. After supper there are group activities such as singing, dancing and cultural programs. Lights are out at 10 p.m. Men and women live separately. Asked if sex was ever a problem, one cadre laughed and said: "I haven't heard of such a thing."

All mistakes and shortcomings in class consciousness are attributed to a lack of thorough study of Chairman Mao's directives. Persuasion is the keynote--persuasion and reiteration. For two weeks of the six-month course, the cadres are sent off to live with peasant families, where they learn other farming techniques and gain an appreciation of how poorer classes of Chinese have, coped with their problems.

But in the main, therapy and self-knowledge come from physical labor. Chao says that he is bone-tired after a day weeding or planting rice, but he has found a new meaning to work. Adds Wang Tien-san, 44, head of the school's revolutionary committee: "By doing physical labor, we maintain the true feeling of the laboring people."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.