Up the Farm

Rural poverty is a problem

For well over a decade, the Dazhai production brigade in China's Shanxi province was the object of nothing less than a cult. The small, 40-family work unit, whose herculean labors were said to have produced astounding grain yields on steep hills, was held up as a model for all of rural China. LEARN FROM DAZHAI was the slogan that covered walls and farm buildings from northeastern Heilongjiang province to Yunnan in the southwest.

Now Peking has begun to disclose that Dazhai may have been no more than a Potemkin fac,ade. In a rare expose, the People's Daily reported that Xiyang county, where Dazhai is located, consistently falsified production figures between 1973 and 1977. The paper charged that nearly 300 million Ibs. of nonexistent grain, or 24% of real production, had been added to the county's claims over the five years. In one particularly bad year, county reports inflated actual yield by 60%. The expose was an unmistakable criticism of one of the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung's most sacred projects. It was also a dig at Mao's successor, Hua Guofeng, who for years was one of the ardent promoters of Dazhai.

The revelation came at a time when Peking's leaders are admitting that despite boasts of great success in increasing food production, Chinese agriculture in general is beset by far more problems than most Western analysts have realized. TIME'S Peking bureau chief, Richard Bernstein, recently visited another showcase commune that has fulfilled all the claims made by Peking. He then inspected a very different kind of commune that offered ample evidence of the failures of Chinese agriculture. His report:

The scene is like a calendar photograph displaying the splendors of rural life. At the Jin Ma (Golden Horse) commune on the lush Chengdu Plain of Sichuan province, the well-watered rice fields are emerald green. Thatch houses are surrounded by luxuriant clumps of bamboo and persimmon. Hundreds of teen-agers work at a prosperous collective silk-spinning plant near by. The peasants have radios, watches, bicycles, money in the bank, food on the table. Some of them treasure framed red certificates, whose bold black characters commend them for having achieved "wealth through diligent labor." Clearly, the Jin Ma commune was no Potemkin fac,ade.

The government has claimed great success with such communes, reporting a rise of nationwide average income, from $43 per capita in 1976 to $55 last year. Still, as many other communes demonstrate, plans for rapid mechanization of agriculture have been sharply cut back. Reason: wherever production increases have been realized, the gains have been outweighed by the investment--mainly in machinery and fertilizer--needed to achieve them.

Indeed, only 100 miles to the southwest of Jin Ma, in one of the province's many hilly regions, the picture is far different. On the remote Long Chi (Dragon's Pond) commune, perched on the lower slopes of 9,000-ft-high Mount Emei, the soil is rocky and dry. Farming is confined to low-yielding terraces that have been carved out of the hills and planted primarily with corn. Peasant incomes are one-third of those on the wealthy Jin Ma commune; they average $44 a year, more than half of which is distributed in grain rather than cash. No one starves, but the commune members eat meat only once a week.

The pattern of such poverty remains widespread; in many regions farm life is even harsher than on Long Chi commune. The most startling revelation in a series of remarkably candid press stories in recent months is that in three decades of rule, the Communist regime has barely begun to improve the lot of a vast number of its peasants. Some regions in the chronically poor provinces such as hilly Guizhou, arid Gansu or often flooded Shandong have not had a single good year since collectivization began in the late 1950s. According to one article, a quarter of the rural population, or roughly 200 million people, had 1977 per capita incomes of less than $27 a .year, not enough even to buy sufficient food. Western specialists do not believe that since then the situation has significantly improved.

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