Essay: WHAT THE U.S. KNOWS ABOUT RED CHINA

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∙ LIVING CONDITIONS. No one is starving any more, and the average Chinese is better off than he was even five years ago. The standard of living is still low, but the people appear healthy and adequately fed and clothed. There are equal if slim rations for all: about 2,000 calories a day of food, two dresses or an equivalent two yards of cotton cloth a year, one bar of washing soap a month. An equitable rationing system of such basics as rice has been introduced. Wage levels and food prices are both low. Chinese earnings range from $8 a month for an apprentice to $24 for a skilled industrial worker, $80 for an engineer, $100 for a party big shot. A pound of pork costs 20¢, a pound of sugar 28¢, a pound of rice 5¢. Housing costs only $1.20 a room per month, but the accommodations are spartan. Flies, beggars and pickpockets have mostly disappeared—but so has something else. "There is no magic and no fascination," wrote Lorenz Stucki of Neue Zürcher Zeitung, after a recent visit to Red China. "Life has become an abysmal bore."

∙ MORALE. The temper of the country is generally stoic; there are no signs of popular restiveness, but no signs either of a really contented people. The Chinese are proud that they have achieved unity and become a force on a world scale, after a rankling century of humiliation by foreigners. Now that the country has settled down internally, the party's big problem is to retain revolutionary momentum. This it seeks to do with regular campaigns of "rectification," which Mao defines as "one of the methods of evolving social contradictions in our country" but which is really a fancy word for purge. Though experts disagree about its extent, there is definitely dissidence and some underground opposition to the regime. In 1961 the army was ruthlessly purged of "corrosive and disintegrating influences." Peking is now cracking down hard on the country's 5,000,000 or so intellectuals, some of whom seem to be bothered by the deification of Mao and his thought, the implacable brainwashing and the minute surveillance and shepherding of individuals. The government continues the dreaded practice of shipping urbanites to the country or remote provinces as ideological discipline.