The Nude on the Basketball Court, and Other Chinese Stories

Military directives rarely make snappy reading, dealing as they do with such weighty subjects as the terrors of trench foot, the best way to dig a latrine and the importance of keeping boots polished. But as in most matters, Red China is different. A 776-page collection of Red Chinese army documents just published by Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace is a fascinating exception. The papers, some of which were captured from Chinese Communist junks off the South China coast, some probably filched by Chinese Nationalist spies, cover most of 1961—a year when Red China was nursing bruised shins from the disastrous "Great Leap Forward." They reflect nagging discontent in army and peasant ranks, as well as the age-old Chinese belief in the efficacy of numerals as a cure-all for despair. Excerpts:

Comrade Wang Tung-Hsing's Report on Ideological Conditions in the Central Garrison Because of the far-reaching effects of the class struggle, especially the Two-Road Struggle in the villages on ideology, and also the natural disaster which happened last year and this year, there is some unrest in thought among a part of our comrades. The soldier Chang Lichen said: "At present, what the peasants eat in the villages is even worse than what dogs ate in the past. At that time dogs ate chaff and grain." Commune members ask: "Is Chairman Mao going to allow us to starve to death?" The soldier Liu Ho-shan said: "Our country has no definite plans at all. Why are we unable to buy things?"

Report of the Political Department of

the 7th Division of Railway Engineer Troops about

the Conduct of the 8th Co. of the 29th Regiment

Whose Sideline Production Group

Strung up and Beat the People

On Nov. 14, a local woman commune member, Yeh Hsiang-shu (poor peasant), cut off and stole from this production group seven heads of white cabbage totaling 6 chin. Yeh, when forced to speak, had to admit that her husband Chou Hsing-jung had also stolen some vegetables. The production group seized Chou also, then took man and wife, with hands tied, and hung them by the wrists from the basketball goal for ten minutes. Then Platoon Commander Yang Ju-hsing announced two conditions: "First, they must give us back 3,000 catties (two tons) of cabbage; second, if they do not give us the cabbage, they must take off their trousers and thank us for our kindness." Yeh soon had all her clothes taken off. Chou refused to shed his clothes, whereupon Yang and his soldiers cut his belt in two with a scythe and laughed heartily. Yeh used a handkerchief to cover the lower part of her body. When the victims began to shiver with the cold, Yang cried out: "You can warm up by running around the basketball court once!" [Yang was later arrested and tried for "foolish, ridiculous actions."]

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