Foreign News: Tigers Borrowing Pigs

The Communist masters of China are having trouble with the peasants. Those who must farm the land to feed the world's most populous country do not seem to have got the idea at all. In fact, most of them suffer from "spontaneous tendencies toward capitalism." Others, unable to see the logic of increasing output or wealth only to have to give it up to government confiscators, are now afflicted, say the propagandists, with the delusion that poverty is best.

Private party reports, filtered out through Hong Kong last week, told in the Communists' own unintentionally candid words how things have been going wrong: "The production sentiment of the peasants . . . lacks stability, and their understanding of the new production relations ... is still obscure."

As a prelude to their vaunted classless society, the Peking Reds have tried to put peasants into a set of strict classes: landlords, who own land but do not work it; rich peasants, who own land or rent it from landlords, but work it themselves and hire others to help them; middle peasants, who may own or rent as much land as the rich peasants, but work it entirely themselves; poor peasants, who may own land, but do not own the tools or animals to work it; hired peasants, who own nothing, work for others.

Land, houses and properties were taken from the upper classes, divided and parceled out to the lower. Then came the "mutual aid teams." In 1952 the reports showed that the party's cooperatives and aid program in Manchuria actually knocked production down. In 1953 the party shifted its ground, told Communist cadres to tone down "socialist education" and put production before all else. Result: production no better than 1952. The Chinese Nationalists on Formosa count the peasants' discontent among their greatest propaganda assets, are trying to nourish it with leaflets dropped from planes which cross to the mainland almost nightly (see cut).

Why Bother? In five years, according to the best figures available in Hong Kong, the Reds have succeeded in setting up only 14,000 cooperatives out of a targeted 800,000 for all China. Some of the reasons for the great lag, as told by a team of Communist inspectors reporting to their bosses from a small area in South China:

The middle and rich peasants are afraid to expose their wealth, fearing that somebody may come along to borrow from them without returning the loans—"like tigers borrowing pigs." The report quoted Middle Peasant Ho Yao-hsiang: "Why bother to make production such a success? It will be sufficient if you grow enough to keep yourself fed. Once you make a success of your production, your staircase will be leveled by the footsteps of visitors." Others were afraid of being accused of exploitation. "Because Poor Peasant Kan Yao-ching once lent grain to Kan Yung-lin, the masses wanted to promote him as a landlord during the reinvestigation. He said: 'I really dare not lend out grain again.' "