RED CHINA: The People's Communes

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It used to be said of Red China that it was repeating, stage by stage, Russia's Communist development a third of a century later. But the evidence coming out of China is that Mao Tse-tung is engaged in a more drastic experiment than Stalin or Khrushchev ever tried. The official name for it is "the people's communes" movement.

In Inner Mongolia, reported New China News Agency, peasants "marked the occasion with revelry that included singing, dancing, and decorating their houses with lamps." In Kiangsi province they beat drums and gongs and shot off firecrackers. Cause of all this merriment: formation of two new "people's communes"—the most determined attempt yet to reduce human beings to the status of ants.

90% Herded. Red China's first "people's commune," a single unit of 9,300 peasant families organized along military lines, was set up in Honan province six months ago without fanfare. Early in September, apparently pleased with the results of the Honan experiment, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party gave the go-ahead for a nationwide switchover to communes. By last week Peking was boasting that already 90.4% of China's 500 million peasants had been herded into 23,393 communes.

The life that faces Red China's peasantry in the communes is regimented beyond the dreams of ancient Sparta. Each commune, averaging about 21,000 inhabitants, is ruled by a party committee that controls everything from food distribution to funerals. Organized into work brigades, the inhabitants of the communes mostly have no set jobs, can be shunted on a day-to-day basis from farm work to military or industrial duties. Ultimately, private property is to be utterly abolished and already the most "advanced" communes have compelled the peasants to surrender the personal garden plots they were allowed to keep when they were forced onto "cooperative farms" three years ago. (The problem of individually owned fruit trees, says the Central Committee tolerantly, can be left for settlement later.)

Private life, too, is not to last for long. Some communes are already planning to tear down' the houses of their members and use the salvaged brick, tile and timber to build communal barracks. In Honan two-thirds of the province's 10 million children are now being cared for in communal nurseries, and in some of the older communes "people's mess halls" have already become, the Reds boast, "almost the only place one can eat." Instead of turning to his wife when his trousers need mending, the good commune member now takes his problem to the "sewing brigade." The result, declares Peking, is that 20 million women in seven provinces now find themselves "freed" to contribute the family pots and pans to a scrap-metal drive and turn their attention from housework to such progressive tasks as "road building, tree planting and ditch digging."