Down on the Farm with Marx and Mao

Since coming to power in 1949, Mao Tse-tung has time and again extolled the discipline to be learned from manual labor. Over the years, China has periodically conducted "down to the countryside" campaigns, in which millions of city residents go off to work on farms for six months to three years or more. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a party member's willingness to "integrate" himself with the masses by doing manual labor became a test of his ideological purity. Professors, government bureaucrats and white-collar workers all spent time, often punitive, in what came to be called "May Seventh schools," combination collective farms and political-indoctrination workshops that took their name from Mao's letter of May 7, 1966 to Lin Piao, then Minister of Defense. In the letter, Mao declared that "every field of work should be made into a great school for revolutionization." TlME's Diplomatic Editor Jerrold Schecter recently visited a May Seventh school near Peking. His report:

Slim green poplar saplings line the dirt road to the Hsuan Wu May Seventh Cadre School, 30 miles from Peking along the banks of the Tsao Pai River. Orchards of apples, pears and peaches are neatly marked off, surrounded by a fresh red brick wall. Rice shoots are be ginning to sprout in well-irrigated fields, and the hogs are fattening. It seems like a typical commune, except that the farm hands are all from the city — 200 schoolteachers, office workers and party cadres who have gone off to the countryside for six months of consciousness raising, Chinese style. The encounter groups center about the works of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Chairman Mao.

Students are indoctrinated with the prevailing government positions, for example, on who is or is not imperialist (the Russians are currently regarded as more imperialist than the U.S.). A kind of group therapy is offered in "struggle-criticism" and "transformation sessions," in which specific actions by participants are critically examined and corrected. Above all, there are long hours of hoeing, heaving manure and helping in the communal kitchen.

It is difficult to compare May Seventh schools to anything in the West or, for that matter, in other Communist countries. Even the late Edgar Snow (The Long Revolution) found an Alice in Wonderland quality about the schools, calling them "reform schools for reformers." With memories of the Cultural Revolution fading fast, the schools have become institutionalized. No longer does a suspect cadre get sent to one for an indeterminate stay to learn to serve the people. The tensions, as well as the physical abuses that Mao himself lamented, have also ebbed. Today, May Seventh schools combine aspects of a Marxist religious retreat and a voluntary labor camp.