Communism In China PEASANTS LIVE ON £10 A YEAR

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28413, 21 October 1957, Page 10

Communism In China PEASANTS LIVE ON £10 A YEAR

[By a Special Correspondent of "The Times"]

Entering the Bank of China in Shanghai. I cashed a cheque for £lO. Looking at the small packet of brownish coloured notes handed with Oriental courtesy across the counter, a thought struck me. This sum, which might with luck last your correspondent for a few days o f most unriotous living, was the income for a whole year of an average Chinese peasant in 1957. “The average annual income of our peasants today is still only 70 yuan” (just over £10). Ministry officials in Peking had told me, “and in some backward mountain areas it is only 42 yuan” (just over £6). Communist China has abolished wealth; it has not i yet abolished poverty. The most difficult question to get an answer to in China today is the biggest: what are the peasants feeling under collectivisation? Ninety-seven point four per cent, of China's 500 million peasants are today working in “higher co-operatives,” some of them with as many as 100.000 members, and up to 50,000 acres. From cultivating his own individual plot of land, the Chinese peasant has become a cog in a vast land factory. It is an overwhelming change in his life. He has been led up to it gradually, through the stage of the lower cooperative (mutual aid teams, in which the land is still individually owned) to higher co-operatives, which are indistinguishable from full collectives. • But the word “collective” has been avoided in China, doubtless because of its disagreeable overtones and bad associations from Soviet experience. This is another example of Chinese sagacity. Give and Take

It is not certain that the Chinese peasant really feels what many Western enemies of the regime are inclined to put into his mind: resentment that the land which was given to him by the Communists when they took power in 1949 has since been taken away under collectivisation. For one thing, the land was never taken away by any overt act. The legal owner of the land today is the co-operative (not the State), but each peasant in a higher cooperative has a certificate showing how much land he has put in. He has the theoretical right to walk out of the co-operative, and in many parts of China has, in fact, done so. In no sphere of activity have the Chinese been so intensely careful to avoid the brutal and wooden-headed Soviet methods as in collectivisation. Not that they have not had trouble. Probably the most serious disturbances the regime has yet suffered have been in the cooperatives. Riots were admitted last year by the Government on many co-operative farms, due mainly, it seems, to discontent among the peasan*' at the method of distributing the harvest. (China, still emerging from age-old illiteracy, is very short of reliable bookkeepers). Hundreds of thousands of peasants in the neighbourhood of the big cities have left the co-operatives and poured into the cities, hoping for a better living. One of the most serious long-term problems the Chinese have to face is the wide difference between the incomes of peasants and industrial workers. Where the average peasant earns £lO a year, the average industrial worker earns about £9O The industrial workers are the elite of China, while the peasant is still, and is likely to remain for long, the packhorse who is supporting industrialisation with his toil. He may not stand it indefinitely.

Peasant Menace Certain figures provided by officials themselves speak vividly of the potential danger of the peasant menace in China. The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture told me that 30 per cent, of all the peasants had been “reluctant to join the co-operatives” during the great collectivisation drive of 1955-56. Thirty per cent, of 500 millions equals 150 million; three times the population of the British Isles as potential malcontents! Another, perhaps more interesting, figure given me by officials was that 75 per cent, of the peasants had increased their income since 1949. This would imply that 25 per cent. —125 million peasants—have not increased their income; again a vast segment of humanity who have no reason yet to be particularly satisfied with the new state of things. These purely arithmetical statements tell one nothing, of course, of the almost inaccessible human reality beneath, but they do indicate the trouble into which the regime could run its head if things went badly wrong in the countryside. They have not done so yet. Though, doubtless, recalcitrant peasants have been sent to forced labour camps, there have been no reports of massive arrests and deportations of Chinese peasants after the Russian example of 1930-31. The comparison with Soviet collectivisation is striking. The Chinese have done it more quickly, r ?re boldly, and until now more successfully. Hands on the Land There is another glaring difference between the Soviet Union and China. Chinese collectivisation is without mechanisation—at least for a long time to come. “We are carrying out agricultural cooperation without farming machinery,” said Liu Ehao-chi, number two man of the regime, recently. (British industrialists hoping to sell large quantities of tractors to China in th 2 near future will be disappointed.) The reason for this anomaly is the same villain—the birth-rate. So vast is the population of China that the Chinese cannot allord to mechanise, for the simple reason that unemployment on an unprecedented scale would result. Mechanisation must wait until the new industries can absorb the teeming peasantry. In every part of China today you see tens of thousands of labourers at work with no instrument more complicated than a couple of baskets dangling from a bamboo pole. They are building China with the methods used for the building of the pyramids. Birth control, now being advocated in every Chinese home, with all the persuasive apparatus of the omnipresent State, may come to the rescue. Many people think that the Chinese, a realistic and not very religious folk, will take easily to this new practice. In fact, they are already doing so. Ministry of Health vans drive

round even the distant co-opera tives with supplies on board.

The Chinese economy has lately suffered severely from too ambitious planning. In all parts of China at the moment huge model factories are working part time because of shortages of raw materials; there are unfinished buildings, immense empty hotels with inflated staffs, and other signs of extravagance. A significant emphasis in all official pronouncements this year in China is on economy. “Building the nation on thrift and industry” is one of the übiquitous new slogans. It is interesting to speculate how far this is due to heavy reductions in Soviet aid to China. One gets the impression in every part of the country that the Russian technicians, whose numbers were legion only a year ago, are now pulling out. and pulling out fast. In many factories there are none at all—and in others a desolate and homesick few. More Self-reliant In this connexion the Chinese Finance Minister. Mr Li Hsiennien, made a significant statement » to the National People's Congress in July. Announcing that foreign loans would be reduced from 117 m yuan in 1956 to a mere 23m yuan in 1957, he added: “We are now in a better position to rely on our own accumulation (of capital) to carry on national construction.” For a nation which overspent is reserves in 1956 by more than 2000 m yuan (nearly £3oom) this was a bold statement. But. what does it mean? That Soviet aid, after the all-out impulse of the first years, is ending? The second Chinese five-year plan due to begin in January, 1958. of which details have still not been announced, doubtless hangs heavily on this question. And on this, too, perhaps depend the shadowy prospects for British trade with China following the relaxation of the embargo. The crucial matter in China is the harvest. To this is related, directly or indirectly, almost everything that happens in China. "The more I see of things the more I realise that everything depends on the harvest,” I was told by one experienced observer. “It provides food for the nation, exports, revenue for the State, and the wherewithal to repay the Soviet aid. Nothing can exist without it.” The Chinese harvest is in progress as this article is being written. First reports are good; but. as a friend put it, "the leaders must be keeping their fingers crossed.” Mao and his comrades are doubtless praying to any gods they know that this year's harvest may be a good one. (To be concluded.)