CHINESE FARMING Peasants who turned winter into spring

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32661, 17 July 1971, Page 9

CHINESE FARMING Peasants who turned winter into spring

(By USA SHARP)

SHANGHAI.

Farming remains a backbreaking task in China. Under-mechanis-ation is a major problem. Part of a timeless tableau, peasants still stoop into lush green paddy or pull ploughs through ancient earth.

Yet advances are being made in farm machinery. Shanghai’s permanent Industrial Exhibition features new rice transplanting equipment and multi-purpose tractors. Officials claim some areas around the city are 65 per cent mechanised. One of the reasons the communes were formed in the first place was to generate enough collective capital to buy heavy machinery. Today, communes which are still too poor to invest in modem aids are doggedly building their own simple machinery whenever possible. The communes, however, have gained spectacular successes in part of the age-old battle against weather: water control. Peasants m the area around Hsing Hua commune, near the Kwangtung provincial capital of Canton, once lived in dread of alternating floods and droughts. To control the excesses of the seasons they built three large reservoirs, one of which can irrigate 30,000 mou (about

4950 acres), and more than 25 miles of low dams. “Winter used to be the dry season,” beamed a Hsing Hua revolutionary committee member named Chen. “Now it is like the spring." Peasant farming methods all over the world have impoverished potentially rich soil, and traditional China was no exception. Nowadays, the state emphasises the importance of fertiliser from chemicals to lake silt, animal manure and human excrement. Peasants pigs “We cannot depend only on chemicals. They spoil the earth,” said one farmer. Hsing Hua uses about 180 jin (2401 b of chemical fertiliser to the acre each year. An important source of manure is the pig, long precious to the peasants and traditionally one of their few forms of wealth. There was bitter controversy in the early days of the commune movement when peasants feared all control of their pigs would pass to the collective. Despite the drive against individualism aftd private property during the 1965-69 Cultural Revolution, the peasants still have their pigs. At both the communes I visited Hsing Hua in the south and Ma Chiao near Shanghai there are more pigs than people. Of Hsing Hua’s 65,000 pigs, 60 per

cent are indivdually owned. The 35,000 people of Ma Chiao average two pigs a household, with a total pig count of 43,600. When a family’s quota is exceeded, the surplus pigs usually are sold to the commune as collective property. The commune families raise their pigs on private plots another stubborn survivor of the Cultural Revolution. Peasants use their small plots not only to raise pigs but to grow their own vegetables, supplementing the rice diet. Cheap living In the communes, the cost of living is low. Housing, medical care and most of the food is virtually free just as well, since the average peasant’s annual income is only 137 yuan (about SUSSS).

Both Hsing Hua and Ma Chiao communes claim to have exceeded their state targets for rice production. Production evidence, in fact, implies that the peasants have been working much harder than in previous years, and this in turn could be linked with solid improvements in the quality of their lives.

Hsing Hua (pop: 61,500) has built or improved 40,000 homes in the last few years. But at Ma Chiao, five households must still share a single waterpipe. There is occasional overcrowding in housing. Commune housing is ultra-simple, usually in threestorey blocks and invariably veiy clean. Ma Chiao is a self-contained unit, with such facilities as an internal telephone switchboard, a post office and a roving film projection team. Medical services Perhaps the most important development, from the peasants’ viewpoint, has been the expansion of medical services in the countryside. Each commune has a central hospital and a network of clinics staffed by “barefoot” doctors who have three months of crash training behind them.

The central hospital at Hsing Hua has 10 qualified doctors and 100 “barefeet.” This hospital has performed 400 operations since early 1969, some of them serious cases involving restoration of severed limbs or fingers. Ma Chiao’s hospital has. 38 qualified doctors and 64 “barefeet.” Interestingly, about three male sterilisation operations are performed there each week.

Like all hospitals in today’s China, the communes are engaged in a drive to reassert the importance of traditional medicine, and are making their own drugs from herbs collected in the countryside.—lntrasia News Service.