Communes’ role to change

Press, 29 March 1982, Page 8

Communes’ role to change

NZPA Peking The Chinese Government is considering transforming the lives of the country's 800 million peasants by stripping rural communes of their political function and turning them into essentially economic units, the English-lan-guage weekly “Beijing (Peking) Review" said yesterday. The system of combining Government administration with economic management was "contradictory,” and it had often led to the concen- • tration of power in the hands of a few people, it said.

The commune system was set up by the late’Chairman Mao Tse-tung in 1958 in what is now officially regarded as an over-ambitious attempt to achieve quick results. Peasants, who form 80 per cent of China’s one billion population, are now grouped into 54,000 communes or clusters of villages which until now have served as the next administrative level below the county and as collective economic organisations. Communes have been effectively abolished in a few areas where a newly revived level of government, the "xiang” or township, takes care

of policy and leaves production largely to the peasant. The new system has been introduced quietly in the populous south-western province of Sichuan, where the Prime Minister (Mr Zhao Ziyang) was formerly the Communist Party chief, and which has become a national pacemaker for economic reforms in the last few years. The reforms have had little publicity in the official press, apparently because the commune system is enshrined in the State constitution. A new constitution is ex-

pected to be published later i this year, but diplomatic i sources say Maoist diehards • are strongly resisting pro- I posed changes in the com- : mune system. ' “It appears that increasing ; numbers of people realise it ! is more reasonable to separ- i ate government administra- I tion from commune manage- i ment,” the "Review” said. ■ The commune bureaucracy I had often interfered with I decisions made by the pro- ; duction team (village), which ; now has greater power as I the result of liberalised j economic policies introduced i since Mr Mao’s death in 1976. •