Reagan visits capitalist commune

Press, 2 May 1984, Page 8

Reagan visits capitalist commune

NZPA-Reuter Shanghai President Ronald Reagan left China for home yesterday after a six-day visit which he described to the Chinese Premier, Mr Zhao Ziyang, in a telephone call as enjoyable and fruitful. But the trip, although marked by personal friendliness, has shown a failure to make progress on key issues dividing Washington and Peking, especially United States arms sales to Taiwan. Mr Reagan spent his last hours in China visiting a show piece agricultural community outside Shanghai, the country’s biggest city. Before he set out to visit the farms, Mr Zhao telephoned him from Peking to say, “President Li Xiannian, general secretary Hu Yaobang, and chairman Deng Xiaoping were very pleased to have had the opportunity to meet you and to get to know you.” White House officials said that Mr Reagan had replied that his visit had been enjoyable and fruitful. Mr Zhao invited Mr Reagan to return and the President said that he looked forward with great pleasure to visiting China again one day. Mr Reagan’s visit yesterday was to the Hongqiao people’s commune, a show piece of China’s new “responsibility system” which allows peasants to keep the profits from their own work. Last year it abandoned the commune system set up under Mao Tse-tung’s drive to achieve communism, and is governed as a township. Only the title commune survives. Instead of sharing out the fruits of everybody’s work together, individual peasant families can contract out to work for themselves and sell whatever surpluses they produce above the amount they supply to the State. Because it is close to Shanghai the peasants have a large market for their vegetables, pigs, poultry, eggs, fish, and milk. The commune’s 8000 families earn an average of 1000 yuan ($728) a year, against the national average of about 300 yuan ($245).