Sixteen months ago, when Red China's "great leap forward" seemed in danger of ending in an ignominious sprawl (TIME, Feb. 16, 1959 et seq.), Peking's planners decided that for the time being they would concentrate on forcing the nation's peasants into the hive life of the new "people's communes." "In the cities," explained the Central Committee of China's Communist Party, "bourgeois ideology is still fairly prevalent among many of the capitalists and intellectuals; they still have misgivings about the establishment of communes—so we should wait a bit for them."
Last week, as...
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