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By last week,there were nearly 25,000 communes; their membership, at least on paper, comprised more than 90% of China's peasantry. The movement is now spreading to the cities. At Yangchuan coal mine in Shansi province, where more than 28,000 miners and their families formerly lived in "an unorganized, undisciplined manner." i.e., scattered around as they chose, workers have now been assigned to living quarters according to their work areas and shifts; according to Peking's People's Daily, "the head of a mine pit is simultaneously company commander of the militia and head of a row of rooms in the living quarters." Meanwhile, the miners' wives and teen-age children have been put to work running 40 new "industrial enterprises," including a cement factory. Logical next step at Yangchuan (and already in operation in some Red Chinese factories) is the "Saturday-night system," under which a married woman worker lives in a factory dormitory, is alone with her husband only on the odd Saturday night when she has the use of a dormitory room all to herself.
Tartars & Tonnage. For Red China's agricultural planners the commune system has obvious advantages: constantly under the eye of the commune's "activists," Chinese peasants will no longer be able to evade forced deliveries of crops to the government. More important, all of China's farmers can be forced to adopt improved techniques, such as deep plowing (as much as 3 ft.) and massive use of natural fertilizer, which have given Communist experimental farms per-acre rice yields twice as big as Japan's highest.
Through the communes, Mao also hopes to solve China's serious underemployment by building up vast cottage industries. Communes are now in the midst of a mass drive to produce pig iron and steel in tiny handmade blast furnaces of a kind developed by Chinese artisans in the Middle Ages. In China's desolate northern marches Mongol and Tartar women sweat over more than 5,000 furnaces which they have built in the last few weeks, and in Honan 440,000 furnaces (operated by peasants who have already put in a ten-hour day in the fields) allegedly turned out 300,000 tons of steel in October alone.
Western steelmen find it hard to credit Communist claims that such operations accounted for 30% of Red China's steel production in October. They are convinced, too, that the steel produced by these methods is of a low quality suitable only for the most primitive construction and the manufacture of agricultural implements. But Red China is headlong in its ambition to do-it-yourself.
Kill That Tiger! The xenophobia that in 1793 led the Emperor Ch'ien Lung to consider British Ambassador Lord Macartney a "Red barbarian bearing tribute," is still very much alive in China. "Westerners," says Foreign Minister Chen Yi, smiling faintly, "used to say Chinese were dirty. We were called an inferior race. Are we inferior now?"