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University Daily Kansan Thursday, April 27, 1961
Red Chinese Face Increasing Hardships
By Phil Newsom UPI Foreign News Analyst
Drought, flood and official mansagement heaped new hardship on the long-suffering people of Red China this year.
For the millions herded into Mao Tse-tung's communes, it meant a cut in daily food rations from 12 ounces of rice to less than four, or a diet of rice husks mixed with yams.
Officially, the Communist Party called it the greatest natural calamity to hit China in 100 years.
BUT PARTY ATTACKS on "bureaucraftic inepititude" and announcement of a purge of "reactionaries and bad elements" within the communes' leadership made it clear that mismanagement was a major cause of the disaster.
The foregoing is not to imply that its mistakes place either the Red regime or Mao Tse-tung in danger.
The commune program has been slowed but not halted. Successes can be claimed in the massive industrialization program, notably in increased steel production.
Mao's own influence remains unquestioned. His infallibility is proclaimed in a rising cult rivalling that once enjoyed by the late Josef Stalin.
MAO TSE-TUNG. a Communist theorist who leaves it to others to
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transform his theories into reality, decreed establishment of the communes on Sept. 5, 1958.
In one stroke some 500 million Chinese were to be jammed into communes of as many as 10,000 families each. Home would be abolished to form a vast labor army organized on military lines.
The years 1958-59 were eventful ones for Red China.
BY 1958, RED CHINA was challenging the Soviet Union for at least co-leadership of the Communist world. Red China announced new oil discoveries, the biggest rice crop in its history, and the inauguration of a vast irrigation project diverting waters of the Yellow River to irrigate more than three million acres in Honan and Shantung Provinces.
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Previous glowing reports of agricultural production proved grossly exaggerated.
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The Four Freshmen will be featured in the Student Union Activities Spring Concert, May 12 in Hoch Auditorium.
In 1950 and 1960 came two successive years of crop failures.
MILLIONS OF CHINESE again were on the move on orders from Peiping, this time back to the farmlands.
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Peasant families were given back small home plots on which to grow food and keep pigs and chickens. Non-Communist incentive plans were being introduced to reward the better producers.
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In all this, there is no sign either of organized uprising against the Reds or that Mao's own position has been endangered. In fact, just the opposite.
Mao is likened to the sun. It was Mao who "struggled and obtained our freedom and enabled us to see the light again."
THE CHINESE, who once proclaimed that "the cult of the individual" has no place in Chinese Communist theory and practice, now has a Mao Tse-tung cult proclaiming Mao's utter infallibility.
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