1985?

March 16, 1959

Some of us thought that George Orwell, in 1984, had portrayed the horrible daily life and terror of a totalitarian socialist regime with classic power and finality. But today actualities surpass what even first-rate scientists were able to imagine.

A vivid report from Red China, for instance, was recently made in three articles for the Associated Press by an Indian social scientist, Dr. Sripati Chandrasekhar. Except for their final paragraphs, these articles are written in a detached tone. They even make some favorable generalizations, though these violate probability. Admitting that there was famine three years ago, the articles say, for example: “No one starves in China now.” No one? That would be a risky statement to make even about the United States, the best-fed country in the world. It becomes particularly implausible about Red China when we recall the chronic famine among its estimated 650 million population, the starvation in Soviet Russia and elsewhere whenever swift collectivization was imposed, and the 2 million farm landlords that the Red Chinese are estimated to have executed. The official claims of a 100 percent increase in food production in 1958 over 1957 are preposterous on their face.

NIGHTMARISH PICTURE

Not that the Chinese Communists are not making great efforts. A Hong Kong dispatch to The New York Times of Feb. 23 tells how “factory and office workers, students, housewives, and army units from towns and cities have joined the rural population in a massive shock campaign of manure collection.” As the People’s Daily of Peking points out: “Manure can be found everywhere.”

But to return to Dr. Chandrasekhar. When he is not merely retailing Chinese official propaganda, but reporting what he actually saw, he paints a nightmarish picture. It is a picture of men and women of all ages working day and night. He personally counted eighteen structures being built around the clock, with the aid of artificial light at night.

“Everyone, men and women of all ages, is dressed in blue trousers and buttoned-up coats,” looking like “an endless army of blue ants.” No one can escape the ubiquitous wired radio loud-speaker. “The radio blares away at you in the bus, in the train, in the trolley, in sleepers and dining cars, on street corners, in villages, towns and cities.” What it blares out is how to make a smelter, how to defeat the American “imperialists,” how to be a good Communist, how to denounce the rightists. The relaying loudspeaker “cannot be controlled and cannot even be turned off.”

Chinese women have achieved “equality.” That is, they do the work of men, and “can and do denounce their husbands at party meetings if they suspect them of rightist and bourgeois tendencies.”

A CHINESE COMMUNE

Chinese Communist officials are proudest of their latest development, the communes, where they have gone beyond the Soviet Union. Dr. Chandrasekhar describes the “best” one, a “showpiece.” It was made up of 68 villages. “The houses, the land, the implements, the cottage industries, and the kitchen utensils were all owned by the commune.” It managed 228 public canteens where all adults ate in hostel-type dining halls. The adult population was distributed over 146 productive “teams.”

Men and women wake up in the morning to the blare of loudspeakers in the streets. After half an hour of exercise in the open air they go off to the canteens for a communal breakfast. After the day’s toil in the fields and factories, all attend regular classes. There they listen to propaganda on the radio. Last is the party meeting, which every worker attends. People rise up, confess their failings, and criticize their colleagues.

At the end of his factual report, Dr. Chandrasekhar sums up: “This is the commune where human beings are reduced to the level of inmates in a zoo. But there is a difference. The animals in a zoo do not have to work hard, and, what is more, they do not have to listen to the quasi-compulsory radio. The lack of peace and quiet in the countryside, where no one can retire and reflect, and the lack of privacy and solitude are to me more terrifying than all the hells put together.”