The man looked up suddenly.

　　"Back!" he almost spit out the words. "No, indeed. Forward!"

　　"You do more work. Is that progress?"

　　"Of course. What else but?"

　　"Before we worked for the landlords; now we work for ourselves and keep what we earn."

　　"You have so many machines. When we have machines, we won't work hard either."

　　"It is selfish not to work."

　　"Produce and we can overthrow Chiang Kai-shek!"

　　"Produce and we will end the feudal reign of the landlords."

　　On village walls, in defiled roadside shrines, in the schoolbooks and on the sides of carts - everywhere - were to be seen these slogans about the necessity and glory of work. And they were effective. Sometimes, however, the enthusiastic cadres went too far. On the long New Year holidays should the cadre try to stir the peasant from his hearth a hearth and home, he would be met by vacant stares, well-fed grumblings or good-humored hostility. For not even for the cadres would the peasant give up his fortnight seasonal rest.

　　Making the peasant sweat harder was for the government and the party a matter of simple logic. Surrounded on every side by hostile troops, living in what amounted to a besieged fortress, threatened on the ground with American guns and in the skies with American planes, the Communists had to make the peasant produce or die.

　　To perform this task without resort to slave labor appeared impossible. The Communists had no industry and had to depend almost entirely on farm labor. But how could they increase farm production when they were taking labor from the fields and putting it in the army.

　　I believe the Communists had six main ways of increasing production:

1. Collective labor.
2. Bringing women into the fields.
3. Making every soldier, official and party cadre produce.
4. Dividing the land.
5. Reviving handicrafts.
6. Persuading the people to work longer hours.

　　In North China there had long been a custom for peasants to get together and do certain jobs collectively. Families would often organize working teams from their surplus labor and send them around to do work for others. Or a man with a mule would plow the field of his neighbor in exchange for help in weeding his own land. These practices never played an important role in Chinese farm production and gradually faded out. The Communists, however, learned about them, refined the old methods and handed them back to the people with the proper propaganda stimulus and efficient organization methods.

　　Thus came into being labor exchange brigades, mutual work teams and labor co-operatives. With the exception of the guerrilla areas and newly recaptured places, I found few villages without them. In some cases, whole villages worked together on various tasks; in other cases, families pooled tools and draft animals for co-operative work in their own fields or for special jobs like land reclamation or irrigation.

　　Membership was entirely voluntary, with no punishment either direct or indirect for not joining. But let not the reader conclude from the extent of these mutual work teams that the peasant was Joining them without persuasion. Had it been left to him, he would have puttered around feebly, gardening in his own futile and individualistic way. He had to be shown the profits in co-operative labor, that the brigades had a direct economic merit for his own life.

　　And he was shown.

　　In Three Wang Village, in the Shansi Mountains, for example, I found a mutual work team of 124 persons, 54 donkeys, 20 oxen, 5 horses and 2 mules. In this group, there was a rich farmer who formerly hired men to work his fields for him. Joining a co-operative and working himself, instead of hiring labor, he saved twenty bushels of wheat a year. In the same village, I came across an opium smoker who hired a man to work his two acres of land for him. Because of the money spent on opium and hired labor, he had barely enough food for himself. Joining the labor brigade, he cured himself of the drug habit, stopped using hired labor and saved two bushels of wheat a year. A poor farmer in the same brigade told me he formerly took sixteen days to weed one-third of an acre of land. Now, with the help of eleven group members, he weeded it in one day.

　　Although work was done collectively, fields, crops and implements remained private property, so the incentives of collectivism and private ownership were both used to the full. Special methods were worked out whereby more points were given those who contributed animals as well as labor.

　　Thus a woman, if she could do as much work as a man was counted a full-labor power and was paid accordingly. Old men and children who could not work fast or long enough were counted as half-labor powers. Two persons equaled one mule and a half a person equaled one donkey.

　　If the reader be shocked at equating animals with men, it ought to be remembered that these were the methods that the people themselves chose to compute the value of what they contributed to the co-operatives.

　　In another village, in the Shansi Mountains, I found a brigade with ninety laborers, eighty-eight half-laborers, eight donkeys and three oxen. Between them they worked sixty acres of land, dividing the produce according to labor and according to the amount of land each family owned. Besides working on their own land, they had reclaimed twenty acres of waste land.

　　Pitiful efforts, you say. Yes. But there were also larger co-operative ventures. One of the most impressive I came across was in Chihsien County in Hopei Province. Here large tracts of land had been destroyed by floods in 1937, 1939 and 1940 and droughts in 1941 and 1942. The land had lain fallow for some time and everyone thought it would be many years before it could be used again. In August and September, 1947, however, two American farm boys, on loan from a Quaker church to UNRRA, and their Chinese students tractored five thousand mow (eight hundred acres) of this waste land so that it was ready for planting. The Americans expected the land would not be planted for a fortnight.

　　But in the meantime, unknown to them, fourteen villages had elected committees to divide the land. With pencils and papers and knotted ropes and abacus and stakes they split up the land into fourteen general plots. Then, having obtained seed from the government, on the night the Americans finished their tractoring, they made the final preparations for planting. That very evening village leaders got up on the roofs with megaphones and shouted for the people to bring rollers, seeders and planters to the fields early the next day.

　　The following morning, two thousand farmers, men, women and children, appeared in the fields with five hundred mules and four hundred planters. As they fell to work a cloud of dust was raised that could be seen for miles over the countryside. At first the unaccustomed work went slowly, but after an hour the farmers were amazed to see how much land they had planted. They grew elated, began to sing, then competed with each other to see how much ground they could plant. By noon; that is, within four hours of starting, they had completely finished over eight hundred acres of land. So pleased were the villagers over the success of their first community labor that hundreds decided that thereafter they would work in no other way.

　　To stimulate the formation of labor co-operatives, the Communist party adopted a slogan: "Organized manpower equals a machine: cooperate and get rich!"

　　But even organized manpower was not able to solve some of the most pressing problems of production in the Border Region. For example, no one had found a way to deal with insects. In the Border Region there were no insecticides, no repellents and no poisons. The only way to fight insects was to catch and kill them.

　　Almost as hard on crop production was the shortage of farm animals. Although UNRRA shipped thousands of mules to China, few came to the Border Region. None could be bought outside and famine and war had killed off over half the animals. A drive had increased livestock to 70 percent of normal, but many of these animals had to be used in transport and the situation on the farm remained desperate.

　　With mules scarce, men were often substituted for animals. Sometimes, man and wife pulled the plow together, but more often four men operated the plow - three pulling at the front, in the place of the mule, and one behind to guide.

　　Yet men could not equal mules when hooked up to a plow. A good mule could plow an acre of land in a day, but men could plow only half an acre.

　　Besides the shortage of farm animals, there was also a shortage of men, many of whom were at the front. This brought women into the fields and contributed greatly to the smashing of an old North China custom that women should not be seen outside the home. In harvest time, I saw women, even those with bound feet, and children gathering crops from the fields and working side by side with men. When the idea of mutual help teams was first introduced to the villages, old men and husbands objected violently to women working in the fields; for they were afraid what might happen when their wives and daughters came into contact with other men. Some of the women, however, revolted against their husbands and went to work in the co-operatives of their own accord. Later, when the men saw the money their wives were bringing in, they no longer objected. As more and more women went into the fields and entered handicraft industries, a saying grew up in the villages: "In all times before this, men supported women, but now maybe women can support men."

　　While the entrance of women into the fields took up part of the slack in production caused by the draft of men into the military service, the army itself took up more slack by turning its troops into producers. As with government cadres, every soldier was required to produce a certain amount of food or cloth or something useful each month. Nearly every company in the army had its own labor brigade, reclaiming waste land or helping farmers with plowing or at harvest time. Sometimes army roduction was carried to such extremes that whole regiments produced enough to feed themselves, while at other times, such as during General Liu Po-cheng's offensive into the Yangtze Valley, soldiers helped farmers reap harvests right in the middle of a campaign. And it should be admitted these soldiers in passing through Kuomintang cities also helped the poor to help themselves to the grain stores of city merchants and big landlords.

　　Economic theorists might find it strange that the home handicrafts did not expand into workshops and weaving mills. The answer was that the mills found it impossible to compete with home industry. Factories need capital; home industries do not. Factories had to feed laborers or guarantee them a wage to buy food; home workers could live off the family's land.

　　During one of the more optimistic truce periods in 1946, the Border Region officials suddenly drew up an industrial plan. They would build a steel plant, two cotton mills, one woolen mill, two wheat rolling mills, two cement mills, one acid works and two match factories while operating six large coal mines. How would they finance this plan? Vice-Chairman Jung got up before a meeting of the People's Council and made a resolution that American capital be invited to participate in the development of industry in the Border Region. The resolution was unanimously passed. In the meantime, a large cotton mill was brought in from Shanghai.

　　Suddenly the short-lived truce was over. No funds of course came from America. Afraid of air raids, the government never put up the cotton mill. The big industrial plan was scuttled.

　　Saddened; but not discouraged, Border Region officials returned to a contemplation of their handicrafts, revising old ones, trying to make new ones. Old looms which could produce sixteen feet of cloth a day were gradually followed by newly invented one-man looms which could turn out forty-eight feet in a day.

　　What could the Border Region have done with industry? Could they have built up a mighty economy as they had built up a thriving handicraft output? That question, though intriguing to contemplate, would have to wait.

　　"Now and at this time," rationalized Border Region leaders, "handicrafts are the things for us."

　　As Lenin said, in the time of revolution, "There is always something backward in a country that is useful for the revolution."