New Earth

Résumé du livre

Until now, very little firsthand informa­tion about Communist China has been available in this country. Of extraordinary importance, therefore, is this story of an early collective farm in East China’s Chekiang Province in the 1949–56 period.

The book is a reprinting of a work first published in China in 1957. For this edition the author has added a new Preface and a new Postscript bringing his account up to date. Jack Chen is the author of a new work on a rural people’s commune, Life in Upper Felicity, to be published in Spring 1973 by Macmillan.

The county chronicled in this book is Hsinteng County, one of China’s 2,082 counties. It offers a typical example of the co-operative movement that swept the Chinese countryside and formed the basis of the Green Revolution, a part of the over-all policy drafted by Mao Tse-tung.

In his new Postscript, in the wake of the cultural revolution, Chen is able to name Liu Shao-chi as the originator of the “compression,” who in Mao’s absence from Peking in May 1955, Chen says, got 200,000 co-ops dissolved throughout the country.