Volume 2, No. 8, August 2001

Ideological Struggle Also Occurs in Families. All households in the Chiateng Production Team of the Sinchihyang Commune belong to the Maonan nationality. Not only have they descended from the same ancestors and have the same surname, but without exception all were poor and lower-middle peasants. People used to call Chiateng the "brothers’ team." But in the course of transforming the mountains and rivers there, contradictions cropped up among "brothers."

They had a fairly good harvest in 1970. With a view to promoting production still more quickly, the cadres recommended that manpower be concentrated on transforming the terrain as soon as the autumn crops were in. Some team members thought that everyone should be able to devote more time to private side-line occupations so as to increase their earnings since the grain produced by the collective already met the needs. These two different opinions found people clashing sharply and opinions also differed in some homes. One couple quarrelled over this question and made quite a scene.

The cadres and old poor peasants put their heads together one evening to analyse the situation. Chin Feng-nien, the team leader said: We all know what Chairman Mao has said in On Contradiction: "There is nothing that does not contain contradiction; without contradiction nothing would exist." It’s true our team is composed only of poor and lower-middle peasants, but class struggle in society invariably finds its expression in our ranks. The current debate is a concrete manifestation of the struggle between the two ideologies and the two roads in society. Which road should we take—the road of socialism leading to common prosperity, or the road of capitalism which enables only a few to get rich?

Veteran peasant Chin Pu-ling said. "The fingers on a hand are not of the same length. The moon waxes and wanes. Even among those of one family there often are contradictions between ideas beneficial or detrimental to the public interest and between what is correct and what is wrong. It’s not strange that there are contradictions."

Another team leader chimed in: "You fellows certainly said the right thing. We belong to one family but our ideologies don’t." After these analyses, everyone present held that since there were differences of opinion, the leadership must not fight shy of the contradiction but should lead the masses to carry on the debate so as to draw a line of demarcation between proletarian and bourgeois ideologies.

Following this, they studied the following teaching of Chairman Mao: "The only way to settle questions of an ideological nature or controversial issues among the people is by the democratic method, the method of discussion, of criticism, of persuasion and education, and not by the method of coercion or repression." The commune members were organized to study and discuss the Party’s basic line and repudiate the capitalist road and revisionist line which would cause the toiling masses to suffer once again. They also reviewed the changes brought about over the years by the development of the socialist collective economy. The discussions went on for some time until they all came to see things in the same light and agreed to work as fast as they could on transforming the terrain. There was a big drought last year but they had a bumper harvest, with yield reaching nine tons per hectare. The team is making big strides along the road of common prosperity.

Revelation in a Compost Heap. It was the winter of 1970 when Pan Jui-li, leader of the Tayu Production Team of the Fulung Commune, heard at the commune cadres’ meeting about a production brigade’s substantial increase in output by harvesting two crops of maize a year instead of one. He was so excited that upon returning he immediately asked members in his team to do the same. Some said: "It’s a very fine idea, but we’re afraid we aren’t able to do it. They live on a plain and we are in the mountains. When they’re still using fans we up here have to sleep in blankets. The ground temperatures are not the same, it won’t work here."

When the ground temperature was low, Pan Jui-li surmised by himself, the seeds would mildew and rot if we sowed them early; but if we waited till the temperature went up, then the late crop could not stand up to the cold winds. These were the difficulties.

But was there really no way out? The team leader recalled what Chairman Mao had taught: "Conclusions invariably come after investigation, and not before. Only a blockhead cudgels his brains on his own, or together with a group, to ‘find a solution’ or evolve an idea’ without making any investigation. It must be stressed that this cannot possibly lead to any effective solution or any good idea." Pan Jui-li and members of a scientific experiment group under the team went to all the bottom-lands to collect detailed data on ground temperature. When they got to the final slope to cheek the temperature, they came across a compost heap. They dug up the earth covering it and the thermometer they put into it read ten degrees higher than the temperature elsewhere. They went through the entire pile to find only rotting maize stalks and fermenting weeds; one maize cob with unthreshed corn on it was sprouting.

Everyone was pleased with the discovery that since the maize had sprouted in the compost, it was also possible to keep the maize crop warm by covering each plant with fermented compost.

This discovery and the results of their findings were reported by Pan Jui-li at a commune members’ meeting. The idea of growing two crops of maize a year was supported by the masses who also put forward many valuable suggestions.

But was the idea really feasible? It remained to be proved in the course of practice and it was not to be applied rashly to all areas under cultivation. Basing himself on the dialectical materialist viewpoint of putting practice first, Pan Jui-li led the scientific research group to experiment on the use of compost and finally succeeded. The team now produces 3 tons of late maize per hectare in addition to 3.8 tons per hectare of early maize. It has thus broken with the old tradition of growing one maize crop a year handed down from generation to generation. Production is continuing to climb steeply.

Sand Out of Rocky Hills. By early summer, 1971, the Lungehih Production Brigade of the Kaoling Commune had everything ready for building irrigation ditches except sand. Lu Chia-yao, secretary of the Party branch, was told that a veteran peasant had once excavated sand in the mountains. He went there and found sand, but the quantity was too small for what was needed.

Was there sand anywhere else? Someone said that sand found in the mountains was only accidental, as the saying goes: "Go to the mountains to quarry rock, into the river to dig up sand." Others frowned at the saying. Philosophically, they said, according to dialectics, all things under the sun are interconnected and the inevitable also lie in the accidental. Further analysis should be made in order to know why there was sand on that mountain slope. So Lu Chia-yao and others examined the location carefully and found that the ground containing sand lay in a valley sandwiched between two hills. The gradient of the slope was not so sharp which had soft and moist top-soil overgrown with a kind of wild groundnuts commonly found on sandy loams. All this made the soil on the slope different from elsewhere.

With the knowledge so gained, they went looking for and found slopes with similar topographical features which had the sand required for building irrigation channels.

This was later referred to a scientific worker who told them that the locale had been an ancient river course with huge amounts of alluvium because of its low-lying position. Later, when the river changed course as a result of changes in the earth’s crust, the sand sank underground but was not so deeply buried and could be dug up easily. Engels wrote: "But where on the surface accident holds sway, there actually it is always governed by inner, hidden laws and it is only a matter of discovering these laws."

— From Peking Review No. 51, December 21, 1973

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