Problem City

Shanghai is the biggest city a Communist regime has ever tried to digest. It has also proved the most indigestible. Tough, resilient, raised on the vigorous traditions of free enterprise, Shanghailanders made little effort to conceal their contempt when Mao Tse-tung's troops entered in 1949, chuckled with sophisticated delight at such jokes as the story of a young officer fresh from the caves of Yenan who washed the dust from his rice ration in a hotel toilet bowl. "Just wait and see," went a confident Shanghai refrain. "We'll change the Communists."

The Communists did all the changing. In 1952 and 1953, Shanghai bore the brunt of Peking's bloody campaigns against "capitalists and counter-revolutionaries." The city's dog track was converted into an auditorium, its Great World gambling hall into a theater, its race course into a parade ground. Still Shanghai persisted in being a problem city. Its "teeming slums gave refuge to a steady flow of anti-Communists and criminals. Long after its shops and factories could provide jobs, they attracted hundreds of thousands who came from the starving hinterland in hopes of livelihood, thereby increasing unemployment, crime and supply problems. The city's population rose from 5,000,000 to 7,000,000 in six years.

Abnormally Developed. Under their Five Year Plan, the Communists proclaimed that industry must be shifted from the old seaboard cities to new centers in the interior. One of the first moves: transplant Shanghai's textile mills, heart of the city's industry, to cotton-growing areas. Last spring came an even stiffer edict. "It is absolutely necessary to reduce the population," decreed the city's Communist People's Congress. The reported goal: 50%. Explained the newspaper Sin Wen Daily: "Shanghai was abnormally developed ... for the benefit of imperialism, bureaucratic capital and feudalism."

A big "back-to-the-village" drive swept over Shanghai. "Volunteer" migrants were picked up by the government, persuaded when possible by a saturation propaganda campaign, more often forced to leave by such devices as canceled food ration cards.

Begging for Jobs. Between April and last month, 500,000 peasants were sent back to their villages. In one month, 35,000 pedicab and rickshaw men "volunteered" to migrate to northern Kiangsu; in one day 4,000 sampan dwellers left for inland cities. The government press reported proudly that 80% of the city's university students and flocks of physicians were begging for frontier jobs.

Altogether, according to the Communists' own figures, nearly 1,000,000 were bulldozed out of the city. But recently--apparently at the end of August--the pressure suddenly lifted, and the drive came to a temporary halt. Last week in Hong Kong, three Belgian priests who had left Shanghai a few days previously, reported that the drive "has met so much opposition, created so many difficulties" that it is at a "virtual standstill."

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