Farming Out the Elite

In Canton, a crowd of 300,000 turned out to give a rousing send-off to 60,000 middle-school graduates, all of them teen-agers bound for China's remoter regions. In Wuhan, a similar rally was staged to bid farewell to 10,000 Red Guards from 150 local schools. In Kweiyang, more than 20,000 students have set out for the mountains and paddylands. Since September, the Peking government has shipped more than 2,000,000 university and high school students, including thousands of young guardsmen, to the boondocks. Hundreds of thousands more of the nation's intellectual elite are scheduled to follow.

It has been standard practice in both China and the Soviet Union to assign graduates to rural work, in part to help them overcome their traditional aversion to dirty hands. But the current mass deportation of intellectuals from urban centers has more far-reaching goals and implications. Chinese broadcasts emphasize that the mass upheaval is part of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's plan for a revolution in the country's educational policies; he is said to believe that the present setup tends to perpetuate urban, bourgeois values. It is also something of a "rectification" campaign, however, designed to punish the young Red Guards who ran wild after Mao proclaimed his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966.

Stinking Thinking. Some analysts, principally British China-watchers in Hong Kong, see even deeper significance in the campaign. They are convinced that the extreme leftists who promoted the lunacies of the Cultural Revolution have been replaced at China's controls by the more conservative army. They believe that the army, which was one of the principal targets of the radical Red Guards, is wreaking its vengeance by shipping the young hooligans off to semi permanent exile, and in the name of their revered Mao, no less. In some provinces, most of the guardsmen find them selves shipped directly to army-run communes, which are especially tough.

Once down on the farm, most of the exiles face the undignified task of learning to live and work as ordinary peas ants do. They must learn to plant and harvest, dig and hoe, and above all to obey their rugged old peasant mentors.

The Chinese press tells the tale of a woman teacher, educated in the Soviet Union, who had never been to the rural areas and who feared to cross a particular wooden bridge. She has now learned to lug 60-lb. loads on a car rying pole across that bridge, thanks to the peasants. "What I learned in the So viet Union was nothing but stinking bourgeois thinking," she is quoted as saying. "I was unable to carry things on a pole. To go on in this way would lead to the quagmire of revisionism."

Planting the Seeds. The long march back to the farms, of course, may well create more problems than it solves.

Thousands of skilled factory workers, for example, have been ordered to take over administration of schools demoralized by the deportations, thus cutting into industrial production. So far, these workers have not had much success in reorganizing schools along Maoist lines, largely because the new order has so far not been spelled out. In the bar gain, they find themselves grappling with Red Guard remnants who are reluctant to join the move to the countryside.

In the rural areas, agricultural pro duction is not likely to be helped by the assignment of skilled peasants to the job of training displaced urban intellectuals. The school system itself, in most parts of China, remains chaotic. More important, far beyond such immediate concerns is the fact that by exiling millions of city dwellers to the countryside, Mao and the army may well be planting the seeds for a bitter fu ture harvest of rural revolution.

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