STUDY SHOWS RATIONING IN CHINA HAS HELPED ASSURE EVEN DISTRIBUTION OF FOOD
Rationing in China has functioned "successfully on the whole," Ralph W. Hueneman declares in a study on rationing in China's urban centers which was published in the April-June issue of The China Quarterly. Among other things it has helped assure a more even distribution of food and thus made it possible to prevent famine even in years of great agricultural difficulty. Before the revolution, uneven distribution of supplies was one of the main causes of death on a mass scale from starvation when crops failed.
Rationing has also helped to maintain stable prices and to counteract inflation, which became a difficult problem in the period when a heavily unbalanced rate of growth in industrial expansion was attempted. ;
Hueneman notes in passing a certain relationship between rationing .and the promulgation of egalitarian themes in the official publicity.
When rationing was first instituted, he points out, egalitarianism was under heavy attack. As support for their attacks, writers cited Marx's "Critique of the. Gotha Program" in which "Marx had strongly criticised the utopian socialists' belief that inequalities of income could be quickly eliminated from society." In actual practice at the time it was possible for the better-paid strata in the cities to find things they could buy despite the rationing.
In the period of "rectification," following the blooming of the Hundred Flowers, the tone changed. While references were still made to the incorrectness of the egalitarian view, the cudgels shifted to attacking undue concern about wages and personal gain. At the height of the enthusiasm over the Great Leap Forward, a further shift was made, a policy being envisaged of distribution "to each according to his needs." It was thought that rationing, like the scarcity making it necessary, would soon be a thing of the past. .
"By 1959, however, as the euphoria of the Great Leap wore off," notes Hueneman, articles defending the principle of 'to each according to his labour' once again began to appear in Chinese publications, and in the years since, egalitarianism has remained out of favour. In this atmosphere, rationing remains in force, but with much the same. status as before: a pragmatic policy, without a hint of ideological pretension."
MAO'S