[ENtINcRap: From the moment
bug) leave the airport in the
You feel you are in a new

City,
Tosa highway is lined’ with
Y-planted orchards stretch-

He hundreds of yards back into
tro ere, ten years ago, the
Yearg a8 stabilised for over two
rls Suddenly, without a sin-
OM to urban house to prepare
ight. Yr it, the city begins with
Storey buildings,
°m. then on four miles of
hate tree-lined Stalin Prospect,
an = in Labor Square, Houses
tabrig ye built of three-ton pre-
i €d blocks, with big pan-
lac wetcast on the outer face,
Wi red on the inner surfaces,
Tails Window frames, picture
already . fitted.
Workeen arcely see a building
Ching ” they are inside the
Machin of the cranes, handling
ing ery. There is no scaffold-

brog

Bibree this one road there are
» © than 100 building sites,

expla esky, the chief architect,
thig Ms the principle on which
bone neighborhood is being

.

‘On:
Nuch 4

Quy:

oe accommodation, public
to ene Playing field, access
Shops Spital, theatre, cinema,
» €Nd so on, has to be pro-
for every individual. We

Cong: -© Whole neighborhood ac-
Tdingly » n

They?
ihe Ay Ve gone so far in fulfill-
ca

© new plan that-Leningrad
aor afford to tear down
ie x buildings in the centre,
80 snig id the city’s palaces look
ar ped as now when they
tion Upied by youth organisa-
Berg,” architects, writers, engin-

Standards lay down how

80m,
cS)

Watching shrubs being plant-

he Admiralty Gardens, I

1d this story:

ee ae II was walking one
On there and admired a

ee lady-in-waiting advised

in t
Wag to

Chool space, creche and .

Leningrad

o~

was never so
splendid

/

Entrance to Leningrad Spring Fair

By
RALPH
PARKER

her to wait till evening before
having it plucked.

A sentry was placed beside the:
rose bush to protect the flower.
Almost a century later Bismark,
German ambassador in Peters-
burg, visited the gardens.

There was no rose-garden, but
there was still a sentry on duty,
for the orders had never been
changed. ;

Today we found 4 newly-plant-
ed rose bush in the restored
border, But no sentry.

&

On a sandy foreland in north-
east Leningrad a new stadium
seating 100,000 people has been
built. From a dredger in the
Gulf of Finland sand was pump-
ed to form a huge mound with a

e

circular saucer within. It was
covered with a concrete, shell,

After Victory Day, Leningrad-
ers came by tens of thousands to
plant trees around it. ‘The ter-
race round the top of the stad-
ium, high above the sea, is like
a promenande.

Leningrad has taken in a 40-
mile stretch of the coast of the
Kiarelian Isthmus, now known as
the Health Resort Region of the
city. Every factory office or
other institution has its summer
hostel there, Long-distance buses
and a railway run along the new
marine drive through little fish-
ing villages, pine forests and
past the reed-edged lakes where
Lenin hid in summer, 1917.

e
The famous Hermitage picture
gallery has been reorganised.

-Now it includes all the Winter

Palace.

The Imperial Staircase, once
reserved for the feet of royalty
and their attendants, is now
trodden by one million visitors

The changing

By ARTHUR CLEGG

HINA is growing larger,
swampy areas and tide lands
along the coast are being drain-
ed and protected by a sea wall
and tree belts.

In the next five years 750,000
acres of such land will be re-
claimed in the province of Kiang-
su alone. Most of it will be put
to growing cotton, giving an
estimated yield of some 70,000
tons a year.

Most of the land, having been
constantly flooded by sea water, ©
is soaked with alkali. Washing
this out will take five years but
once this is done the rich silt will
be splendidly fertile.

But planting starts as soon as
the land is feclaimed and
through this reclamation China

iis expanding the area under cot-
ton without further reducing
that under grain,

In Shantung and Anhwei pro-

_ vinees, north and south of Kiang-

su, similar reclamation projects
are being started.

This is one of China’s many
answers to the “over-population”’
professional prophets of woe.

The problem of unemployment
formerly chronic, has been solv-

ed in China.

In Chiang Kai-shek’s China
there was always mass unem-
ployment and beggary in every
town and city of China. The
collapse of trade during Chiang’s
civil’ war and the destruction of
industry by his retreating troops
made. matters worse,

When the People’s govern-
ment took over there were mil-~

to the galleries every year.

The French section has been
rehung. I saw there fine paint-
ings of Renoir, Monet, Degas and
(Pissaro, and in another room
Cezanne’s Man Smoking a Pipe,
three of Gauguin’s Tahitan
scenes and fine paintings by Van
Gogh and Marquet,

The collection of early Picas-
sos was being hung as we trav-
ersed the gallery.

Se

Gostiny Dvor—the Arcades on
the Nevsky /Prospect burned
down during the war—has been
completely restored. With a more
stable population than Moscow,
Leningrad shops are less crowd-
ed.

‘One shop, typical of the times,
sells only packaged food and has
a demonstration hall where cus-
tomers are encouraged to try
new food concentrates and to

- watch new dishes being prepar-

ed by white-coated assistants. I
tried the bottled apricot juice.
Delicious.

6

In the city hall, headquarters
of the Leningrad Soviet, men
and women in their early forties
administer a city with a budget
of 2,000 million roubles, nine-
tenths of which is being invested

lions of unemployed. Even after
nearly a year under the People’s.
government, unemployed and

workers on part time totalled
over one and a half million.

Now there is a growing ‘short- |

age of skilled and experienced
workers and intellectuals, and
there are more jobs than people
to- fill them. : x

Total production, both indus-
trial and agricultural, in Man-
churia this year will be 25 per-
cent greater than its previous
peak in 1948. China has passed
the. stage of restoring her war-
battered economy and is now
rapidly expanding.

Manchuria is the most indus-
trialize part of the country and
the increase in industrial and
mining output last year was 24.1
percent, This year it will in-

in developing and
the city.

The city soviet has 1,450 elect-
ed members with an executive
committee of 25 and 14 perman-
ent commissions. Each of the
city’s 23 districts has similar
committees and to these other
citizens are co-opted so that in
working out the city budget, for
example, about 2,000 citizens are
involved in committee work.

The man in charge of power
and fuel, son of a tram-driver
and a teacher, who began to
work at 16, was head of the
city’s power-station when he was
elected to local government. The
woman vice-chairman of the Len-
ingrad Soviet, once a weaver, is
a candidate for a doctorship in
philology.

é :
(My last hours in Leningrad
were spent at the ballet, watch-
ing a new production of The
Sleeping Beauty. The decora-
tion, strongly influenced by the

“Watteau paintings in the Her-

mitage, are by a Georgian artist.
J

Moscow also has a new produc-
tion of this great ballet, so that
the old healthy rivalry between
the two cities has now involved
the bailet-critics.

€

China

crease by 41.5 percent, double
last year’s physical increase of
output. /

Nearly three-quarters of the
industrial output in the North-
east is in capital goods. This is
the main root of China’s rising
demand for skilled workers.

Half a million Chinese workers
are now to be trained as skill-
ed engineers to meet the need.

Part of this output of capital
goods is improved machinery for
egriculture which is leading to a
steadily rising agricultural out-
put in the northeast and other
parts of China,

In the northeast agricultural
output is planned to go up: 20
percent this year. It has risen
considerably every year since
1948, when Manchuria was lib-
erated by the People’s Armies.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JUNE 138, 1952 — PAGE 9