Correspondents' Correspondence

...Certainly the stakes are high enough...

...The new reforms could bring public discussion of controversial issues before the electorate for the first time during the voting expected later this year...

...Now he is Mr...

...Clean, guided by Mao's thoughts, cultivated by contact with the masses, and giving his all for the glory of Communism...

...A concerned-officers committee has met in Los Angeles to ask for a Court of Inquiry into "illegal" lettuce purchases by the Navy, and men at other bases have filed requests for only union lettuce...

...has introduced legislation that would curtail the Pentagon's power to act as a strikebreaker in the lettuce boycott...

...The opera, first performed in 1959, portrays a civil war episode in which a contingent of the People's Liberation Army wipes out a Kuomintang unit in the mountains of northeast China...

...In the last general election, 340 deputies nominated by the Party--as opposed to only nine by the voters--were seated in the Parliament...

...they involve not only the Farm Workers but the power of the Pentagon to tip the scales in any dispute involving labor.--Nicolaus Mills Hungarian Reform Budapest--Feeling their hand strengthened by the recent events in Poland, Hungary's Communist leaders are again quietly loosening their hold on elections...

...Tiger Mountain, filmed in color and featuring modernized Chinese opera and ballet, offered at least partial fulfillment for such sentiments...

...Although carefully avoiding any challenge to the one-party system, they will now allow private citizens to nominate alternatives to the official slate...

...The grape dispute was kept alive long after it should have ended by a 350 per cent jump in Defense Department grape purchases, and the lettuce drive has given rise to even more flagrant cases of strikebreaking...

...Perhaps most important, Congressman William Ryan (D.-N.Y...

...Its replacement, the filmed version of a more famous work in the genre, The Red Lantern, is almost certain to enjoy equal--if not greater--success...

...fresh in the public mind, there is reason to hope that UFWOC's charges of Pentagon intervention will receive a favorable hearing...

...The opera's fighting finale, marked by spirited music and spectacular acrobatics, is as predictable as the end of any Hopalong Cassidy epic: The Good Guys beat the Bad Guys...

...they have come to Hong Kong, but their hearts are in the homeland...

...The first would give UFWOC organizers the right to pass out information at Army commissaries, from which they are now barred, and the second would enjoin Defense from further purchases of Bud Antle lettuce...

...Other demonstrations are planned for military bases across the country, and several have already taken place outside the Pentagon as well as at Fort Ord in California, Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and Fort Holabird in Maryland...

...It has signed some of the largest producers in the industry--among them Inter-Harvest, Inc., an affiliate of United Fruit--and the current national lettuce boycott is achieving results at a much faster rate than the five-year grape boycott...

...Some audience members cheered clever Communist tactics and hissed Kuomintang heavy-handedness...

...Like many members of Hong Kong's middle class, this couple does not subscribe to Mao's thought, but has no fondness for Chiang Kai-shek either...

...Being a product of the Cultural Revolution it adds heavily ideological tones to what had been a more freewheeling melodramatic plot...

...In the first fiscal quarter of 1971, Defense buyers paid $750,000 for Antle lettuce, more than the Department spent in all of fiscal 1970...

...As UFWOC has increased the pressure on its chief target, Bud Antle Inc., an agri-business giant in which Dow Chemical has heavy investments, the Pentagon has turned its energies to the task of bailing Antle out of trouble...

...It is likely, too, that they will further enhance the standing of Party boss Janos Kadar...

...In Los Angeles, for example, the Defense Personnel Subsistence Center bought over 49,-000 pounds of Antle lettuce at $5.54 a crate when the highest-quality wrapped lettuce was going at $3.50 a crate...

...The filmed presentation, however, is a revised version directed by former Shanghai movie actress Chiang Ching -- better known in the West as Madame Mao Tse-tung...

...It is China.--Arnold Abrams...

...Until this year, constituency meetings were merely authorized to recommend candidates, who then had to be approved by the Party-controlled Patriotic People's Front...

...The second-quarter figures are still more revealing, with Antle going from 2.9 per cent of the Pentagon market to 13.7, an increase of approximately 475 per cent...

...These were necessary because the predominantly Cantonese-speaking local population cannot understand Mandarin, the dialect Peking hopes to have all the people of Communist China adopt...

...Hong Kong audiences were largely unresponsive to these ideological revisions, which--according to the program notes--converted the leading character from a "reckless, muddleheaded adventurer" into a "genuine proletarian hero with towering ideals and revolutionary spirit...

...One scene, depicting Kuomintang troops pillaging a town and then murdering the infant daughter of two protesting parents, brought tears to the eyes of a Chinese couple attending the film with me...

...The production, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, recently concluded a run of more than two months, having played several times daily to near-capacity audiences in five movie theaters...

...The state-owned mass media will also be required to make equal facilities available to all candidates...

...These actions are bringing some results...

...Others, though they were less vocal, were clearly moved...

...This is what used to happen," said the wife, a middle-aged native of the area where the events in the opera take place...

...In fact, the colony's distance--political and geographical--from the mainland was symbolized by the need for theaters here to supplement the film with Chinese subtitles...

...Nevertheless, the Farm Workers are deeply disturbed by recent developments in the campaign...

...The Farm Workers have decided to meet the Pentagon challenge head-on...

...The delighted audience filled the theater with applause, and many left the theater humming the closing strains of "The East is Red...

...The villain's daughter does not even enter his mind, much less the set...

...In New York they have filed two suits against the Defense Department...

...Its heroic characters drew cheers from the audience, and some scenes revived painful memories for older viewers...

...They did this to us many times...

...Greening the Pentagon Washington -- Although its effort to organize California-Arizona iceberg lettuce workers is less than a year old, more than 20 per cent of the lettuce on the market now bears the label of Cesar Chavez" United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC...

...They cast a plague on both old mens' houses...

...The hero originally was a swashbuckling type who lived by his wits, liked to hum dirty little ditties, and was not above seducing the villain's daughter...

...On the same day the two suits were filed, the Reverend Jim Drake, long-time assistant to Chavez and director of the New York boycott, began a fast and led UFWOC supporters in a demonstration outside the local military purchasing headquarters...

...Once bitterly hated by his people, he has curbed the power of the secret police, reached a truce with the church, and decentralized the economy, now in its third year of rising productivity.--Thomas Land...

...It is not Communism that stirs these people...

...At Camp Pendleton in California a sermon on the boycott by Father Victor Salandini moved the camp's Chief of Staff to ban him from ever saying mass there again...

...Madame Mao's Opera Hong Kong--The first showing of a revolutionary opera filmed in Communist China proved a remarkably popular attraction in this predominantly Chinese capitalistic colony...

...But nobody has been converted by Peking's revolutionary opera...

...Anyone who wins one-third support at a voters' meeting will automatically be placed on the ballot...

...What worries them is not their boycott machinery across the country or their ability to sign lechugeros, but the role of the Pentagon...

...Indeed, it demonstrated once again that while most Chinese here do not support Peking's policies, they take pride in Communist China's achievements...

...Equally indicative of Pentagon policy is the fact that not only have its purchases been at the expense of growers who have signed with UFWOC (Inter-Harvest's share of the Defense market is down), but they have frequently come at times when the price of Bud Antle lettuce was extremely high...

...The attendance at Tiger Mountain was significant, for it far exceeded the small proportion of pro-Communist partisans among the colony's approximately 4 million residents...

...Nevertheless, viewers reacted intensely to the dramatized struggle between Mao's men, portrayed as heroes, and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang troops, shown brutalizing the civilian populace...

...His bill has gathered a number of co-sponsors and, with the scandals in the Px system revealed by Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D.-Conn...