Visitors busily take notes on a peasant invention at the National Farm Implements Exposition outside Beijing. Of the four-hundred-odd exhibits, aside from some heavy machinery from England, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR, the items on display were the fruit of peasant ingenuity, born of years of having to “make do” or to adapt standard equipment to local problems. This sort of invention is encouraged by the government as a way of mobilizing the masses. Other inventions included a wooden machine, operated by a pedal, that performs eight different operations: cutting grass, threshing wheat, etc.