Wake up（21）

 

21

 

When Pan Tianliang and his wife began to boil traditional Chinese medicine according to Chai Jianhua's request, Chai Jianhua and He Jiafu sat in front of Lao Pantou's bed, and Lao Pantou excitedly started talking.

Lao Pantou talked about the land reform again. For a person who has lived to be 75 years old, he sees many things lightly. After experiencing ups and downs in his life, there is basically nothing that he cannot let go of. However, he seems to have endless things to say about land reform.

Old Pan said:

Before and after the outbreak of the War of Liberation, the Communist Party] began to carry out land reform campaigns in the controlled areas. After deciding to carry out land reform in an area, the local party committee will first send “land reform work teams” into each village. Each work team has about 3 to 5 people, and its job task is to preside over the land reform movement in the village. The members of the work team are generally cadres of government agencies at all levels or intellectuals of democratic organizations, but in order to prevent resistance to land reform, it is stipulated that the work team members must avoid their hometowns.

After the work team entered the village, they had the status of "imperial envoys". If the village party secretary and village chief were found to be dereliction of duty or engaged in other illegal activities, they had the right to remove them at any time and hold new elections.

Task forces need to gain the trust of farmers. Through visits to understand the situation in the village, the work team strives to conduct an accurate investigation and find out the general situation in the village, such as which ones may be classified as landlords, which ones are rich peasants, and which are poor and hired peasants. But the work team's visit was not smooth at the beginning. Many farmers dared not tell the truth to the work team out of fear of the landlords. Because in some places the land ownership situation in villages is not as uneven as imagined, and everyone lives in the same village, almost all of them are relatives. The potential is the same as fire and water, and even in some places the relationship between the two parties is relatively harmonious. At first, many people were unwilling to take the lead in attacking the landlord.

On the contrary, when the work team mobilized them to fight the landlords, many poor and farm laborers would feel a sense of resistance. Some poor peasants also said: "I took the landlord's salary and supported my whole family with it. Therefore, the landlord is not exploited." Many poor and hired peasants also said: "The villain's life is poor, it is destined, and the fields of different people need to be paid. Get ill". Some said: "I work for the landlord, and they take care of my food. I will pay back my wages at the end of the year. This is all agreed. If I don't pay wages or food at the end of the year, I can sue him. But they do I gave money and I also gave food, so what's wrong with that?"

In fact, another important reason why the peasants were unwilling to rise up and fight against the landlords was "fear of changes in the sky." Because when the Kuomintang and the Communist Party meet each other in battle, it is hard to say who will win the battle. If the peasants rise up and fight against the landlords, they will surely be in bad luck if the Kuomintang settles their accounts after the fall. Some people also said, "One day the emperor and one courtier, we know when your work teams will leave", "We can't resist you leaving". The peasants worried that the landlords would counterattack in the future.

The work team soon realized this. When mobilizing the peasants to fight against the landlords, they first had to explain the situation to us, explaining that the Kuomintang had already been overthrown, and it was impossible to give the landlords a chance to settle their accounts after the fall. From the point of view of farmers, groups are always safe. Therefore, the work team began to look for a leader who "has suffered greatly and hated deeply", and this search process became "interviewing suffering". Visiting Ku is to look for typical "bitter masters" in the village, who often have experienced some tragic past events.

Old Pan sighed and said:

The working team usually targets three types of people: the elderly, women, and marginalized people in the village. Because based on past experience, these people suffer the most, feel the deepest oppression, and are the easiest to mobilize successfully. After the mobilization target is determined, the team members will move into his home, eat and live with him, and further discover their "suffering". Wu Tianren in the village is 61 years old and has been a long-term worker for 30 years. His family is so poor that the team members settled accounts with him: "In 30 years, you can harvest 2,400 shi of rice, and you only get 840 shi. The rest is given to the landlord. The exploitation is gone, so your life is so miserable now.” After such a calculation, not only did he become enlightened, but even his wife actively participated in the land reform movement. The working team found me and helped me to calculate an account. After calculating that 100,000 catties of rice had been exploited by the landlord in the past 40 years, I jumped up excitedly and shouted: "I'm going to peel the landlord's skin, smoke The tendons of the landlords!" Under the guidance of the team members, I began to understand that the reason I was poor was because I had been brutally exploited by the landlord class for generations. The work team continued to guide us: "The reason why the landlords dare to oppress and exploit you is because Chiang Kai-shek is the head of the landlord class. The Chiang bandit army did not resist the Japanese, but burned, killed, killed and oppressed the people everywhere. Now that we, the Communist Party, have come, we want to support you. turn you into masters." This naturally leads us to love the Communist Party and hate the Kuomintang.

Various investigations have shown that the cadres of the land reform team generally encouraged farmers to beat people, and it was not uncommon for the cadres of the land reform team to beat people in person, resulting in the death of a large number of people during the land reform period. Among the 2,742 townships in southern Jiangsu, riots occurred in more than 200 townships; according to the original records of the Southern Jiangsu District Rural Work Committee of the Communist Party of China at that time, a total of 218 people were beaten, hanged, forced to kneel or stripped naked clothing.

Mu Qing, the former president of Xinhua News Agency, reported in "Internal Reference" on June 2, 1950 that more than 40 cases of forced death occurred during the land reform movement in Henan in just over a month. In Guaying District, Lanfeng County, seven people were forced to death within 20 days.

At that time, Ye Jianying, secretary of the South China Branch of the Central South Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, and Fang Fang, deputy secretary, adopted relatively moderate policies and practices when leading the land reform movement. As a result, the land reform in Guangdong was criticized by the party chairman Mao Zedong. In November 1951, Mao Zedong criticized Guangdong's land improvement progress too slowly, like a "turtle". Mao Zedong transferred Tao Zhu and Zhao Ziyang to Guangdong to take charge of the land reform work, and mobilized a large number of cadres to go south to Guangdong to participate in the land reform work. In February 1952, Mao Zedong criticized Fang Fang face-to-face at a meeting of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China for making the mistake of "rightist land reform."

Tao Zhu, who had just taken office in Guangdong, proposed that Guangdong should "make great fanfare, act resolutely, and use numbers." The situation of Guangdong's land reform subsequently underwent major changes, and indiscriminate killings were serious. Every township should formulate an index plan for killing landlords. In the spring of 1953, 1,156 people committed suicide during the land reform in the western part of Guangdong Province. At that time, the popular slogan in Guangdong Province was: "Every village bleeds, every household struggles."

At that time, Luan Da Luan hanging was very common, suicides were also very serious, and chasing and digging for bottom line money seemed chaotic. Some cadres have the idea of preferring the left to the right: "If you kill the landlord 100, you can't kill a poor peasant, so it doesn't matter."

During the land reform, people who were classified as landlords and their relatives were tortured inhumanely, resulting in a large number of deaths. Among them, women are more full of sexual violence, and rape, gang rape, and sexual abuse are often heard. Someone once saw a township head tied to a tree, his bones were scraped out with bark, and he died tragically by the roadside. "

After hearing what Old Pan said about the land reform, Chai Jianhua and He Jiafu seemed restless, and a sense of fear made it difficult for them to fall asleep.