Wake up（57）

 

Chapter 11 Concealment

 

57

 

The weather in summer is hot. The sun sprinkled heat to the earth to its heart's content, even the wind didn't bother to blow.

Because people are afraid of the heat and the scorching sun, they all hide in comfortable air-conditioned rooms.

The old Chinese doctor Chai Jianhua returned to the house and turned on the air conditioner. But he still couldn't make up his mind. Sitting idle under the air conditioner, he read the booklet "The Catastrophe of Life" written by Wang Changcai.

In the booklet "The Catastrophe of Life", he saw the materials of "big water conservancy" in the Great Leap Forward era, and thought of the environmental disasters around the world he saw when he was playing with his mobile phone in the yard just now, in order to understand the situation of China's environmental construction in the Great Leap Forward era , he began to read the pamphlet seriously.

The booklet "Life Catastrophe" records: Before the Great Leap Forward started, the whole country started "big water conservancy" according to Lao Mao's call.

The "big water conservancy project" started in October 1957. Beginning in 1958, 100 million farmers were invested in large and small dams, reservoirs, and canal projects. At that time, the total population of the country was 659.94 million, of which 553.03 million were rural population and about 265 million rural laborers. If 100 million farmers engage in water conservancy, that means one out of every 2.65 laborers will work on water conservancy construction sites, and more labor will be invested in places with large-scale water conservancy projects. In many places, every family has people who have been stuck on water conservancy construction sites for a long time. By mid-April 1958, farmers across the country had invested more than 13 billion labor days in water conservancy and completed more than 25 billion cubic meters of earthwork. Some people have calculated that if these earthworks are paved into a road with a thickness of 1 meter and a width of 66 meters, it can be paved from the earth to the moon.

The author Wang Changcai wrote: When the Great Leap Forward started in 1958, I was still in elementary school, and I was often assigned various "voluntary labor" with urban adults. The most work I did was to go to the countryside to "do water conservancy projects", mostly wielding a hoe. , hammer, and steel braze to build a "reservoir". The thin soil layer on the hillside is full of rocks, which are all consumed by hard work, and they are broken and dug out bit by bit... Later, it was discovered that the reservoirs and ditches built with great pains were due to random site selection and lack of supporting facilities. and other reasons, almost all of them have become useless waste rock pits and damaged the natural ecology.

The earth and stone moved by the four-year "big water conservancy" in the country is equivalent to the construction of 950 Suez Canals. The main force is naturally farmers, and most of the tools used are hand-made hoes, hammers, shovels, shoulder poles, and baskets, which are brought by farmers. They also had to pay for their own food while working. They often set up tents in the open air and set up camps. The farmers with empty stomachs worked more than ten hours a day, or ran with a load of one hundred catties, or struggled to dig the soil quickly. The work style of the cadres on the construction site is extremely bad. It is common for farmers to be beaten, scolded and tortured arbitrarily. In April 1958, Lao Mao convened various provinces to discuss water conservancy projects, and praised Wu Zhipu's Henan and Zeng Xisheng's Anhui (the first secretaries of the two provinces): "Wu Zhipu said to build 30 billion cubic meters, and I think 30,000 people will die; Zeng Xisheng said to build 200 million cubic meters. Yifang, I can see 20,000 people die." The deputy governor of Gansu and other cadres called this kind of water conservancy "Qin Shihuang's grinding of the people" and "it is the exchange of human life", and they were labeled as rightist anti-party groups.

In June and July 1958, Fengxian County in Shanghai put forward slogans such as "If you don't complete the task, you will meet with your head" and "We must use the heart of killing to engage in production" in the "big water conservancy" campaign. Phenomena such as hanging and beating, random punishment, random fighting, and random customs clearance. According to the survey, 4 people were beaten to death at the water conservancy construction site in this county, 95 people committed suicide after being cornered, 131 people died of exhaustion due to continuous labor day and night without rest, and 205 people died of illness and were not allowed to seek medical treatment. , 411 people died of sick children as a result of not allowing their parents to go home to care for them, and 114 others died due to severe coercive orders. In addition, more than 4,000 farmers were privately reformed through labor by various communes, and "children's training classes" in disguised form were also held. The children who were punished in the "training" were as young as 6 years old.

After the "anti-rightist movement" at the Lushan Conference in 1959 led to a climax of starvation across the country, the peasants in disguised labor reforms at various water conservancy construction sites basically starved to serve hard labor. In December 1960, Wang Congwu of the Central Investigation Team (Deputy Secretary of the Central Supervisory Committee) disclosed in a speech in Henan Province that more than 17,000 people died of exhaustion, beating and starvation in the three water conservancy construction sites in Gushi County alone; Luoshan, Suiping and Yubei and other water conservancy construction sites also killed a lot of people from starvation. More than 200 strong laborers from the Shangyuan Brigade of Qiyi Commune in Gushi County went to the water conservancy construction site. As a result, 160 people died. In one family, all 6 members of the father, son and brother went there, and all of them died.

The "big water conservancy project" undertaken with such a huge sacrifice has not received the benefits it deserves. In the early days of the Great Leap Forward, more than 500 large-scale reservoirs with a volume of more than 100 million cubic meters were launched, but the number was reduced to 200 in just over a year.

To Chai Jianhua's surprise, in addition to communalization, large-scale water conservancy, and high-yield satellites, the Central Beidaihe Conference in 1958 arranged more combat tasks: to carry out socialist and communist education campaigns, to use big words, big releases, and big characters All "white flags", "grey flags" and "yellow flags" should be pulled out in newspapers and debates, and a larger plan for increasing production and harvest should be formulated to set off a greater production boom; The high-yield field is more than two feet; it is necessary to accumulate manure, make manure, and fertilize in layers; it is necessary to continue to eliminate the "four pests" and create more four-no townships, four-no counties, and four-no provinces...

Everything is an important instruction from the Party Central Committee and Lao Mao, and everything must be done with all our strength and resolutely. The approach of communism incited fantasies and enthusiasm, strong political pressure and violent persecution swept away obstacles, all fantasies and nonsense were unimpeded and intensified, and everyone was driven around by the whip of the Great Leap Forward.

The way to create miracles in the world is to "organize militarization, act into combat, and collectivize life" in battle, and it is to force coolies regardless of day and night, all night long. Steelmaking, construction of reservoirs, power stations, railways, roads, factories, and construction of the abandoned Minjiang Power Station and the Chengguan Railway have mobilized 100,000 migrant workers in the Wenjiang area. Groups of male laborers left the fields, and women, children, grandmas, uncles, disabled people, and bedridden patients were all driven up. Along the way, children cried and women screamed, and "rushed to the battlefield" in the bitter wind and rain of winter. A large number of farm labor in Henan was transferred to water conservancy construction sites and local industries, and later to coking and steel making. There was a shortage of labor, and all women, old and young were driven to the production line.

The state serfdom with militarization of organization, collectivization of life, and militancy of labor has made the power of cadres infinitely expanded, and blind command of production, oppression of the people, and beating and scolding farmers have become commonplace. Gong Mingtong, a farmer in Wenjiang County, Sichuan Province, was a little late to start work, and was fined by the branch secretary for 15 days. The branch secretary of the Daming district forced the patient Xiao Yougen to carry rice from the commune back to the district. Xiao walked slowly, and was violently tortured on the charge of "grinding foreign workers", causing Xiao to hang himself. He died soon after being left unattended; Zhou Yuming suffered from swelling, and the director of the district still forced him to go to work. Zhou passed out and was accused of resisting labor. Li Hongying in Rongchang County suffered from severe swelling, and the officials forced him to work in the paddy fields. His wife begged him not to send Li to the fields, but the officials slapped Li Hongying and took away his meals for two days. Li Hongying died within a few days of going to the fields. The Shixing Commune in Nanxiong County, Guangdong Province has "three cramps" for inactive members: those who doze off have eye cramps, those who don't work hard have cramps at the waist, and those who don't stand up after listening to the report have cramps.

The Chunhua Management District of Chengxi Commune, Dianjiang County, Sichuan Province engaged in "big corps operations", gathering hundreds of laborers from seven teams in the whole district to carry out "deep plowing". , 60 catties of wheat were used for seeding, and the final harvest was not as much as seeds. After the labor force was concentrated, the other teams missed the production season, resulting in a large amount of wasteland. The four teams had a total of 129 mu of fields and 172 mu of land. In 1959, only 40 mu of wheat was planted, and it was only sown in November of the lunar calendar. Wheat production is down 63 percent from 1958 levels. During the busy season of agriculture, a large number of laborers were transferred to water conservancy construction sites, and the season for transplanting rice seedlings was also delayed. Some communes transferred people from one team to another team to transplant rice seedlings, and transferred people from another team to this team to weed, resulting in the abandonment of large areas of land. There are more than 5,400 mu of barren land in Jinniu Commune in Chengdu, more than 1,000 mu of which have not been planted after the season of transplanting rice seedlings, and more than 4,000 mu of land that has not been harvested due to poor management after transplanting.

During the deep plowing and autumn sowing in Fengxian County, Shanghai, the masses were forced to turn over 78,891 mu of cotton that had matured and was about to be harvested. In the second management area of Mianzhu Commune, Leshan County, Sichuan, some seedling fields that had been sown with seed and sprouted did not meet the requirements of the higher authorities to be “tidy and beautiful”, so the farmers were ordered to pick up the sprouted seed seeds one by one and scatter them over the entire field. kind. In the 43 acres of artichoke fields that were not planted according to the unified regulations, the seedlings had grown four or five inches, and some had already grown small artichokes, so they had to be dug out and replanted. When transplanting rice seedlings, you must bring rulers and ropes, and those that do not meet the uniform requirements must be reworked. The temperature was already very high, and the members were forced to use firebeds to raise red sweet potato seedlings, but the red sweet potato was roasted 11000

catty. It was stipulated that no sweet potatoes should be dug before the frost. As a result, the temperature dropped sharply after the frost, and a large number of sweet potatoes rotted. The busy season of spring plowing should have been

Concentrate on transplanting rice seedlings, but let a large number of laborers engage in "gardening", and miss the rice live broadcast season. More than 170 mu of deep fields and cold soaked fields were originally suitable for planting middle-aged rice, but the superiors forced them to plant early rice; more than 100 mu of land suitable for planting sweet potatoes forced farmers to plant corn. These two items alone reduced the grain harvest by at least 40,000 catties.

Chai Jianhua fell into confusion.