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作家、摄影家、民间文艺家

2023年4月1日星期六

Wake up(58)

 


58

 

The scorching sun sprinkles heat on the earth to its heart's content, and this summer is particularly hot.

Chai Jianhua, a 95-year-old Chinese doctor, hid under the air conditioner because he was afraid of the heat. But he still couldn't calm down. So I read the booklet "The Catastrophe of Life" written by Wang Changcai again, trying to distract myself from my irritability.

"The Great Catastrophe of Life" wrote: Lao Mao said that the United States is nothing more than a little more steel, plus hundreds of hydrogen bombs. He believes that if the steel output increases, the economy will increase, so he proposed "taking steel as the key link" and "steel marshal's promotion". At the end of June 1958, it was suddenly proposed that the steel output for that year would be 10.7 million tons, double the 5.35 million tons in 1957.

At that time, regular steel factories worked overtime day and night, and they were still far from meeting their targets. By the end of August 1958, more than half of the time had passed, and it was still far from 10.7 million tons, so the "National Mass Steelmaking" was launched. Lao Mao himself said that there are at least 90 million people who have been "forcibly" involved in indigenous steelmaking. Small blast furnaces have been built everywhere in rural areas and cities across the country, including government agencies, campuses, and even Zhongnanhai.

Hundreds of thousands of earthen stoves were erected overnight in Sichuan Province, and tens of millions of iron and steel smelting troops worked day and night. The Wenjiang area around Chengdu is short of coal and iron mines. The whole region mobilizes more than 500,000 strong laborers, led by the first secretaries of each county, to form a large iron-making corps, carrying backpacks, grain, hoes, and poles. Head to the mountains to the west. The iron-making army lived and boarded on the mountain, and there had to be tens of thousands of former troops for logistical support. The iron smelting corps in Chongqing County needed bricks to build furnaces. The county organized tens of thousands of students, workers, government officials and street residents to demolish the city walls and transport bricks up the mountain day and night.

Steelmaking needs scrap iron, so people are forced to hand over their metal products at home. "There is iron for iron, but there is no iron for iron." Even the necessities of life, such as iron rings and locks on the door, iron pans and shovels for cooking, and valuable furniture and agricultural tools, are filled into the soil blast furnace that cannot be filled no matter what. Fuping County, Shaanxi Province drives all the old men and old ladies to look for ores in the wild. As long as they find any stone or mountain soil that is red or rust-like in color, they will take it back as ores. An old lady with small feet couldn't carry her back, so she wrapped a stone in a handkerchief and carried it around. Several ships of high-quality alloy steel bought at high prices from the Soviet Union were also secretly detained by cadres in a certain place

Sent into the soil blast furnace. Chinese medicine practitioners also boldly invented the use of traditional Chinese medicine for steelmaking, adding traditional Chinese medicine such as Huaijiao, chicken stomach, and tortoise shell to the blast furnace, which is said to improve the steelmaking ability.

For the fuel needed to make iron and steel, the forested mountains were cut down and the houses of farmers were stripped away. Sichuan has also created a new technology of "big kiln steelmaking": choose a valley depression, shave the trees on the surrounding mountains, fill them with a layer of wood and a layer of ore, and then set a big fire for several days. Burn it out, dig out the black things that burnt so that the ore is not ore, and the iron is not iron, and beating gongs and drums to carry it to announce the good news.

The author Wang Changcai recalled: I was involved in the "big iron and steel smelting" when I was a child. I went through old graves with children to move bricks and pick up nails, and pulled the bellows for the earthen blast furnace in the steelmaking center of the county. The men in the countryside work around the earthen blast furnace 24 hours a day. When the harvest season comes, only women and children are left to harvest the crops. Peng Dehuai sighed: "The grain is scattered on the ground, the potato leaves wither, the young and strong go to smelt iron, and harvest the grain boys and aunts. How will the next year be?"

In 1958, the whole country was in good weather. Despite a series of crazy toss, it was still a rare bumper harvest year. However, all the young and middle-aged farmers were spared from large-scale water conservancy and steel smelting. In many places, the crops rotted in the fields and there was no labor to harvest them. Some crops in Yuncheng County, Shandong Province were harvested and could not be transported to the yard, where they were piled up on the ground and became moldy and deteriorated, or were threshed and rotted when they were pulled to the yard. All the good laborers in Qin'an County, Gansu went to the Taohe Water Conservancy Construction Site. The crops were all old men in their 70s and 80s. The autumn red sweet potato in the Wenjiang area of Sichuan has more than one million mu, and it grows very well, but when it comes to digging the red sweet potato, there is no labor to spare. From the province to the county, meetings and emergency notices are held, but to no avail. The red sweet potato is either rotten in the ground or dug. Get up and pile up on the ground to rot.

After so much tossing until the end of the year, the People’s Daily finally reported with red headlines that the 10.7 million tons steelmaking target had been reached. But as Mao himself admitted: "Only 40% is good." This 40% is actually made by regular steel factories. The most produced by earth blast furnaces is pig iron, and most of them are not even enough for pig iron. They are useless "bull dung lumps".

Almost all the "big industries" that have sprung up across the country have lost their wives and soldiers. From the beginning of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 to the end of the year, in just a few months, 1,639 large-scale enterprises were built in China, but only 28 were completed and put into operation in the end. Many of the wasted equipment was exported food in large quantities and bought from the Soviet Union at a huge cost, because There is no infrastructure and supporting industries, so it is left idle, and it is allowed to rust and be scrapped.

In June 1959, Zashyako, the deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union and a metallurgist expert, reported to Khrushchev after his visit to China: "They simply ruined our things."

All kinds of enterprises in normal production are not allowed to take a break just like people. Major accidents occurred one after another. At least 30,000 multi-tasking workers died of serious work-related injuries within a few months, and the quality of products was not guaranteed. Experts who worked up the courage to offer their opinions were pulled out as "white flags".

Lao Mao said: "As for the knowledge of bourgeois professors, we should treat them as bullshit. They are equal to nothing, despise, despise, and despise."

Arkhipov, the Soviet general adviser who was very pro-China, recalled: "I asked Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun to persuade Lao Mao not to command blindly, but Lao Mao refused to listen. They told me: Sorry, Chairman Mao disagrees with the Soviet Union."

Chai Jianhua put down the booklet "The Great Catastrophe of Life". He couldn't read it anymore, and all he felt was disgust and hatred. He began to reflect on himself, what was he doing at that time?

1 条评论:

  1. Group psychological exploration novel (Shenyang)

    Today is like a crow gathering, and tomorrow will disappear like a beast. This is the case for hooligans, politicians, and ignorance people. Today, you can mix together, and will run counter to the benefit tomorrow. I explore the novels of group psychology, hoping that more people in the world can wake up from nightmares.

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