Wake up（60）

 

60

 

The heat is fumigated, and the hot and humid weather this summer seems to be steamed in a cage. The scorching sun was scorching hot and the heat was unbearable. Sitting indoors under the air conditioner is also unbearable in this summer. The old Chinese doctor Chai Jianhua walked into the yard, where the dense green trees could still cover some sunlight.

The 95-year-old Chai Jianhua sat under the shade of a tree, calmed down, and read the booklet "The Catastrophe of Life".

Chai Jianhua suddenly remembered the past events of his wanderings in Xinyang, which had been deeply embedded in his memory.

After the Lushan Conference in 1959, an "anti-rightist" campaign swept across the country, killing more than 3 million "rightist elements" in one fell swoop—most of them were relatively soft-hearted cadres who were unwilling to take food from the peasants. Deng Xiaoping said in May 1962 that the campaign was "estimated to be 10 million nationwide, and tens of millions of people will be affected"—thus holding the party members to push the famine, which had already caused disastrous disasters, to a climax of terror , All kinds of heinous and beastly atrocities finally ransacked the farmers' life-saving rations, and collective canteens generally closed down. Tanghe County, Henan Province also picked up the old cotton in farmers' quilts, cotton clothes, and cotton trousers to complete the task of cotton procurement.

The gates of hell were opened, and the terrifying god of death spread its wings and rushed towards the vast number of farmers who were waiting to die. Many villages began to die in groups and on a large scale. Ghosts were crying and wolves were howling, and many places showed unimaginable doomsday scenes.

In the Xinyang area, where the People's Commune was first established and the first large-scale abnormal deaths were exposed, more than 80,000 people were beaten to death, and 67,000 of them were beaten to death. They confiscated all the living rations of the peasants, and more than 1 million people starved to death within a short period of time. According to the historical data disclosed by Li Suli, a researcher on the Great Famine in Henan Province, "the dead village", "in the winter of 1959 and the spring of 1960, in the Xinyang area...more than 50,000 households died and more than 10,000 villages were destroyed"; 639 villages are extinct, and there are more than 400 uninhabited villages in Gushi County”; “453 extinct villages” in Shangcheng County. Among them, the young and middle-aged labor force starved to death on a large scale. According to the survey report of the Central Working Group in June 1960, young and middle-aged people accounted for 54.7% of the death population in Xinyang Huangchuan County, 67.9% of the death population in Gushi County, and among the 1,464 people who died in the Sixth Brigade of Huaibin County, the labor force Accounted for 54.2%.

In Meitan County, Guizhou Province, from September 1959 to April 1960, during the anti-concealment of production and forced food, they used cutting fingers, sewing mouths, piercing ears and heels with wire, lighting sky lanterns, monkeys carrying piles, hanging ducks to float in water, dragging 1,324 people were beaten to death, more than 200 people were imprisoned, and 1,680 cadres were dismissed and dismissed from public office by wearing rightist hats, resulting in 125,000 starved to death in more than a year. Absolutely more than 3000 households. Wang Lusheng, the former vice chairman of the Guizhou Provincial Political Consultative Conference, was ordered to collect the population of the counties in Zunyi. The total population of the Zunyi area was more than 3.7 million at the end of 1957, and it was more than 3.1 million in 1961. In just three years, more than 600,000 people evaporated from the world.

Tongwei County, Gansu put forward the slogan "Better owe blood debt than grain", and organized people to go door-to-door, rummaging through boxes and cabinets, conducting widespread searches, and not leaving anything behind. In some places, they dug the ground three feet to find food. In a series of campaigns, more than 120 types of torture were used, more than 10,000 peasants were denounced, 1,169 cadres above the production team were condemned, and 1,637 people were sent to reform through labor in communes. During the process of forcing food, the Maying Commune set up 12 machine guns and held a struggle meeting. The commune secretary Zhang Xuesheng presided over the torture of more than 160 people, killed 4 people on the spot, and kidnapped laborers.

Change to 66 people. The 35-year-old county magistrate Tian Buxiao went to the countryside to investigate and told the truth, advocating to let the peasants have a way of life, and was labeled as an anti-Party element "Xiao Peng Dehuai". The whole county looted 11 million catties of life-saving grains from farmers who had "distributed the production and privately distributed it", causing one-third of the population to starve to death. Almost all of the Dongpo production team in Jichuan Town starved to death. The yard was full of dead people who hadn’t been buried, and grass grew out of the bones.

A large number of farmers in Gansu fled to Lanzhou, the provincial capital, to beg for food. Many died of starvation in the streets and at the railway station. The two major factories of Lanhua and Lanlian sent five or six trucks to collect the corpses every day. Zhang Xizhen, Jichuan Town, Tongwei County, recalled that when he pulled a shelf cart to the back of Dingxi Railway Station and threw dead people, he saw that there were dead people from the foot of the ditch mouth to the inside, men and women, the ditch was full, half of the body, arms, and legs were eaten by wild animals. , rotten clothes, rotten quilts, what a huge death pit, just like the Nanjing Massacre on TV.

According to the account of Eva, a Chinese-American who investigated the Great Famine: The party secretary of the Daniugou Brigade in Tongwei County forced three unmarried girls aged 16 to 18 to sleep with them, and stripped the girls who refused to do so and hung them in the On the beam of the house, a rolling pin was used to spread the girl's legs, a thick straw rope was inserted into the vagina, and then pulled out suddenly. This was repeated many times and tortured to death.

Starvation is everywhere in Shandong Province, with corpses lying in the village alleys. The former governor Zhao Jianmin said that 600,000 people starved to death in the Huimin area alone. As early as the winter of 1958 to the spring of 1959, severe famine occurred in Jining area. Farmers dug wheat seedlings, peeled bark to satisfy their hunger, and ate the chaff from pillows. More than 670,000 people suffered from edema in the whole region, and a large number of abnormal cases occurred. die. In April 1959, when Tan Qilong, the second secretary of the Shandong Provincial Party Committee, was investigating in the Jining area, he wrote a letter to the first secretary Shu Tong, a calligrapher who was both anti-rightist and the Great Leap Forward. He talked about the famine and death. Some reasons: Many places forcibly confiscated farmers’ grain, grass, vegetables, pots, etc.; Juye and Yuncheng counties were only allowed to keep three days of rations during the autumn harvest last year, and all the rest were put into storage; all counties moved villages and merged them. A large number of villages and houses were destroyed... Fan Zuoyun of Yuncheng County said that after the daughter of Liu Xuejin in Panzhuang starved to death, in order to get another person's food, the Liu family covered the child's body in the bed for many days, and passed through the smelly smell from his door. people.

According to another quote from "Small Traces of the Past": The party secretary of a brigade in Huji Commune, Jinxiang County, Shandong Province cooked his son who starved to death. The husband and wife and daughter wept around the meat basin. The brigade secretary dares to eat, what are you afraid of? Even if they are full, they will be pulled out and shot immediately, which is better than starving to death.

Liang Zhiyuan, who was in charge of the government office and the life office of the county party committee in Boxian County, Anhui (now Qiaocheng District, Bozhou City), the hometown of Cao Cao, calculated according to his work notes and loose-leaf records that more than 200,000 people died abnormally during the Great Famine in Boxian County. Nearly 30,000 households were completely destroyed. At the end of 1960, he led people to investigate six villages including Dawangzhimiao in the Wangge Brigade of Shuanggou Commune in Bo County. Among the 127 households and 575 people, 239 people died of starvation in two years, accounting for 42% of the original population, and 18 households died. , accounting for 14% of the original number of households. In Yangzhuang, Sihe Brigade, Wuma Commune

According to the investigation, there were originally 68 people here, except for 4 people who left the whole village, only 18 people remained, and 46 people died of starvation in two years, with a mortality rate of 70%. Ten of the 11 orphans adopted by the Yangmiao Brigade Kindergarten in Shibali Commune starved to death.

Yin Shusheng, the former executive deputy director of the Public Security Department of Anhui Province, disclosed that the population of Fengyang County was 402,700 in 1958, but it dropped to 245,262 in 1961. In just three years, there was a net reduction of 157,438 people, and more than 39% of the total population died of starvation; There are 2,404 households that have disappeared and 27 villages that have disappeared. Xiaogang Village, Fengyang County, which took the lead in contracting at the beginning of the reform and opening, since 1959, 60 people died of starvation, 6 households died, and 71 people fled famine to beg for food. By the spring of 1962, there were only 10 households left in the village. 39 people. Yang Dechun, a former cadre of the National Bureau of Statistics, recorded: "The Zhaosi Brigade in Gongji District, Taihe County, Anhui Province, from the winter of 1959 to the summer of 1960... 1,709 people died in the whole brigade, accounting for 36.3% of the original population. 41%."

According to Guan Huailun's "Famine Survey of Dali Brigade in Feidong County in 1960", 868 people from 180 households in the 12 production brigades before the disaster, 381 people died in the famine, and 22 of them died. The county party committee of Lixian County, Hunan Province reported in June 1960 that during the campaign against forced food production, the county’s rural cadres used very vicious methods to torture the masses, such as eating feces and drinking urine, hanging half of a pig, piercing the mouth with a needle, and piercing the genitals with a stick. , water prison, burning, tooth extraction, snowballing, forcing women to be naked, male and female genital biting, plucking beards, pulling hair, hanging ducks into water, lifting sticks through hearts, hanging excrement buckets around necks, kneeling and smashing tiles, chopping fingers And more than 40 kinds of torture. In some places, it is common to search the house and demolish the house, seal the door after the raid, and sweep the floor to go out.

Preliminary statistics show that since the establishment of the commune, 90,268 people have been physically punished, 68,868 people have been robbed of food, 384 people have been beaten to death, 301 people have committed suicide due to beatings, 350 people have starved to death, 1,813 people have been maimed, and 15,996 people have fled due to the style of cadres. One person beat more than 340 people and killed 15 people. Pan Qicai, a cadre of the Hetang Brigade of the Liyang Commune, stipulated that after a person was killed, the family members were not allowed to collect the corpse, cry, or buy a coffin. He even forced the family members of the deceased to laugh. With so many people starved to death, beaten to death, and forced to death, is there really no life-saving food?

The grain procured by the state during the Lao Mao era was stored in warehouses in various places, but the local governments could only keep it in storage and not use it, and only the central government had the right to allocate it. Therefore, many places would rather let the people starve to death while staring at the food in the granary. They didn't dare to open warehouses to release grain to rescue the victims. This was something that had never happened in previous dynasties. During the Great Famine, nearly half of the people in Jiangkou County, Guizhou starved to death. Several commune secretaries took the lead in robbing grain depots to save their lives. The secretary also threw himself into the river and died. Zou Yingjie, head of a grain station in Gulin County, Sichuan Province, couldn't bear the sight of the villagers being starved to death. He opened a warehouse to distribute some grain to the victims and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

An old man who was a brigade cadre in Zhaojiashan, Tongwei County, Gansu Province, recalled: "At that time, more than half of the people in the village were dead, but there were still dozens of catties of oil residue and dozens of catties of grain in the warehouse of the production team, but they dared not distribute them to the members. Eat. When the working group of the Provincial Party Committee came to visit the village, they asked: People are starving to death, why don’t they give it to the commune members to eat? We didn’t answer correctly, but we knew in our hearts: Whoever dares to eat, will not live if he eats it!” At that time In Hezheng County and Tongwei County, when the crops are growing, they are constantly pushing for grain. People have no choice but to cut off the immature green grain and fry it in a pot to hand it over, and dry the immature corn on the kang to hand it over to the public grain. After spoiling himself like this, he had no food to eat, and the buckwheat husks hidden in the pillow core and the millet noodles in the crotch were also searched. Someone killed 11 mice in a barn at night, boiled them and ate them all. A man named Zhao Yousu's family saw at dawn that a large number of people had died on the kang, and five people died of starvation overnight.

A man named Cao Yuzhou in Tongwei County ate up all five dolls, and even stripped off his clothes and sold them for food. Xinyang, Henan Province is one of the most cruel areas where farmers are violently forced to pay for food, and the most people are beaten to death. However, the treasury of Xinyang was full at that time, and there were as many as 1.1 billion catties of grain in stock. All of the more than 1 million people who died could have survived. At that time, Zhang Shufan, the deputy secretary of the Xinyang Prefectural Party Committee and the commissioner of the administrative office, who took the initiative to distribute relief food and saved the lives of countless Xinyang people, was labeled as a rightist and was brutally persecuted. In the end, he took the risk to uncover the shady scene of the Xinyang tragedy to prevent more people from starving to death. Before his death, he left a tear-jerking last words: "At that time, so many people starved to death in Xinyang area, it was not because there was no food, and the grain depots they belonged to were full. But the people would rather starve to death than snatch a Grain depot." Why did the common people dare not grab grain to death from starvation? Because everyone knows that if you rob the treasury, you will inevitably die, and it will also harm future generations. All those who survived will become counter-revolutionary relatives.

According to other information, during the 12 months of the Great Famine, when the most starved people died, the records of the Ministry of Grain showed that there were at least 40.3 billion catties of grain in stock, which was equivalent to at least 100 million people’s annual rations according to the food standard at the time. If the most common practice in history is to open warehouses and release grain for disaster relief, tens of millions of people will never starve to death.

At that time, hungry people in Xinyang sat next to the grain depot and shouted: "The Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us!" Some people starved to death next to the grain depot. It is said that there is a rule above that "you will not open a warehouse if you die of starvation."

Yu Dehong, who was Zhang Shufan's secretary, recalled: In 1959... in October of the lunar calendar, the grass roots and bark were eaten up, and a large number of people starved to death after that. My family is in Fanghu, Huaibin County, and I went back twice. Before the lunar calendar, I saw 6 corpses on the side of the road a few kilometers from Baoxin to Fanghu. When I returned to Fanghu, which was 5 kilometers away from my home, there were dead people on both sides. More than 100 corpses were not buried in the wild. They walked to the reed ponds on both sides of the river pond. , saw more than 100 dead bodies. There are rumors outside that the corpse was eaten by dogs, and it was said that dogs eat people and make their eyes red.

Yu Dehong worked in his hometown Huaibin County for many years, serving as deputy county magistrate and other positions. He said that there were 500,000 people in Huaibin County that year, and no less than 30% of them died of starvation. Xiong Renkuan, the former party secretary of the Fanghu Commune in the county, recalled that there were about 50,000 people in the Fanghu Commune, and a total of 22,000 died of starvation, accounting for more than 40% of the total population. Among them, Wuzhai Brigade (Yu Dehong's hometown brigade) accounted for 52% of the total population. 13 households in the production team of Xiao Li in Fengzhuang brigade died. 9

household. There used to be more than 400 people in Malou Village of the Huanggang Brigade, but about 300 died of starvation. Of the 207 people in the Wangzhuang Production Team of the Yangweizi Brigade, 107 died of starvation, including 6 households. ...In short, in all the villages I know, the death toll accounts for about half of them.

Yu Wenhai, Fanghu Township, Huaibin County recalled: Gao Hongwen of the Gaozhuang production team had three children. Gao Hongwen went to Minggang to repair the railway, and his wife cooked and ate all three children.

Tibet, which had just undergone "democratic reform," also suffered from the Great Leap Forward. The pro-communist Panchen Lama wrote a 70,000-word long letter in 1962, reporting to Zhou Enlai the disasters suffered in Tibet, including: "Excessive purchases... most households were searched, and the residents' own stockpiles of grain, meat, and butter Wait, almost all of them have been dug up." "People panicked and complained." "Because this kind of hunger pain has never been seen in the history of Tibetans, and people never dreamed that there would be such severe hunger pain... In some places, many people because of They were starved to death because they ran out of food... There are also some cases where the whole family died."

Lao Mao was furious after reading it. Soon, the Panchen Lama was criticized and thrown into Qincheng Prison in 1968. He was only released in 1977.

Sitting under the shade of a tree, Chai Jianhua couldn't calm down, so he closed his hands. The summer is scorching, and the fire umbrella is high. The chairs are hot and unbearably hot. Chai Jianhua returned to the house.