Wake up（71）

 

71

 

In this hot summer, He Jiafu especially missed his old comrade-in-arms Chai Jianhua. When he heard that Chai Jianhua was infected with the epidemic, He Jiafu asked his grandson Nanshan Yun to accompany him to visit his old comrade-in-arms. On the way, he met Li Tiandao, an old man in his 70s from Sichuan. Li Tiandao was a librarian in Xichong, Sichuan before retiring.

Li Tiandao said to He Jiafu: "I am a librarian, so I have access to a lot of internal newspapers and data. After retirement, I have become the most loyal reader of the library. I have consulted a lot of information about the Great Famine .”

Li Tiandao said that since ancient times, the Western Sichuan Plain has been known as the "land of abundance, floods and droughts, people do not know famine", and the phenomenon of starvation and cannibalism during the Great Famine was very tragic. According to the book "Tombstone", in March 1960, after the husband of a woman surnamed Pan died in the third team of the eighth management district of Puyang Commune in Guanxian County, Sichuan Province (now Dujiangyan City, Chengdu), she took a hoe, a kitchen knife, and a basket in the middle of the night and dug up the tomb. Husband's grave, took the corpse home, ate the meat himself, and sold the bones as bear bones at 1.5 yuan per catty, a total of 11.75 catties.

In April 1960, Liu Yuanfang, a female member of the Jiuguan District of Anren, Dayi County, Sichuan Province, dragged her 8-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son to the Qingshui River in Anren Guanyin Hall with ox ropes and drowned them. The reason was that these two children stole two catties of peas from the company. At noon that day, the head of affairs deducted the meals of Liu Yuanfang, mother and son, because they couldn't eat, and they couldn't complete the tasks to survive. She had nowhere to go, and finally killed her two children.

According to the investigation conducted by Zheng Dajun, head of the rural working group of the Chongqing County Party Committee, a large number of strange cannibalism occurred between December 1959 and November 1960 in the first production team of the fifth brigade of Dongyang Commune in the county. . The whole team has a total of 491 people in 82 households, 83% of the families have a history of cannibalism, especially girls have become the focus of being eaten, killing and eating 48 girls under the age of 7, accounting for 90% of the girls of the same age in the team. Those who are cruel enough to do so should be done by their parents; those who can't bear to kill their own flesh and blood directly, they should trade it with other parents.

hand. The girls who were killed and eaten were all skinny and skinny. In order to eat more, some smashed the bones and pounded them into bone powder in a stone mortar to eat. A man named Mo Erwa was sentenced to death for killing and eating his own daughter and hunting and eating two boys from the neighboring team.

There are more than ten million hungry souls in Tianfu, but is this caused by natural disasters or man-made disasters?

Li Tiandao said to He Jiafu: I checked the library data. Wikipedia records: "At present, the Chinese government still has not provided conclusive raw weather data to prove that severe natural disasters occurred throughout the country during the three-year period, and more evidence shows that there were no large-scale natural disasters during the three-year period. Sichuan, the province with the most severe famine, is even more It’s a good weather. You can check the "History of China’s Catastrophe Maps in the 20th Century Volume 2"."

Known as the "Land of Abundance", Sichuan Province was the province that suffered the most and the longest duration of tyranny and starvation during the Great Leap Forward-Great Famine, and people were still starving to death until 1962. In June 1962, Liao Bokang, former secretary of the Chongqing Municipal Party Committee and chairman of the Sichuan Provincial Political Consultative Conference, reported to the central government that no less than 10 million people died of starvation in Sichuan, and the maximum number was 12.5 million. In July of the same year, Xiao Feng, Secretary of the Party Committee of the People’s Daily and Director of the Editor-in-Chief Office, was dispatched by the General Office of the Central Committee to investigate in Sichuan. The survey report “Sichuan Situation” stated: “The population of (Sichuan) was 73 million in 1957... (The Great Famine ) totaled more than 12 million people, a decrease of about 17%.

Li Tiandao said: Chengdu writer Dong Fu's "Miao Miao Er Qing Cai Hua Er Huang - Documentary of the Great Leap Forward in Western Sichuan" also disclosed that more than 10 million starved to death in Sichuan. According to the special research results published by Cao Shuji, a professor of historical geography at Shanghai Jiaotong University, in "China Population Science", from 1959 to 1961, more than 9.4 million people died abnormally in Sichuan Province; Deaths also exceeded 10 million. In just a few years of peacetime, 10 million people died abnormally in a province, which is equivalent to the lives lost by 150 Wenchuan earthquakes.

The hunger in Sichuan Province began in the autumn and winter of 1958 and ended in the autumn of 1962. Farmers in Sichuan have been starving for four years, the province with the longest period of starvation in the country. According to historical materials in Sichuan and the recollections of Liao Bokang and other officials, at least 3 million people died of starvation in Fuling during the Great Leap Forward, and more than 30% of the death population died; more than 100,000 people died of "swelling" in Fengdu County. ghost town". More than 100,000 people starved to death in Fushun County, Zigong; the population of Rong County decreased by 190,000, and more than 60,000 people starved to death in 1960 alone. Deng Zili, secretary of the Luzhou Municipal Party Committee and Deng Xiaoping's cousin who was demoted to Changning County as deputy secretary for committing a "rightist" mistake, recalled that more than 70,000 people died of starvation in Changning County, which had only about 200,000 people.

According to the "Jianyang County Chronicle", the county's population was 1,233,232 in 1957 and 864,034 in 1961, a net decrease of nearly 370,000 people in four years. Among the county-level areas that have announced population changes in the country, the number of deaths is unprecedented.

In July, a fireball-like sun hangs in the blue sky. The clouds seemed to be melted by the sun and disappeared without a trace. There is no cloud in the sky, no wind, only a scorching sun overhead, and all the trees stand there listlessly and lazily. The scorching sun is like a fire, and the earth is like a steamer, which is so hot that people can't breathe.

     The old man Li Tiandao said to He Jiafu: "Mr. He, your legs and feet are inconvenient. Let's take a rest in the small forest under the cliff in front."

Supported by his grandson Nan Shanyun, He Jiafu walked slowly towards the grove, leaning on crutches. It was a long drought and no rain in the summer, the stream on the edge of the cliff dropped a few inches, and the stones exposed on the water suddenly became larger. It was so hot that even dragonflies only dared to fly close to the shade of the trees, as if they were afraid that the sun would hurt their wings.

The vegetation in the grove was also lush, supporting He Jiafu and his party with a thick green shade.