Wake up（73）

 

73

 

In summer, the hot air seems to be stagnant, and the fiery face waits for the wind sadly, but the wind does not come. The sun shone fiercely in the dark blue sky. In the distance, there is a field of yellow and clear wheat, which does not even shake a single ear of wheat.

The old man Li Tiandao continued to tell He Jiafu the story of starvation in Sichuan during the Great Famine. These little-known truths surprised He Jiafu's 18-year-old grandson Nanshanyun.

Li Tiandao said to Nan Shanyun: "Young people today don't know these things. This is not a legend of gods and ghosts. This is history, and it is the contemporary history of China."

Li Tiandao continued:

On July 1, 1960, Sichuanese who were struggling with hunger were stunned by a bolt from the blue: all food stamps in Sichuan were invalidated! As a result, 48 million catties of grain were "saved", and the authorities dispatched a large number of migrant workers from Wanxian and other places to carry them out of Sichuan.

According to an interview with Ren Tianhe by Yiwa, an investigator of the Great Famine: “In 1959, when I was studying in the Chinese Department of Gansu Normal University, there was a male student in his early 20s from Sichuan in the Department of Political Science and Education. He sold it on the black market at Lanzhou West Railway Station for one yuan each. When he saved 500 yuan, he starved himself to death. After his death, we found out the secret from his diary. It turned out that his family wrote that there was no food , Ask him to send money back to the emergency. Where does a student get money? He squeezes out his life-saving rations and sells them, saves the money, and thinks about taking it home during the holidays, but he starves to death before the holidays When dealing with his funeral, the Department of Political Science and Education bought him a coffin with the 500 yuan he sold steamed buns." "My other classmate surnamed Shao was just the opposite. He was so hungry that he wrote to his family to ask for food. Yes, I ran to the Shilidian cafeteria after receiving the 5 catties of food stamps from my family, bought all the steamed buns and rice, and ate them all in one meal, and ended up starved to death.”

Yu Xiguang, a survivor of the Great Famine in Yingjing, recorded that in the spring of 1960, the four townships and eight fields in Yingjing County were full of crying. Every day on the road from the communes to the county town, dead bodies fell to the ground; the four streets and eight alleys of the county town were full of starved dead, withered, swollen, or smelly corpses. Because there were too many dead people, they were not buried at all, and the dead were thrown into the ditch, or randomly thrown into the small river ditch outside the north gate of the county town, and allowed to flow downstream. In some extinct villages, no body was buried, and the stench was so bad that only skeletons remained. According to the "Yingjing County Chronicle" published in 1998, the county's population was 123,717 in 1957 and 69,656 in 1962, with a net decrease of 54,061 people in five years, a reduction rate of 43.7%, making it the county with the largest proportion of starvation deaths in the country. . As a result, a "counter-revolutionary armed riot" occurred in which Li Wenzhong, the head of the armed forces of Fengyi Commune, seized the treasury at gunpoint, opened warehouses to release grain, and helped the hungry. The result, of course, was that it was easily suppressed.

Liao Peilin from Jingyan County, Leshan recalled that his parents, daughter, younger sister, two older sisters, and two brother-in-laws starved to death one after another during the famine. He was designated as a "historical counter-revolutionary" because he participated in the expeditionary army to resist the Japanese, and he was sentenced to 29 years in labor reform and "second labor reform".

In 1959, the reform-through-labor team of the cable factory where he worked killed people every day, and those who were dedicated to burying the corpses would clean up from the bed every day, pushing and shoving, and carrying out those who did not move. Some still have a little weak breathing, which is also dragged away like a dead pig, so as not to cause trouble the next day. In 1960, more than 200 of them were sent to Jiangzhen to repair water conservancy. Because many people were so hungry that they walked staggeringly, 17 people did not arrive two days after the one-day journey. The team sent people to pick them up. It has been bitten beyond recognition by wild dogs and mountain rats. After arriving at the Jiangzhen construction site, he died faster, from every day

The number of corpses buried increased sharply to fourteen or five per day. It turned out that the two full-time burials in the hospital were not enough, and two more people were added. Originally, one person, two or three people were buried in one pit, but later increased to ten or eight.

Li Tiandao sighed:

In the Mao era, the totalitarian system ruled by the Iron Curtain and the arbitrary imperial dictatorship, and the "revolution" that turned history back in the name of liberation, overturning, socialism, and being the master of the country, was indeed a horrible road of poverty. The road, the road of death.