Chapter 25 cadre

In most parts of the country, the integration of cadres in the liberated areas and base areas has caused many difficulties, and the problem in Guangzhou is the most serious.Mao Zedong said at the "Seventh National Congress" of the party in 1945 that the struggle in southern China was more difficult than in the north because the foundation of the Kuomintang was stronger and class relations in the south were more complicated.This point was repeatedly verified in Guangzhou after October 1949. Li Zhensun, secretary of Zhu Guang, secretary of the Guangzhou Municipal Party Committee, took Meizhou, where he had been engaged in guerrilla warfare for a long time, as an example: “Guangzhou was the original capital of the Kuomintang and the seat of the Whampoa Military Academy. There are many Kuomintang, Communist Party, overseas Chinese, and intellectuals. These four relationships intersect with each other, and some personal relationships even transcend parties and classes. If they are not handled properly, they will bring a lot of trouble at any time.” The person in charge is because he is one of the few Cantonese in the central government and has a solid foundation in Guangzhou in the past, so he has the ability to handle these four relationships well."

Yang Yingbin, who served as the deputy secretary-general of the Guangzhou Military Control Commission at the beginning of Liberation, recalled that when Ye Jianying went south, he told Mao Zedong that Guangdong was "Shuiweitian". The source of water is the local cadres, so the takeover of Guangdong must make full use of the latter. In fact, Ye Jianying's reflection is not only a suggestion to the central government on the issue of the use of cadres, but also the objective status quo of Guangdong's fait accompli.Ou Chu, who was the secretary of the Guangzhou Municipal Party Committee, recalled that before the liberation of Guangzhou, a third of Guangdong Province had established a democratic regime. Therefore, before the southward army arrives in Guangdong, the most realistic choice is to serve locally. "Many of our cadres stay in the local area, such as the county magistrates and deputy magistrates in Kaiping and Taishan, who were all in charge of the original guerrilla detachments."

In Guangzhou, four major groups were integrated into a large takeover working group after liberation. working Kuomintang officials. "But it's hard to say that these cadres can cooperate with each other tacitly." Pu Xiangmin, a researcher of local history, said, "Following the tragic failure of the 1927 revolution, a small number of the Communist Party stayed in Guangdong to work underground until 1949. The central government has almost completely lost contact. Although some Guangzhou people had contact with the party in Hong Kong before 1949, Zeng Sheng and his Dongjiang guerrilla army and the other four guerrilla forces were completely incorporated into the PLA, but the local characteristics of the guerrilla movement in Guangdong are that they are not It’s self-explanatory. They’re more local, and the languages ​​used at party meetings are dialects — Teochew, Cantonese and, most commonly, Hakka.”

The initial integration came from top-down pressure from the central government to local governments, and cadres who went south and cadres from other backgrounds were required to get to know each other quickly. "As early as 1950, shortly after the start of Guangzhou's takeover work, the movement to learn Mandarin was already in full swing among the city's ruling officials. The central government expected all local officials to learn to use Mandarin within a few years." Pu Xiangmin said. It is undeniable that verbal exchange was only superficial, and it could not resolve the more fundamental differences in the 1950s.In a huge commercial city, a certain degree of divergence between central and local interests is unavoidable.For example, the prosperity of traditional business based on individual interests is beneficial to local and private wealth, but it obviously affects the centralization and control of materials and funds.

On the other hand, as Ye Jianying said, the southbound cadre group formed from the northeast is composed of experienced veteran cadres. When this group of people went south to Guangdong, there were very few left. The solution was to temporarily supplement and absorb from the liberated cities along the way.In the middle of 1949, the Fourth Field Army began to recruit students and various specialized technical personnel from universities and middle schools in Tianjin. In August, this "Southern Industrial Group" mainly composed of young people reorganized in Wuhan, targeting Guangdong. More than 1,000 local team members went down from Jiujiang and arrived in Ganzhou in early October.However, in the eyes of some Guangzhou cadres, these intellectuals who are much younger than them "got off the train" and have not been tested by decades of hard struggle in the mountainous areas, and they do not understand the local conditions.

At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the use of limited local funds became the first aspect of disagreement between the central and local governments.Except for the imperative rebuilding of the "Haizhu Bridge", for a long time, there were almost no decent large-scale municipal projects in Guangzhou. "One person's meal is eaten by two people" has been practiced for a long time in northern cities around 1950. Under this background, cities in various places are required to tighten their belts.The construction of the provincial party committee office building was postponed several times, and finally started after repeatedly confirming the budget. The Guangdong provincial party committee and its predecessor, the South China Branch Office, had always been working in a group of bungalows west of the island.Ou Chu recalled: "Later, with the increase of administrative personnel, the house was not enough for use, and the provincial party committee decided to build a five-story office building. In order to keep the construction cost below 1 million yuan, Tao Zhu led me and engineering designers to The first on-site meeting discussed that it was decided not to use glazed tiles on the roof, and the height of each floor was lowered by one inch. The floors of the first to fourth floors of the same building were only plastered with cement instead of tiles. The fifth floor was the meeting room of the Standing Committee. The budget reached the target." "After the building was completed, it was actually very tight. It accommodated almost all the organs of the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee at that time. We, the chief and deputy secretary-generals, like other cadres, shared an office with five or six people. The building has become the most important decision-making place in Guangdong. Tao Zhu once said that when he went up to the fifth floor of the Provincial Party Committee Building, "the directors and directors only listen and don't speak."

In contrast, in order to bring the city out of the transitional state of the end of the war as soon as possible, local cadres in Guangzhou were more willing and motivated to spend money on some large public buildings and parks first, so as to reflect the new atmosphere of a new city. "Before the liberation of Guangzhou, the sanitation situation in the city was very poor. After Zhu Guang took office, he took charge of many large municipal engineering projects, hoping to improve the appearance of the city." Li Zhensun recalled, "Guangzhou began to build a number of houses on the south of the Pearl River in 1950. , used to immigrate more than 60,000 "water residents" who live on boats all year round in Guangzhou City. This huge project to improve the ecology of the Pearl River and the lives of boat people is really not easy. It costs the Guangzhou government a lot of expenditure. You know, the finances at that time were not abundant.” Zhu Guang’s other move was aimed at the domestic garbage produced in Guangzhou every day and spread all over the city. Li Zhensun said, “After advocating the construction of Yuexiushan Stadium, he also presided over the municipal Invested 1 million yuan to build an organic fertilizer plant, hoping to use a new technology to turn domestic waste into fertilizer, but because the technical problems have not been solved, the project has been delayed for a long time." The resistance is nothing.

"From the perspective of the central government, these local projects focus on superficiality, rather than increasing product output." Pu Xiangmin said that in 1954, the central government publicly criticized Guangzhou's new construction of 300,000 square meters, less than 10% of which was used for productive enterprises.Therefore, Tao Zhu, secretary of Guangdong Province, who represented the central government, announced that within two years, any party and government organization in Guangzhou would, in principle, no longer repair dormitories, residences, and non-productive public buildings. . "Tao Zhu also named Zhu Guang at a meeting of the Provincial Party Committee, calling him a 'petty bourgeois leader'." Li Zhensun recalled.