Chapter 12 11. Changes in Tiexi

All their belongings were piled up in the carriage.They are packed in bamboo frames, or wooden rectangular boxes, and are tied with ropes to the wagon.His wife was wearing a red padded jacket embroidered with large flowers, holding a small wooden box in her arms, which should contain the family's precious and small items, and sat at the front of the carriage.Cai Qingquan, wearing a locomotive hat, is the driver of the carriage and the head of the small family. This is China on December 18, 1952.In the Tiexi Industrial Zone in Shenyang, Northeast China, the glory of the eldest son of the Republic has attracted countless young people to the northeast corner of China.China's new regime has been planning large-scale economic construction since 1951.The way of economic construction is to imitate the most powerful country in the socialist camp, the Soviet Union, which focuses on heavy industry and formulates economic development plans in units of five years.

The protracted war has exhausted the vast country. "The country's new leadership faces some intractable problems. The society and regime are torn apart, public order and morals have been corrupted, the war-torn economy is suffering from severe inflation and unemployment, and China's fundamental economic and military backwardness has left the social elite The goal of striving for a strong and prosperous country poses a huge obstacle", in the first chapter of "Cambridge History of the People's Republic of China" edited by MacFarquhar and Fairbank, historians discuss after the fact the huge problems facing China's leaders when said.

At the same time, the high-speed economic growth achieved by the planned economic model of the Soviet Union even survived the Second World War.After the war it served as a model for many otherwise stagnant countries around the world.Among them was China, which had struggled to win support from the Soviet Union. Central economic officials headed by Chen Yun established the Central Finance Committee at the suggestion of the Soviet Union and revised the "First Five-Year Plan" three times. The visit of Zhou Enlai, Li Fuchun and Chen Yun to the Soviet Union in August 1952 can be regarded as a victory.According to later descriptions, the biggest achievement of this visit was to win the Soviet Union's aid commitment to China's industrialization, and a large industrialized country went all out to help a backward agricultural country to achieve industrialization.

Northeast China, which is adjacent to the Soviet Union, directly became the beneficiary of the economic construction of China's industrialization with the help of the Soviet Union. Changchun and Shenyang later became the most famous industrial areas in China. From aircraft manufacturing to automobile and machine tool manufacturing.Among them, Tiexi District of Shenyang City, where many heavy industrial factories gather, is also known as the Eastern Ruhr.Along with Changchun's Tiebei and other industrial zones, it has attracted much attention as the eldest son of the Republic, attracting young people from all over China to devote their youth to the attractive rose-colored prospect of national economic construction.Those young people who are fortunate enough to be able to work in these factories have also become the most envied people of their peers.

Therefore, when Cai Qingquan and his wife drove a carriage and moved their home to the newly built Workers' Village in Tiexi District, Shenyang, their hearts must have been filled with great happiness.He was an employee of Shenyang Machinery No. 19 Factory, which was later known throughout the country as Shenyang Tractor Factory. Tiexi Workers' Village later became the largest workers' settlement in China. Cai Qingquan and his wife were the first residents of the Workers' Village. In September 1952, under Mao Zedong's instruction to "improve the lives of workers on the basis of increasing production", the Shenyang Municipal People's Committee invested 12 million yuan to start the construction of the workers' village.The three-story Soviet-style building with rows of red bricks and red tiles was the most enviable residence in Shenyang and even China at that time. When 143 Soviet-style residences were built in 1957, when the plane passed by the sky, if you carefully observe, the passengers on the plane can see that these red buildings are neatly arranged in three Chinese characters of "workers' village".Among these residents, there were many people who made great achievements in the future, including Ye Xuanping, the deputy factory director of Shenyang Yiji at that time, and later became the vice chairman of the CPPCC.

In this industrial area, factories are built next to each other, and the criss-crossing railways can go directly to the interior of each factory, sending the raw materials needed for production to the workshop, and sending their products out of Tiexi, according to the economic plan of the entire country , to send the labor products of the eldest son of the Republic to all corners of the country. But the republic's eyes will not be fixed on its own territory for long. The "First Five-Year Plan" laid the foundation for the heavy industry in Northeast China and Shenyang.However, for half a century since then, the industrial development of this region has not surpassed the plan 50 years ago.In the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of the Republic's construction shifted to the "third-line construction", which made the government's economic plan not only did not continue to increase investment in Shenyang and Tiexi, but also transferred part of the power of these heavy industrial bases to The third line in the mountains and inland.

The reform and opening up that began in 1978 made the cities along the southeast coast the economic darlings of the entire country, and the special zone cities established to attract foreign investment and develop export-oriented manufacturing industries have become China's new hot spots.Young people no longer flock to the heavy industrial cities located in the cold northeast, but instead, they flock to the humid and hot southeast coast.A generation with a revived individual consciousness replaced the elders who obeyed the arrangements of the state, and began to work for personal economic interests and livelihoods, rather than for the industrial development of a country.

At the same time, not only did Shenyang and Tiexi not attract large-scale investment projects, but they were in trouble due to their own institutional reasons.Those huge state-owned enterprises must obey the dispatch from the central plan and turn over their profits to the state. This has caused the enterprises to retain too low a level of profits for a long time, and lost the ability to transform and improve their own facilities and plan for longer-term development. When the public once again focused their attention on Tiexi.The Firstborn of the Republic is a withered scene. Surprisingly, this effort to refocus the same young documentary director is inseparable. Wang Bing, who was born in Xi'an in 1967, came to Shenyang when he was 24 years old and studied in the Photography Department of Shenyang Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts.Four years later, in 1995, he left Shenyang to continue his studies at Beijing Film Academy.But at the end of 1999, he returned to Shenyang and started filming Tiexi on DV.

The documentary "Tiexi District" presented to the audience was surprisingly long, but its length did not conceal the shock it brought to people.This documentary consists of three separate parts: 4 hours of "Factory", 3 hours of "Yanfen Street" and 2 hours and 15 minutes of "Railway".From 1999 to 2001 when Wang Bing filmed "Tiexi District", the decline of Tiexi District and the entire Northeast Heavy Industry Base has been fully demonstrated.It is the main victim of the "lay-off" of employees due to the downturn of state-owned enterprises.The residents of the once-envied worker's village began to feel the embarrassment of life.

And Tiexi District, because it has concentrated 90 of the 99 large and medium-sized state-owned enterprises in Shenyang City, has become the hardest hit area of ​​the recession.The factories that once produced many of the country's first (the factory here once produced the country's first ordinary turning machine tool, the first 500,000-volt ultra-high voltage transformer, and the first 1.25 million-ton extrusion machine) have now become a new burden .Many factories on Beier Road, Tiexi District, have been ridiculed by the people of Shenyang as "resorts" because of long-term suspension of production and workers' holidays.

Beginning in 1986, the government began to carry out efforts to carry out the overall transformation of Tiexi District.But the real turning point in Tiexi came in June 2002, when the Shenyang Municipal Government decided to co-operate Tiexi District and Shenyang Economic and Technological Development Zone, forming the two districts into a new Tiexi New District.After the reform of the government's organizational structure, a large number of old state-owned enterprises began to move out of the original subway area and moved to the new economic and technological development zone.Instead, real estate agents from all over started moving in. More than 100 large and medium-sized state-owned enterprises have left the previously decayed area, and the chimneys and factory buildings have gradually disappeared.When this process was carried out gradually, the car distributors first saw the gap, and now there are 4S stores of various brands of cars on both sides of Tiexixi 2nd Road.Then there are all kinds of newly built real estate. Its changes are reflected in various surfaces: the high-rise hotel established in 1998, with a height of 19 floors, made it known in Tiexi, but now buildings with more than 20 floors can be found everywhere; a senior local media person said that in his In my impression, since 2006, this road called Xinggong Street has been blocked. When he said this, the taxi we took was crowded on Xinggong North Street. In front of us was the first bus in Tiexi area. The five-star hotel Rongfu Hotel; on the various avenues in Tiexi, there are many private cars that were rarely seen before—even taxis seldom set foot in Tiexi before, but many workers who left from Tiexi Join the ranks of taxi drivers. Now those who want to go to Tiexi to re-witness the set of decaying scenes in "Tiexi District" will definitely be disappointed. "There, teenagers are fighting and scolding each other on the street covered with dirty snow, the train on the rusty railway passes through the dilapidated factory area again and again, the chimney still stands standing up to the sky, and the workers are working in the workshop with steel brackets. Eat, play cards, chess, quarrel, and chat in the lounge with mottled walls and dim lights; Workers rummage through small objects that are still worthy of being taken away; people remove the door panels of their homes in the snow and leave the demolished Yanfen Street; Stare blankly at the news broadcasts or karaoke or porn on TV," wrote an article about Wang Bing and "Tiexi District". All those scenes are gone now.Although the smell from the unrelocated pharmaceutical factory is still floating in the air; when vehicles pass by the streets of Tiexi, the dense railway lines on the road still cause the vehicles to bump. Fifty-six years later, the Tiexi Workers' Village, which made Cai Qingquan and his colleagues proud, is gradually disappearing.Looking down from the sky, the three characters of Workers' Village can no longer be seen.People are leaving.Their old splendor must give way to an age of unsympathetic silence. Nanjing West Road, known as "the first commercial street in China", has become a landmark because it has witnessed the rise and fall of commerce and the ups and downs of tycoons. In 1956, three business tycoons, including Rong Yiren, announced on Nanjing West Road on behalf of the Shanghai business community that they welcomed "socialist transformation." After a long period of decline, it was not until after the reform and opening up that Nanjing West Road reappeared in prosperity and tycoons.This road is the west half of Nanjing Road in Shanghai, crossing Huangpu District and Jing'an District in Shanghai.The road section in Jing'an District starts from Chengdu North Road in the east and ends at Yan'an West Road in the west, with a total length of 2,933 meters, passing through the downtown area of ​​Jing'an Temple and traversing the whole area.Nanjing West Road has been a famous commercial street since the late Qing Dynasty; today it is one of the most expensive locations in China.