Chapter 20 19. Chen Yonggui's Dazhai: Specimen Rural Areas

Dazhai is a specimen of the Maoist countryside.Dazhai is located on the banks of the Songxi River at the foot of the Taihang Mountains, with an average altitude of 1,000 meters, which is considered high for plain areas.Being located in a mountainous area also determined the poverty of Dazhai for a long time.Dazhai is 5 kilometers away from Xiyang County, where it belongs, and 168 kilometers away from Taiyuan.For a long time, the reputation of Dazhai was much higher than that of Xiyang and Taiyuan, and the reason was attributed to what Wu Si called "Mao Zedong's farmer" Chen Yonggui.He made Dazhai a "red flag" on China's agricultural front in the 1960s and 1970s.After Chairman Mao called for "learning from Dazhai in agriculture", more than 10 million people came to Dazhai to visit, study and travel, including many heads of state and Chinese political leaders.Chen Yonggui himself has been an official to the deputy prime minister.To this day, Dazhai is still a well-known red tourist destination. Many people come to visit Dazhai, attracted by the self-reliance, hard work and entrepreneurial spirit advocated by Dazhai and the revolutionary romanticism it contains.

In 1952, 37-year-old Chen Yonggui went to Taiyuan, Shanxi Province to participate in the province's agricultural harvest model representative meeting.This model worker who became well-known throughout the country and became the vice premier of the State Council was unknown at the time. When he was 6 years old, he moved to Dazhai with his father Chen Zhiru—a place later created by Chen Yonggui as a model of the countryside. A year before, his father sold his wife, daughter and young son.As an outsider in Dazhai, Chen Yonggui gained a foothold with his courage, courage, and daring to take responsibility. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, he led his own agricultural mutual aid group full of old people and young people, and created 15 farms with a yield of 500 catties per mu. The achievements of the above-mentioned high-yield and high-yielding households have joined the party and been evaluated as models, and they have become a small peasant leader.

Accompanying him was Mrs. Zhang, a labor hero who participated in the founding ceremony of Daobakou, Xiyang County.Before the opening of the model worker meeting, a car stopped at the hotel where the model workers lived. Mrs. Zhang bent down and got into the car, and the car drove away in dust.Chen Yonggui, who was standing at the gate, watched this scene, was silent for a long time, turned around and said to his companion: "Hey, look at this. Why do the leaders above take a farmer's work seriously? I'm going to make a fuss when I go back. Career!" After returning to Dazhai, Chen Yonggui started his journey of "making a career".Aiming at the harsh natural environment of Dazhai, which has "seven ditches, eight beams and one slope", Chen Yonggui formulated a ten-year plan to control the mountains and waters.He believes in Mao Zedong's idea that man can conquer nature, and under his leadership, Dazhai has indeed made great achievements in the game of nature.

Writer Wu Si later wrote a biography of Chen Yonggui "Chen Yonggui Ups and Downs in Zhongnanhai——An Experiment to Transform China".He recalled that when he first arrived in Dazhai, he was quite shocked.Because the tallest buildings in Beijing at that time were six or seven stories high, the terraced fields built by the people of Dazhai along the mountain were extremely majestic. In the newsletter "Road to Dazhai", which once caused a sensation all over the country and left an impression on Mao Zedong, two reporters described how Chen Yonggui and his partners built Dazhai in this way:

"The cold wind blows, and the dripping water turns into ice. The Dazhai people who fight against nature in Baituogou are all sweating. Every day, they leave the village at dawn, and the stars blink before they finish their work. They eat in the field and rest. In the field. Chen Yonggui led four poor peasants to build a dam and hit the vanguard. Two to three hundred catties of stones, the two of them worked hard, and they built them up. The stone broke their two hands that were numb from the cold, and the blood bit by bit Dripping on the rocks, Chen Yonggui didn't seem to have anything serious, and the Dazhai people worked like this for a month without even roasting the fire, turning the Baituogou into a piece of cultivated land."

Baituogou was only the first ditch that Chen Yonggui and his team managed. Later, they treated Houdigou in 1954 and Langwozhanggou in the winter of 1955.Chen Yonggui led the cadres in Dazhai and more than 50 laborers in the village to work hard for three months in the cold winter, building 38 stone dams and building more than 20 mu of land. Langwozhanggou was destroyed twice by floods, and it was not until the third time that Chen Yonggui and Dazhai finally conquered it. Later, Wu Si summed up the land-building experience of Chen Yonggui and Dazhai people in his book: "From 1953 to 1962, Dazhai built land for ten years, modified seven ditches, and successfully completed the first ten-year land-building plan. The results Just as Premier Zhou Enlai said in his government work report in 1964: They changed the previous 4,700 lands to 2,900 lands, and all of them were constructed as drought-flood-guaranteed, stable and high-yielding farmland. Their grain output, in 1952 It was 237 catties, and it increased to 774 catties in 1962. In ten years, Dazhai people invested a total of 210,000 workers in farmland infrastructure construction, accounting for more than 40% of the total labor, with an average of 120 days per person per year. That is to say, Chen Yonggui Every year, the head of the family uses four-tenths of the hard work of the whole family for a year to "purchase real estate" to solve the tense relationship between population and arable land resources. If this is not the case for ten years, it will not be changed for twenty years , so that he has no regrets in his life. Whether it is in terms of ambition or the great efforts that must be made in organizing work and hard labor, it is really difficult for Chen Yonggui and for the people of Dazhai."

The government report made by Zhou Enlai mentioned by Wu Si happened in a memory of the third National People’s Congress on December 21, 1964. The materials provided by Liao Luyan, the Minister of Agriculture who visited Dazhai, summed up the spirit of Dazhai. The three points of Dazhai spirit are: first, the principle of putting politics in command and leading ideas; second, the spirit of self-reliance and hard work; Third, the communist style of loving the country and loving the collective. Inevitably, Dazhai and Chen Yonggui were placed in the special context of that era, and were attached with many spirits and meanings, and these spirits and meanings were all placed in a fierce ideological background.

During the first meeting of the third National People's Congress, Mao Zedong also invited Chen Yonggui to his birthday party, and began to call on the whole of China to learn from Dazhai in agriculture.The glory that a new Chinese farmer can achieve reaches its peak at this moment.But what Chen Yonggui couldn't expect was that this was only the beginning of the honor he and Dazhai had won. During the ensuing Cultural Revolution, Chen Yonggui, a shrewd peasant leader, was further promoted.After surviving the brief period of bewilderment in the early days of the Cultural Revolution, Chen Yonggui quickly took the initiative. In mid-January 1967, Chen Yonggui and another model worker from Shanxi Province, Li Shunda, arrived in Shanxi. Together with other model workers, they published a joint statement in the Shanxi Daily and began to be involved in the wave of the Cultural Revolution.Wearing the Red Guard armband presented to him by Zhou Enlai, Chen Yonggui began to appear in various places where rebels gathered.On February 6 of this year, the prominent headline on the front page of "Shanxi Daily" reported that Comrade Chen Yonggui was "killed".

Then, Chen Yonggui's status changed rapidly. He became the leader of Xiyang County, where Dazhai is located, and the third most authoritative figure in the entire Shanxi Province from a peasant representative whom Mao Zedong met in less than two months. , Deputy Director of the Revolutionary Committee of Shanxi Province. In 1973, 58-year-old Chen Yonggui was re-elected as a member of the Central Committee at the 10th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, and then was elected as a member of the Politburo. In 1975, Chen Yonggui's political status reached its peak. He was appointed as the vice premier of the State Council, and he seemed to be the leader and spokesperson of farmers throughout China.

But at this time, some words and deeds of Chen Yonggui have caused dissatisfaction among some people. Zhang Guangyou, editor-in-chief of "Farmers Daily", mentioned one thing in his memoir: "In the winter of 1968, Chen Yonggui thought that the Xinhua News Agency's report on Dazhai was not strong enough, so he had an opinion. At that time, the leader of the Xinhua News Agency's military control team panicked, and quickly invited him to Xinhua News Agency for advice, and asked him to report to all the staff of the head office. .Chen Yonggui was also unceremonious, boasting and bragging at the general meeting of the whole society; at the same time, he made out of nothing and scolded the reporters out of thin air: saying that a certain photographer used the photo of the captain of "Iron Girl" to find a partner; a certain reporter thought Dazhai The food in the guest house was not good, so I went out to eat in the restaurant; a certain reporter criticized and scolded Dazhai's "black material" for more than an hour. Finally, the reporter of the Shanxi Branch of the Xinhua News Agency was declared persona non grata, and the Shanxi Branch The reporters stationed in Dazhai were driven out; at the same time, the head office was required to directly organize powerful reporters to go to Dazhai.”

Chen Yonggui has also become increasingly radical in politics, perhaps he really believes in everything he advocates, that kind of thorough collective economy.However, in order to protect the face of Chen Yonggui and Dazhai, Dazhai had to lie about the harvest in 1973. But those who have doubts about the agrarian economic model advocated by Chen Yonggui and Dazhai also have to admit that Chen Yonggui himself remains almost morally impeccable.He asked county-level cadres to participate in labor for 100 days a year. Feng Dongshu, a reporter from Xinhua News Agency in Dazhai at the time, had been secretly watching Chen Yonggui for a year. He found that in 1971, Chen Yonggui, who was already a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, participated in labor for no less than 150 days. . Later, after he became the vice premier of the State Council, his wife and children still had rural household registration and lived on work points. Chen Yongzheng himself did not have an urban household registration and had to earn work points in Dazhai.Every autumn, Dazhai distributes grain, and the cadres in Dazhai have to take out Chen Yonggui's ration, send it to the commune grain store, exchange it for national grain coupons, and then send it to Chen Yonggui. He survived the Cultural Revolution safely. Although he once turned against Zhang Chunqiao, the favor of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai kept him safe.He is also close to Mao Zedong's successor, Hua Guofeng.Hua Guofeng resigned, and Deng Xiaoping once stated for Chen Yonggui that Chen Yonggui was not a member of the Gang of Four. But the era that belonged to him and Dazhai has passed after all.It is said that Hu Yaobang hated Chen Yonggui's Dazhai system. He believed that many formal land reclamation and water conservancy projects imitating Dazhai were just a waste of money and people.And Chen Yonggui was furious: "What Hu Yaobang, I think it's Hu Yaobang." Next, the household contract responsibility system started to be implemented in Xiaogang Village, Fengxian County, Anhui Province, became popular all over the country.Even the Dazhai model that political forces once fully promoted has not been promoted so quickly in such a short period of time as the contract responsibility system. On August 30, 1980, the National People's Congress accepted Chen Yonggui's resignation as Vice Premier of the State Council. At the same time, Hua Guofeng also resigned as Premier of the State Council. On November 23 of this year, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China forwarded the "Preliminary Summary of the Experience and Lessons Learned from Dazhai's Agriculture in the Whole Province" by the Shanxi Provincial Party Committee, making a conclusion for Chen Yonggui and Dazhai's experience: since the "Cultural Revolution", in Dazhai Comrade Chen Yonggui should be mainly responsible for the implementation of the extreme "left" line in Hexiyang and the serious consequences caused by it... Eight years later, Chen Yonggui died of illness.Three days before his death, the most famous farmer in all of China refused doctors to give him medicine: "I understand that you have done your best, sent the best doctor and used the best medicine. My The disease cannot be cured, so don't waste medicine for me." This simple and honest old farmer who always appeared in the image of wearing a white turban and wrinkled face has spent his whole life fighting for an ideal imposed on him by the Communist Party, but he never imagined that what he and Dazhai did would And the graphics of this approach may be moving away from the realization of that ideal goal.