Chapter 21 20. The Great Northern Wilderness: "You said you wanted a revolution"

The movement to develop the Great Northern Wilderness from 1950 to 1970 made the Great Northern Wilderness an unforgettable place for countless young intellectuals.There was once a poem describing the Great Northern Wilderness: "There is no one in a hundred miles to break the afternoon smoke, and the wasteland is endless." This vast wilderness originally refers to the vast barren areas in the Sanjiang Plain, the Heilongjiang Riverside Plain and the Nenjiang River Basin in northern Heilongjiang Province, China.Its barrenness originated in the Qing Dynasty. In order to consolidate the ancestral dragon veins, the government prohibited Han people from entering the Northeast.The land in most parts of the Great Northern Wilderness is fertile, and some are low-humid swamps with a short growing season, but corn, spring wheat, soybeans, sugar beet, sorghum and other crops can be grown. After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the government organized demobilized soldiers, farmers and educated youths to carry out large-scale reclamation in the Great Northern Wilderness from the 1950s to the 1970s, creating a large number of state-owned farms.In most people's minds, the Great Northern Wilderness is closely linked with another term "educated youth" in Mao Zedong's era.Inspired by a revolutionary idealism and romanticism, a generation of intellectual youths from the city went to this barren land to spend their youth.The Great Northern Wilderness has also become the deepest place in the memory of these people, and countless educated youth writers have taken it as the object of description.

"That night, Lao Zhu and I broke up with Deng Can. We didn't go home. We walked not far from Xihua Gate and walked to Tiananmen Square. The brightly lit Tiananmen Gate Tower and the portrait of Chairman Mao above the gate made us feel so sacred. Our hearts were filled with indescribable passion, let the night wind blow away in July of that year, and there were turbulent waves rolling on Tiananmen Square, one by one, we could all see it so clearly, The next day, Lao Zhu and I made a special trip to Tiananmen Square, took a camera, and took a photo in front of Tiananmen Square. We carried such a photo with us, as if we were holding Tiananmen Square in our arms. Sacred and solemn went to the Great Northern Wilderness. Yes, at that time, we were so ridiculous. At that time, our exciting and fashionable slogan was: don’t be a bird in a cage, but be an eagle in the cloud. We What I admire is the magnificent artistic conception in Chairman Mao's poems: when the current hits the water, the waves restrain the flying boat; where is today, where the Ganjiang River is filled with wind and snow. And I quietly but self-righteously copied in my diary the night before going to the Great Northern Wilderness There are two lines of ancient poems: Shaking clothes for thousands of hills, washing feet for thousands of miles. I have the sword of Cixiang, and the jade edge can cut clouds."

It was 1968, 21-year-old Xiao Fuxing and his friends decided to set off from Beijing to a wilderness they had never set foot in. This wilderness is located in the Great Northern Wilderness, from 123°40′ to 134°40′ east longitude, across 11 longitudes; from 40°10′ to 50°20′ north latitude, across 10 latitudes, with a total area of ​​55,300 square kilometers.If you look at the literal description today, this is an attractive land where the Heilongjiang, Songhua and Wusuli rivers meet in the depths of this plain and then flow into the sea; next to it is the vast Xingkai Lake, and Wanda Mountains traverse the plains.It is also one of the three largest black soil belts in the world, with a high content of organic matter. It is known as "you can pinch the black soil to produce oily flowers, and you can germinate when you insert a pair of chopsticks";

It is the northernmost frontier of China, and the cavalry from here once swept across the Central Plains: Jin, Yuan and Manchu.But then it became a wasteland, its disadvantages exaggerated: cold climate, short farming period, sparsely populated. "The Great Northern Wilderness, the Great Northern Wilderness, there are rabbits and wolves, and the wild grass grows without harvesting food", which is also a folk song.It is a land of richness and barrenness.When Nie Gannu was sent to the Great Northern Wilderness, he said: "The beauty lies on the top of the dangerous peak, and the treasure must be hidden in the dangerous place."

The Chinese Communist Party's earliest development of this treasure hidden in a dangerous place was in June 1947.The new regime has not yet been established, and the war is still going on, but a group of troops from Yan'an and Nanniwan have entered the wasteland, and they have begun to open up wasteland here.And this is exactly what this army of peasants is good at doing. Whether in Yan'an or Nanniwan, they have classified barrenness as abundance.The large-scale development of the Great Northern Wilderness was after the establishment of the new regime.The first to enter this wasteland was the army, "in April 1955. Due to the lack of land reclamation machinery and the inability to work in low wetlands, Yu Youqing, the old Red Army and farm manager of the 850 Farm, took the lead in experimenting with human plows to open up wasteland. As a result, there appeared on the wasteland dressed Soldiers in uniform lined up in long lines, shouting chant, and people pulling plow poles. In 1958, another 100,000 demobilized soldiers went to the Great Northern Wilderness.

But to this day, when people talk about the Great Northern Wilderness, they don’t talk about its richness and barrenness, its vastness and coldness, or the miracles created by man in this piece of nature. People always talk about the youth oscillating in it. Youth is like the sound of the piano going around the beam for three days, it is beautiful, but after all it is sad because it disappears. Xiao Fuxing and his friends were not the first group of youths to rush from the city to the wilderness. On the "China Youth Daily" published on August 16, 1955, five young people from Beijing, including Yang Hua, published a declaration on the front page of the headlines of the establishment of the Great Northern Wilderness Youth Reclamation Team: No matter how important the journey to the frontier, It can't stop our determination to go on an expedition; no matter how cold the frontier is, it can't cool our enthusiasm for labor. Yang Hua, who was born in 1932, was already the mayor and secretary of the Youth League Committee of Huangcun Township, Shijingshan District, Beijing when he was 20 years old. However, the enthusiasm of young people inspired Yang Hua, 23, to leave Beijing and go to places where soldiers had gone. , open up new frontiers.Two weeks after they published their manifesto in the China Youth Daily, Yang Hua took over the banner of the "Beijing Youth Volunteer Land Reclamation Team" from Hu Yaobang, then the first secretary of the League Central Committee, and led his like-minded youths to Great Northern Wilderness.Since then, he has been living in that wilderness, except to attend commendation meetings in Beijing and give reports across the country, he has never left.In the one year after Yang Hua arrived in the wasteland, 14 team members from all over China came to the Great Northern Wilderness. They established eight young people named "Tianjin Village", "Hebei Village" and "Harbin Village" according to the names of their hometowns. Collective farms.

The large-scale influx of "educated youth" into the Great Northern Wilderness was precisely the year when Xiao Fuxing and his colleagues set out for the wilderness with grand ideas and photos of Tiananmen Square. "People's Daily" published an article "We also have two hands, so we don't have nothing to do in the city!" " report, the editor's note of the report quoted Mao Zedong's quotations: "It is very necessary for educated youth to go to the countryside and receive re-education from the poor and lower-middle peasants. We must persuade urban cadres and others to graduate from junior high school, high school, and university. send their children to the countryside for a mobilization. Comrades from all over the countryside should welcome them.”

It is the youth who really need no persuasion.Xiao Fuxing, who later became a writer, said, "Yes, we were so ridiculous back then." Xiao Fuxing recalled that in order to be able to join the ranks of young people rushing to the Great Northern Wilderness, he almost did everything he could.Lu Xing'er, a writer who also recalled his youth going to the Great Northern Wilderness, said, "The time background of the prologue is 1968. Chairman Mao's call for 'intellectual youth' to go to the mountains and go to the countryside to combine with workers, peasants and soldiers once again stirred up the land of China. At that time, I , is just a passionate young man who is easily inspired by slogans. In order to join the ranks of the first batch of revolutionaries who went to the Great Northern Wilderness to cultivate and guard the frontier, I cut my finger with a blunt pencil sharpener and wrote a blood letter to express my determination. Back home In the face of my mother who had agreed to my brother and sister to go to the branch of Xinjiang, I told the ancient poems of Zoya and Shula. Their siblings fought to defend the Soviet Republic. Now, I can no longer imagine the scene when I told the story. Cute, or naive and ridiculous? At that time, I only had the passion and poetry of "fighting against the sky". When I left home, I wrapped a novel "A Place Far From Moscow" about the development of Sakhalin Island in my simple luggage. .”

Youth is not afraid of the mountains and rivers. The ancient romance of death on the battlefield and shroud of horse leather has been replaced by the romance of new construction. "All the families on the entire Ten Mile Chang Street started to get busy. Families were killing chickens and dissecting fish - the parents hoped that their children would eat enough good food, but there was an atmosphere of panic in the sumptuous banquet, which put Buddha The children can no longer eat good food. Every family is crying and mourning, and the elders’ sad mood makes the children feel dissatisfied: We are about to welcome the fiery youth, why are you crying for no reason? What a group of backward-thinking petty citizens.” Writer Zheng Jiuchan wrote.

In the West at the same time, the 1968 wave of rebellion swept through the youth, from Paris to Washington. The confrontation between students and the government in Paris in May 1968 captured the world's attention.It eventually led to President Charles de Gaulle announcing the dissolution of parliament and fresh elections.In the United States, rock music, marijuana, school strikes, and parades are prevalent. "Kids of the middle class" crave a taste of "revolution" as much as they experiment with sex and drugs, they want a taste.Lyndon Johnson came out of the White House and asked the driver to go around the square. He said he wanted to see the hippies, the younger generation of America.And Nixon said: We find ourselves materially rich, but spiritually poor. We are torn apart, lacking consistency, and we see an empty life around us, devoid of fulfillment.

The Beatles, who are regarded as spiritual leaders by countless young people, released the "White Album" in 1968. In this double-disc feature, John Lennon wrote a song "Revolution": "You said you wanted a Revolution, you know? We all want to change the world, but when you talk about destruction, you don't know you can't fix me, you don't know if that's true. You say you want to change the system, you know? We all want to change you mind, you tell me this is the system, you know? You better free your mind first!" In China, Mao Zedong called on "intellectuals to go to factories, go to the countryside, and the main thing is to go to the countryside to be re-educated by workers, peasants and soldiers", "the world is vast, and there is a lot to do."Perhaps there was no political leader more beloved by the country's youth than Mao Zedong at the time.No one asks these young people who are excited about their ideals, "You'd better free your mind first." It is said that more than 20 million young people rushed from the cities to the frontiers and rural areas.Liang Xiaosheng said: "I think they are a generation of enthusiasm, a generation of sincerity, a generation full of sacrifice, pioneering spirit and sense of responsibility, and a generation that can be praised and moved. They have not only the distinctive and sad imprint of the specific historical period, but also have The shining and precious side should be fully affirmed, and it is the most tragic and extremely unfair to regard the entire generation who gave their youth, enthusiasm and even life as a sad generation with only sympathy.”Jia Hongtu, a writer from Heilongjiang, called these stories "love and life without tombstones" in "Our Stories - Life Forms of One Hundred Old Educated Youths in the Great Northern Wilderness". The stories about the Great Northern Wilderness and the educated youth have been narrated and interpreted by countless people.Most of them are educated young people who have experienced the Great Northern Wilderness or went to the countryside.Moreover, most of them are educated youths who eventually returned to the city, leaving behind an unknown generation.The waste of youth and the waste of people are topics that cannot be mentioned.This is already the case, or, after all, that period of youth has burned out. They lived in Paul Korchagin's world, imagining that they would forge themselves into steel through loyalty, service to the people, and toil. When Sun Wenzhen, a young intellectual from Hangzhou who came to the Great Northern Wilderness in 1969, died of illness in 1989, her last words were: Mom, I am dead, so take my ashes to the Great Northern Wilderness. On April 20, 1957, the front page of the "China Youth Daily" published a letter written by students of Nanjing Agricultural College, including Lu Shiheng, to the Minister of Higher Education: "The frontier we are going to is a difficult place. We will bring labor We will build a new life on the wasteland with our hands, and ignite the youth of the earth with our fiery hearts. We are the future agronomists of the motherland, and we are determined to go to the frontier to start a family and work for the rest of our lives!" "The 30 million mu of land (Northern Great Wilderness) has been reclaimed. Every inch of the land has been watered with our sweat, and even sacrificed our precious lives. The Great Northern Wilderness has become an important commodity grain base for the country. This is what we have created. Yes, it is also our glory. We should write a glorious history of reclamation. The reclamation of the Great Northern Wilderness is closely related to water control. We have experienced many difficult years from digging ditches and embankments to modern sprinkler irrigation. , Our prospectors, our water conservancy construction army, stepping in the ice cellar, wading in the swamp, fighting with the sky, fighting with the earth, and even fighting with wild animals, are all real heroes.” Wang Xilu, former Secretary of the Party Committee of the State Agricultural Reclamation Administration A collection of essays said. Looking at it now, these passionate years have passed, and the Great Northern Wilderness has also become an important production area and the name of a listed company.No matter how hot our youth was at that time, we must find our minds and liberate them.