Chapter 4 1. One thing in 5000 years: the people depend on food

China is the first country in the world to choose grain as a food for food.As early as 5,000 years ago, the industrious and intelligent Chinese nation began to grow rice, millet (grain), sorghum, etc.Generations of descendants of Yan and Huang have sown and reaped and multiplied on this piece of yellow land. Most people in China are engaged in agriculture. Most of China's arable land grows food. ——For 5,000 years, there is one thing: the people depend on food! China's 5,000-year oriental civilization is largely a farming civilization, and China's 5,000-year history is largely a history of hunger and anti-hunger.

When we open the history books, no matter which dynasty or century we are in, we can see page after page of shocking records of famine, and we can see paragraphs of tragic descriptions of hungry people turning into ants and starving to death. Qin Shihuang unified China. Although he took some measures to promote social development, his exploitation and oppression of farmers was extremely heavy.When he was in power, the tax was 20 times higher than that of ancient times, and farmers were forced to hand over 2/3 of their harvest.As a result, the people were devastated, the people were destitute, and the vast wilderness was full of hungry people fleeing famine.When Qin II Hu Hai came to the throne, there were millions of hungry people, and the bark of many places was stripped and eaten.

At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, powerful landlords wantonly annexed land, and farmers went bankrupt and went into exile.Coupled with the frequent occurrence of natural disasters, millions of hungry people across the country have no food to eat, and even reached the tragic situation of "human cannibalism". In the last years of the Ming Dynasty, the feudal ruling regime was extremely corrupt. Landlords and bureaucrats frantically annexed farmers’ land, so that 9/10 farmers became landless tenants. In addition, there was a severe drought in northern Shaanxi, especially in 1628. After eating grass and bark, people eat "grass and rocks" and often die of abdominal distension. There are miserable images of starvation everywhere. In 1640, the hungry people in Henan even "eat each other", starved to death, and no one restrained them.

Checking our family history, there are probably only a few people whose ancestors did not lean on a begging stick, and only a few people have no ancestors who died of starvation in their families. China is a large agricultural country with 5,000 years of farming civilization.In terms of food production, it has been in a leading position in the world for thousands of years.The grain produced by each labor force and the grain per capita reached a very high level as early as the Tang Dynasty.In the Tang Dynasty, each labor force in China produced an average of 2,262 kilograms of grain per worker, and 628 kilograms of grain per capita, which was not only the highest in the world at that time, but even exceeded our current level (in 1997, my country’s per capita grain output per worker 1160 kg of grain, 398.5 kg of grain per capita).However, due to the decay and decline of the feudal society, most of the cultivated land was in the hands of landlords and bureaucrats, resulting in serious unfairness in the distribution and possession of food.According to statistics, only 10% of the total population suffers from hunger and semi-starvation for a long time due to lack of land.Once a natural disaster occurs, there is simply nothing to eat.

The irrational distribution of land has prevented the vast majority of Chinese people from getting rid of hunger and poverty for a long time, and it has also prevented China from solving the problem of food well.Generations of Chinese people have made unremitting efforts to fill their stomachs, but they have not been able to get out of the shadow of hunger. Food is the cornerstone of a country's stability.Looking at the history of China, we can see without exception that whenever a famine strikes and there is a food shortage, there will be rebellions by hungry people, leading to the change of feudal dynasties. "No rice leads to chaos" has become a barometer of social unrest in China.From the "Chinese riots" that occurred in the late Western Zhou Dynasty, to the first large-scale peasant uprising in Chinese history led by Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, and the later Yellow Turban Uprising, Huang Chao Uprising, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, all of them were caused by famine.

The Chinese nation is a nation that has suffered from hunger.With a spirit of hard work and hard work, they endured hunger and hunger, ate bran and swallowed vegetables, and spent a long time.Now, they have placed the historical responsibility of completely solving the food problem on the shoulders of the Chinese Communist Party. The hungry Chinese look forward to an era of full food. This is not an extravagant expectation, but a basic requirement for human survival. More than half a century ago, a European scholar who studied Chinese history was surprised to find that China, which has a splendid civilization history of 5,000 years, was actually a "famine country". Almost every page of Chinese history can find "natural disasters", The word "famine".

Indeed, the Chinese nation is a nation full of disasters. Thousands of years of feudal rule and the oppression of landlords and bureaucrats have made the people of the Chinese nation miserable, and the vast majority of people are threatened by hunger. Frequent natural disasters have also helped the tyrants, making matters worse, and pushing the Chinese nation to death. The "space" allocated by nature to the Chinese is a "space" full of risks. Natural disasters such as drought, flood, earthquake, and epidemic occur almost every year. If it is either a flood in the south or a drought in the north, an earthquake in the east or a plague in the west, This makes it difficult to stabilize China's grain production, and it is difficult to balance the food problem of the Chinese people.Therefore, there is a saying that "there is a hunger at the age of three, decline at the age of six, and famine at the age of twelve".

China is known as the "country of famine".In the nearly 4,000 years from the 18th century BC to the present, all recorded years will be associated with "famines" and there will be descriptions of "hungers perish in the wild, and people eat each other with hunger".According to some statistics, during this period of time, there were nearly 5,500 disasters of various kinds in China, with an average of one disaster every six months. Geographically speaking, China is located in the east of Asia and the west coast of the Pacific Ocean, directly affected by the world's largest land and the largest ocean, and belongs to the East Asian monsoon climate.In this climate, from September to October to March to April of the following year, the dry and cold winter monsoon blows from Siberia and the Mongolian Plateau to my country, resulting in cold and dry winters throughout the country, and ice and snow damage are prone to occur; while in summer from April to April In September, affected by the warm air current blowing from the ocean, the country is generally hot and rainy, and disasters such as floods, typhoons, and hot and dry winds are prone to occur, directly affecting agricultural production and people's lives; and spring and autumn are the alternating periods of winter and summer winds, with frequent weather All kinds of disasters are likely to happen.

In terms of regions, China's Loess Plateau and the Yellow River, Huaihe River, and Haihe River regions are prone to drought; Huanghuaihai Plain, the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the southeastern coast, the Songhua River Basin, and the middle and lower reaches of the Liaohe River are prone to flood disasters; typhoons mainly hit the southeastern coast and the coast of East China, while dry and hot winds often cause harm to the North China Plain; the west of China is often hit by hail, while the southwest, northwest and North China are among the regions with the most earthquake disasters in the world.

Among various natural disasters in China, floods and droughts are especially common.Mr. Zhu Kezhen introduced in the article "Climate Changes in History" that from the 1st century AD to the 19th century, there were 1013 droughts and 658 floods in China.According to Mr. Deng Tuo's "History of Famine Relief in China", from 206 BC to 1936 AD, there were 1,037 major floods in China, with an average of one every two years. According to the research and analysis of the National Conditions Analysis Research Group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in the past 2,200 years, there have been more than 1,600 major floods and more than 1,300 major droughts in China, and droughts and floods often occur in different places at the same time.Later, the number of disasters increased and the time interval became shorter.For example, the average number of disasters per year was 0.6 in the Sui Dynasty, 1.6 in the Tang Dynasty, 1.8 in the Song Dynasty, 3.2 in the Yuan Dynasty, 3.7 in the Ming Dynasty, and 3.8 in the Qing Dynasty.

Grain production is most affected by natural climate change, regardless of drought, flood, earthquake, epidemic, all directly affect the quality of the harvest. "Guanzi Dudi" pointed out that the natural factors that affect grain production are mainly "five pests": "water, one pest; drought, one pest; wind, fog, hail, frost, one pest; pestilence, one pest; , a harm." In a society ruled by feudalism, the country lacked sufficient food reserves, so it was impossible to allocate the country's food production, and because the land was in the hands of a few landlords and bureaucrats, once a natural disaster occurred, there would be large-scale famine and landlessness. Or the peasants with few lands were all reduced to starving people because they had no food reserves.According to historical records, no matter where a disaster occurs in China, hundreds of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people will immediately become hungry people, and go out in groups to flee famine. The fields and roads are full of victims with yellow and emaciated faces. People starve to death. In 1628, there was a severe drought in northern Shaanxi. The hungry people ate grass and bark, and finally developed into a tragic situation of "cannibalism". In 1812, there was a severe drought in northern China and floods in the south, and famine broke out across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people lived on bark and grass roots for a living, and "uncountable" starved to death.From the third to fifth year of Guangxu in the Qing Dynasty, that is, from 1877 to 1879, Shanxi, Hebei, Henan, and Shandong provinces experienced three years of severe drought, and 13 million people died of starvation alone, nearly 1/3 of the total population of the country at that time. 10. In order to resist natural disasters, the Chinese nation has made unremitting efforts with perseverance and lofty heroism.Since Gun Yu's water control, China has consciously and organizedly managed rivers and transformed nature. In the era of Gun Yu, "the waters of the great flood flooded the sky, and the mountains and mausoleums were vast, and the people were worried." The crops and residences were flooded, and there was no food, no shelter, and their survival was seriously threatened.Gun stepped forward, "stealing the emperor's breath to flood the flood", and sacrificed heroically.Yu inherited his behest, continued to fight against the flood, and finally achieved the achievement of flood control. However, this is just a beautiful legend.For thousands of years, although the feudal rulers have also carried out some water conservancy constructions, due to their own decay and decline, corrupt officials exploited layers upon layers, basically they have not played a role in resisting natural disasters. After liberation, my country set off a large-scale water conservancy construction movement. Although disasters still occurred frequently, the occurrence of disasters was effectively reduced, especially the national macro-control ability was strengthened.In the 50 years since liberation, China has not experienced a major famine due to disasters. However, this has added another heavy pressure to China's grain production.Tian Jiyun, the former vice premier of the State Council, once said that China is a country with many disasters and severe disasters. In ordinary years, nearly 300 million mu of crops were damaged, and nearly 20 billion kilograms of grain was lost due to disasters. According to data, since 1951, there has been almost no year without drought, flood, and disaster in China. Drought in 1951; drought in 1952, waterlogging of Huaihe River and Hanshui River; drought in 1953, flooding in North China and South China, severe freezing damage in northern winter wheat areas; In 1956, the drought was severe, and the cold dew wind in the south was serious; in 1959, the drought was severe, and the hail disaster was severe, and the Pearl River Basin and the northern part of North China were severely flooded; In 1963, the North China Plain was severely flooded; in 1964, the waterlogging was severe; in 1965, North China was severely drought; in 1966, the Huaihe River Basin in South China was severely drought; in 1967, North China was drought, and the Haihe River was flooded; In 1969, there was a flood in the Yangtze River and a severe drought in the northwest; in 1970, there were continuous cloudy days in the south of the Yangtze River; in 1971, the summer drought was severe; in 1972, the worst drought in the north in 30 years; in 1973, the drought was severe; in 1974, the drought, Heavy floods in the Yellow River and Huaihe Rivers; drought in 1975, floods in Henan, severe waterlogging, and freezing damage in the south; low temperature in 1976, cold spring, Tangshan earthquake; drought, waterlogging, severe cold, frost and snow in 1977; drought in 1978; drought in 1979; In 1980, there was a severe drought in North China and severe floods in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River...As for the disasters in the past 10 years, we naturally have deep memories, such as the flood disaster in 1988; the earthquake, flood, severe drought, and hail in 1989; In 1996, there was a flood that had not happened in a century in the whole country... What makes us still palpitating is that in the summer of 1998, unprecedented flood disasters occurred in the Yangtze River Basin, Songhua River Basin, and Liaohe River Basin in China. There were more than 10 provinces and cities in the country. More than 400 million people were affected by the disaster, and the direct economic loss reached more than 240 billion yuan. China suffered many and severe disasters, which seriously restricted China's grain production, which added another major obstacle to solving the food problem of the Chinese people. U.S. Secretary of State Acheson believed that "a big reason for the failure of the Kuomintang government on the mainland is that it did not give China enough to eat." Obviously, this is biased, but we found that the failure of the Kuomintang, in addition to political corruption, did not effectively solve the problem of eating Chinese people, and indeed played a certain role. Whoever does not pay attention to the issue of food may collapse. This is a fact that has been proved dozens of times in China's history. It was a wrong move by Chiang Kai-shek to "ignore" the people's food problem. The corruption and retrogression of the Kuomintang rule have determined that they do not pay attention to China's grain production and do not care about the problem of eating Chinese people.On the contrary, the bureaucrats and landlords headed by the four families of Chiang, Song, Kong, and Chen took advantage of their privileges to plunder the land wantonly, expropriate and extort money, and once again pushed the Chinese people into the purgatory of starvation. Since the Opium War, the self-sufficient economy in rural China began to disintegrate, and landlords and bureaucrats began to annex and plunder land.Especially after the failure of the Great Revolution in 1927, under the rule of the Kuomintang government, land annexation intensified.According to data analysis, in 1934, the country’s arable land area was 1.4 billion mu, of which 68% was occupied by landlords and rich peasants who accounted for only 10% of the rural population, while the middle peasants, poor peasants and farm laborers who constituted 90% of the rural population, all of their arable land The area is less than 1/3 of the total area.After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, this unreasonable land distribution situation became more serious, and the Kuomintang government even carried out military plunder and annexation.On the one hand, they used the name of "reclamation" and "joint venture" to openly invade and annex farmers' land, and on the other hand, they explicitly "received" a large amount of land that Japanese imperialists brutally plundered during the occupation of Chinese farmers. After the land was invaded and plundered, more than 90% of the farmers could only live by renting the land, while the landlords and bureaucrats took advantage of the situation to exploit the tenants crazily. In most areas, the land rent reached 80%. If the harvest reaches 20%, it is already difficult to make ends meet in normal years, and in the event of a famine, there is no food at all. At the same time, the majority of peasants have to bear the excessive expropriation by the Kuomintang government.Before the Anti-Japanese War, the average land tax per mu, including various additional taxes, was about 1.5 to 2 dou of rice. Some have increased to 9.5 buckets. The high rents of bureaucrats and landlords and the excessive expropriation by the Kuomintang government caused a sharp decline in China's grain production, and hundreds of millions of people were dying and struggling. In 1936, my country's total grain output was still 150 million tons. By 1949, it had actually decreased to 113.18 million tons, a 24.5% reduction in production.The average yield per mu is only 85.5 kg, which is only half of that in the Tang Dynasty. The Chinese nation fell into the darkest age. Hundreds of millions of people were threatened by hunger, displaced everywhere, and lived in extreme hardship.According to the "Government Bulletin" of the Kuomintang government: From 1929 to 1930, a severe drought occurred in Shaanxi, and the Kuomintang government had no one to rescue the disaster. 100 million people; in 1933, the Yellow River burst, and 3.64 million victims; in 1936, more than 100,000 hungry people in Sichuan Province ate bark.According to relevant survey reports, in 1935, in 1001 counties, at least 20 million farmers lost their lives.Another report said that during the drought in the spring of 1942 to 1943, hellish scenes appeared in most parts of Henan Province: "...At that time, in the wheat fields on both sides of the Luohe-Zhoujiakou Avenue, every 8 or 10 steps, That is to say, there are several hungry corpses, no one restrains them, and wild dogs compete for food..." It is estimated that millions of people starved to death in Henan province. Officials forced the people to rebel, and the people had to rebel.With anti-hunger as the fuse, mass movements against the Kuomintang rule were launched across the country.The wave of "grabbing rice" aroused in order to survive swept through many towns in the Kuomintang ruled areas. On May 6, 1949, dozens of large and small towns in more than 10 provinces including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Sichuan took part in a wave of "grabbing rice", with millions of people participating.The wave of "grabbing rice" in many places developed to directly fight against the Kuomintang government.Finally, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the Kuomintang regime was overthrown. From the day of its birth, the Communist Party of China has put the problem of food for the Chinese people in a prominent position.Mao Zedong, who was born in a peasant family, paid special attention to this.As early as 1928, Mao Zedong led the people in Jinggangshan to carry out the land revolution and develop production. In 1937, the policy of reducing rent and interest was implemented in the revolutionary base areas.Rent reduction means that the rent rented by landlords to farmers is reduced by 25% according to the standard before the Anti-Japanese War; interest rate reduction means that the annual interest rate is generally set at one cent (that is, 1/10), and the maximum cannot exceed one and a half cents.In addition, miscellaneous rents, servitude and all forms of usury were banned.The policy of reducing rent and interest has brought economic benefits to the majority of farmers, greatly increased the enthusiasm for agricultural production, and achieved better development of grain production. After 1940, in order to repel the anti-communist upsurge of the Kuomintang government and overcome the difficulty of insufficient food supply in the base areas, Mao Zedong launched a large-scale production campaign, calling on the army and civilians in the base areas to be self-reliant and develop food production.Tens of thousands of people from all walks of life in the party, government, military and academic circles in Yan'an participated in the mass production movement. Leaders such as Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, and Ren Bishi personally participated in productive labor.The 359th Brigade led by Wang Zhen drove into the deserted Nanniwan to open up wasteland and produce, and built the famous "Jiangnan in Northern Shaanxi". In 1944, the grain produced by the 359th Brigade was not only self-sufficient, but also handed over 10,000 shi of public grain. The large-scale production movement promoted the food production in the base areas, effectively overcame the food difficulties of the soldiers and civilians in the base areas, and significantly improved the lives of the soldiers and civilians. During the three years from 1942 to 1944, the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region reclaimed more than 2 million mu of wasteland. In Yan'an alone, 6,000 stones of fine rice were produced in 1943.By 1945, most of the farmers in the border areas were able to "cultivate more than three years and one", that is, to cultivate crops for three years, in addition to consumption, they could have enough food for one year.In some areas, it is even possible to cultivate for one year, and there is only one year's food left over. This is a successful attempt by the Communist Party of China to solve the problem of eating Chinese people.In contrast, Chiang Kai-shek was not only a mess politically, but also economically.