Chapter 6 3. Acheson predicted bankruptcy, the Communist Party can solve the food problem

In the glass case of the Chinese History Museum, there is a crumpled contract. Don't look at this torn piece of paper, which is like a rural child scribbling casually. It records a sad history at a turning point in Chinese history. The Republic entered 1978 after 29 years of ups and downs. Compared with the old society before the birth of the Republic, China has undergone earth-shaking changes, the national economy has developed rapidly, and people's living standards have been significantly improved. However, due to the destruction of the "Great Leap Forward" and the catastrophe of the "Cultural Revolution", China's economy is still in a rather backward state.In particular, China's food production has been slow to develop.Many people's food and clothing problems have not been better resolved.

By 1978, although my country's total grain output had reached 304.77 million tons, due to the rapid population growth, the per capita share of grain was only 318 kilograms. Compared with the level of 307 kilograms per capita in 1956, it had only increased by 11 kilograms in 22 years. Even compared with 1949, it only increased by 109 kilograms, and the annual increase was only 3.75 kilograms.Many places in rural areas have not yet solved the problem of food and clothing.According to statistics in 1978, farmers with an annual income of less than 100 yuan accounted for 35.37% of the total population.There are 231 counties where the per capita annual income is still less than 50 yuan, and it is difficult to maintain a large amount of food funds allocated by the state for a long time. In most rural areas, production depends on loans, production depends on relief, and food depends on resale.Peasants in many places work for only 8 cents for a day of labor. They cannot buy salt and peppers are not spicy.

The people's commune system of "one big and two public" has brought China's agricultural production into a dead end! Fengyang County, Anhui Province is known as the hometown of flower drums throughout the country.Before liberation, there were tens of thousands of Fengyang people who wandered around knocking on plates with a chopstick, singing a song "Talk about Fengyang, talk about Fengyang, and cry when talking about Fengyang. Since Emperor Zhu was born, ten There will be a nine-year drought in one year," the Huagu ditty is sung all over the country. In the 1970s, many Fengyang people returned to their old jobs.At that time, the whole county relied on reselling food for food, and relying on loans to spend money. Each person was allocated 8 taels of grain per day. They couldn't eat enough, so they had to go out to beg for food.By 1978, there were 20,000 to 30,000 beggars in the county, and within a few years, the county's rural population dropped by 100,000.

The Xiaogang Production Team of Liyuan Commune in this county is particularly important. The grain harvested in 1978 was only 1/3 of that in 1955.Within a few years, 60 members of the team were starved to death, of which 6 households died, and 76 members fled their hometowns to beg for food. A desolate fact that our modern people can't believe! On the evening of November 16, 1978, Yan Junchang, then captain of the production team, called together 18 poor and hungry families for a secret meeting.The 38-year-old man sadly said to the villagers: "We have to save ourselves." How to save it?

——"We divided the land." He proposed to divide the land and contract it to each household. Some villagers said to him: "Junchang, it is illegal to divide the land and do it alone. You are in prison. What about your children? What about your family?" After discussion, the honest and simple folks finally agreed: Everyone is willing to divide the land and work alone.If the cadres suffer a lawsuit, everyone is responsible for raising their children until they are 18 years old.There is no evidence for empty words, but words are evidence! The 18 peasants who had been digging in the soil for many years but could not get enough food and clothing pressed their bright red finger prints tremblingly with tears in their eyes.

"If you are poor, you want to change", this is the necessity of history, and it is also the choice of materialism. Just two days after 18 peasants pressed their fingerprints, on December 18, 1978, the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was grandly opened in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.At a critical historical juncture that concerns the fate of the country and the future of the nation, China's top politicians and bottom-level peasants have jointly turned a new page in history. Twenty years later, on September 22, 1998, Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, made a special trip to Xiaogang Village, the place where China's reform was unveiled.Today's Xiaogang Village presents a thriving scene to people: green trees stand on both sides of the road leading to the village, a flat and spacious cement road runs through the center of the village, and rows of brick and tile houses of farmhouses are scattered in a modern way. The style of primary school buildings rises from the ground, and the parabolic antenna for receiving TV signals shines in the sunlight... Seeing all this, General Secretary Jiang smiled happily: "Although I have never been to Xiaogang in the past, I have always been there. I am very concerned about Xiaogang, because the cause of reform and opening up initiated and led by Comrade Deng Xiaoping first blossomed and borne fruit in the countryside, and Xiaoshangang Village took the lead in carrying out rural reforms." He spoke clearly and forcefully to the farmers in Xiaogang Village Said: "The policy of household contract management must be persisted for a long time, and it will not change."

Xiaogang Village is a mirror of the times.It reflects such a clear historical trajectory: from the firm support of Deng Xiaoping, the second-generation leadership core of the party, to Xiaogang Village 20 years ago, to the ardent hopes placed on Xiaogang Village by Comrade Jiang Zemin, the third-generation leadership core of the party, again Explain a truth: agricultural and rural issues are always the most concerned issues of the Communist Party of China! Deng Xiaoping said: "As long as the people have enough to eat, everything will be fine." Similar to the time when Xiaogang Village was engaged in large-scale contracting, the Anhui Provincial Party Committee, after suffering a century-old drought, sent a large number of cadres to the production team to organize farmers to plant "life-saving wheat" during autumn planting.Yang Maolin, secretary of the Shannan District Committee of Feixi County, stayed in the Huanghua Brigade and implemented the method of "contracting production to the group and assigning responsibility to the individual", which was soon promoted spontaneously throughout the county.Someone brought the complaint to the Provincial Party Committee, and Wan Li, the Secretary of the Provincial Party Committee at the time, who played an important role in China's reforms for more than ten years, personally conducted an investigation.He first came to Xiaogang Village and asked Yan Junchang what is the benefit of contracting labor. He replied: "Now each family farms, and they get up early and go to bed late. Both adults and children can do it, and there is no need for the captain to call. In the past, they were tied together. If you don’t work hard, and you don’t have enough food, you can’t be a team leader.”

Wan Li was very happy to hear that, and said: "If someone says you are wrong, you can ask him, what good way do you have? If you have a way to make everyone full, I will follow you; if you have no good way, I'm sorry ,I am not wrong." The truth of the doer is also the most real. In the spring of 1979, the front page of the "People's Daily" published letters from readers, accusing household contracting of production as a retrogression of restoration.A county party secretary in the Chuzhou area found Wanli in a hurry, and Wanli said firmly: "The newspaper does not farm, the newspaper does not harvest grain, and after autumn the peasants have nothing to eat, so they will come to us. Don't bother with that, we will do it the same way." . . . ”

Farmers need to farm, and farming requires enough food. This is as simple as 1+1=2. At the beginning of 1979, it became a political issue that was repeatedly debated throughout the country.It doesn't matter if people starve to death. After all, they starve to death for "socialism." Dividing the land and doing capitalism alone is the greatest sin. —What absurd logic. At that time, there were sporadic and spontaneous implementation of various forms of "quota contract" all over the country.Peasants resort to ingenious ways to conceal or negotiate with leaders.But once they were discovered, they were all ordered to cancel, labeled as the revisionist "Three-Self, One Package", and condemned.

It cannot but be said that it is a great tragedy for Chinese peasants to engage in an "underground struggle" with Communist Party cadres in order to feed their stomachs. In 1979, the first Xiaogang production team to engage in large-scale contracts proved their approach with facts.The village's total grain output reached 132,000 jin, an increase of more than six times that of 1978, and the per capita income of 18 households was 311 yuan, an increase of more than six times that of the previous year. Since 1957, this production team sold 40,000 catties of grain and 24,000 catties of oil to the country for the first time.At that time, they made up a few jingles: "Big contract, big contract, go straight without turning. Those who pay enough to the country, keep enough to the collective, and the rest are their own."

The peasants' spontaneous actions finally won the approval of the top leaders of the Communist Party of China. In 1980, the central government officially affirmed that household production contracting is a better form of agricultural production. Since then, Anhui and Sichuan's methods of contracting production to households and groups have been spread and implemented across the country at the fastest speed, and quickly developed into an upsurge of rural economic reform with the "household joint production contract responsibility system" as the core content.By 1984, 5.69 million rural production teams across the country had implemented various forms of production responsibility systems, and 184 million rural households had implemented joint production contracts, accounting for 96.6% of the total rural households.At the same time, the separation of government and society has basically been completed nationwide.The people's commune system, which had been implemented for 26 years since August 1958, ceased to exist. This is another major liberation of agricultural productivity in Chinese history and a real "leap forward" in China's agricultural production.With its unique vitality, it has pushed China's agricultural economy, which has been stagnant for a long time, to a peak. Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of socialist reform and opening up who believed in the belief that "it doesn't matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice", said a meaningful sentence: "No matter what major events happen in the world, as long as the people have enough to eat, everything will be fine." In 1992, the Chinese government solemnly announced that, except for a very small number of impoverished areas, China has basically solved the problem of food and clothing throughout the country! The news shocked the whole world: the Chinese government has solved the problem of feeding more than one billion people on such a small amount of arable land in such a short period of time. This is a miracle in the history of world food and a great feat of the Chinese Communist Party. We will never forget that more than 40 years ago, US Secretary of State Acheson arbitrarily predicted that no Chinese government could solve the problem of feeding the Chinese people, nor could the Chinese Communist Party. After more than 40 years of ups and downs and more than 40 years of ups and downs, the Chinese government has finally proved with iron facts that under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, we are fully capable of solving the problem of feeding more than one billion Chinese people. For this goal, we have made arduous efforts. After liberation, Mao Zedong formulated the agricultural development policy of "taking grain as the key link", putting grain production in a prominent position.At the same time, he organized the people of the whole country to carry out water conservancy construction, and initially built a water conservancy engineering system for flood control, drainage, irrigation, and power generation, laying a good foundation for China's grain production. The implementation of the rural household contract responsibility system has enabled China's grain production to develop rapidly. In 1979, China's total grain output reached 332.12 million tons, an increase of 27.35 million tons over 1978; China's per capita grain consumption has also increased simultaneously. It reached 343 kg in 1979, 392 kg in 1984 and 398 kg in 1997. According to the statistics of the World Food and Agriculture Organization, China's per capita grain possession and consumption have reached the world average level and far exceed the level of developing countries. Except for a very small number of people in poor areas, every Chinese feels the taste of having enough to eat.No longer have to eat the last meal and think about the next meal, and eat today and worry about tomorrow.Farmers have grain in their warehouses and rice in their vats, and they can eat as much as they want, while people in the city go to the grain store with tickets and buy what they like. The faces of the Chinese people began to turn red! The hearts of the Chinese people began to feel at ease!