Chapter 6 poor family

At noon on October 19, 1935, Mao Zedong's team passed through the yellow-brown valley, Toudaochuan, and arrived at Wuqi, a dusty town in the heart of the Loess Plateau in Shaanxi. Wuqi Town is a small town with only a hundred households.Beside the Luohe River, it belongs to Baoan County.It is said that it was named to commemorate Wu Qi, a famous general of Wei State during the Warring States Period. When the Central Red Army arrived, Wu Qi was already the gate of the northern Shaanxi base.Although the place is a bit desolate and dilapidated, the people here have the vigilance that people from the Soviet area have.Seeing the troops coming, except for a few old men who were not afraid of getting into trouble as informants, the rest hid in the ravine.

The soldiers were puzzled.Judging from the slogans such as "Long live the Communist Party of China" and "Support Liu Zhidan" written on the wall, this is the site of the northern Shaanxi base.But why are the people in the Soviet area afraid of the Red Army? It was only later that I realized that it was a misunderstanding due to a lack of language, and the local people heard "Red Army" as "Fengjun". After the misunderstanding was resolved, the old people quickly found the person in charge of the local party organization and retrieved the masses. In the evening, amidst laughter and laughter, the people of the Soviet area welcomed Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhang Wentian, Bogu and other leading comrades from the central government into their homes.And arranged for them to live in the new kiln yard on the hillside in the northeast of the town.

In the barren Wuqi, in the loess cave dwellings, the Red Army found their relatives and found their own home... Nie Rongzhen used the word "too poor" to describe the family situation of this family in his memoirs. Li De's "China Chronicle" records this in a little more detail: "The new base area in northern Shaanxi covers an area of ​​30,000 to 40,000 square kilometers. Its scope is roughly bordered by the border of Gansu in the west, the Yellow River in the east, the Great Wall in the north, and Fu County in the south. Large villages and towns are occupied by the enemy, and the only road from Xi'an to Yan'an is also controlled by the enemy. Looking around, except for a few fertile river valleys, the rest is barren yellow land. There are no forests everywhere, only deep valleys. Here Often suffered from droughts and floods, the hard rocky land, even if it is cultivated, yields very little.

"The daily meals of farmers and soldiers are usually three bowls of small rice or sorghum rice and a little sauerkraut. Only the relatively dry continental climate is comfortable, although the climate is very variable and occasionally blown from the Gobi Desert. However, most of the residents here suffer from conjunctivitis and skin diseases, and sometimes even smallpox and sheep plague spread from Mongolia. "Since ancient times, this area has been the most barren and backward area in the whole country. Only urbanites and big landowners can live in houses, and farmers without exception live in cave dwellings with their livestock. This kind of cave dwelling is like The tunnels are dug on the slopes. The villages are far apart, and there are generally four or five households, and the relatively large villages do not exceed 12 households. Not only is food and clothing poor here, but some places are also seriously short of water. Therefore, Although this area is vast, it is sparsely populated, with a population of no more than 500,000 at most."

The crisis of survival is the first problem that the Red Army faces after arriving at "home". The Kuomintang newspapers gloated that here the Red Army had nothing to eat, food, or even men to replenish its ranks.In their words: "The Long March from Sichuan to Northwest China is no different than a long march to death." There are also people in the Red Army who are wavering. Lin Biao showed pessimism more than once.He once formally wrote a letter asking the central government to approve him to take some troops to fight guerrillas in southern Shaanxi.Mao Zedong severely criticized him, and Nie Rongzhen also patiently persuaded him.In his memoirs, Nie Rongzhen wrote: "I said, don't look at these broken cave dwellings. After all, they are a base and our foothold. We didn't find these broken caves after traveling 25,000 miles. Cave dwellings? If you go to southern Shaanxi, maybe you won’t even find broken cave dwellings.”

Lin Biao's mood did not rise slightly until after the battle of Zhiluo Town. In addition to "poverty", there are two more disturbing things in this family: one is "harassed" by the enemy, and the other is "trapped" by the "left". "Poverty" is obvious to all, but "disturbance" and "difficulty" are only well understood by higher-level leaders. After the urgent investigation and understanding of the situation, Mao Zedong quickly drew a map of the work that the Party Central Committee gave him and his comrades in arms:

The current task of the Party Central Committee - "defend and expand the base area in northern Shaanxi". Work strategy - military and political two-pronged approach. Specific division of labor - the soldiers are divided into two groups.Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Peng Dehuai led the way and were in charge of the military.He led his troops to the south quickly and joined the 15th Xu Haidong Red Army Corps, which was fighting the enemy, to jointly rescue the military crisis in the northern Shaanxi base.Zhang Wentian, Bo Gu, Liu Shaoqi, and Dong Biwu were on the other side, responsible for politics, and led the central authorities to Wayaobao to rescue Liu Zhidan and others from the "Left" activists.