Chapter 33 Primer

I have never heard of the place name "Zhangjiagang" in my childhood memory.In the early 1990s, when the newspapers were full of stories about the experience of Zhangjiagang in Suzhou, I was a little puzzled: how could there be a "Zhangjiagang" in Suzhou?Moreover, "Zhangjiagang" has become a model for the whole country to learn from!So I called my father back home. "It's the original Shazhou County! It was separated from our Changshu..." My father said this before I realized that "Zhangjiagang" is also a part of my hometown. Chinese people know "Zhangjiagang" no later than I, a Suzhou native, almost at the same time.

Zhangjiagang is located in the northwest corner of my birthplace, which used to be called Shazhou.As the name suggests, it is a continent in Shali.If you look at the map of Zhangjiagang, you will know that it is located in the upper reaches of Chongming Island in Shanghai, the first island in the Yangtze River estuary, at the mouth of the big tiger before the Yangtze River enters the sea, which is less than a hundred miles away.Before Zhangjiagang, the Yangtze River is basically a river of several hundred meters, but after Zhangjiagang, the Yangtze River is like a surging dragon, galloping into the embrace of the sea...

On January 1, 1961, the State Council formally approved the Yangtze River sandy land at the junction of Changshu and Jiangyin as an independent county-level administrative division. Nine townships (communes) make up Shazhou County. I knew the name Shazhou when I was very young, not because it is a new county system, but because when I was a child, when I didn’t eat well, my grandma would say “If it’s not delicious, I’ll send you to Shazhou” The words kept scaring me before I firmly remembered the place name.In my memory, or in the memory of us Suzhou people, Shazhou is a poor place, at least the poorest place in our Suzhou area. "The people there were thrown into the Yangtze River to feed the fish after starving to death..." Grandma scared me like this, which caused me to have a sense of fear of sandbars since I was a child.

It is only natural that I know Shazhou but not Zhangjiagang. Zhangjiagang was officially renamed from Shazhou on December 1, 1986.At that time, I was working in the army in Beijing, and I had less time to go back to my hometown, unlike now, I sometimes go back several times a year.The reputation of Zhangjiagang surprised me even a little: Suzhou is actually as famous as Zhangjiagang?And it is more famous than my birthplace, Changshu!I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t even want to believe it for a long time. It wasn’t until I went back to Suzhou a few years later and went to Zhangjiagang to see that Zhangjiagang was indeed better than Changshu. That was the year after the first “pedestrian street” in Zhangjiagang was born. to go.

At that time, Zhangjiagang was the only city with a high-level pedestrian street among the county-level cities in the country. My intuition at the time was: this street is not much worse than Wangfujing Street in Beijing.Wangfujing Street is a bit chaotic, but Zhangjiagang Pedestrian Street is very civilized and clean. That’s when I first knew Zhangjiagang.Later, I learned more and more about Zhangjiagang.First, because a cadre from Zhangjiagang named Jiang Hao became the secretary of the Changshu Municipal Party Committee. He is bold, witty, and eloquent. The entrepreneurial spirit of Tianxia Pioneer was brought into full play, which brought about a complete change in the work drive and style of Changshu, the "boss" among Suzhou counties.When Comrade Jiang Hao was the Secretary of the Changshu Municipal Party Committee, I wrote a long reportage "Highlights of a Great Country" for my hometown for the first time, which recorded the period of history before and after he took office.Later, Changshu came to Changshu with a person from Zhangjiagang as the secretary of the municipal party committee. I am not familiar with this person, but I also heard that he transformed the old city of Changshu into a garden. At the same time, he built two development zones, which made Changshu's economy leap forward new level.This year, I heard that the third person from Zhangjiagang came to Changshu to be the secretary... I think there must be a reason for the Suzhou Municipal Party Committee's personnel arrangement. At least it shows that the cadres in Zhangjiagang are very good. "Boss" Changshu to a new height.

Changshu people used to look down on Shazhou people from the bottom of their hearts. Of course, they didn’t think much of Zhangjiagang for a long time, because both Shazhou and Zhangjiagang were just a kind of subsidiary of Changshu and the “poor boy” for a long period of time. "character of.But in the past ten years, when I went back to Changshu and listened to people in my hometown talking about Zhangjiagang, it was completely different! In a word, in today's Suzhou, no one dares to take Zhangjiagang seriously!Zhangjiagang's tiger power and strength made all Suzhou people feel a kind of pride and heroism.