Chapter 4 Chapter 2 Zaoshu Village: The Origin of the Solitary and Boiling Peasant Revolution

Looking at the history of the Communist Party of China and the history of socialist modernization, reform and opening up since the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, we can see such a historical account: In 1978, 18 farmers in Xiaogang Village, Fengyang, Anhui distributed their land according to their fingerprints, thus It started another great revolution of Chinese peasants... In fact, it was not Xiaogang Village that was the first to divide land to households. According to the author’s field interviews and materials, Zaoshu Village, Baishuiyang Town, Taizhou City was established several years earlier than the 18 households in Xiaogang Village. The scope and process of subdividing farmland to households are more thrilling than those experienced by Xiaogang Village!

On April 23, 2006, when I finished interviewing many modern and advanced enterprises and the exciting private economy in Taizhou, and proposed to visit the relatively backward mountainous areas in Taizhou, comrades from the Propaganda Department of the Municipal Party Committee contacted Linhai City After a while, the person concerned took me to Sanshuiyang Town, the junction of Linhai, Tiantai and Xianju.Compared with the highly developed urban area of ​​Taizhou, the remote mountainous town of Baishuiyang is indeed more like the southern town in the 1970s and 1980s in my memory.Although the residents here can also watch the live broadcast of the Oscars on the other side of the ocean through TV, the houses where people live and the shops are basically furnished with daily necessities, and fashionable luxury goods are rare.When Xiao Yang, head of the cultural station of the town government, led us to the town meeting room, there were already several veteran cadres waiting for us.One of the old comrades named Wang Zhijiang pointed to the conference room and said that when he was the deputy district chief in the 1970s, this conference room and office building looked like this.For nearly 40 years, the office conditions of the town government have not changed much.

"Our Baishuiyang is quite famous in history! It's only a few tens of miles away, and the bustling market is here. People in Linhai, known as the 'Taizhou Capital', all call our place 'Little Shanghai'." The words of the old district chief made me look at Bai Shuiyang with admiration.It is a mountain town with 50,000 people living here. Based on this alone, I believe it has a special status in the minds of the people with a radius of tens of miles. Walking around the most prosperous place in Baishuiyang Town, I generally feel that there are occasional young people here who can access the Internet, but the common people are basically still in the state of carefree and self-sufficient in the agricultural society. Compared with the crowded situation of people and cars, the carefree lifestyle of Baishui foreigners gives people a sense of nostalgic enjoyment.

Baishuiyang Town now governs two towns and one township, that is, the original Baishuiyang Town, Shuanggang Town and Huangtan Township. Just like the reform of rural towns in China, Baishuiyang Town has merged and merged in recent years, and the administrative villages under its jurisdiction have also changed from the past. The 145 withdrawals and mergers became 122.Shuanggang and Huangtan were no longer called towns and townships, but were changed to offices under Baishuiyang Township, which was the former commune. Those of us who were members of the "People's Commune" naturally knew the situation of the People's Commune thirty or forty years ago. However, when I left Baishuiyang and went to Shuanggang and Huangtan deep in the mountains to witness the "Commune" again, Still can't believe how big China is and how much difference there is between rural and rural China.

The town of Shuanggang is passable, with a few streets and residents.But I can't recognize the location of Huang Tan's commune. The location of the "Commune" turned out to be only a dilapidated small courtyard halfway up the mountain.The owner told me that the current Baishui Yanghuangtan Office and the former Huangtan Commune are located in this small courtyard.Compared with the "communes" I saw when I was a child and the small towns in Jiangsu and Zhejiang that I visited in recent years, Huang Tan is really at the level of "Northwest"!From this, I imagined in my heart: what happened to Shuanggang and Huang Tan in the 1960s and 1970s was completely inevitable.

The administrative jurisdictions of Baishuiyang, Shuanggang and Huangtan have evolved again and again in the decades after the founding of New China.With its long history and large population, Baishuiyang Town has always been the leader in this area with the advantage of being a "central town". The "second" Shuanggang used to be the seat of the district government below the county in the previous administrative division of the town, while the "little brother" Huang Tan was always under the leadership and jurisdiction of Baishuiyang and Shuanggang.Now, from the center of Taizhou City to Baishuiyang, the car journey is only three or four hours, and from Linhai to Baishuiyang is only two hours, but in the first ten or twenty years when the traffic was not developed, let alone the leaders of Taizhou City Even if the leaders of Linhai County can go to Shuanggang or Huangtan, it is really not easy.No wonder when I told Zhu Guangjian, executive deputy director of the Propaganda Department of the Taizhou Municipal Party Committee who had been a leader in Linhai for more than ten years, the historical fact that Huang Tan and Shuanggang people had distributed land to households on a large scale in the 1960s and 1970s, he was very surprised and said: "Why didn't I know that Huang Tan and Shuanggang have such a great thing?"

"Of course they don't know! Because before the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee, the farmland in our village was contracted on a household-to-household basis. Starting from the cadres of the commune, the district committee, and the district government, everyone did it without telling the truth. Don’t let the higher-ups know about it, otherwise it will be troublesome!” Wang Zhijiang, the old district chief, explained. "Isn't it through the wind?" I asked. "It can't be said that the above didn't find it. I experienced it twice: one was at the end of 1976, and the other was in 1979 before the central government issued the rural contract policy." When Wang Zhijiang talked about the big contract of the year, he suddenly became emotional , said: “Let’s talk about 1979 first, because the land in our two townships, Shuanggang and Huangtan, was basically divided, so the cadres of the nearby townships reported to the county. One day, the county leaders sent me and the district party secretary Lu Comrade Kai called to the county to inquire. When we admitted that this was the case, the county leader ordered Secretary Lu Kai to conduct inspections at the three-level cadre meeting in the county. It's very serious. Anyone who wants to divide the land into households is a "restoration of capitalism" and will be imprisoned and killed. Our Secretary Lu is really a tough guy. He told the county leaders confidently, saying that it is okay for me to check, but let me Mobilize farmers to take back the allocated fields, I won’t do it! I can’t do it either! When the county leader heard this, his mouth twisted in anger, and he said: You are the secretary of the district party committee. What are you, the secretary of the district party committee, doing? Secretary Lu said: You can take off the black hat of my secretary at any time, but none of you can stop farmers from dividing their fields! Secretary Lu’s attitude made this matter worse, and the surrounding communes were afraid The wind from our subfields to households blows to them, so a huge sign was specially erected at a place called Huaguanyan leading to the outside of our Shuanggang and Huangtaner Townships, with ten big characters written on it strikingly. : Block Huaguanyan to prevent Shuanggang from rotten. It means that our Shuanggang has been rotten by capitalism. Now Huaguanyan Village next to Shuanggang is the last line of defense for other villages. The wind blows to them." It was only 30 years ago, and now we hear the scene that happened that year, and we will laugh out loud.

"What happened next?" I asked. "At that time, the farmers' desire to live a good life was already like a dry water seedling, which could not be stopped by a sign or an order. There was not much time. Our Shuanggang, Hetou, Yanxi, and Zhangjiadu around Huangtan In mountainous villages and other villages, many farmers secretly imitated us and divided the land. But the two communes of Shuanggang and Huangtan were the most widely distributed..." Old man Wang Zhijiang talked about that period of the past, quite proud of it. "Compared with Xiaogang Village in Anhui, how much earlier is your division of land to households? How is the method different?" This is what I am concerned about.

"The farmland here is distributed to households. Some of the earliest production teams were distributed before the 1970s. I dare say it was a few years earlier than Xiaogang Village, or even more than ten years! Our land contract and farmland are everyone's. A kind of tacit understanding, it was divided according to the population at the beginning, unlike Xiaogang Village, they are a form of resistance to the collective land system formed by the union of several peasant households." Wang Zhijiang further introduced: "For example, there is a village in Huangtan Commune. Before 1977, Zaoshu Village had all the land subdivided. Later, in the 1980s, when the central government issued the rural land-to-household responsibility contract system policy, Zaoshu Village did not re-divide the land, because several years They had finished allocating the land a few years ago...it was not until the new round of land contracting policies issued by the central government two years ago that they readjusted the land contracting division of the village because of the relatively large changes in the household registration personnel in the village." Wang Zhijiang said After finishing this sentence, he added: "I have been working as a cadre in Shuanggang and Baishuiyang for decades, and I have been working in the countryside for decades. I remember clearly everything that happened here. "

"Then can you tell me when you first started to know and support the farmers' division of land and labor?" "Yes." Wang Zhijiang told me without hesitation, "The first time I knew about the division of land and contract work was in 1976. At that time, I was the deputy head of Shuanggang District." "How did you find out that the farmers here have actually divided up the land?" Wang Zhijiang said proudly: "Let me first introduce some basic conditions of our agriculture here." After all, the old man was born as a rural cadre, so he knew what he should let me know first. "The situation in our Shuanggang District is better than Baishuiyang Town. In addition, Shuanggang and Huangtan are the poorest places near the sea, especially Huangtan, which is basically a mountainous area, and it is a remote place far from the emperor. After returning to the collective, the farmers still couldn’t get enough to eat the returned grain, so as early as the early 1960s, the production team distributed the land to each household according to the head. But at that time, after all, the country’s rural areas were not allowed to divide the land The so-called socialism goes to households, so when the higher-ups heard that someone was dividing the land, they asked us to cut the tail of capitalism. In the summer of 1976, when I was the deputy district chief, the higher-ups asked us to organize a working group to go to the countryside. The peasants who divided the land were violent. At that time, the spirit given to our working group by the superiors was: as long as the Communist Party exists, no one will be allowed to do it alone.

What this means is: Whether we can stop and stop the practice of going it alone is a huge issue related to whether we can keep the Communist regime.To be honest, when I was leading the working group, I felt like I was in a life-and-death struggle against going it alone.As you can imagine, we think that we represent the Communist Party and the Communist Party’s political power, and their going it alone and dividing up the land is capitalism, an anti-socialist counter-revolutionary that is in opposition to the Communist Party!But after a while, we found that the farmers divided the fields and worked alone, so much that we couldn't start.In order to give some color to those who divide the land and work alone, the working group also used dictatorship methods to arrest a few people, like the landlords and capitalist roaders, and paraded them in the streets and villages.But these measures still do not work.On the one hand, there are too many people who work alone, and it is impossible for us to arrest all those who work alone and divide the land; on the other hand, if you go to a certain production team today to combine their land, your work group will not leave tomorrow. The village, they divided the land again.I didn't believe it after someone reported it, saying how could the land be divided so quickly!After investigation, someone told me that the district chief is not easy. We are familiar with each piece of land. Your working group collected the allocated land during the day, and we held a meeting at night to divide the land again in a few words.After I heard this, I thought it was not true. The farmers have lived here for generations, and they know every piece of land well.So I mobilized the staff of the working group, saying that in order to prevent farmers from secretly dividing the fields and working alone, all the soybeans collected from the fields during the day were dumped on the drying yard of the production team, so that it would be difficult to tell whose soybeans belonged to them. You can't do it alone.I thought that this would make the farmers have nothing to do, but they smiled and led me to the drying yard, and then gently paved the soybeans all over the ground with their feet.When I saw it, I suddenly realized: it turns out that the farmers put a few straws or small stones under the soybeans to divide the soybeans of the Zhang family and the Li family clearly..." "Haha, the farmers got away with such a simple and wise way!" I couldn't help laughing after hearing this. The old man also laughed and said: "No way, they have too many tricks. No matter what method our working group thinks of to cut the 'tail', it still has no effect at all. In this case, our working group began to reflect: One is to think about why the farmers are so strongly insisting on splitting the fields to households to work alone? The second is to conclude from the survey that where the farming is carried out alone and the fields are divided into households, the life of the farmers is relatively better, basically No one went out to beg for food. On the contrary, many people go out to beg for food every year in those villages that rely on the grain sold back by the state and do not divide the land. Based on this situation, I immediately reported to the district committee and secretary Lu Kai, and the results of several other A working group understands the same situation as ours. Farmers are willing to divide the fields and work alone. The cadres of the grassroots production brigade and production team also support the work of dividing the fields. And these grassroots cadres clearly told our working group: If they must be allowed to implement If the peasants are not allowed to do their own work and divide the land, they will all resign automatically. This attitude accounts for more than 90% of the cadres below the township level. If the tail of communism, the mobilization of farmers to hand over the land that has been allocated, and stop doing it alone, then all grassroots organizations below the village level will basically be paralyzed. In those days, if this happened under the leadership of the Communist Party, no one could afford it. Therefore, the attitude of the district committee, especially Secretary Lu Kai, who originally supported farmers to divide their fields, our working group that cut the tail of capitalism later completely sided with farmers. For example, the six working groups I led, Among the dozens of cadres, none of them said that there is any harm in farmers working alone and dividing their land. But after all, as some of us responsible for leadership, we still have to be responsible to our superiors, so in the end I called the captains of the six working groups together, and we discussed a countermeasure against the superiors.Because under the political situation at that time, what the higher authorities were most concerned about was "under the good situation of the motherland", if there were crowds of begging and homeless people in any place, it would be the biggest political problem.Therefore, the captains of several of our working groups made an agreement: in the production brigades we are in charge of, we will turn a blind eye to the phenomenon of farmers working alone and dividing their fields, and basically no longer care about them.The task of the working group is to guarantee to the higher authorities: if there are people who go out to beg for food in the place where we are stationed, we will take political responsibility.At that time, we also vowed to guarantee to our superiors that the rural areas we were stationed in would require less or no resale grain from the state.The county later heard that the "tail-cutting" working group sent by our Shuanggang District was able to guarantee the above two points, and he was naturally very happy. After that, he stopped forcing us to ask whether the phenomenon of dividing the land and working alone had been resolved. At best, ask how much land has been collected now, as for how much land has been distributed, it seems that it is not included in the statistics.This situation continued until 1979 and 1980...So when I heard that Xiaogang Village in Anhui divided the fields into households and some people followed them, the cadres and farmers here just laughed, because by that time, the entire Yellow River The land in Tan Township has basically been divided up, and the land in Shuanggang Township and Baishuiyang has almost been divided. " When Wang Zhijiang said this, he suddenly remembered something important, looked up at the conference room in Baishuiyang Town where we were sitting, and said: "Probably in 1979, there was an economist named Xue Muqiao who wrote in "People's The Daily News published an article saying that the socialist economy is a commodity economy, which sparked a nationwide discussion. At that time, cadres from all townships in our district were sitting in this conference room to discuss, and there was only one topic: dividing the land into land Whether the household is capitalism or socialism. This discussion involves a major issue for farmers, so our cadres have a meeting in the conference room, and many people from various townships have also come. They are outside listening to our attitude The discussion lasted for a whole day. When the cadres in our conference room said that there is nothing wrong with dividing land into households, they immediately went home happily. When our meeting ended, the townships, brigades, and production teams The undivided land was redistributed almost overnight!" "Is it so fast?" I couldn't believe it. "That's right. It was divided so quickly." Wang Zhijiang confirmed to me with wide-eyed eyes, "Whether the land was divided or not was a big issue for the peasants at that time whether they could survive or not. They cared too much! So listen to our cadres. When they said there was nothing wrong, they immediately spread the news. Think about it, although our place is a mountainous area, it can be spread to hundreds and thousands of times... In the time of a meal, the news that the district committee cadres agree to the distribution of land to households is still Hasn’t it spread to every corner?” I see! "Old Wang, as far as you know, at that time, the division of land was done alone. Among our two communes, Shuanggang and Huangtan, which village was the earliest and most typical?" "Huang Tan's Zaoshu Village." The old man told me without thinking. Zaoshu Village has been etched in my mind ever since.There is no time for the first interview in Taizhou. On the morning of May 22, 2006, after I arrived in Taizhou for my second interview, I immediately asked comrades from the Propaganda Department of the Municipal Party Committee to arrange an interview in Zaoshu Village.At around 3:40 in the afternoon, we arrived at Zaoshu Village. This is just a "Xanadu" with beautiful mountains and clear waters: a small village surrounded by mountains, located in the middle of the mountain, backed by the peak of the mountain, and there is a huge rock that soars to the sky, which is very majestic and majestic.In front of Zaoxie Village, there is a small basin where green rice is planted, and the mountains are covered with green forests.When we went that day, it was after the rain, so the whole village and basin were covered with wet clouds... The air looks very fresh.There is a small stream by the village, with gurgling water, no matter looking up or looking down at the grass, it is refreshing everywhere. The villagers told me that Zaoshu Village got its name because there was a big saponin tree with two people hugging each other on the mountain behind the village. The pods of this tree were like soap and could be used to wash clothes, so it was named "Zaoshu Village". .According to the old man, this village has a history of more than 100 years. In the past, few families lived here. After the Anti-Japanese War, many people who were afraid of war moved down the mountain, so gradually the village grew.The current village party secretary Li Fangman received me. When I sat down at his house, more than a dozen villagers immediately sat around with us.The reason is that in the morning, some cadres in the town told them that I would come to learn about what they did in the village to divide the fields alone. In addition, the old district head Wang Zhijiang came with him, so when we appeared, the villagers who were idle at home came to the village party secretary's house one after another. . "I haven't been here for almost thirty years. It's basically the same..." Senior Wang Zhijiang looked at the small mountain village and said with emotion. "When I was an accountant, there were 296 people and 101 households in the village at the most. Now it is much smaller. There are 70 people who live here often, and the rest have gone out to work. 65 households went to Linhai and Taiwai to buy. Some even went to Hangzhou and Shanghai to buy houses. They will never come back..." Li Fangman introduced to me. I can't believe that in such a small and remote mountain village, there are also many people who yearn for urban life, and even join the ranks of the rich. "Don't look at our small village, there are people who are multi-millionaires now!" Li Fangman pointed to a new building in the center of the village, saying that the owner of the house was a "multi-millionaire". "What is it for?" I was quite surprised. "He was engaged in construction in Hangzhou and Taizhou. He was my predecessor and was a village director." Li Fangman said. The farmers in Taizhou are amazing. It is unbelievable that even such a poor mountain village deep in the mountains will have a tycoon that we admire. "Our Zaoshu Village is all surnamed Li. The whole village has 100 mu of grain fields, including 30 mu of dry land, 70 mu of rice fields, and 460 mu of mountainous land. It is a very small mountain village. When the people's commune, we used to be an administrative production brigade , According to the natural village, it was divided into three production teams. Because they are all mountainous areas, the grain grown is not enough for the whole village to eat. In those years when the grain was sold back, the whole village got about 10,000 catties of grain. By the time of the Cultural Revolution 'Afterwards, the resale of grain was intermittent, and the life of the people in the village was very difficult. But life has to pass, what should we do? Just going out to beg for food is not a problem, especially during the 'Cultural Revolution'. When members go out to beg for food, they need the production team to issue a certificate Yes, at that time no one dared to issue a certificate to the members. Once you issued a certificate, it was equivalent to saying that you allowed bad elements to go out and discredit socialism. The responsible cadres could not afford it. So going out to beg for food was not allowed, and the state’s return of food was not allowed. Come on, the harvest from collective farming in the people’s commune is not enough for everyone to eat, and in the end there is only one way to go—distribute the land to the commune members to grow by themselves..." "So, the distribution of fields to households is actually forced out?" "That's right! The peasants in Xiaogang Village, Anhui Province were also forced out. There were a lot of people who starved to death in their place. Their land was divided into households. In fact, the peasant brothers were fighting with the god of death. We are fighting with the god of hunger. Duel. In contrast, our place is high above the sky and the emperor is far away. In the big valley, the cadres from above usually would not come to us. Staying for a few hours, we just listen to what they say, and what to do is our own business. Besides, our district committee officials and commune officials were all very good people. They have feelings for our farmers. They are not people who talk nonsense with their eyes open. Looking at the lives of our peasants, they will not do some unconscionable things. The head of Wang District is a good example. You can ask him if he is this The situation? Tell me." Li Fangman pointed to Wang Zhijiang who was sitting beside him. "Yes, our best way is to turn a blind eye and close a blind eye, and no one will be offended." Wang Zhijiang nodded, smoking the cigarettes handed over by the villagers. The villagers suddenly burst into laughter. "As long as their cadres and working groups turn a blind eye, we will have a good time!" A villager stood up, offered cigarettes and tea to Wang Zhijiang, and said that it was thanks to the kindness of the old district chief. At this time, Wang Zhijiang felt very proud, and said repeatedly: "I have always been bad at Feng Shui in my life, but I supported your division of land to households back then." "Only relying on this one, you have immeasurable merit!" The folks said to him. The old man Wang Zhijiang nodded repeatedly after hearing this, with a smug smile on his face. "Then—can you tell me exactly when you officially started to divide the fields into households?" This is a key question, and I hope the folks in Zaoshu Village can answer it accurately. "It's not 1965, it's 1967!" someone said right away. "It should be 1967." Someone said. "Whether it was 1965 or 1967?" I want to find out, because this is very important. If this time is established, it means that Zaoshu Village's land distribution to households is actually ten years earlier than Xiaogang Village in Anhui! "That's for sure. We can guarantee that it will be much earlier than their land distribution!" "Much earlier... Later, the newspaper said that we should learn from Anhui people to divide the land. We have divided the land for many years!" Folks, you talk to each other, but there is one thing in common, that is, the total time for the distribution of land to households here is much earlier than that in Xiaogang Village.So how many years earlier?The current village party secretary Li Fangman’s words may be closer to the truth. He said: “I worked as an accountant for the production team at the end of 1966 and the beginning of 1967. Before that, the canteen in our village during the three-year natural disaster had been closed for several years. Remember In 1964 and 1965, the food in the village was still not enough. When I was an accountant, the production team decided to allocate the 30 mu of dry land and the fragmented land at the foot of the mountain to each household. But this strategy was not fundamental. It worked. After the first and second years, the members of the commune generally reported that the food was still not enough. What should we do? At this time, we found a situation: there are more than 70 mu of good land in the village, but no matter how to plant it, we can’t get it. On the contrary, the 30 mu of dry land that has been divided and the fragmented land at the foot of the mountain are quite high. To sum up, there is only one reason: the good land in the big field is collectively planted, and the members of the commune are not like The dry land and corner land assigned to each household were carefully cultivated, so the total grain output of the production team still could not increase, and the rations of the members were still not enough. In view of this situation, the production team finally decided to make the remaining 70 mu Tian Ye was distributed to each household according to the head of the person..." I see. "Don't you know anything about this?" I asked. "Yes. The Commune knows." "Knowing that they still agree to share?" "How could you agree?" Li Fangman said, "That was the craziest time of the 'Cultural Revolution' and the most serious attack on capitalism! How dare we openly divide the land against the wind!" "Then what trick did you adopt?" "Ask us veteran cadres." Li Fangman pointed to an old man sitting next to me, and said, "He is the deputy captain of the brigade and the captain of the third brigade. He knows." Someone told me right away, the old man called Li Wenjun.I asked the old man Li Wenjun to sit beside me and asked him to talk about how the big fields were divided back then.The old man said: "The commune won't let us divide the fields. If we divide the big fields, we will be counter-revolutionaries! We are divided in the name of vegetable growing land and pig mouth land..." "What is Zhukoudi?" I didn't understand, so I asked. "It's the ration land for pigs. When agriculture learned from Dazhai, we raised pigs in the countryside to support socialist construction and the 'Cultural Revolution'. This was called by the top, and the vegetable seed land was also called by the top, so we borrowed from the top The land was divided in the name of a variety of vegetable seeds and a place to grow pigs..." Li Wenjun grinned at me with a mouth that had lost several teeth. Since ancient times, Chinese farmers have always been very smart. When the miserable life forced them to go nowhere, many miracles in the world were created by them.The advancement of the history of human civilization is especially dependent on their creativity and enthusiasm to change their destiny.Now that China's modernization has developed into a highly civilized industrialization and information age, many people seem to be forgetting the achievements of farmers, which is actually very naive. China's rapidly developing modern and information-based industrial society today is actually driven by the foundation laid by the reform spirit of farmers in Zaoshu Village and Xiaogang Village in Anhui Province. "At that time, we also used the policy to cover up our practice of dividing land to households." Li Fangman said, "The people's commune said that the team is based on three levels of ownership. So we used this policy to divide the original three production teams. , then divided into small production teams, and divided into nine into nine small production teams. This division, the whole brigade is equivalent to distributing all the land to each household through a legal policy..." "I don't quite understand what that means." I was a little confused by the clever farmers. "Haha..." Then the whole room laughed.They told me in a hurry: Our Zaoshu Village was originally surnamed Li, basically the head of the same clan, and then divided into nine small production teams, so it became "father and son team", "husband and wife team" and "husband and wife team". "Brother team" and "relative team" are mainly "dividing land to households" and "contracting production to households". How clever!The reasonable and legal system of assigning land to households and individuals was consistent with the three-level ownership system of communes and brigades at that time... "Later the commune found out, and sent people to ask us to merge. From the perspective of the above, the three-level ownership system is a big deal, and we can't just divide into small teams, so we had to formally re-merge into the original three production teams. This happened around 1973 and 1974." Li Fangman recalled. "After the people from the commune left, several of our cadres sat together and discussed again. This time we adopted a new method: divide the land according to the cattle!" Li Wenjun introduced. "How about dividing the land according to the cattle?" I didn't understand again. Li Fangman hurriedly took over the quarrel and explained: "We are in a mountainous area, and basically every household raises a head of cattle. At that time, the superiors would not agree to divide the land according to the person and the household. Once they heard that the land should be divided according to the head and household, that would be it." It’s impossible to engage in capitalism! So we came up with a way. Didn’t you not allow them to be divided into small teams? Then I will divide the fields according to the cattle. Cattle were the main production tools when agriculture learned from Dazhai. The policy encourages vigorous breeding Cows, to divide the land according to the cattle, the above cannot disagree, because there is no provision in the central document that cannot divide the land according to the cattle, only to encourage the spirit of vigorously raising cattle. We borrowed this spirit to come up with a "according to" Niu Fen Tian'..." High, really high!I couldn't help stretching out my thumbs to show off the farmers in Zaoshu Village.They laughed and said, "This is an impossible method." After hearing this, I said that this was a "really brilliant method"—because it did not contradict the policies at the time, and at the same time, it combined the reality of Zaoshu Village. . "At that time, the political situation was very tight. Not to mention the distribution of fields to households, it was considered 'capitalism' to find out who planted a few loofahs. The farmers worked hard for only 0.24 yuan a day, and there was no way to live. Our labor is not allowed to go out. Whoever goes out to work is a dishonest person, a hooligan, a blind drifter, a bad element, and a counter-revolutionary. The policy is to tie all labor to the land. If there are fewer people in the fields, or more land is better , may be passable. But our Zaoshu Village has a lot of people and little land, and the fields are all very poor mountainous land. If two or three hundred people are tied up in such a mountain nest, if they don’t think about it, they will definitely starve to death. People! The distribution of land to households was forced out." Li Fangman said. "No, if it weren't for the fear of starving to death, who would dare to risk their heads to distribute land to households!" Li Wenjun pointed to the people in the room and asked one by one: "You tell the writers, is what I am telling the truth? " "Yes, that's the truth." All the villagers spoke in unison, as if they were going to swear to me. I have no reason not to believe that these honest and honest farmers have never seen any journalists or writers in Zaoshu Village for more than a hundred years, except for the cadres who had to come up many times to survive. I can totally believe that they have never told a second time, except that they concealed the lies from the farm to the household. "If you count from 1967, or 1973 and 1974 when the land was divided according to the number of cattle, to 1980 when the central government decided to divide the land, there will be six, seven or ten years in between. China's political situation is relatively complicated' During the period of the Cultural Revolution and the "two whatevers" just after the Cultural Revolution, did you get implicated in your land-to-household contracting?" I asked further. "Yes. The struggle will be more difficult later on!" Li Fangman pointed to Li Wenjun: "The old captain knows best!" Li Wenjun nodded, smoking a stuffy cigarette.I suddenly found that the old man's eyes were full of tears... "Old Captain, can you tell me?" "He has suffered a great crime." Someone said from the side. The room suddenly fell silent.I guessed that there must be something very sad... Sure enough, after taking a few puffs of cigarettes, Li Wenjun said in a low voice: It should have happened in May and June of 1976. I remember it very clearly. Cabbages are planted on the large slopes, and each person in the village has 15 plants, and everyone has a share.The vegetable field was growing well, and it was at the entrance of the village. It happened to be discovered by the newly appointed secretary of the commune surnamed Jin who went to the countryside to inspect the work.In fact, the other 100-odd mu of land in the village had already been divided, but he didn't realize it.This secretary surnamed Jin was originally assigned by the district committee to our work team of Huangtan Commune, but later he stayed in Huangtan.This person is very "leftist". When he found out that our half-acre land had been divided, he dragged me to the commune cadre meeting to criticize me.It was an on-site meeting held on the top of the highest mountain in Huangtan Township, where there was a tea farm called Anjishan Tea Farm.The criticism meeting was held there.They hung a piece of cardboard on my chest, which said "Fentian Touzi".I was also asked to beat a small gong in my hand, and knocked as I walked, from the commune at the bottom of the mountain to the tea farm on the top of Anji Mountain. Li Wenjun spoke for more than ten minutes, and what he said was not complicated and not too sad, but after he finished speaking, everyone in the room stopped talking, and there was a long silence.I think the villagers must still be immersed in that terrible incident back then. "Think about it, writer: it's just because half an acre of land at the entrance of our village was discovered, and there was such a big movement of criticism. If the higher-ups really knew that we had divided up all the fields in the village, what would happen? Disaster!" It was Li Fangman who broke the silence. His question made Li Wenjun speak again: "I dare say that all the cadres of the brigade will have to step down, and several major cadres will have to go to jail." "What the old captain said is really possible." I nodded. "No, they criticized and fought a few times for only half an mu of land, and they also suspended my job. If they knew that the whole village's land had been divided, it would be fine! The nature is different!" Li Wenjun told me, because of this half mu of land, he was fined 15 yuan in addition to being criticized and dismissed. Li Yihong, another captain who was in charge of the specific division of land, was also fined 15 yuan. His family’s situation was better, and he paid cash: My family was poor and had no money, so I had to take out a wooden box at home. It was my wife's dowry back then..." the old captain added in a low voice. His words once again silenced the room, and I almost cried after hearing it.I thought to myself: the production team leader back then was also poor, or even poorer than the average commune members, but just to keep his fellow villagers alive, he distributed a piece of half-acre sloping land at the head of the village to the commune members. It is the fate of being dismissed and paying a fine of 15 yuan in the end!The poor Li Wenjun was pitiful and had no money, so he had to hand in his wife's dowry to pay for it... This is a scene that once happened in Chinese society, not far from today's day. However, because of suffering, because they wanted to survive, and because they wanted to live a better life, the cadres and people in Zaoshu Village were not intimidated by repeated criticisms and punishments. During the most severe and intense period of the "Cultural Revolution", various very clever methods were used to distribute the land to each household for planting, so that the people in this small mountain village can continue to pass on their families and thrive to this day. Isn't this a sound that seems silent but louder than Wanjun Thunder? Isn't it a great revolution?Should the history of our party and the history of the socialist country miss Zaoshu Village, Huangtan Township, and Shuanggang Township where they divided the land into households and engaged in contracting? Chinese people have many lands, especially the vast rural areas.Like Zaoshu Village in Taizhou, I think there may be quite a few more cases of farmer-to-household distribution. Like Zaoshu Village, they may be far earlier and more thorough than Xiaogang Village in Anhui.I later learned that in Taizhou alone, there are still many land division events like Zaoshu Village, and their revolutionary spirit is equally valuable and worth remembering. On the first day of the interview in Taizhou, the Municipal Party Committee arranged for me to meet Xing Chuanxin, a veteran cadre known as "Taizhou Rural Expert".The old director of the Ministry of Agriculture and Industry who went to Taizhou to work in the countryside in the early 1950s was assigned to Taizhou by the province as the captain of the land reform shortly after the founding of New China. "Taizhou's farmers are very remarkable. They can be said to be the most revolutionary group of farmers. Their sensitivity and affection for the land represent the mentality of most farmers in China." 78-year-old Xing Chuanxin talked about Taizhou's "three rural areas" "History is endless, and he was basically the only one talking all morning: Land reform is a great joy for farmers. The farmers in Taizhou were very happy. When the fields were divided, everyone shouted and sang. He said that our land finally came home.The land reform at that time was linked to the work of resisting U.S. aggression and aiding Korea, and the time was short.Our first agricultural cooperative in Taizhou is in Liufang Village, Yangdu, Linhai.Farmers are in favor of primary cooperatives because it is a system based on the principle of distribution according to work.Although the land reform solved the problem of land ownership, the poor and lower-middle peasants with poor family conditions did not get any farm tools and buffaloes for arable land, so farmers especially looked forward to the establishment of cooperatives to solve farm tools and other means of production.Yangdu was established in 1951, and they had a bumper harvest in the second year, and the farmers were very happy.The reason for the bumper harvest is that besides the ownership of the land, two measures were taken in production: one is to reform the farming method, and the other is to plant double-cropping rice, which increases by one or two hundred catties per mu.The farmers in the six villages of Yangdu who set up cooperatives got benefits, and other villages followed suit. Yangdu Township set up ten cooperatives at once, becoming the first advanced unit in the agricultural front in Zhejiang Province at that time.Taizhou became famous at that time.However, problems arose in 1953 and 1954, because the middle peasants with relatively good family conditions had objections, saying that they joined the communes and worked together with the poor and lower-middle peasants to farm the land. I didn’t eat much meat.” So the middle peasants asked to quit the cooperative one after another.For a while, the phenomenon of quitting cooperatives in Taizhou became serious, and even alarmed Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing. Mao Zedong, who had been extremely enthusiastic about farmers running cooperatives since the land reform, was very concerned about the tendency in Taizhou. The adjustment policy for the interests of the middle peasants was "women with small feet", and immediately put forward the famous eight-character policy of "doing it with the secretary, and the whole party runs the co-op".Under Mao Zedong's call, rural areas across the country rose up, criticizing the middle peasants, and the whole party running communes surged. In 1953, the whole country implemented unified purchase and marketing. There was a wealthy middle-aged farmer in Yangdu who produced a lot of grain, but I asked him to hand over 1,000 catties of grain. He cried all day and night, saying nothing.As soon as I inquired that his family could afford the food, I told him sternly: It's no use crying!Later, the wealthy middle peasant still sold 1,000 catties of grain.Since then, it has become an obligation for farmers to sell grain to the state.At this stage, Chinese farmers have made great contributions to national industrial construction, national defense construction and urban construction.However, the time it takes for farmers to pay grain is too long, and the farmers have objections.By 1957, some farmers started to make troubles because they could not get enough to eat after paying the grain.Xianju County is located in the deep mountainous area of ​​Taizhou. The cooperatives here collapsed soon after some farmers made trouble.Later, it spread to Linhai. Some farmers even went to the county and township government in Linhai and smashed all the government signs, which shocked the whole country. This once again stabbed Mao Zedong.Mao Zedong was furious, and immediately proposed to severely crack down on the spontaneous capitalist behavior of wealthy peasants and the emerging rural saboteurs.Taizhou was the hardest hit area, and hundreds of people were arrested at once... This incident is still vividly remembered by some elderly people in Taizhou. When the old man Xing Chuanxin said this, he stopped the topic and looked dignified. "The situation changed later. After 1958, the higher authorities called for the establishment of people's communes in all places, followed by the Great Leap Forward. After three years of natural disasters, people starved to death in Huangyan and Wenling. There have also been deaths in the county... Because of the incident of arresting hundreds of people in 1957, Taizhou farmers, who have always been daring and rebellious, no longer expressed their dissatisfaction with reality. Do whatever you want, in our local words, you have learned to be good. "The old man Xing Chuanxin introduced a very interesting situation: "In the years from 1957 to 1961 and 1962, Taizhou, like all parts of the country, had many starvation deaths. Farmers in Anhui and other places died because of collective farming by the 'People's Commune', but we in Taizhou have never starved to death. Why do you ask?就是因为我们台州人其实通过各种形式，偷偷把土地或直接分给了农民、或承包给了生产小组，总之形式上是一样在干人民公社，其实是在进行土地所有制的调整和生产生活的自救，也可以说是农民们自己搞的地下革命……”邢传欣这样总结道。 “有人现在把台州看做是中国民营经济的硅谷，不是没有一点历史原因的。因为台州人在过去计划经济的年代，特别是政治高压的年代，他们一直没有放弃最大限度地发展自由经济形式，一直在默默地发挥着人的最大创造性和积极性，他们是最讲实际、最求现实的人。'文革'时期，我在下乡中经常听到农民们这样对我说，主任啊，我只要吃饱肚子，就是做死也愿意。台州人就是这个样。在种地吃不饱的年代，你只要让他们吃饱肚子，他们甘愿像黄牛一样干死也情愿。后来政策松动了，允许干私营经济，允许赚钱发家致富了，他们又对我说：邢主任啊，只要能让我们发财，就是再苦再累、再下等、再被人瞧不起，我们也不会有一句怨言。世界上，能有这样的人，你还不相信他们能创造人间奇迹？”邢传欣最后一句话发人深省，令我内心产生强烈震撼，也使我明白了为什么名不见经传的台州人能够在今天成为中国民营经济的奠基者。