Wang Yeping grew up in Shanghai, is Jiang Zemin’s sixth uncle Jiang Shangqing’s wife Wang Shi Lan’s niece, graduated from the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute, than Jiang Zemin two years younger. After the flirtatious Jiang Zemin transferred from The Japanese Central University in Nanjing to Shanghai Jiaotong University, he visited Wang’s house several times and had a little interest in Wang Yeping, but the two did not really take it seriously. In 1949, when the Communist Party was about to win the world, Jiang Zemin suddenly had an idea to pursue Wang Yeping.
Wang Shilan had some resentment towards Jiang Shijun’s family. When Jiang Shangqing died, the Communists were still called bandits, and his elder brother Jiang Shijun failed to persuade his sixth brother to leave the Communists, so he tried not to communicate with them to avoid suspicion. The 28-year-old widow with two daughters, aged one and three, had a very difficult time. In an interview with Kuhn, the second daughter, Jiang Zehui, said sincerely, “There was not much food in the house, and sometimes there was not even a little food at all.”
After the establishment of the Communist regime, the situation was reversed, Jiang Shijun became a person who could not lift his head, and his children’s life also became difficult. In order to hold on to the status of “orphans of revolutionary martyrs”, Jiang Zemin had to further close the relationship with Wang Shilan’s family. So, when Wang Zhilan went to her mother’s house in Shanghai again, she saw that Jiang Zemin was in love with her niece Wang Yeping. In December 1949, less than two months after the “Founding Ceremony” of the Communist Party, Jiang Zemin married Wang Yeping in a flash. This marriage firmly smashed the fictitious “orphan of martyrs” into Jiang’s head.
Wang found a job in a bank in Shanghai and has been taken care of by her eldest daughter Jiang Zeling for more than 20 years after her retirement. Less than a month after Jiang Zemin was inaugurated as mayor of Shanghai, Wang Zhilan died in Yangzhou at the age of 74.
Soon after Jiang returned to the factory from his internship in the Soviet Union, Wang Yeping and his two young sons also moved from Shanghai to Changchun. Compared with others, the living conditions of the family of “Hakkelihong”, who first served as director and then promoted to factory manager, were quite good, and in addition to his own money, Wang Yeping also received a desirable salary. The Jiang family was allocated a set of flats located on the fourth floor, three rooms and a hall. The house had a Soviet-style central heating system, a gas stove, a bathroom for their own use, and double-glazed windows especially suited to the cold weather in the northeast. This was a condition that most people in China could only dream of at that time.
The Great Leap Forward brought economic disaster and a terrible famine. Since the peasants were forcibly organized into “people’s communes” to carry out the Great Iron and Steel Refining and the Great Leap Forward, there was no one to plant or collect the grain in the land, and all the grain stocks of each family were collected and taken to the commune to eat the big pot of rice together, and there began to be food cuts and starvation in the countryside. Soon the famine spread from individual places to the whole country, from the countryside to the cities. Experts estimate that in the three years from 1959 to 1961, about 20 to 50 million Chinese people died of hunger. In many areas where the famine was severe, there were human tragedies such as the eclipse of sons and daughters, and in some villages such as Xinyang in Henan Province and Renshou County in Sichuan Province, whole families and villages were starved to death, leaving nine out of ten rooms empty.
The northeast, due to the superior natural conditions of less people and more land, is considered a light disaster area in the three-year man-made disaster. But even so, the workers of the automobile manufacturing plant did not have enough to eat, and the strong laborers doing heavy work had only 30 pounds of rations each month, purchased with tickets. Jiang Zemin increasingly found it difficult to survive in this northeast.
Material satisfaction does not make Wang Yeping used to life in Jiangnan happy, not a few days a year can wear a skirt, and most of the time wrapped in bulky cotton clothes and pants more beautiful Wang Yeping full of complaints about Jiang Zemin, complaining that he caused the family to migrate from Shanghai to this icy place.
Wang Daohan transferred Jiang Zemin to the Soviet Union for internship in order to promote this junior and good friend, but it made Jiang Zemin leave Shanghai to work in Changchun. He was not willing to leave the prosperity of Shanghai, but in the long run, he thought it would be a roundabout way to get promoted.
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