Mother was a “devolved cadre”

My mother, Gong Lan, has an old photo taken in 1958: she is holding a large bundle of freshly cut grain, showing the joy of harvest. According to my mother, this photo had been exhibited in the “Exhibition on the Achievements of Decentralized Cadres” run by the Sichuan Forestry Department that year. From the photo, my mother was smiling and happy, showing the spirit of the people in that “Great Leap Forward” era. However, behind this expression, my mother had some other unforgettable memories. In her later years, I talked to her many times about those past events, and she told me about them one after another.

The photo, which was taken when my mother was a “devolved cadre”, was a souvenir of the time when several of them took the same photo in this pose.

Nowadays, when you mention “devolved cadres”, many younger people don’t know what it means anymore. Some will think it is the cadres who went to the so-called “May 7 cadre school” in accordance with the supreme instruction of the great leader of the Cultural Revolution, “the vast number of cadres are decentralized to labor ……”, but very few people remember or even Few people remember or even know that the term “decentralized cadres” was a proper noun that appeared in 1958.

Back then, there was a popular “children’s song” (written by adults, of course) that we sang in our elementary school music class.

Little turtledove, coo coo coo.
A good aunt has come to my house.
She eats with me in the same pot.
I live in the same room with me.
In the daytime to work in the field, and
When she comes back, she sweeps the floor and feeds the pigs.
My mother asked her if she was suffering.
She said no, she was happy.
Which one was she?
She is a good cadre of the decentralized.

Now there are articles on the Internet that say this is a glorification of the female cadres of the “Four Clean-ups” task force, which is totally wrong.

On February 28, 1958, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) issued the “Instruction on the Decentralization of Cadres for Labor Exercise”, arguing that most of the young cadres, who make up the majority of our 10 million strong cadre force, had not been through the revolutionary war or the masses. In order to build up a team of working-class intellectuals who have class consciousness and business skills, who can withstand risks and are in close contact with the masses, and who will fight for communism, we should organize and mobilize a large number of intellectual cadres to participate in manual labor in factories and rural areas and to do practical work at the grassroots level.

The Instruction pointed out that the total number of cadres going to the grass-roots level, mainly in the countryside to participate in labor, had exceeded one million, and that about three million cadres had been decentralized and were about to be decentralized. (Ma Qibin et al. eds., Forty Years of Chinese Communist Party Rule (1949-1989), 1989 edition of the Communist Party History Press, p. 142)

The Chongqing City Journal records two cases of “decentralization” prior to the issuance of this document.

On February 7 (1958), the CPC Chongqing Municipal Committee held a general meeting at Chongqing University to send off the first batch of professors, lecturers, assistant professors, scientific researchers and administrative cadres from various universities and scientific research institutions to the suburban agricultural society to participate in labor.

On February 14, 265 cadres of municipal organs and enterprises were sent to 13 agricultural cooperatives in Jiulongpo District, Mawang Township and Jiansheng Township to work and exercise. (The General Editorial Office of Chongqing Local Records Compilation Committee, Chongqing City Records, Volume I, Sichuan University Press, 1992 edition, pages 344-345)

Also according to the Zhizhi of Shizhong District, Chongqing.

(1958) March 25 from January, the whole district district 4 batches of decentralized cadres 396, of which 380 people were decentralized to Nantong mining area and Jiangbei District Agricultural Production Cooperative to participate in production labor, and 16 people were decentralized to the grassroots. (Local History Compilation Committee of Chongqing Yuzhong District People’s Government, Chongqing City Central District, Chongqing Publishing House, 1997 edition, p. 28)

My mother was a kindergarten teacher at the Chongqing Taxation Bureau’s nursery, but two years ago she responded to a call to “support forestry” – to run a nursery at the Third Brigade of the Central Forestry Department’s Forest Survey, whose headquarters were in Chongqing. According to the document of the central government, the young intellectual cadres who need to be decentralized are those who “have not gone through the revolutionary war” (i.e. have not been soldiers and fought in wars), “have not gone through mass struggles” (i.e. have not participated in the mass struggles led by the Chinese Communist Party), and “have not gone through the exercise of labor production”. “She had all three of these conditions, plus the fact that my father had already been labeled a “rightist” at that time, so although she had four young children at home (the oldest, I was in the second year of elementary school), she could only be a member of the cadre. Therefore, although she had four young children (the oldest was in the second grade), she had to obey the arrangement to become a “decentralized cadre”.

She was one of the first “decentralized cadres” from her unit to the rural areas of Nantong Mining District (later renamed Wansheng District) in the far suburbs of Chongqing after the “March 8” Festival in 1958. Because of the small number of people in the third brigade, several of them “decentralized cadres” were decentralized together with a group of teachers from the central district of Chongqing.

Nantong mining area is the south of Chongqing adjacent to Guizhou alpine mountains, in addition to coal mines, rural areas are very poor. After they went down, they were required to “eat, live and work with the farmers”. However, due to the crude and cramped living conditions of the local peasant families, living together was not possible at all, so they had to stay in groups, but meals were assigned to each peasant family to eat. My mother was assigned to eat at the home of a “worker” (the husband of the peasant woman was a miner).

The workers should be the better economic conditions of the local farmers, but still eat very simple, sometimes cooked rice with bran shells, chewing full of mouth “ch-ch-ch” sound, difficult to swallow, after eating to solve the stool is very difficult, sometimes is a little vegetable leaves plus a few grains of rice cooked clear thin rice, farmers can eat a few bowls, but my mother can only eat a bowl or two, of course, starving. Of course, she had to go hungry.

After they went to the countryside, to participate in a variety of labor, digging is to dig the kind of hard soil, but also to plant rice, tart grain, picking water …… my mother is most nervous about carrying the local kind of tall, sharp-bottomed rattan to walk the mountain road to transport things, she is short, the rattan almost as high as her people, tired of the road to rest when you can not put down the rattan, only leaning close to A rock wall or tree, the sharp bottom of the rattan rest to the ground, so that the body to reduce the weight, hands to support a stick to maintain balance, catching a few breaths and then walk. More alarming is sometimes a section of the road on both sides are cliffs ……

The daily heavy labor, but not enough to eat, you can imagine the hardship of life. At that time, it was not yet a period of famine, but the “devolved cadres” had already experienced the taste of starvation. The leaders warned them repeatedly in advance that they should not go out to eat in the street, for the peasants would recognize who were the deputized cadres and it would have bad influence. At that time, these “decentralized cadres” were very honest, and after the “anti-rightist” campaign, who dared not “listen to the Party”? Generally, they did not dare to go out to eat in the street. Sometimes when she was really hungry, my mother met up with one or two colleagues and quietly went to the township field after dark to buy something to eat. It was only after many of the “decentralized cadres” had fallen ill from hunger that the leaders, fearing that something might happen, gathered them together at the Nantianmen farm and opened their own meals.

In recent years, when I read the third volume of Wu Mi’s Diary (1957-1958), I saw that in 1958, the year of the “Great Leap Forward for All”, there was already a famine in the suburbs of Chongqing, at the university in Beibei and in the nearby countryside. In Wu Mi’s diary on February 13, it was recorded that the cafeteria of his school, Southwest Normal College, “Recently, all students staying at the school were given porridge for three meals, and food was saved to help feed the teachers and students working in the countryside. The staff public canteen this four days, also no rice, noodles, buns of the supply ……” March 6 recorded a teacher from the countryside back to tell the news: “farmers five days, only eat dry rice a meal, the rest are porridge, dishes to chili, pickled radish mainly …… teachers who go to the countryside to exercise …… are suffering from food can not be full, labor is not win.” The “teachers who went to the countryside to exercise”, obviously refers to the “decentralized cadres”. In his diary on June 15, he also recorded a visit from a friend who said, “The peasants in the countryside are poor, hungry, and suffering in a way that they have not been since the past, and recently they are fed with bran, bran, and corn stalks, and the children’s brothers and sisters are fighting over a dried bean. (See Wu Mi’s Diary, Book 3, Sanlian Bookstore, April 2006, first edition.) Wu Mi’s diary records the hunger in the countryside during the same period when my mother and her “decentralized cadres” experienced hunger firsthand.

During the period of my mother’s decentralization, some of the cadres who had been convicted of being “rightists” were also escorted down one after another. The difference between the “rightists” and the “decentralized cadres” is that the “rightists” came to “reform through labor” while the “decentralized cadres” came to “exercise through labor”.

One incident that left a deep impression on my mother was this.

A “rightist”, a teacher in a middle school in Chongqing, came down and found his wife (also a teacher) among the “decentralized cadres” here, and the couple had a small gathering at her place, and she cooked a meal for her husband. When the leaders found out about this, they immediately held a criticism meeting and asked the wife to make an examination because she did not “draw a clear line” with her “rightist” husband. The poor wife had to make a “sorrowful examination” with tears in her eyes.

Soon afterwards, because some cadres were tired and hungry and fell ill, and there was a shortage of medicine, so, with the approval of the leaders, including the “rightists” were allowed to take leave to go back to Chongqing city to see a doctor. Back to the city, of course, can improve the life, so some people will find a way to pretend to be sick.

The “rightist” teacher also wanted to take the opportunity to go back to the city to improve his life, but he was in good health, so how could he pretend to be sick? He used red salve on a piece of grass paper and lied about having a “hemorrhoid”. So he was allowed to go back to the city to see a doctor. Before leaving, he was afraid that his wife would worry about his illness and whispered to her that he was faking it. Unfortunately, the wife, having learned her lesson the previous time, no longer dared not “draw the line” with him and immediately reported the truth about her husband’s faking his illness to the leadership. As a result, the “rightist” husband was forbidden to return to the city and was criticized. The husband was so angry at this blow that he threatened to kill his wife. Under such circumstances, the organization took the husband and his wife through a divorce.

Many years later, my mother heard from people who knew her well that the husband’s “rightist” charges had been “corrected” and that his children had grown up and, seeing that neither of their parents had remarried, they wanted them to remarry. But their father’s heart wound was too deep and he strongly disagreed. The family was not able to reunite after all.

Who would have thought that the photo of the joyful “devolved cadres” still hides these bitter stories in his heart ……

Among the old photos saved by my mother, there is a photo of them “the first batch of decentralized cadres sending off the first batch of Xiao Yu and Shao Qing back to the team” (she wrote these explanatory words on the back of the photo), in which she is in the middle of the front row, the two ladies on the left and right are Xiao Ye, a cadre of the district committee, and Xiao Wang, an elementary school teacher, and the men in the back row are all young cadres of the Third Brigade of Forest Investigation. Young cadres.

In early 1959, after ten months of being a “glorious decentralized cadre”, my mother was finally notified of the end of her decentralization, but at that time, the Third Brigade of Forest Investigation had been decentralized from the Ministry of Forestry to the Sichuan Provincial Forestry Department, and the team organ in Chongqing was abolished, so my mother and the last few decentralized colleagues were asked to report directly to the team headquarters that had been moved to Chengdu. Another assignment of work. Mother had to hurriedly “pass by” instead of “return” to her long-lost home in Chongqing, entrusted all the family affairs to Grandma, took us four children to a photo studio for a group photo, and then continued to carry our luggage and took the Chengdu-Chongqing Railway train for the first time, honestly going to Chengdu ……

August 21, 2020
Changed to Chongqing Fengjiang Pavilion