The village of Dazhai, Xiyang County, Shanxi Province, has been filled with an aura of infinite sanctity and warm yearning since I was a child. The name Dazhai accompanied my rural production and life, and grew up with me, and its influence was too great.
My home is in Wanrong County, Jinan, the hometown of grain and cotton, where there is a mountain called Lone Mountain, also called Fang Mountain, which is said to be a boulder that fell out of the basket when Erlang Shen chased the sun with two baskets of soil. In the early morning, we watch the sun rise from the top of the mountain, and sometimes the clouds slowly cover the mountain, indicating that it will rain, as the proverb goes, “The mountain wears a hat and the members sleep. At that time, as the Great Leader called for it, the authorities spent a lot of manpower and money to build the five characters “Agricultural Science Dazhai” with stones and ash on the top of the lonely mountain. On a sunny day, standing in the fields of our village, these five characters can be seen clearly and vividly.
My hometown is a typical loess plateau, the land is spreading sandy soil, under the point of rain easy to retain moisture, as long as the application of fertilizer or fertilizer, intensive farming, good wind and good weather, can be said to plant what harvest. Here belongs to the year one ripe or two ripe, so-called ripe, such as sowing winter wheat, sowing seeds in the fall of the first year, to the next summer after harvesting, turning the land over, allowing the sun and rain for two or three months, during which time harrowing and preservation of moisture, called “resting the ground”, until the autumn wheat sowing.
If cotton was planted, the seeds were planted in the spring, and after the cotton harvest in the fall, the land was deep-tilled and “rested” for the winter, and then sown the following year. It is said that after the wheat harvest, seize the opportunity to sow some corn, mung beans, grains and other omnivorous grains, and wait for the late fall harvest, and then rush to sow winter wheat. However, this kind of double-ripening cultivation makes the land unable to rest and exhausted, and the grain yield is not high, occupying less than one-third of the land plot each year.
What Xue Dazhai has done most aggressively is to build the Dazhai field. Most of the plots in the village are more than one hundred meters long. When I was a child, I held a scythe in my hand to cut wheat and drilled between the wheat monsters, and the sun was blazing, my mouth was dry, my back was sore, and my hands were blistered with blood. The movement to learn from Dazhai has been going on for a while, and the higher-ups have proposed to build Dazhai fields in our area, as well as “small artificial plain” and “sponge fields”. What is the Dazhai field? How do you fix the Dazhai field? The cadres of the brigade cut the feet to fit the shoes, and selected some small plots, even the length of the small plots was up to tens of meters, and the neighboring plots with a drop of one or two meters were raised and lowered to form a piece of land with a larger area than before, the so-called Dazhai field.
In order to cope with the inspection, the brigade cadres concentrated one or two hundred young and strong laborers from the three production teams on the selected plots to form a large-scale field-making position. For a time, the fields were covered with red flags, people were shouting, picks and shovels were flying, and vehicles were running. It seemed like a huge project on the surface, but in fact the work was very simple: shoveling down the soil from the high plot, transporting it to the low plot, and leveling off the two plots.
Except for cutting wheat in the summer, repairing the Dazhai field was the hardest and most tiring work at that time. The plots were empty soil that had just been planted with crops, and a small flatbed cart filled with soil was used to haul it from the south to the north, one trip after another, with heavy shoulders and heavy feet. In order to improve labor efficiency, a simple kitchen was set up at each site to boil water, prepare porridge, and cook food for the members. The food was usually boiled cabbage and carrots, with a little bit of oil floating on top.
When members of the community went to the field in the morning, they brought cold steamed bread from home, and for lunch, each of them a bowl of vegetable soup and a bowl of gruel, which they ate on the ground. After the meal, they take a short break and work until dark before calling it a day.
The construction of the Dazhai field is divided into summer and winter twice a year. In summer, after the wheat was harvested, the sun was scorching and baking the earth, and the members swung shovels and danced picks, pulling carts to transport soil. Winter began after autumn, which was supposed to be the winter season in the family cat, but let the members repair the Dazhai field, the earth froze, the pickaxe hit the ground hard, only to chew out a few white dots. It was really hard to pull the truck to carry the soil, and the actual truck went out to sweat cotton clothes, and the empty truck returned cold to the body.
One winter, while I was working in the field, the political captain of the production team told me that I should be responsible for setting up the political atmosphere at the site of the Dazhai field in order to meet the higher-ups’ visit and inspection. In the open field, we pulled a few gates and erected them as banners and wall posters. The next morning, the accountant of the production team and I found newspapers and pens, ink, paper and ink stone, copied several large copies of the article on learning Dazhai from the newspaper and took them to the field for posting.
The cold wind was bitterly cold, and the freshly simmered paste, when applied to the door, was instantly frozen into a lump of ice. As soon as the paper was taken out, it was torn by the wind. A few people fiddled with their hands and feet, but they couldn’t get the poster to stick. Just as they were burning with anxiety, they heard the crowd shouting, “Look, the visiting leaders are here!
We couldn’t care less about posting the wall newspaper, and looked around, only to see a fleet of visiting and inspecting dozens of small green jeeps, and drove to the site. I don’t know if the leaders were afraid of the cold, or in a hurry, they didn’t even stop the car, made a big circle in the ground, and then drove away in a hurry. The wind and dust from the back of the convoy rolled up all the way, mixed with the taunts and curses of the members.
It was not enough to work in this way, when the revolutionary slogans shook the heavens: “A red heart, fighting the sky and the earth”, “Agriculture learns from Dazhai, and Wanrong becomes the south of the Yangtze River”, “Work until the 29th day of the 12th month in one breath, and then go to work after eating dumplings on the first day of the first month! “. The members were tied to the land throughout the year, and in some places, big criticism meetings, model theater performances, and even weddings of young men and women were moved to the construction site of the Dazhai fields. Dazhai became the overwhelming political movement in the countryside, and every revolutionary trick imaginable was performed to the fullest extent of the imagination.
The Dazhai field, which was built in this way, undoubtedly expanded the area of the plot, but it destroyed the original living soil layer of the two plots, so it was not possible to plant a crop that year without growing seedlings, and the next three years without growing a crop. What is this if not a formality? What is this if not a waste of money? In fact, the cadres and members knew it very well, and dared not say it to their faces, let alone oppose the boycott, and could only complain behind their backs.
Another way to learn from Dazhai was to engage in a political movement. Another way to follow Dazhai’s example was to organize a political campaign, which included the following actions: “to promote a large number of people to work hard,” “to be impartial,” “to fight fiercely against private ideas,” and “to prefer socialist grass to capitalist seedlings. “It is strange that everyone works so hard for the collective, but the collective economy is not rich. Strangely enough, everyone was working hard and working hard for the collective, but the collective economy couldn’t get rich.
The production team I was in had more than two hundred people, and all the collective had was seven or eight hundred acres of land, a few warehouses for raising livestock, dozens of large animals, a few large vehicles and some farm machinery. “Grain-based”, only allowed to grow grain and cotton each year, except for a very small number of grain and cotton left as rations, seeds, all to be sold to the state in accordance with the price set by the state, sold under the money deducted from the annual cost of production, the remaining profit before to members of the dividend.
Each production team is different, a high labor day can be divided seventy-eight cents, low only one or two cents, and some hard work for a year, the members also have to pay the production team money. In my production team, I used to be able to get 78 cents for each working day, but after more than 10 years of learning in Dazhai, the value of the bonus was getting worse every year. When I went to college in 1978, my share was only 8 cents. The more people worked, the less enthusiasm they had, and the more they worked, the less effort they put in, the more opportunistic they were, the more skulking they did.
People coax the ground, the ground coax the belly. The hungry members of the community will think about how they can take advantage of the collective. The accountant of a production team in a certain village made a note in his expense account: he bought a donkey and spent 300 yuan; he also made a note in his income account: he sold a donkey skin and earned 20 yuan, which put 280 yuan into his pocket. How can this collective economy grow?
Why is the work value of the production team so low? First, only allowed to grow grain and cotton, no other cash crops, grain and cotton and sold to the state at a low price, limited income; second, there is too much useless labor throughout the year. I worked as a bookkeeper in the production team for a few years, which meant that everyone swarmed to work every day, hoeing and tilling the soil, etc. I worked with everyone and took out a small notebook to write down everyone’s name on the spot.
At that time, political study and criticism meetings were often held, and during the daytime meetings, work credits were always recorded, and every night there were sometimes fifty or sixty members attending the meetings, and each person was given two minutes of work. The men smoked and dozed off, and the women did needlework, regardless of what the cadres on the podium said.
At that time, our family of three, my father and I are full of labor, each earning 10 minutes a day, my mother earned 8 minutes a day, one year hard to the end of the dividend 53 yuan money, however, the production team has no money, can not cash at the moment. Our production team of families with more laborers, a year can be divided into seventy or eighty yuan, the village each year hundreds of yuan of farm households rarely very few.
The worst thing is that those families with a large population and little labor are not only unable to get dividends from year to year, but also owe a lot of debt to the production team. Their punishment was to withhold rations, but these people had an old idea in mind: they could not starve to death anyway, so they withheld rations for a period of time and gave them a share.
Moreover, most of the defaulting households are poor peasant components, is the main force in the class struggle, more lice do not bite, they are not anxious, every year, the higher-ups allocated relief, but also the first relief them. They do not have food to eat, every day to find the brigade cadres or commune cadres, cadres were pestered can not, had to approve a note to let them share rations, you take them what way. As a result, some debtors accumulated year after year, and at some point, the production team had to forgive all the debts.
The production team grain production could not go up, the patriotic grain to pay but not a grain less. The rations were not enough for the members, and the higher-ups called for the planting of large quantities of sweet potatoes, which were highly productive. In the fall, when dividing the sweet potatoes, according to 5 pounds of sweet potatoes converted to 1 pound of grain, a family can share hundreds of thousands of pounds of sweet potatoes, piled everywhere in the house is sweet potatoes. When you cook and steam the sweet potatoes, mix the vegetables with the sweet potatoes, and boil the porridge with the sweet potatoes, you will have a hard time eating the sweet potatoes and vomit sour water.
When I was in high school, I lived in Yanjing High School in Yuncheng, 30 miles away, and gave all the annual rations from the production team to the commune’s food station in advance, no matter how much or how little the rations were, the school always provided students with 32 pounds of rations per month. It is the time to grow up, the school’s stove is not full of rice, you have to take from home steamed buns to supplement.
However, if the rations were handed over to the food station, how could there be any extra food at home? Many students brought sweet potatoes and put them in a net to be steamed and eaten in the cafeteria, but when class ended late, the steamed sweet potatoes were taken away by other students. In order to digest the sweet potatoes, people came up with various ways to dry the dried sweet potatoes and make sweet potato flour noodles and sweet potato vermicelli, and in those years they were terrified at the sight of sweet potatoes.
Our production captain was an expert in all kinds of crop work and had a good business sense. The commune once organized a visit to Dazhai, and came back and told me: “Well, it’s strange that other people don’t have high yields of grain in Dazhai, and every day so many people visit, and the land is fattened up just by shitting and pissing.
This is not an exaggeration at all. I graduated from college to a newspaper as a reporter, a time to go and Xiyang County, adjacent to Heshun County, interview, surprised at this remote county, the county party committee of the guest house built so luxurious and imposing. The secretary of the county party committee told me that this is the light of learning Dazhai, that a few years to Dazhai visitors are huge, can in Xiyang County around several counties guest house accommodation, has been very lucky.
A production team can elect a good captain, the crops are adjusted in a systematic way, the farm work is arranged in an orderly manner, the members of the community to follow to enjoy some happiness. There are also poor, elected production captain, can not take care of farm work, the production team of several hundred people, food, no food, no money, a year before the start of the work, the members of the community clamor for his downfall.
There was a production captain who had many children and no food to eat, but in the spring, he rang the bell in the morning to summon the members, assigned the farm work, and then took a cloth bag and secretly went to a faraway village to beg for food. Don’t you think this is ridiculous? At that time, the political movement frightened people, and very few cadres in large and small teams took advantage of their power to eat more and occupy more, not because they did not want to be greedy, but because they dared not be greedy.
Another practice of Xue Dazhai was to “cut off the tail of capitalism”. The members of the community are allowed to plant only a little bit of their own land for food, and to plant cash crops is to engage in capitalism, and the propaganda says that the people of Dazhai do not have their own land, nor do they raise pigs and chickens. The traditional village temple fair was also banned, and the members had no place to go to sell the turnips and vegetables grown on their own land or to buy a piglet, or to pay for their children’s school fees or to buy oil, salt, soy and vinegar.
One year, a few courageous members of our production team rode bicycles in the dark in winter to the neighboring Linjian County to buy cotton, and then took it home and quietly sold it locally to make a little difference in price to feed their families. I don’t know who reported this incident, the cadres of the village work team and the main team cadres treated this as a typical case against learning Dazhai, and imprisoned those members who peddled cotton into the main team headquarters, held classes, explained the problem, and made a deep review.
Our production captain, because he had some leadership responsibility for the incident, held a meeting to announce the revocation of his position as captain, and ordered him to write a profound review. The production captain’s education level was low and he could not write coherent sentences, so he asked me to write the inspection for him. I was the note-taker he had promoted and used, and when he was in trouble, I couldn’t ignore my conscience, let alone throw stones at him. So, I wrote several pages of the inspection for him in a dense manner.
After he handed it in, the captain of the village team saw right away that it was not written by him, and asked: Haha, your inspection is quite profound. Is this what you’re really thinking? The captain answered yes. During the busy autumn season, the production team was left without a captain and without a leader, so the team made good use of the situation to get him “back to work. The member who sold cotton was imprisoned for more than ten days, and was also “acquitted” and released.
There is no end to the absurdities of Xue Dazhai. Many years later, I had the opportunity to visit Dazhai and pedaled up to Tiger Head Mountain, where I saw the Dazhai field built by Dazhai people, the largest man-made small plain with a plot of land not as large as the one in my hometown. Thinking back on my painful experience of participating in the construction of the Dazhai fields, I couldn’t help feeling overwhelmed with emotion.
It was not the fault of the Dazhai people per se, but the fault of the whole country for distorting the sutra of learning Dazhai, for politicizing learning Dazhai, for engaging in one political movement after another, and for using one rural model to guide the agricultural production of the whole country. Our village is the same piece of land, and the population has increased a lot. For many years, the members could not solve the problem of food and clothing by reading the scriptures of Xue Dazhai. Once the reform and opening up of the joint production contract system was implemented, not only the problem of food and clothing was solved, but also the production of food and cotton were worried about selling out.
In the 90s of the last century, our village farmers in the ancestral land planted wheat and cotton, planted apple trees instead, a patch of apple groves sprawling, more than ten million yuan of annual income from the sale of apples is very common among farmers, became known as the apple village, rich village.
The contrast between today and tomorrow, is not thought-provoking?
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