From 1974 to 1975, while I was a high school student in Yanjing Middle School in Yuncheng District, Shanxi Province, I came across the movement of criticizing Lin Biao and criticizing Confucius.
It is strange to say that Lin Biao, who was appointed by the Great Leader as his successor, rebelled against the Party and the country by escaping on a Trident, and crashed and died in Mongolia, a big event that happened in 1971. This event has passed for several years, why suddenly criticize him again, and also link him with the old man Confucius more than 2,000 years ago to criticize? We rural students were perplexed by this question, but we did not dare to question it, let alone find an answer.
At the first criticism meeting organized by the whole school, Mr. Li Ronggui, who took our place in the political science class, made a wonderful criticism speech. He said that Lin Biao had inherited the mantle of Confucius, restoring himself and his rituals in a vain attempt to revive capitalism in China, and that he was in line with the ideological system of Confucius. Mr. Li said, “Lin Biao and Confucius are two broken clay people and put together again, you have me and I have you.”
The students all found Mr. Li’s criticism very good, with vivid metaphors and easy to understand, thus adding a little new understanding to the movement of criticizing Lin Biao and Confucius.
However, only in oral and written criticism of Lin Biao and Confucius seems to be not deep enough, criticism of Lin Biao and Confucius, need to be linked to the actual to be more convincing. I don’t know if it was the school leader who came up with the idea, or the idea of the leader of the worker propaganda team stationed at the school, Yanjing Middle School decided to take the criticism of Lin Biao and Kong movement deeper, and the school building where our school is located, the big landlord Li Ziyou family’s luxurious manor together, targeted, to make a wonderful article.
Interestingly, although Yan Jing Middle School is a regional direct secondary school, the school site is neither in the executive branch location Yuncheng, nor in Wanrong County town Xiedian town, not even in Wanrong County Wang Ya Commune (now renamed Gaocun Township) location of high village, but in the Wang Ya Commune jurisdiction of Yan Jing village, 70 to 80 miles from Yuncheng, nearly 30 miles from my village.
In the old society, Li Ziyou was a landlord and national capitalist in Yanjing village. The Li family was originally from Shaanxi, and then moved to Yanjing village, and several generations made a fortune by farming and doing business. Li Ziyou had studied in England at his own expense, and married a British woman who served as a senator in Shanxi Province.
After the Li family became rich, they built a courtyard with a brick roof in their hometown Yanjing Village. In this grand building complex, there were also a fine theater, a western and Chinese house, an ancestral hall, a back garden, a bathhouse, etc., which were famous in Jinan and even in the Jin-Shanxi-Yuhan triangle.
After the liberation of the land reform, Li Ziyou’s family members were expelled from the courtyard, and this magnificent building complex was taken back by the government, using the Li family compound as a school building to establish a Fenan Middle School, the predecessor of Yanjing Middle School, which has trained a large number of talents for the country. Mr. Li Ziyou took refuge in Xi’an during the war, and settled in Taiyuan after the establishment of New China, and served as a member of the Shanxi Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
This Li family compound is really magnificent, at most, it can accommodate more than 10,000 teachers and students. Each courtyard has a floor above the halls and rooms, and the stairs are connected to each other, so that people can live on both floors. In the rural areas of Jinan, when the people mentioned the Li family compound, they felt envy and admiration.
Before the liberation of the Jinan countryside, most small landowners, the family has a hundred acres of land, a set of mules and horses, a large car, cover a small courtyard, it is very impressive. The Li family compound has more than a dozen quadrangles, not to mention theatres, gardens and houses. Legend has it that the Li family had countless business stores all over the world, and he himself took a mule car from Yanjing Village, south across the Yellow River, through Xi’an and on to Lanzhou, staying at his own store at night along the way, not needing to stay in a hotel.
Therefore, in the land reform movement, the villages around Yanjing Village were classified as landlords and rich peasants, who did not dare to say anything on the surface, but were very unconvinced behind the scenes. They thought that they were classified as landlords and Li Ziyou was also a landlord, but in terms of their own homes and properties, they were not qualified to tie the shoes of Li Ziyou, who was also a landlord!
The majority of us, students from a dozen villages in Wanrong County’s Wang Ya Commune, were busy under the leadership of our teachers. Students in each class were divided into many groups, this group went to Yanjing village to find poor peasants to visit the poor and collect information; that group set up an exhibition in the school, posting slogans.
The second time, the whole school held a powerful criticism conference, teachers and students have to speak on stage, oral criticism of Lin Biao and Kong Lao Er, the history of the Li family landlords cruel exploitation of peasants, unlike the last criticism as empty to empty. After the critique, the students and teachers followed the tour route and went to the various exhibition sites in the school building.
I was most impressed by these exhibits. The southeast corner of the school was originally the bathhouse of the Li family, which had long been abandoned because of the lack of water, and the exhibition introduced it as the “water prison” where the old landlords imprisoned the poor. The exhibition introduces the small theater in the campus, which was a “pleasure stage” where the big landlords lived in luxury and decadence. In order to facilitate the storage of grain in the kiln after drying, there are several holes above and below the platform and the kiln for dumping grain, and there is also the function of ventilation. ……
The school courtyard is a mixture of Chinese and Western architecture, with exquisite brick carvings around the doorway and a row of five houses where Li Ziyou and his British wife lived. After the liberation, Li Ziyou, who was out of town, missed his hometown and wrote in a letter to a friend, “When I return in another year, I will talk about family life downstairs in the five rooms”. The critics seized on these two lines of poetry and said that Li Ziyong was discontented with the land reform, always thinking of “changing the sky”, restoring capitalism, enjoying the days of spending and drinking again, making the poor peasants suffer twice again, suffering twice again.
This criticism meeting, hanging Lin Biao Kong Lao Er, down to the big landlord and capitalist Li Ziyou, can be described as vigorous, sound and colorful, to achieve the effect expected by the planners. As my father was wrongly classified as a “historical counter-revolutionary”, I was actively seeking progress as a “educable child” and was being tested by the school’s Communist Youth League, so I actively participated in the criticism meeting and remember it particularly well.
When I was young, an old lady from my village often came to my house to see my father, and the two families had a close relationship. Once the old lady came, my parents called her “Yan Jing’s” “Yan Jing’s” every time, and people in the village who were older also called her that way. I thought at first that “Yan Jing’s” was the old lady’s name. Only when I got older did I know that the old lady was originally a maid of the family of Li Ziyou, a big landowner in Yanjing village, and she followed her family to flee the famine when she was young, her parents died of hunger, and she left her hometown without relatives, and was taken in by the Li family as a maid. She grew up to a teenager, the Li family found him an in-law, so from Yan Jing village married to Ding Fan village.
It is possible that she originally did not have a name, because married from Yanjing village, according to local customs, people called her “Yanjing’s”, she also recognized the name. Knowing this background, I was so curious that I couldn’t help but compare the old lady around me with Xi’er in the movie drama “The White Maiden” and Wu Qionghua in “The Red Army of the Maiden”.
However, the old lady was so used to my parents that whenever she sat in my house and chatted, I always heard her say, “The master’s family is very good to us, we are well fed, well dressed, and usually peaceful, just like a family. When I got married, they even gave me a lot of clothes and bedding as dowry. Nowadays, it’s nonsense to say how bad the landlords and rich peasants were in the old society.
Oh my God! What the old lady said was a complete reversal of the propaganda in the movie, theater, and newspaper conferences at that time, and a complete reversal of the positive education I had received in school, and was simply “reactionary”! If another person had said these words, on the table, not by the rebel faction to fight half dead, will also be a layer of skin. Of course, “Yan Jing’s” roots are red, “bitterness and hatred”, she said it does not matter how, others will not do anything to her. Of course, she knew that in front of my parents so to say, it is the same as the insurance, will never reveal out.
However, I was listening to it, how shocking it was to the soul? This kind-hearted landlord’s “maid” in front of me is very different from the White Maiden and Wu Qiong Hua. In the literary works, Bai Mao Niu and Wu Qiong Hua suffered from the cruel persecution of landlords and bullies, they were full of hatred and resolute to fight with the landlords and bullies; this “maid” in front of me was not forced by anyone, but net said good things about the landlord, which “maid” is the real one? Which “maid” is the real one? I do not dare to think, let alone say, can only be hidden in the stomach of blind thought.
It is said that, Yan Jing High School leaders in the preparation of the second criticism of Lin and criticism of the Confucius Congress, the school’s work propaganda team had proposed to invite the old lady of our village, the maid of the Li family back then, personally to the venue, to the revolutionary teachers and students to a personal statement, to expose and accuse the Li family landlords to exploit the peasants of the heinous crimes. At that time, the old lady was still in good health. Unexpectedly, when the old lady heard about this, she flatly refused, without any room for negotiation. This plan of the Labor Propaganda Team was not realized. The old lady said to my parents privately: “What should I say? If I tell the truth, will people believe me? If I tell a lie, I won’t do something that is against my conscience!
During the period of criticism, according to the arrangement of the school, I went with some students to visit the poor in the village of Wu Stop near Yanjing Village. It was a summer night, we rode bicycles to the village, and after entering the village, we found a production team feed room, where the old man, the feeder, was busy cutting grass for the animals. We helped him finish his work, then sat down to chat and asked him to tell us about the hardships he suffered in the old society.
The old man smoked a dry pot and said: “In the old days, life was much better than now. In the old days, who here ate coarse food? All white flour, corn and sorghum are fed to livestock. Now, all year round, so hundreds of pounds of wheat, corn sorghum is not enough to eat …… look, tossed half a day, talk, nothing to gain. The way back to school, the students are silent one by one.
However, things did not go as planned. The harsh reality of life was in front of people, the peasants could not feed their bellies after a year of hard work, they had no money to spend, there was a shortage of goods in the stores, many goods had to be bought with tickets, and the peasants’ children had to look for connections and “go through the back door” to join the army, recruit workers, and recommend them for college.
Those older members of the community and the old society, a comparison, naturally feel that the current life is not as good as the old society, how can he heartily praise the new society? At that time, the cadres of the brigade conveyed the central document about Lin Biao’s crimes in the assembly, pointing out Lin Biao’s counter-revolutionary remarks, which mentioned that Lin Biao said that the intellectual youths going to the mountains and going to the countryside were equal to “labor reform in disguise”, etc. When the masses listened to this, they did not dare to say anything on the surface, but some of them nodded their heads in private, thinking that Lin Biao’s words were quite reasonable.
Besides, the Li family, whether it is a big criticism or an exhibition, the Li family of the old society has been discredited to a mess, too numerous to write, unforgivable. However, in private, the people have a scale in their hearts. In the old days, the Li family was called “Li Shanren” by the local people, and its reputation was far-reaching.
From the official point of view, in the 17th and 18th years of the Republic of China, when Shanxi was hit by successive droughts, the Li brothers joined hands and successively provided relief to the 17 counties in the Hedong (Yuncheng area) for 1,000 silver yuan each, donated 10,000 silver yuan to the Hedong Drought Relief Association and 6,000 silver yuan to the county (the old Wanquan County). The Li family also set up a congee farm in the Xuedian Village Family Temple (the ancestors of the Li family fled from Shaanxi to Shanxi and settled in Xuedian Village first, then moved from Xuedian Village to the nearby Yanjing Village), Yanjing Village Ancestor Temple and Yuncheng Chi Shen Temple, so that many people survived. At that time, Yan Xishan, the chairman of the Shanxi provincial government, issued a plaque for the Li family as a token of appreciation for their “generosity to the people”. The governor of Wanquan County (Wanquan County and Ronghe County were later merged into Wanrong County) also awarded a plaque of “goodness and charity”.
From the folk point of view, Yan Jing village and the surrounding villages know that the Li family landlord’s stable, often left four or five animals for the villagers to plow the fields, grinding noodles, hauling coal to make service, never charging returns. As for repairing bridges, paving roads, schools and other good deeds, the Li family to pay more money. The Li family “Li good man” title, the name is true.
However, these good deeds of the Li family, when criticized by our teachers and students, were said to be the same as the “fake benevolent government” of Confucius, a corrosive agent to anesthetize the revolutionary masses.
The stars have moved on, China’s reform and opening up into the 21st century, Shanxi Province to develop tourism, has been in Jinzhong repair of the Qiao family compound, Wang family compound, Chang family manor and other famous monuments, with the TV series “Qiao family compound” hit, Shanxi’s Jin merchant compound culture out of the Niangzi Pass, known throughout the country, and reap considerable economic benefits. Yuncheng City’s leadership inspired by this, but also to the tourism development of the eyes of the Li family compound.
The Li family compound is located at the junction of Wanrong County and Linyi County, seventy to eighty miles from Yuncheng City, as far away from the city, to the students’ learning, teaching staff life, etc. brought a lot of inconvenience. In the 1990s, Yanjing Middle School located here was abolished, Yanjing Teacher’s College was moved, and the once bustling Li family compound was empty, like a lonely and desolate noblewoman, silently holding on to her graceful and dignified temperament.
Many years ago, the government and all parties to invest in the Li family compound tourist attractions, the theme of “good deeds and righteousness”, in order to distinguish themselves from other compounds in Shanxi. I have provided the story of the “maid” of our village to the comrades who prepared the publicity for the Li family compound attraction, and the old man has long since passed away. The comrade in charge of publicity visited the descendants of the old lady for this purpose, and included her story in the publicity materials of the Li family compound.
In 2008, after the restoration of the Li family compound opened to the public, I visited once with my wife and children, saw a steady stream of visitors, people marveled at the splendid architecture of the Li family compound, the Li family’s feat of good deeds from the heart. Revisiting the old place, standing in the quadrangle of student dormitories where I once lived, strolling on the platform of the school department where I once participated in the criticism session, I could not help but feel a surge of emotions, something else came to my mind.
A hundred years of vicissitudes, the years are like a song. The same is a Li family compound, one moment it is said to be the abyss of evil, and then become a hall of good; one moment it is said to be a large landlord and capitalist to squeeze the blood and sweat of the poor cohesion; one moment it is said to be a good business and good businessmen; one moment it is said to be the landlord class corruption and degradation of the paradise, and then become a combination of Chinese and Western architectural essence… …
History, as they say, is really a little girl who is at the mercy of others?
July 25, 2013 in Lingkong Bookstore
Revised in August 2017
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