Back then, a full laborer earned only 50 to 60 cents a day
In the early 1970s, in order to implement Chairman Mao’s supreme directive of “Food as an outline,” the rural areas of southern Jiangsu abandoned the more than 3,000-year-old “one rice, one wheat” system of cultivation and created a two-rice, one-wheat, double-three system of cultivation. At that Time, officials thought that by planting more rice of one maturity, they could harvest more rice of one maturity, which would naturally increase grain production. Some people’s communes also ideally put forward the “two programs folder a thousand” mu yield target, the state in the agricultural development program, set the south of the Yangtze River farmland mu yield of grain for 800 jin, while the local cadres of the goal is a ripe wheat 800 jin, the front season rice 1000 jin, the back season rice 800 jin, the total yield per mu up to 2600 jin. Such yields are difficult to achieve even today, with highly developed technology. A variety of ripe rice, it means that at the same time, to invest twice the labor and fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, etc., at that time, after accounting, the southern Jiangsu area per mu of field need to invest more than 110 labor days, at that time, the value of each work point are very low, a full labor force a day can only earn 50 or 60 cents, individual production teams and upside down phenomenon.
The master was only 60 cents a day, eight cents less than the apprentice.
The year I left school, my father served as a production team breeder, diligent and honest labor dynamics, get the attention of work captain Gong Bingchen. Once when Gong was inspecting the pigsty, my father asked him if he could let his son work in the team-run factory. Considering my Family‘s special difficulties and the fact that I also held a high school diploma from the Cultural Revolution (in fact, we only spent more than three years in school throughout our junior and senior high school years), Captain Gong nodded his head and agreed. At that time, it was an enviable profession to work in the “team-run factory”, but we had to go Home to work as farmers during the three busy seasons of the year, and our occupation was characterized as “both worker and farmer”. Normally, the value of work points in the small factory had to depend on the value of work points of the production team where we worked.
I remember in 1973, I was still in the apprenticeship stage, and I got 0.9 work points for every 8 hours. My production team in North Qitou was 0.77 yuan per work point. This was the middle to upper level at that time, and I got 0.69 yuan for 8 hours of labor, and overtime was counted separately. My master, Cao Genxing, was a technical school student graduated in 1950s, with high craftsmanship, who was devolved from Wuxi Yuzui Oil Pump Factory to go home as a farmer during natural disasters, and got the highest work points in the team-run factory, 1.3 work points per 8 hours, but the Baishuidang production team he was in could only get 0.47 yuan per work point, and the master got 0.61 yuan per day of labor, which was 8 cents less than the apprentice, based on the policy of The policy is based on “three levels of ownership, team-based”. There are several folk proverbs around Jiangnan that flirt with people: “The king is not as good as the land, the boss is not as good as the man, the man is not as good as the student’s will”. Here is verified.
The death of a young farmer in the village of Hexi, Nanqiao brigade in 1974
Three times a year, the production team is busy with farming, and the most terrible is the second busy season called “double robbery”. At that time, each busy season had a special name: the first was called four summers, the second was called double robbery, and the third was called four autumns. This number is actually the main content of the busy season: harvesting, planting, management, levy and payment of public grain. The time period is from the highest temperature of the summer to the first half of the autumn. The final deadline given by nature is that we cannot plant rice seedlings after the autumn, and we all understand that after the autumn, the temperature starts to drop, the rice ears will not be filled and the harvest will only be deflated. We had to work 17-18 hours a day in the heat of 36°C-37°C, and we had to work with mosquitoes, locusts and even poisonous snakes. I remember in 1974, the South Bridge brigade in the village of Hesi has a young farmer surnamed Zhu (he has a sister or my high school classmates), in the rice cut by a viper bite, no manpower in time to send medical care, such as venom into the vitals, the hospital has no power of return, leaving behind a young child and elderly Parents, died, his wife was pregnant with six, the second son became a posthumous child. The day of the funeral, it so happens that the captain sent me to the South Bridge production materials to buy pesticides, to the funeral site around, it was a heartbreaking scene, the deceased’s young wife and young children dressed in white mourning clothes kneeling in front of the coffin, the elderly mother’s mouth in a demented “my sky is falling”. The production brigade held a small memorial service for the deceased to appease the family, and read a quotation from Chairman Mao as a rule: “To die for the people’s interests is heavier than Mount Tai.”
The youths also made some “dirty” jokes during their work
Every morning, just after the east was white, the captain’s whistle went off. After blowing it a few times, there was not much movement, so he knocked on the door of each house and told each of us what farming tools to bring and what work to do. (At that time, we didn’t know that the story of Zhou Qiaopi “learning to crow in the middle of the night” was fictional. We wore straw hats and ragged clothes, and we couldn’t see the road under our feet, so we walked barefoot toward the fields. Sometimes, when we reached the fields, the members of the neighboring village had not yet “rested” from their night work, which we called “early morning work and encountered overnight people. We could only pull out the seedlings in the rice fields, tie them into small bundles, and then pick them up and take them to the big fields, where the mosquitoes bite us all over, and the locusts in the water bite through our skin without being aware of it. Many young intellectuals who went to the countryside for the first time encountered locusts and only cried out in panic.
In the midst of heavy labor, the intellectuals also talked about some things and made some “dirty” jokes. One time, Sanlonglong (Shen Zuxing, our peer who died of a disease at the age of 32) suddenly asked a question: “Is there such suffering as ours in the prison?” This topic sparked a debate. Some people thought that the people in prison were all class enemies who had committed the worst crimes, and their labor intensity must be higher than ours; others said no, our intensity had reached the limit, and if the criminals worked like that every day, everyone in prison would have died long ago. No one has ever been in prison, no one has ever experienced it, and no one can say who is convinced. However, there is one person who has been in prison: Shen Yunhai, a counter-revolutionary in charge of water management (Shen was imprisoned for serving as the secretary of the district committee of the Youth League before liberation, and was not rehabilitated until 1980 to remove his hat), but for the sake of love, no one was embarrassed to ask Shen Yunhai to hand in his answer sheet.
A young man named Pu wanted to go to prison and deliberately commit a crime finally got what he wanted
Soon this commune Shitang brigade happened an incident, proving that the latter opinion is correct. There was a young man surnamed Pu in Shitang Brigade, a distant relative of my neighbor Jinchang, who turned out to be a college student, joined a reactionary organization in college, but in fact, it was just classmates reading together, after the case, the leading teacher was shot, the young man surnamed Pu was released home after a few years in jail, at this time, his parents had left the world, his brother was a foot abductor, and also brought several children, who could not take care of themselves He began to miss the prison Life, and he was ready to take action, one night, he semi-publicly stole 300 meters of lighting wire for night work, and deliberately left some horses, the public security officers came to the door, it does not matter what the crime is, sabotage of production is counter-revolutionary It doesn’t matter what the charge is, it’s counter-revolutionary for sabotaging production or bad for stealing property, as long as he can go to jail. When he was handcuffed, he said to his brother with a slightly relaxed look on his face, “I never want to go home again anyway.”
Asking Chairman Mao for early instructions before going to work every day
The most onerous of the farming jobs was picking The load. Because of the tight schedule, the cut rice from the previous season had to be put on the field before it was dried. In the heat of the red sun, each load of rice had to exceed 50% of its own weight, and the longest stretch was about 1.5 kilometers. We ran back and forth with bare feet, gravel and mud under our feet, and heavy burdens on our shoulders, gritting our teeth. According to technical requirements, the burden on the shoulder halfway can not stop. Once you stop, the ripe grain will fall to the ground, resulting in waste, and the shoulders can only be eaten left and right to change shoulders. When you reach your destination, you run to the nearest home, gasping for breath, and drink a bowl of cold water from a large water tank, gulp, preferably just hanging up the well water, the colder the more comfortable, and then pick up the straw bale and go to the field. Half a day 5-6 round trips. Due to my skinny body, I am honestly weak in most farming jobs, but rice planting is my strength, and rice planting is a very technical job in rural areas. In the “double robbery” busy heavy labor, the cadres also forgot to engage in “image engineering” and show a high degree of unity, before planting the rice seedlings field finishing to achieve the field flat as a mirror, after planting the same spacing of each plant, forming a small square, uniform and neat. An old farmer from the old society said “high and low as usual, bend and curve as long as you pass” (now I think it is a bit like Comrade Xiaoping’s “black cat and white cat” theory), but the production brigade also held a criticism meeting for this. Soon, I don’t know which agricultural expert came up with a brilliant idea in the office called “pulling a line to set the dill”, which means that dozens of people stand on a line, marked with red plastic rope, and each person can only plant rice seedlings on the mark, with two people on each side of the ridge pinching a stick and blowing a whistle, all of them step backwards in unison. This way of labor is torturing the fast hand and hurting the slow hand, but no one dares to go one step beyond the thunderbolt. Every day before we start working, we have asked Chairman Mao for instructions, and the political captain educated us that we should be guided by the invincible Mao Zedong Thought, unified thinking, unified steps and unified actions ……
Peasants toil without gain, or in a state of semi-starvation
Pay such a heavy price, the purpose is to want to fight more food, but we are first in a large number of food consumption, labor intensity, long working hours, the original three meals a day into six, seven meals, such as our poor families, meat and fish rarely meet, if the hungry belly again, will not be able to survive. Growing double-season rice requires several times more seeds, pesticides and chemical fertilizers, while growing single-season rice requires only 4 to 5 pounds of seeds per acre, double-season rice has a short growing period and a low tiller rate, so each mu of seeds has to use 40 pounds. And the price of grain is low, the state purchase price, only 8 cents per catty, there was a saying at that time, “government white stickers, urban residents eat for nothing, farmers plant for nothing”, meaning that the government subsidies to agriculture did not work, urban residents sold extra food stamps to farmers at high prices, they could buy back the fixed grain, farmers worked hard without gain, or They were still in a state of semi-starvation.
It was not until the late 1970s that Comrade Zhou Wei, who later became the Minister of Agriculture and Labor of Wuxi City, through a thorough investigation, obtained a lot of informative data and information, and fiercely argued with those who tried to tie the peasants to the land forever, using very simple language: “Three sixes and one eighteen, two nines are also one eighteen”, denying the “The article was published in the People’s Daily, and we returned to the norm, and the curtain went up on the comic drama in the field of pulling a line to plant rice seedlings.
After going into town to watch a movie, the production leader asked me to give an account of my whereabouts for the afternoon
I played a little smart, the purpose is to steal half a day lazy, to enjoy the city life, after planning, in a noon after work, I told the work team leader that I do not feel well, in the afternoon to go to the cooperative medical trip, the team leader nodded and agreed. In the afternoon, I was still dressed in rags, with 50 cents in my pocket, barefoot, with a pair of plastic sandals under my armpits, diving onto the highway and taking the No. 7 bus to Waterwheel Bay. I look like this into the city, many city people look at me, think I am blind or beggar, but then I have a good psychological quality, not afraid of the city people call me “A country”, frankly and openly according to the plan to implement the luxury life. I first went to the workers and peasants cinema located in the west gate, with 15 cents to buy tickets into the scene, the feature film “heroes and sons” has seen many times, that era for us to see too few things, watch again is also enjoyable, more happy is the cinema has “cold air”, in the field intensity of labor, at this time like a fairyland. After the movie, I walked towards the city center, to Chong’an Temple Gongbei Building, with 8 cents to eat two or two noodles, Gongbei Building noodles in Wuxi is famous, on the way back, and twice into the cold drink store, a cup of sour plum Soup and a cup of frozen red bean soup, both for 5 cents, there are still a few cents left, the bus can not take, while the dark, walking home humming a ditty. Just stepped into the threshold of the house, my father asked in horror: “Where have you been, the captain has come several times, and into the room, even the bed has seen.” Then the whistle for the night work went off, and the captain first blocked the back way for me to lie; the barefoot doctor had already been to our fields, and I had not gone to the cooperative’s medical clinic at all. At this point, the production captain did not suspect me of doing anything counter-revolutionary, but he made sure I told him my whereabouts for the afternoon. I had no choice but to go to my relatives’ house. No, the double robbery was the first big thing, and no one had died at my relatives’ house, so it was not the time to visit them. I can only say, just out of school shortly, about a classmate to meet today, and repeatedly state that the next time not to make an exception. My dilemma was similar to “begging for mercy”. Finally the captain said, “Next time again, cancel your qualification to work in the team factory.”
That was the most terrible sentence I had ever heard in my life.
Southern Weekend 2009-05-13
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