In later societies, because the tools of ideological propaganda were held by vested interests, privileged classes, and their spokesmen, peasant uprisings were generally not highly regarded by later generations. [Full text reading]

Putting aside the foolish people who have been brainwashed by the mass media controlled by vested interest groups, even ordinary people have some incomprehension of those peasant uprisings in ancient times.

It is difficult for people in an industrial society to understand the ideas of people in an agrarian society. It is also difficult for people in the modern society, where the class contradictions have been alleviated by rapid economic development, to imagine what the living conditions of people in the ancient society with extremely fierce class contradictions were like.

Even after Wang Shuhui led the establishment of the Reconstruction Association more than 70 years after the founding of New China, the new Chinese who fully entered the stage of industrial society, especially the new Chinese who grew up after the founding of New China, it is difficult to understand the peasant uprisings that occurred one after another in the last years of the Ming Dynasty before the founding of New China.

Many of them came from farms, were familiar with agricultural production, and were born into families of agricultural workers, who were also puzzled by the outbreak of peasant uprisings in the late Ming Dynasty. For them, agriculture as they know it is agricultural production through industrial means. They have lived in a stable, sound, safe, and prosperous new society since they were born, and the peasants they know are completely different from the peasants in the last years of the Ming Dynasty.

For those young people who have grown up in New China, it is really difficult for them to understand this kind of thing.

In fact, for Wang Shuhui himself, although he himself conducted a large number of social surveys in the late Ming Dynasty and accumulated quite a wealth of first-hand materials, and because of the rich scientific social theories from later generations, he had a rational understanding of the class contradictions in class society. However, Wang Shuhui's understanding of the peasant uprising in the late Ming Dynasty that was unorganized, unprogrammated, and unprepared was not very profound and clear.

Of course, Wang Shuhui's situation is actually directly related to the environment in which he lives. Although his theoretical understanding of class contradictions is very scientific and objective, because of the environment in which he grew up and his own practical experience, he still emphasizes construction over struggle in his practical concept of the scientific revolution.

For Wang Shuhui, the old man Mao's sentence "We are not only good at destroying an old world, we will also be good at building a new world", Wang Shuhui pays more attention to the second half of the sentence in revolutionary practice. As for the destruction of an old world, Wang Shuhui is not only not good at it, but he feels that the Ming Dynasty itself is undertaking this work.

At least when Wang Shuhui himself saw the report of Chen Li, secretary of the party group of the Revival Society in Jingmen, his first reaction was not to understand the causes and details of the Chengtian Incident, but to consider how to deal with the events after the Chengtian Incident.

Regarding the outbreak of the Chengtian Incident, Chen Li, the head of the working group of the Fuxing Society stationed in Jingmen Prefecture and the party secretary of the working group, was not a witness.

After the incident broke out, a military household who had been living in Chengtianwei and worked part-time on a farm construction site reported the incident to a military cadre of the Fuxing Society who was training farm workers in production and construction troops.

Sensitive to the nature of the mutiny, the military cadre immediately inquired in detail about the incident and reported the details of the incident to the working group.

If you look at this Chengtian incident from the eyes of modern people, it will definitely feel a little nonsensical. Generally speaking, the whole thing broke out because after Mu Nan, the eunuch of Chengtianfu, the direct leader of Chengtianwei, issued an order to the guards to prohibit military households from going to the manor to work, and the officers of the various guards under Chengtianwei carried out such an order.

Among them, in one of the hundred households under the Jingmen Thousand Households to which Song Sanzi belonged, because the hundred households were relatively rude in the execution of this order, he took a few of his own dogs to intercept the military households who were about to go to the manor to work, and a fierce conflict broke out.

In the fierce conflict, Song Sanzi and Ye Xiaoman killed the hundred households of the guard who accidentally got involved in the conflict in the chaos. The death of the hundred households aroused the uneasiness of the military households in the guard, and under the call of Ye Xiaoman, who was more authoritative in the hundred households, the military households of the hundred households rose up, destroyed the full door of the hundred households, and divided the food and money of the hundred households.

The uprising initiated by Song Sanzi (passive) and Ye Xiaoman (active) was nothing more than a small mutiny, if no one responded. In terms of Chengtianwei, as long as Mu Nan sent his hundreds of family members who could still handle it, this small mutiny would be quietly suppressed like countless large and small mutinies in the last years of the Ming Dynasty.

However, on the one hand, the military households above and below Chengtianwei have been in a serious state of dissatisfaction for a long time under the oppression of the greedy Mu Nan. On the other hand, Mu Nan was very stupid to tell the military households that he wanted to extinguish the little hope of a "good" life that they had just ignited (for the military households working at the construction site of the Fuxing Society's farm, the treatment provided by the Fuxing Society was a good life).

The Chengtian Guards, who were on the verge of survival all the time, suddenly experienced the process from hope to despair, and this huge contrast caused them to have a very strong emotional reaction. In this case, the actions of Song Sanzi and Ye Xiaoman, who took the lead in unveiling the rod, were like lighting a match on gasoline, which suddenly caused the dissatisfaction of the entire Chengtian Guard household to explode.

After learning the news of Song Sanzi and Ye Xiaoman's affairs, starting from the hundreds of households in Jingmen's Thousand Households, regardless of whether there were military households working on the farm site, all the guards under Chengtianwei broke out in an armed mutiny. Originally, there were only a very small number of rebellious military households, but by this time, the rebellious military households had become the majority.

Although Mu Nan, the eunuch of Chengtian Town, who had been staying in the Hindu Guarding Division in Chengtianfu, had not yet been directly impacted in Chengtianfu City, which was protected by hundreds of families and defended by the families of the local gentry organized by the prefect of Chengtianfu. However, when the soldiers killed all the officers of the guard post where they were located, they instinctively decided that their enemy was Mu Nan, the eunuch who was huddled in the city.

Therefore, after receiving a small amount of food and silver, they all gathered outside the city of Chengtianfu.

More than 10,000 armed forces (including the regular soldiers of the guards and the remnants of the military households of the guards over the past two hundred years) who had been initially armed (the arsenals in each guard were either empty or only rusty* and tattered) surrounded the city. For the prefect of Chengtianfu, this is a terrible rebellion.

This prefect did not know that he was the only remaining high-ranking civil official of the Ming Dynasty in Hubei, so according to the custom, he immediately sent his cronies "warriors" to Wuchang Mansion with emergency documents to ask for help from the Yamen of Huguang.

What the prefect must not have imagined was that before his cronies "warriors" could escape from the city, in Zhijiang County, less than 300 miles away from Chengtianfu, more than 1,000 heavily armed Fuxing Army soldiers from two battalions were on their way to Chengtianfu.

However, it is not known whether this armed force, which has been completely modernized with guns and artillery, went to Chengtianfu to suppress the uprising or to suppress the reactionaries