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Fifth, the Republic of China landlord is not good (northern chapter)

I have talked so much about going off topic before, mainly to expose the true face of some admirers of the Republic of China, referred to as "national fans". and the absurdity of those elegant "Republic of China styles" in the eyes of ordinary people.

Otherwise, no matter how I depict the daily life of the Republic of China, there will always be people who put forward the "new views" of these "historical masters", "prove" that what I wrote is a bunch of nonsense, and accuse me of whitewashing history for ****.

Let's get back to business, if you want to travel to the Republic of China era, where will you travel to the Republic of China era?

-- The Republic of China was an era of alternation between the old and the new, from the coast to the interior.6 There were great differences in social outlook between different regions of China.

When the ten-mile ocean field of Shanghai Beach has been lit up with gorgeous and colorful neon lights; The serf estates in Lhasa, Tibet, were still in the darkness of medieval ignorance. The British once disassembled a small car, carried it on pack horses, and transported it to Lhasa over the mountains and mountains. As a result, after assembling the car in Lhasa, it was found that there was no driver here, then there was no gasoline, and finally there was no road for a car to run......

In view of the above-mentioned vastly different differences, when we specifically describe the life of the Republic of China, we can only select some more representative areas as samples, so as to reflect the social outlook of the entire Republic of China era from the small.

It must be made clear that those modern people who have traveled to the Republic of China, except for a few people who want to carry out the red revolution, should not be willing to go to the middle and lower poor peasants or pull rickshaws if they have a choice. And if you want to live a more decent life in the Republic of China era, then it seems that you have to be a local owner and old wealth in the countryside, and in the city, you have to be a petty bourgeoisie, or simply become an official and follow the official career......

Here, let's first discuss the life of the landlords in the Republic of China era.

In the hearts of many people of the older generation, the most classic image of the landlord of the Republic of China is probably none other than the Huang Shiren in "The White-Haired Girl" - they occupy a large amount of land through guò skillfully, and use the land in their hands to brutally exploit the peasants, get nothing for nothing, embezzle the wealth of the peasants, and live a shameless life.

Unlike the modern agricultural capitalists who run large farms, the traditional Chinese landlords do not seem to care at all with the selection of improved seeds, the rental of agricultural machinery, the purchase of fertilizers and pesticides, or the construction of irrigation and water conservancy projects.

In normal times, these landlords sat at home and only enjoyed themselves, and they could also conscript tenant farmers to serve without compensation. When the autumn harvest came, the housekeeper took a group of dogs to the fields to collect rent from house to house. In the unlikely event that the good times are not good and the rent cannot be collected, the peasants are forced to sell their sons and daughters to pay off their debts, or with a little kindness, they are allowed to reduce their rents as appropriate, which is basically the same as the major shareholders in modern companies who are waiting for dividends.

In this way, the life of the landlord should be very relaxed and leisurely.

…… This one...... How so? Such a leisurely and prosperous landlord life may still be possible in the peaceful years of the Qing Dynasty. But in the era of the Republic of China...... Belch...... It can only be said that it is in line with the old saying: "The landlord's family has no surplus grain!" ”

In short, the landlords in the Republic of China era were not very easy to be.

First of all, the Republic of China era was an era of frequent wars, and warlords and bandits were rampant all over the country. From the beginning of the Baolu Movement in 1911 to the eve of the Anti-Japanese War, Sichuan has been fighting the Sichuan Army Civil War intermittently; Although Hebei Province (then called Zhili) was located in Gyeonggi, it also became the main battlefield of the Zhiwan War, the Zhifeng War, the Second Zhifeng War, and Chiang Kai-shek's Second Northern Expedition.

As the hardest hit area of the civil war, Henan Province was constantly looted by various Beiyang warlords and rogues over and over again throughout the Republic of China era - the Bailang Uprising, the Zhensong Army, the giant bandit "Old Foreigner", the Red Gun Society, Feng Yuxiang's National Army, the Northern Expedition, and Chiang Kai-shek's Central Plains War in 193o...... In the end, there were 4o thousand bandits running around the province, and they were almost crushed.

In the midst of such frequent wars, not to mention that the bones of the Shengdou small people have filled the ravines, and even the lives of the landlords and gentry are not guaranteed.

You must know that for most of the Republic of China era, China was a lawless and chaotic world. The soldiers and horses of those warlords are more or less disciplined in the big cities, and when they go to the countryside, they are completely like bandits.

In the Qing Dynasty, the landlords and gentry who owned vast fields in those places often had "fame" such as lifting people, showing talents, and donating officials (officials bought with money, mostly for false positions), and many people also had children, nephews or relatives who served as officials in the imperial court, thus weaving a huge network of relationships.

Even in the turbulent Taiping Heavenly Kingdom era, in addition to the Taiping Army and the Twist Army as anti-thieves, the Hunan Army, the Huai Army, and the Chu Army, which were under the name of the imperial court, usually had some scruples about them, so they did not dare to plunder too much. No matter how domineering the soldiers are, as long as they are not determined to rebel, otherwise they will be somewhat afraid of these landlords and gentry who have intertwined connections.

But the problem is that in the era of the Republic of China, this qiē amulet and privilege were all lost. The soldiers and warlords of the Republic of China era will never take the fame and identity of the Qing Dynasty in their eyes again. Extort when you should extort, slaughter when you should slaughter, and you will not be polite at all - the death of a person in the countryside in those years is really no different from the death of an ant.

In Yang Bailao's eyes, Huang Shiren is undoubtedly the one who dominates life and death; But in front of the warlord with soldiers and horses, Huang Shiren is also a fart.

Although the landlords are also trying to defend their rights and interests by following the upper echelons of the new era, such as running for parliament. But after all, the early period of the Republic of China was an era of "having a gun is the king of grass", even if you have a friendship with some high-ranking official in Beijing, it may not be useful in the local area.

It is also a way to think of forming a good alliance with local warlords, after all, the county officials are not as good as the current management. But the problem is that most of the warlords have risen and fallen, and this "current management" has been replaced too often. The gentry had just spent a lot of money on investment, and the warlords had already been electrified...... So it was in vain.

Second, in Hebei, Shandong, Henan, and Sichuan, which were war-torn places in the early years of the Republic of China, even in the years when there was no war, the taxes that the warlords apportioned to the landlords in order to support the huge army and maintain a luxurious life were far heavier than in the late Qing Dynasty.

For example, at the end of the Qing Dynasty, Sichuan Province only needed to support 12ooo people in one town (equivalent to a division) of the New Army, plus a similar number of old green battalion troops, and financial subsidies of about 250,000 taels of silver to Yunnan, Guizhou, and Gansu.

But by 1935, the total strength of the Sichuan army that the Sichuan people needed to support had swelled to a huge scale of 34o regiments and about 840,000 people! The annual expenses are naturally several times more than ten times higher. In some places, the agricultural tax was actually "pre-levied" after the 100th anniversary of the Republic of China (2o12)! Coupled with the destruction of the local economy caused by the Sichuan army's melee, even in a country of abundance like Sichuan, the landlords and gentry also complained of misery.

Although the situation of "pre-levied" taxation in the rural areas of the northern provinces is not as absurd as that of Sichuan, due to poor natural conditions, frequent famines, limited wealth among the people, and the tragic damage caused by wars, the actual proportion of the burden is even heavier.

Of course, the landlords could also try to raise the rent and pass on these burdens to the peasants. But there is only so much to be produced on the land, and even if the peasants are not left with a grain of grain, there is a limit to the amount of grain that can be scavenged. However, there has never been an upper limit to the warlords' ability to impose miscellaneous taxes, and it is not uncommon for them to come up with sixty or seventy kinds of additional taxes at once—such as donations for green seedlings, tobacco, sanitation, green mountains, roads, entertainment, population tax, lantern tax, and so on. As the saying goes, "Since ancient times, there has been no tax on, and now there is only fart and no donation"!

Moreover, in addition to these exorbitant taxes, the warlords also liked to extort money from the landlords in various names, which often led to the bankruptcy of people.

For example, in the early years of the Republic of China, Shaanxi Province implemented the braid-cutting order while wantonly apportioning the "Guangfu money". As a result, the squires led the villagers to besiege the government, known as the "Braided Exemption" (I want to continue to keep the braids, so I don't pay the money). When the old and young people of the former Qing Dynasty heard about it, they all thought that "people think of the Holy Clear"!

Therefore, in North China and Shandong during the Republic of China, although the landlords and gentry in many counties had already received more than 70% of the actual land rent, they still took advantage of the danger of people in the famine year, fell into the ground, used usury to exploit the peasants, and forced the tenant farmers to only regard grain bran as a staple food, and when the famine years came, they had to go out to flee the famine, and even went to the northeast to "break into the eastern part of the country". However, under the rampant expropriation of the warlords and the wanton rampage of bandits, except for a very small number of the top large landowners, most of the small and medium-sized landlords still had a bad life.

According to a rural survey in 193o, in North China during the Republic of China, due to backward science and technology, there was no modern agricultural system, chemical fertilizers and pesticides could not be obtained, even if the best high-quality land, with the best irrigation conditions, the grain yield per mu was only about 1oo kilograms, about 2oo catties, which was only equivalent to one-third to one-fifth of the average grain yield per mu in modern North China.

Therefore, if there is no additional income from industry and commerce, there is no way to escape taxes by only digging in the fields. Then the landlord's family at that time had at least 2oo acres of good land to eat white flour buns and eat meat during the New Year's holidays.

The landlords and rich peasants below this standard did not dare to eat much of their own wheat, even if it was ground into white flour, and had to sell it to pay taxes and exchange it for necessities such as matches, salt, and cloth, leaving only coarse grains such as stick noodles and sorghum flour to feed themselves.

It is only after the wheat harvest in the early summer of each year that these families can eat a few meals of noodles made of white flour, which in their eyes is a great luxury, and those who can eat it until August are extremely rare, let alone eat it for a year.

As for the poorer peasants, it would be an eye-opener to be able to drink two bowls of sweet potato porridge mixed with leaves every day.

In our modern villages, banquets are often set up, and although the dishes are not very exquisite, they are also full of chicken, duck, fish, and meat, as well as cigarettes and good wine. In North China during the Republic of China, according to the memoirs of General Feng Yuxiang, there were festive funerals in the countryside, but most of the banquets for hospitality were "cabbage and tofu pickled seats", only vegetarian dishes - cabbage, vermicelli, bean sprouts, tofu puffs, etc. The rice is steamed with a lot of fine sand, and if you are not careful, your teeth will be knocked out (it feels a lot like ancient Egyptian food). General Feng Yuxiang has lived in Qingyuan County, Hebei Province for more than ten years, and has only eaten meat banquet once, but even the so-called meat banquet is only two or three extremely thin slices of pork in each bowl.

At that time, General Feng Yuxiang, who was a small rich family, only had green onions, radishes, and pickles as side dishes, and he was never willing to use oil to make a dish of stir-fried dishes, let alone meat dishes. Even poorer families are reluctant to eat pickles, so they only make some salty water rice temporarily.

Third, in the north of the Republic of China, there have been terrible famines one after another.

For example, from 192o to 1921, there was a great famine in the four provinces and regions of North China, with more than 1ooo deaths and 3ooo ~ 5ooo million victims.

From 1928 to 193o, the eight northern provinces were again in a continuous drought, with locusts, wind, snow, hail, water, and plague in the red land for thousands of miles, and no grain was harvested. The disaster lasted for three years, causing countless people to flee the wasteland, and at least 1ooo million starved people died in the wasteland.

Shaanxi originally had a population of 130,000, but in the past three years of famine, more than 30,000 people have died of starvation and epidemics, and more than 60,000 people have been displaced, accounting for 7o% of the province's population. According to some foreign journalists, the bodies of hungry people often disappear before they are buried, and in some villages, human flesh is even sold publicly.

In 1942, the Central Plains broke out in a great famine, and the four major disasters of "water, drought and locust soup" hit the Central Plains in turn, and 3oo people starved to death in Henan Province with a population of 1ooo, and another 3oo people went west to Tongguan as displaced people, and the population was instantly reduced by two-thirds.

Under such circumstances, the poor peasants would certainly be dead. The life of the landlords was also bleak. Even if there is some food and money in the house, they must first use it to recruit their families, buy weapons, raise the courtyard walls, build earthen forts, defend against bandits and homeless raids, and bribe the warlord troops who come to fight the autumn wind. It's not easy to survive, let alone have any luxuries.

In the end, even before the birth of **, the peasants in the countryside were fighting rent all day long, making trouble in every possible way, and it was basically an impossible task to collect the rent in full. Especially when the harvest is very poor, people often flee with grain and abandon the field, so that the landlord's family can not receive anything.

As a result, the landlord's family had to raise a group of thugs to force the tenant farmers to pay rent, so there was a lot of extra expenses.

What's worse is that the loyalty of these thugs is sometimes very suspicious, if the host's family is too weak or too harsh, some unconscionable thugs will even collude with bandits behind their backs, and then kill the landlord's whole family, and then divide the property themselves, and enjoy the happiness of being a small landlord - so the landlord of the Republic of China must be able to fight, just like many village cadres today.

In view of the above circumstances, like the copycat version of the Grand View Garden in "Dream of Red Mansions" in the TV series, the mansion is deep, the maids are crowded, and the luxurious landlord life is clothed and fed. At least in northern China, where wars and disasters are frequent, it is difficult to sustain itself by collecting rent from the fields alone.

Those who were able to live a luxurious life in the countryside were either additional income from non-agricultural industries such as factories, trading houses, mines, opium, etc., or they were top landowners with at least tens of thousands of acres of land.

However, once someone's territory is so big, if they don't have a good army and horses in their hands, then they can't look at the field at all. And those who have tens of thousands of acres of land and pull up a large number of soldiers and horses are usually already warlords rather than landlords. Once defeated by other warlords, don't expect to be able to keep these hard-won lands in the end.

Therefore, once you cross into the landlord family in the north, you want to learn kung fu masters to fight with people all day long, but you never worry about the lack of opponents, basically every year there are homeless people and bandits come to visit the door, and the landlords and tyrants often pull up a team to practice attacking each other. In those years, almost every landlord who was able to keep his family business was beaten. If you are particularly capable of fighting and have the ability to pull up a group of brothers, then even if you want to become a warlord like "Fan Ha'er" (the prototype of the TV series "Fool Commander"), there is a certain hope.

However, if you are not interested in things like fighting and killing, and just want to live a more modern life, then it is very difficult - according to a 193o statistics, among the tens of thousands of people in 2ooo households in 11 villages in Qingyuan County, Hebei Province, there are only 7 bicycles, 6 flashlights, 2 hot water bottles, and no radio.

Lights and telephones are a no-brainer, as there is generally no electricity in the countryside, and there is no running water. If you still have to get your own motors, it seems that only the homes of those big warlords can get these many money. For example, Yuan Shikai in the late Qing Dynasty, the villa he built when he retired to his hometown, not only had electricity supply in it, but also pulled telegraph lines, and even had a private telegraph room.

Even ordinary metal products were quite expensive at the time – until 1949, China was a purely agrarian country, with only 150,000 tonnes of steel produced, just enough to build the bird's nest in Beijing's Olympic Village. As a result, iron and steel products were rarely seen in the homes of ordinary people in the countryside at that time: agricultural tools were often only covered with a layer of iron in the most critical parts, wheelbarrows were made of wood, and the carriages of the rich had iron-clad wheels. The bucket at home is made of wood, and the water scoop is a big gourd cut in half. Buying a kitchen knife can help a farmer empty the savings they have saved for a year.

Compared with the Qing Dynasty, the only obvious sign of "modernization" in the northern countryside during the Republic of China was the more widespread use of kerosene lamps, and rural lighting has been basically replaced by kerosene - here I have to admire the sales ability of Mobil. You know, marketing kerosene lamps in rural North China at that time was almost as dangerous as doing a small commodity business in modern Somalia.

However, compared with the previous Qing Dynasty, the living conditions of ordinary peasants, far from being more modernized, deteriorated greatly - in order to pass on the excesses of the warlords' taxes, the landlords generally raised the rent for farming to 60 to 70 percent, and if they only collected 50 percent of the rent, it would be considered a great favor. After paying the rent, the tenant farmers usually have enough surplus food to make ends meet, so they have to borrow from usury, thus falling into the spiral trap of "borrowing new debts to pay off old debts", so that the debts become higher and higher, and eventually the family is ruined.

Even homesteaders with small plots of land, after suffering heavy tax exploitation, have difficulty avoiding the trap of usury and embark on the road to bankruptcy. Moreover, according to the general rule, the smaller the plot of land, the more difficult it is to keep - in the event of drought and locust plague, the warlords will naturally force you to sell the land and pay taxes, while the landlords will take the opportunity to force you to buy it at a low price; In the event of heavy rain, a few very conscientious landlords will often emerge, organize dogs to dig up the embankment and flood your field, let the flood wash away the boundary markers, and then spend a few small money to go to the yamen for some activities, so your land will become their ancestral business. Next, if you don't want to be beaten to death by those dogs, it's better to pack up your package and run away as soon as possible!

Recently, there have always been people boasting that the landlords of the Republic of China era were all willing to give kindness and help the poor, but while gnawing their own nests, they sent meat and white noodles to long-term workers, and the life of tenant farmers was more generous than that of landlords...... I really don't know what to say about the reversal of black and white of these "historical masters" -- if the landlords of the old society were really so benevolent and arrogant, why did they collect six or seven percent of the land rent and force the peasants to death?

In short, the landlord during the Republic of China was certainly not good to be, but the peasants during the Republic of China could not be a farmer.