Looking at such a cramped dwelling where there is no space to turn around, a living environment where bulls and horses take turns to fight, and the ghosts and spirits appear on the scene, Wang Qiu feels that even the basements rented by the modern "Beipiao" family in Beijing, as well as the collective dormitories of migrant workers, are much better than this ghost place...... But the few underground parties who came with them were already quite envious of Gu Mansha's residence, which had electric lights and running water supply.

According to the underground gang, most of them don't even have a house to live in, so they can only sleep in shabby shacks in the slums of Zhabei.

After settling down the patient Gu Mansha, Wang Qiu and the others left General Political Commissar Hu to take care of his female disciples, and then took the newly acquainted underground party comrades to the warehouse where they had rented and stacked the goods, set up a few tables to make tea, and talked about their experience of joining the revolution with these revolutionary predecessors who seemed to be very different from the images in the patriotic propaganda films.

As a result, it seems that because of the long-depressed relationship, after only a few cups of tea, they opened the conversation box and spit out bitter water endlessly.

In general, everyone did not carry out the revolution with a beautiful vision of communism, but was forced to embark on this road by a desperate fate.

First of all, it was an aunt who eloped, but she was deceived by her handsome little lover and cruelly abandoned, and then she walked a bunch of bad luck and almost fell into the green building, talking about her tragic love history and entrepreneurial history, it was really a handful of snot and tears: "...... Men in this world are just unreliable! ”

It turned out that this aunt surnamed Fu. Originally, she was also a young lady from a large family, and her family was an enlightened scholarly family, and there was no pedantic bad habit of "a woman is virtuous if she is not talented". is willing to spend money to send her daughter to school. And Miss Fu herself is also very competitive, not only looks good-looking, but also quite talented, graduated from the famous Shanghai Chinese and Western Girls' School, and her appearance and talent are second to none among the girls, and her family has also arranged a good family affair for her.

It's a pity that people sit at home, and disaster comes from the sky - Miss Fu never dreamed that this beautiful face for her attracted the admiration of countless people in Shanghai. turned out to be the source of his own abuse by fate...... made her halfway back to her hometown in Tangshan after graduation, and was robbed by a division commander who was born as a horse bandit at the door of her house to be her aunt's wife! When her family reacted and hurriedly asked her relationship to organize a rescue. Miss Fu has been broken by the division commander who used aphrodisiacs on the bed, and it is difficult to collect it in the water - this is really called "Xiucai meets soldiers, and it is unreasonable to explain"!

Obviously, such an illiterate old man who likes to smoke a lot. It's definitely not the dish that Miss Fu likes; And the fierce house fight between the bitter wife of the main room and the other aunts and wives who are showy. It made her miserable even more; On her mother's side, because she "didn't know self-love" and "insulted the style", she cut off contact with her, which made her feel that she was abandoned by the whole Shijie......

In a depressed mood, she looked at a polite little white-faced clerk with gold wire glasses, and then the fight was even hotter, under the sweet words of her lover, Mrs. Fu, who was deeply in love, was ruthless, and ran out of the smoky compound with a lot of money. hooked up with his lover and eloped all the way to Shanghai by train, thinking that he finally had a home. Unexpectedly, they met a white-eyed wolf - they had just arrived at the Shanghai Railway Station. The little white face ran away with all his luggage and money......

In addition to luggage, there is also a sum of money hidden in her personal pocket, and then she pawned the hairpin and earrings on her head, and actually made up hundreds of oceans, so she did not become a female homeless when she first arrived in Shanghai.

Although he still has some money in his hand, it is not a matter of sitting on a mountain like this. Just when Mrs. Fu was worried, she happened to hear about the famous strong woman in the Republic of China era, the wife of the Sichuan warlord Dong Zhujun ran away with her four daughters and came to Shanghai to found the Jinjiang Hotel (specific search TV series "Century Life"), for a while I was quite fascinated, thinking that when I was in school, I always got full marks in the housekeeping class, especially good at pastry skills, baking biscuits, frying steaks, making cakes are all first-class, and I can make good black tea, and the catering industry should be no worse than the legendary Dong Zhujun......

So, Mrs. Fu took out all her savings and ambitiously opened a pastry shop in the Shanghai Concession, intending to make the most of her cooking skills and not let the slum-born proprietress of the Jin Jiang Hotel be beautiful.

Then the supplier tricked her hard, mixing a lot of sand and lime in the flour, sugar, coffee, and pepper for Mrs. Fu...... When Mrs. Fu went to theorize angrily, she found that the other party had the support of the little leader of the Green Gang behind her, and she had no fear of being such a weak woman with no power, no power and no money. As a result, she was not only cheated with all her money, but also almost lost her life.

Seeing that she was about to be penniless, Mrs. Fu had no choice but to wipe away her tears, pack up and leave, relying on her ability to be proficient in four foreign languages, and applied for a job as a private translator in the home of a famous literati who was said to love the country and the people. As a result, from the first day she arrived, the sanctimonious social critic tore off her mask and unabashedly set her eyes on this young, beautiful, helpless and erudite female translator, and all kinds of coercion and seduction courtship methods were stubble...... Mrs. Fu barely suffered for a week, and her employer's son, who was studying in college, returned from summer vacation, and his eyes were also entangled with her - Zuihou was poured with an unknown liquid on a sad night, and she was actually lost to both father and son at the same time!

Such a terrible encounter made Mrs. Fu, who still had discipline in her heart, painful, and then had a year of becoming a monk, so she stumbled out of her employer's mansion and found a convent to join her, wanting to convert to God as a nun...... Who knows, but it is only out of the tiger's mouth and into the wolf's den!

It turned out that the seemingly sacred and solemn monastery was actually a "special green building" that played "uniform temptation". For those guests with filthy hearts, in the solemn church, under the holy cross. Accompanied by melodious chants, the body of a nun is feasted on to experience the infinite pleasure of blasphemy...... If it hadn't been rescued by General Political Commissar Hu in time. Sister Fu was really going to hold on to the cross and be forced!

In short, after completely despairing of her relatives, her family, society, and religion, Mrs. Fu was attracted by the ideals of communism and determined to join the revolution and transform this unfair society. “…… I kind of understood that on this cruel shijie, if you don't have the power and status to protect yourself. Then even being beautiful is a sin! Only by breaking this old shijie can I not let the tragedy on my body recur......"

Since then, Mrs. Fu has been engaged in underground party work as a nun in the church of Hu Dexing, a red priest. Until now.

After Mrs. Fu finished talking about her tragic experience. The next person to speak was a rickshaw driver surnamed Li, who claimed to have been the adjutant of a certain commander, and his life was quite nourishing. It's a pity that there are no invincible generals in this world, and after the Central Plains War, his commander's soldiers and horses were absorbed by Chairman Chiang and sent to Jiangxi to "suppress bandits." As a result, like all the miscellaneous armies, they were raised by their mothers, and they were given a cold reception in terms of salary, supply, and treatment -- a large number of officers and soldiers had not seen what military salaries looked like for a year. The food and clothing were even worse than those of the Red Army, so they were so angry that they collectively joined the Communist Party!

After the mass defection. Naturally, the commander of the unit was court-martialed and charged with colluding with the Communist Party. And Adjutant Li, who has worked hard with the commander for half his life, has no owner, and the above neither pays severance pay nor arranges demobilization, wants to change jobs and continue to eat food in the army, and has no reliable connections, let alone a son to start from the big head again...... In desperation, he had to go to Huahua Shijie in Shanghai to make a living.

However, he was arrested at a very young age, and he had fought for half his life before, except for shooting and killing, he almost didn't know anything about other means of making a living, doing a small business was to pay a loss once, and farming could not compete with those crops, and entering the factory was also clumsy and smashing the work, zuihou, Adjutant Li's savings were all exhausted, so he had to pull the rickshaw - but the rickshaw was not so easy to pull!

In Shanghai in this year, just renting a licensed rickshaw from a car dealer generally has to pay 25 yuan a month, which means that the driver works hard for a month, and more than half of his income is earned by the car dealer. Moreover, if you don't have connections and connections, you can't rent it at all! Then deduct the routine filial piety to gangsters, patrol policemen, and fines for traffic violations - counting the later increase in the Japanese Concession, there were actually four sets of traffic laws in Shanghai in this era, such as the French Concession and the Public Concession, which are one right and one left, for the basically illiterate rickshaw drivers, it is really difficult to not make mistakes at all - so the average monthly income of Shanghai rickshaw drivers is only nine yuan, and they are so poor that they can't even eat.

Because he couldn't rent a licensed rickshaw in the car dealership, Adjutant Li had no choice but to secretly pull the black car without a license plate, and as a result, he was not only seized by the traffic police, but also severely beaten by the thugs of the car dealership...... At the most unlucky time, he even almost jumped into the Huangpu River. Unfortunately, before committing suicide, Adjutant Li ran to the church of General Political Commissar Hu to pray for confession, and was fooled by General Political Commissar Hu into getting on the thief ship, otherwise it is difficult to say whether there is a person like him at the moment.

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If the miserable experience of the first two people can be attributed to the misfortune of their personal fate, then the narratives of the next few workers fully reflect the cruelty of exploitation by Chinese and foreign capitalists in the Republic of China era, and even "anti-Japanese patriotism" has become an excuse for exploiting and oppressing workers.

In a casual conversation, a worker in a yarn factory lamented that the treatment of workers in Shanghai had improved through the Revolution and the May Day Movement. However, since Chiang Kai-shek launched the "April 12" counter-revolutionary coup, all kinds of labor protection clauses that were hard to win have basically become dead letters.

Later, the Shijie economic crisis of 1929 broke out, and the entire capitalist Shijie fell into the terrible Great Depression, and the income level and welfare benefits of Shanghai workers plummeted. In 1932, the Shanghai Cotton Weaving Industry Union simply petitioned the Nationalist Government, openly demanding a drastic reduction in workers' wages in the name of reducing costs and increasing competitiveness with foreign businessmen...... In the face of the economic crisis, the management of the mill passed on the losses to the workers. The previous year's salary was discounted by 8%, and this year's salary will be discounted by 7%! The daily salary is only four dimes! The half-hour meal time at noon is gone, and the monthly vacation is gone. If you take a day off, you will be deducted a dollar! If you take a leave of absence for three days, you have to roll up and get out! The overtime system, which had been abolished during the Revolution, has now been reinstated under the slogan 'Obey the needs of the national struggle', requiring sixteen hours a day! That is, in addition to sleeping and eating. The rest of the time you have to work - not even the animals! ”

The scrawny mill worker complained, mimicking the boss's admonition: "...... Don't you hate the Japanese? Isn't it anti-Japanese and patriotic? The Japanese are about to bring down Huasha, so that you have no work to do! Now you are helping the factory to reduce the cost of production, which is to show the unity spirit of our China's 'labor-management cooperation', that is, the patriotic action of arriving in Japan and saving China! If the workers refuse to help, then we will not be able to sustain it, only the factory! And you lazy people are all traitors and traitors! ”

Speaking of which. He couldn't help but spread his hands, "...... Now that we've said that, what else can we do? It's better to work harder than to be unemployed...... But after 16 hours a day. It felt like I was just getting back from a serious illness. Not to mention that in some cases, you have to work up to 18 hours a day! I really don't even have the strength to get out of the workshop! And the salary is only for twelve hours! It's even going to be discounted, and it's going to be sent late!

I have a good brother who used to carry a gun together, and he is a strong Shandong man. It's not a problem for one person to hit five. Who knew that it had only been a year since he was reduced to working in a yarn factory. The pimple meat fell off with a whole body, his hands and feet were as thin as a reed stick, his face was as miserable as a dead man, he walked like he was on stilts, coughed and sweated all day long, and he still worked hard, and Zuihou was tired to death - he only weighed less than sixty pounds when he died!

Hey, I'm tired of being in the factory. It's not the worst. Some of the workers were so sick that they couldn't stand up. I really couldn't do my job, but I couldn't die for a while, so I was kicked out of the factory by the boss...... It's a pity that they can't even crawl, and they don't have the strength to beg for food if they want to be beggars, so they can only curl up in the corner, waiting for when they will starve to death and freeze to death......

Next, the employees of the cigarette factory also complained that their factory had recently switched to assembly line operations, and the production speed had been greatly accelerated, but the number of workers had not increased but decreased, so that one person had to be responsible for several processes, and had to work for at least ten hours in a row without a single break. As a result, every week someone makes a mistake in their busy schedule, gets their hair twisted or their fingers cut off...... In those years, Chinese workers had neither work-related injury benefits nor accident insurance, and even if they became disabled, the owner would give them a few yuan at most, and then throw them out to fend for themselves......

Death from overwork in a factory like this sounds horrific enough, but what is even more terrifying is that after such unhealthy labor, many workers still do not get their fair wages—"...... Since last year, only half of the wages in the factory have been paid in cash, and the other half has been paid the products (silk) of the factory that cannot be sold, so that the workers can find a way to sell them for money, but the friends around them are so poor that they have no food to eat, where can they afford to buy silk? Nowadays, the silk on the market is seriously unsalable, and even pawnshops refuse to accept it! I had no choice but to hold the silk and cry! ”

A haggard silk factory worker cried silently with a teacup in her hand, while Wang Qiu expressed pity that she was willing to pay for her silk, and considered whether to place an order to buy the silk that had accumulated in their factory—she had the most money in her hand anyway.

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After listening to the tragic accounts of these workers and looking at their bones, premature and sickly bodies, Wang Qiu was deeply shocked.

In fact, not to mention the workers who were exhausted to death in the story and kicked out of the factory by the boss to freeze to death and starved to death, even the few guys in front of them who are still struggling in the world, in Wang Qiu's eyes, seem to be dying and waiting to die, the walking dead - the average is only twenty or thirty years old, but he is aging as if he is forty or fifty years old; Both men and women, all of them are slim, unresponsive, staggering, and extremely weak; Most people suffer from pneumonia, tuberculosis, bronchitis and asthma, as well as common occupational diseases such as dyspepsia, liver disease, kidney disease and rheumatism. But there is no money for treatment, and there is no vacation to recuperate, so I can only live one day at a time......

Even the serfs who farmed on the banks of the Nile in ancient Egypt seemed to be much healthier than these capitalist "free men"!

For these proletarian laborers in the Republic of China, the iron gate of the factory is probably like the big mouth of a man-eating monster, and the whistle of the workers is the chewing sound of eating people, swallowing fresh and healthy lives and spitting out a dying walking corpse...... It's just appalling!

No wonder Marx would say: "Capital comes into the world, dripping with blood and filth from head to toe, from every pore." - A primitive version of capitalism like this is indeed a cannibalistic system! It's not an exaggeration, it's not an artistic rhetoric, it's really eating people! (To be continued......)