Usually, after hearing or seeing some young people now seeing film and television dramas that reflect the old society, they are not only not resentful of the landlords who bully men and women inside, but say that the author made them up randomly, and can only say that these young people have grown up in honeypots and have not experienced that kind of painful years.
The years have passed, and in the blink of an eye, decades have passed, and fewer and fewer people have experienced those years of suffering. In response to the bullying of the landlords in the old society reflected in the film and television dramas, we recently visited some elderly people who are now alive and have experienced the old society, and they said that the landlords of the old society were indeed very vicious and vicious. However, they said, the viciousness of landlords was only one aspect, and from the current point of view, Guan Jian was that the legal system was not perfect at that time, especially the lack of policies and laws to protect vulnerable groups.
Before liberation, land was privatized, which meant that land could be bought and sold freely. Rich people become landlords after buying a large amount of land, and what should peasants who have no money and cannot afford to buy land rent the landlord's land for cultivation and then pay rent to the landlord. If they cannot afford to pay the rent and owe too much, the landlord can take back the land, and the peasants who do not have land can go to the landlord's house to work as the rent that has not been paid, or they can sell their sons and daughters to the landlord's family as long-term workers or servants, otherwise, there will be no food to eat. At that time, the economy was backward, there was no talk of part-time work, let alone poverty alleviation and low insurance, and the vast majority of peasants could not survive without land.
A nearly ninety-year-old Yang Laohan told such a story. It was in the 1940s, when a man in the village surnamed Zhao was arrested and thought he would not return, because soldiers often fought at that time. After a few years, he went home, made a lot of money in the army, returned to the village to buy hundreds of acres of land, and became a landlord. Those in the village who could not afford to buy land became his tenants. In order to collect rent, he also raised several family members, and the village chief also fought with him.
After a year of drought and poor grain harvest, many tenants could not pay the grain on time and in quantity, so the landlord brought the family ding, as well as the bao ding of the village bao long belt, to cooperate together, urging the grain to be handed over, forcing the tenants to write IOUs, and for those tenants who had a large population and a large amount of rent, they also forced a person to go to the landlord's house as a long-term worker. The landlord took a fancy to a girl from a family surnamed Liu and forcibly asked the family surnamed Liu to rent a girl, but the family surnamed Liu did not agree, and was arrested by the landlord's family and the village baoding, and locked up for several days.
Why did the landlords of the past dare to do whatever they wanted, arrogant and fierce? Guan Jian was that the legal policy at that time only protected the powerful and the rich, the poor and vulnerable were not protected, and it was not surprising that the landlords bullied the poor tenants. If at that time there were sound laws, land was not allowed to be privatized, people were not allowed to engage in human trafficking with rent, it was illegal for landlords to arbitrarily detain peasants who were in arrears of rent, and it would be a crime to provide relief to people who really did not have food to help the poor, and the landlords might not have dared to be so rampant.