In September 1949, the land of China was already boiling, the Liberation War began to come to an end, and the whole land of China was about to usher in reunification again.
In order to ensure the peaceful liberation of xinjiang, under the command of Mao Zedong, Peng Dehuai led the First Field Army and the Twenty-second Corps to the west, at the same time,
Wang Zhen's corps led troops to the Qilian Mountains to jointly deter the remnants of the Kuomintang forces entrenched in Xinjiang.
In order to achieve an unexpected effect, Wang Zhen's corps immediately set off for the Qilian Mountains after receiving instructions. Because they came from the grasslands, the warriors' cold supplies were not very abundant, and in the face of the icy Qilian Mountains, they did not even dare to stop their rapid steps, and at night the warriors could only huddle together for warmth to carry through the long night.
Even so, many warriors remained on the land permanently.
After enduring hardships, Wang Zhen's army finally crossed the Qilian Mountains and went straight down to Jiuquan to join Peng Dehuai's troops.
Although with the joint efforts of Kuomintang officer Zhang Zhizhong and other members of our party, there has been no large-scale military confrontation in Xinjiang, some reactionary forces are still eager to move.
Under these circumstances, for the sake of peace and stability in the Xinjiang region, the organization decided to send troops into Xinjiang as soon as possible to stabilize the situation.
On the afternoon of October 20, after more than ten days of long journeys, Wang Zhen led the chariot battalion of the First Corps of the First Field Army to arrive in today's Urumqi and take over the provincial capital of this vast land.
However, limited to the conditions at that time, only a small number of teams were able to drive there.
Most fighters want to reach all parts of Xinjiang and can only move forward on their feet.
In order to reach the designated location as soon as possible to quell the rebellion, some fighters even chose to cross the Taklamakan Desert, known as the "Sea of Death".
Years later, a veteran who had personal experience recalled: "The most difficult thing in the desert is that there is no water to drink, even if the lips are dry and cracked, they only dare to drink a small sip." ”
In this harsh environment, the soldiers still fulfilled their mission and completed the task brilliantly, spending less than half a year to enter the major cities and key military fortress areas in Xinjiang at that time. At this point, the Xinjiang region has once again firmly thrown itself into the embrace of the motherland.
As the People's Liberation Army moves throughout Xinjiang, a thorny problem emerges.
After the liberation of Xinjiang, everything was poor and white, everything was in ruins, because the production methods at that time were quite backward, which led to an extremely low level of productivity, and ordinary people often hovered on the edge of the subsistence line.
How to supply the rations of hundreds of thousands of soldiers has become an urgent problem to be solved.
Whether it is transporting grain from the interior or buying grain from neighboring countries, it is not a long-term solution.
However, the reason why Mao Zedong sent Wang Zhen to Xinjiang in the first place was that he had a certain idea about this matter a long time ago.
As early as 1941, Wang Zhen led the troops to develop the "Nanniwan", and after arduous struggle, the "Rotten Mud Bay" in people's mouths was developed into a small Jiangnan plugged in, ensuring the self-sufficiency of the troops.
It was on this basis that Mao Zedong sent Wang Zhen to Xinjiang, hoping that this talented man could lead the soldiers to open up the wilderness and cultivate and recreate a "small Jiangnan" in the Gobi desert.
Wang Zhenzi understood this, and after taking over Xinjiang in an all-round way, he would work with Tao Zhiyue, Zhao Xiguang, and others on xinjiang-related matters.
However, under the conditions at that time, the soldiers were poor and white, and they wanted to build Xinjiang into a "small Jiangnan" in which the hardships could be imagined. Not only that,
Some warriors had a hard time accepting it when they heard that they were to be allowed to engage in agricultural production.
In their view, to be a soldier is to fight a war, but now he wants them to work as peasants here to cultivate the land, and there is inevitably a gap in their hearts; for this reason, Wang Zhen on the one hand personally leads his subordinates to do ideological work with these comrades, and on the other hand, he organizes the soldiers to conduct military training while the peasants are busy, and arouses their enthusiasm.
Despite this, there are still quite a few problems in front of everyone's eyes, and the most urgent one to be solved is the accommodation of the soldiers.
At first, many of the warriors who reclaimed the wasteland did not even have the most basic place to sleep.
Only the ground can be used as a bed, the sky as a quilt, and camping in the open air. Later, under the efforts and exploration of the soldiers, it was possible to build a simple "ground nest" nearby to rest, and solved the most basic accommodation problem.
The so-called "ground nest" is to dig a regular deep pit down on the flat ground, and then build a low wall with adobe piles, on which a few strong rafters are used as beams, covered with branches and blades of grass, and then fixed with mud.
This kind of "house" is much simpler than our understanding of normal houses, and even less than thatched houses, although relatively warm in winter and cool in summer, but its ventilation is quite poor, and the house is filled with a turbid smell all year round, which lasts for a long time.
But as an early "home", the warriors were already quite content.
For the Zhiqing who came to aid Xinjiang later, this "earth nest" is definitely a rare thing.
There was once a group of zhiqing who came here at dusk, and as far as the eye could see, the wilderness was in full swing, but in an instant, the heads of people were surging and they were very surprised, as if people had grown out of the soil.
But when they actually stayed in this place, they found many inconveniences. For the newcomers, the "ground nest" is too similar, and when they go out, they can't find their way home, and they often turn in a big circle to touch the residence. And as soon as it gets dark, a few soldiers who are not familiar with the road conditions and rush home occasionally have a foot on the roof and parachute into his house.
Once the army's literary and artistic performances, the female Zhiqing who hurried back to the air stepped into the air and fell on the bed of other soldiers who were drinking and talking in the house, and after everyone in the room was stunned for a moment, there was a burst of cacophony, and some people quipped that this was really "people sitting at home, beautiful people falling in the sky", in order to make fun of it.
However, with the improvement of living conditions, earthen houses slowly appeared in the corps.
It was not until the 1990s that brick-concrete houses gradually appeared in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.
Later, with the support of state policies, a wave of housing construction fever was set off within the corps, and the "ground nest" completely completed its historical mission and disappeared into the sight of everyone.
Also, in
At the beginning of the reclamation, although the problem of living has been basically solved due to the emergence of "land nests", it is also indispensable to cultivate land and water.
The only way the warriors could think of to get an adequate source of water was to dig a ditch and draw water down from the Tianshan Mountain.
But under the conditions at that time, this was almost impossible to complete the project, and the stone for the construction of the ditch alone required seven thousand cubic meters, which was quite a huge amount of work.
For the warriors at that time, they had neither vehicles nor tools, some were only flesh and blood, relying only on shoulders to pick, but even so, the warriors never flinched.
In the process of carrying the stone,
In order to avoid the wear of clothes by stones, some warriors simply took off their shirts and worked on the sheepskin pads they had picked up on their shoulders.
Although the stones arrived, another conundrum ensued: where the cement came from, upset the warriors.
While pondering, a warrior was in a hurry and proposed the use of cement by grinding bricks into powder and adding lime to later.
After several trials, the "cement" made in this way has basically achieved quite good results, but it also has obvious side effects.
Those soldiers who went to produce "cement" almost all had different degrees of burns on their hands and feet.
And because of the long-term work under the dust, many soldiers can even cough up blood, which is tantamount to fighting with their lives.
Under such high-intensity work, the nutrition of many warriors can not keep up, over time, many warriors have "night blindness", in order not to delay the progress of reclamation, many warriors unanimously decided to select young children to become the eyes of everyone in the night.
Although it has been many years, some of the soldiers who know about it are still in tears when it comes to this matter. Today, the first generation of pioneers involved in Xinjiang's production and construction have long since passed away with the years, but their contributions to Xinjiang deserve to be remembered forever.
In the museum in Xinjiang, there is a military coat with two hundred and ninety-six patches that stands out among the many exhibits, which is the military coat worn by a military reclamation soldier in the past.
At the beginning of the reclamation, each soldier was rationed with extremely limited supplies, basically every three years to issue a set of cotton clothes.
Under the high-intensity labor, the wear of this cotton coat is quite serious, and the patch is almost a must-have. At the same time, in order to save cloth, the soldiers' military uniforms have almost no pockets and collars, so that each soldier can save the province and fully support the production and construction of Xinjiang.
Although everything was difficult at the beginning, it was precisely under this spirit of not accepting defeat, having the motivation, and being able to bear hardships that many soldiers and soldiers worked together to forge ahead in a pioneering spirit, and in the end, they did not pay off their hearts, and in the first year they brilliantly completed the tasks assigned by the organization and basically realized the self-sufficiency of the troops.
Subsequently, taking into account the actual situation in Xinjiang, Wang Zhen and other senior generals jointly decided to propose to the Central Military Commission that the troops in Xinjiang be collectively transferred to work and the Xinjiang Construction Corps should be established.
The CPC Central Committee decided to adopt this proposal after careful consideration in light of historical experience.
On October 7, 1954, a major directive was issued, requiring a total of 175,000 soldiers and their families stationed in Xinjiang to collectively transfer jobs on the spot and establish the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.
At the same time, the original self-sufficient production mode of the Corps has changed, and it has begun to transition to enterprise management, and the business field has gradually rolled out to the secondary and tertiary industries.
And after that, the corps continued to replenish fresh blood from all over the country, gradually grew, and eventually formed a military formation corps with production and construction as the mainstay.
However, the good times did not last long, and when the special period came, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which had just been on the right track, was also affected, until December 1981, when the central government made a decision to restore the xinjiang production and construction corps after on-site inspection and listening to the opinions of all parties, and officially renamed its name "Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps".
thereafter
Under the leadership of the party, the corps began to gradually come out of chaos and disorder, and officially opened the road of secondary entrepreneurship.
After 1983, the Corps began to adhere to the economic construction as the center and accelerated the reform of the agricultural reclamation economic system. In 1990, the national economic and social development of the Corps began to be listed in the state implementation plan, providing a good external environment for the economic development of the Corps.
As a system of integration of the party, the government, the military and enterprises, the Central Committee officially issued a document in 1997 to clearly stipulate that the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is a special organization that fulfills the mission of reclamation and reclamation, and it must not only accept the leadership of the central government, but also the leadership of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
At the same time, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps can set up administrative organs and political and legal organs to be responsible for administrative and judicial affairs within the Corps, respectively. In addition, as a "paramilitary entity", the corps can still retain the army structure of divisions, regiments, companies and other military structures and corresponding military titles.
Since its inception, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps has always implemented the good work style of "not taking a needle and a thread from the masses" and "fighting for profits from different local people".
Therefore, most of the reclamation activities are basically organized on the edge of the desert.
On the edge of the vast desert, every green bud and every green plant embodies the painstaking efforts of the soldiers of the Corps, and is the fruit of generations of Corps people holding hoes, sweating like rain, and cultivating diligently.
Agriculture, as the main industry of the Corps at the beginning of the reclamation, has now developed into a local basic industry.
With the advantage of local resources, generations of corps have worked hard to reclaim oases on the vast Gobi Desert.
Approaching this oasis, it can be clearly observed that the agricultural equipment here has basically achieved a high degree of mechanization like the inland state farms, and it can be said that today's farms have basically completed the construction of a modern large-scale agricultural system.
The agricultural and animal husbandry products produced here are not only diverse, but also compared with similar products on the market, both yield, quality and commodity rate are in a dominant position, and the yield level of major cash crops is among the best in the country.
As a well-known commercial cotton sales base in the country, the Corps can account for one-sixth of the country's total cotton output every year.
At the same time, in order to ensure the irrigation of agricultural production, the corps carried out the construction of large-scale water conservancy. In this way, the water transmission network of reservoirs, water pipelines and mechanical and electrical wells covered the entire farm and could transport water to almost every corner of the corps.
Complementing the corps's agriculture, the corps' existing industrial system is based on the processing of agricultural and sideline products, supplemented by energy and basic industries, which basically covers hundreds of categories such as food, coal, and chemical industry, and together constitutes a modern industrial system.
In fact
The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps can be deservedly called the founder of Xinjiang's modern industry.
Testing the waters of industry under the harsh conditions of the time required great courage and sacrifice. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps rushed to the forefront.
After the initial test of the water, the Corps carried out a series of drastic reforms around the problems that needed to be solved at that time, resisting the heavy pressure generated by the outside world, which created the current situation of the Corps thriving in industry, and produced dozens of excellent listed companies, and the industrial products they produced have also won the honorary titles of National Excellence, Ministry Excellence, and District Excellence several times.
However, whether it is the development of agriculture or industry, in order to promote products, a developed and convenient commercial circulation system is indispensable.
In fact, the Corps has always regarded it as a key point in the process of development and construction.
Large-scale infrastructure services not only connect Xinjiang into a close whole, but also completely open up Xinjiang's economic and trade exchanges with the mainland and neighboring countries.
Not only that, due to the accumulation in the early stage, the current Corps has a one-stop construction and installation construction team that surveys, designs, and constructs, and they can go to various places at home and abroad to undertake large-scale construction projects such as railways, highways, water conservancy and hydropower, and contribute to Xinjiang's economic construction.
In addition, with the deepening of the reclamation of the frontier, the population of the Corps is also increasing year by year, and by the end of 2019, its population has soared from 175,000 in the early days to 3.248 million.
Each generation of legionnaires has dedicated their youth to this land and has deeply rooted their roots in the land beneath their feet.
generally
The mission and purpose of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is "Tunken Shubian", Tunken as a means, Shubian is the real purpose, Tunken ultimately serves Shubian.
As a product of the central government's support for local governments, the stabilization of local economic development, and the protection of national peace and security, the Corps not only effectively smashed the attempts of local forces and foreign hegemons to split Xinjiang, but also once reached nearly 300 billion yuan in economic terms, effectively promoting the prosperity and development of the local economy.