The Immortal Spark - The Dressing Problem Involves Basic Survival and the Human Spirit (Part II)

We describe the ancient small-scale peasant economy will use the word "male cultivator and female weaver", farming and weaving is to solve the problem of food and clothing, we even sublimate the basic need to dress into a beautiful imagination, all the men in the world most want to marry is the "weaver girl". Of course, there is no heavenly "weaver girl" to take care of the "team of poor people" led by the Communist Party. Communists are both revolutionaries and laborers, their hands are "golden shuttles and silver shuttles", and "abundant food and clothing" rely on "doing their own thing".

-- Is it to continue the previous article - https://www.toutiao.com/a7054770823432929822/

Most of the Red Army troops that had just arrived in northern Shaanxi were in rags and disheveled figures, but soon this army, which had undergone thousands of hammers and tribulations, stabilized in northern Shaanxi, the Long March was victorious, and the revolution turned the crisis into safety.

Snow's wife's red army soldiers' clothes: proud and clean

In the early days of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communists had just been established, foreign trade in the border areas was relatively smooth, and the industrial supplies needed by the party, government, and military departments were mainly purchased from Xi'an and other places. Helen Foster Snow, the ex-wife of Edgar Snow, escaped the surveillance of Kuomintang agents in April 1937 and entered the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region for interviews, when all three main forces of the Red Army had reached northern Shaanxi. On May 27, she wrote in an interview that she photographed a Red Army soldier wearing Mickey Mouse pants, which came from Xi'an, khaki cloth, and many Red Army soldiers wore them. "Red Army soldiers like to dress up, they are proud, they are clean and hygienic, they wear shoes made by themselves." (Helen Foster Snow, Yan'an Interview, p268)

The blockade allowed the difficulties to strike again

However, with the establishment of huge party, government, and military institutions and various types of schools, the continuous increase of the non-productive population, and the increasing pressure on finance and economy, cloth is even more insufficient. The annual need for all kinds of personnel in the border area is about 250,000 horses, and the productivity of the border area is only 11,000 horses, with a gap of nearly 240,000 horses. Therefore, the restoration and development of traditional handicraft industries in the border area has become an important task in the economic construction of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region. In particular, since 1939, the Kuomintang has imposed an economic blockade on the border areas, and the cloth has become less and less, and the price has soared. Mao Zedong once said that during this period, "we used to get almost no clothes to wear, no oil to eat, no paper, no vegetables, soldiers without shoes and socks, and staff members who were not covered in winter ... Our difficulties are enormous. "The difficulty of wearing clothes and quilts came again, and the government of the Border Region began to seriously develop the textile industry. The party proposed to do itself and self-reliance, and cloth self-sufficiency became a particularly important part. In the fourth chapter of Mao Zedong's article "Economic and Financial Problems" published in December 1942, a special section was devoted to the development of the textile industry. He noted that the problem could be solved by relying on the cooperation of public industry, women's weaving and civil cooperatives.

More than half of the people in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region did not understand textiles, and at first the border areas relied on foreign aid from cotton cloth to needlework, although the textile industry in the border areas developed later, but still faced great difficulties. In order to solve the problem of the people in the border areas "wearing", the CPC Central Committee called on cadres and the masses to spin threads. The "Rules for the Formulation of Spinning Labor rules by the Production Self-Sufficiency Committee of the Border Region" stipulates:

(1) All personnel of all departments and departments of the border government shall participate in the work of spinning wool, but on the principle of not obstructing administrative work and study.

(2) All intellectual labourers under the age of fifty and over the age of thirteen, regardless of gender, shall participate in the whole production (i.e. one or two spinnings per day).

3. All manual workers (e.g. grooms, groomsmen, barbers) must participate in semi-production (i.e. half a day of spinning)

……

Nine...... The yarn spun should pay attention to learning to spin well, heavy quality is not weight...

10. The yarn spun by each personnel within the prescribed amount shall be awarded according to its quality, and those who have more than the amount of yarn shall be paid wages in accordance with Article 2 of the Interim Measures for Spinning and Wool of the Industrial Department of the Construction Department... (Extracts from the Financial and Economic Historical Materials of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression -3-Industrial Transportation, P544)

Do it yourself

Zhou Enlai and Ren Bishi, who were then secretaries of the Secretariat of the CENTRAL Committee, insisted on actively spinning thread in their free time, despite their busy work.

Although Zhou Enlai had an injury to his right hand at that time, he still insisted on taking the lead in learning spinning threads; while shaking the spinning wheel sent by Brigade Commander Wang Zhen of the 359th Brigade from Nanniwan, while working, he actively and tirelessly learned from comrades with good spinning technology, and constantly studied spinning technology: from the tightening of rolled tampons, the humidity of the tampons, the height and tightness of the ingots, until the coordination of the drawing of the shaking car, the joints, and other techniques, he systematically practiced and studied step by step. He not only mastered the whole set of spinning skills in a short period of time, but also led everyone to sum up experience and improve efficiency together with Ren Bishi, so that the quantity and quality of all the spinning comrades were improved. After that, Zhou Enlai and Ren Bishi also specially gathered some spinning experts to jointly study technological reform. Using the principles of physics, they installed an acceleration wheel between the wheel and the spindle, and after careful study and repeated experimentation, the rotation speed of the spindle was accelerated, and the efficiency of the spinning thread was doubled.

In order to stimulate everyone's enthusiasm for spinning, a spinning competition was held in Zaoyuan soon. According to the quantity and quality of each person's spinning thread, the competition evaluation committee rated him as a "hero", "commando" and "expert". Although they repeatedly stated that the quantity and quality of the threads they spun were not up to the standards of the spinning heroes, and suggested that they should not participate in the appraisal, all the comrades insisted on doing things according to the regulations, rated them as spinning heroes, and sent the first-class fine threads they spun to the border district government for display at the exhibition of agricultural and industrial production achievements in the border area. In folk women weaving, "Our difficulties are really great, but we have overcome them." (China Discipline Inspection and Supervision Daily, May 2, 2016, 6th edition)