· This is the 5183rd original debut article Word count 3k+ ·
The film and television drama market of May 1st is the hottest "The Long Season" directed by Xin Shuang and starring Fan Wei, Qin Hao and Chen Minghao. Since its launch on April 22, it has scored 9.0 on Douban, and as the plot progresses, the score is getting higher and higher, and after the finale on May 1, it rushed to an incredible 9.4 points, far exceeding the hit TV series "Crazy" in the Spring Festival file.
If "Crazy" tells the history of the growth of the underworld, then "The Long Season" focuses on a painful history of the worker group in the process of reform and opening up.
Regarding the process of reform and opening up, there have always been two faces:
One is starting from the four special zones (urban reform) of Xiaogang Village (rural reform) in Anhui Province and Shenzhen-Zhuhai-Shanxia, starting from point to face, constantly deepening, positive and smiling. In the past, the main theme of literary and artistic narratives mostly focused on this side, such as Lu Yao's "Ordinary World" in the early years, to the hit "Great River" and "The World" in recent years.
The other is the tears of vulnerable groups such as those who bear the cost of reform, including landless peasants and laid-off workers. Just because these groups lack a voice, this aspect has rarely received attention in the past. "The Long Season" takes a 18-year-old unsolved case of a broken corpse as the lead, recalling and presenting the other side of the reform that has not been paid attention to, which resonates with a large number of first-hand witnesses, and then reaps the word-of-mouth effect beyond expectations.
So, how painful is this painful page? How did it turn over later? Why should it not be forgotten by people, especially young people?
After 1949, large-scale employment difficulties occurred about three times. The first time was in the mid-to-late 1960s, after which a vigorous movement was launched across the country against the "old third" and "new third". Although the movement is steeped in ideology, many scholars believe that it is closely related to the pressure on urban employment caused by a series of economic policy failures since the late 50s. However, at that time, due to widespread poverty, strict regulation, and the agitation of revolutionary discourse, economic factors did not have much impact on society.
The real shock came a decade later. As the young people continue to return to the cities, and the state-run units do not have so many jobs to place them, the urban unemployed population has soared. Some people, because they have nothing to do, wander around all day and even gather crowds to fight, which has become a factor of social instability, and the first generation of underworld forces in China emerged during this period.
Years later, writer Kong Ergou wrote this experience into the novel "The Past of the Northeast Underworld", which became popular on the Internet for a while. Of course, novelists' stories are embellished, and reality is much harsher than that. According to statistics from the Ministry of Public Security, since the 1980s, vicious public security cases have occurred frequently in various places. In 1980, more than 750,000 cases were filed nationwide, including more than 50,000 major cases; In 1981, 890,000 cases were filed, including 67,000 major cases; in 1982, 740,000 cases were filed, of which 64,000 were major cases... This led directly to the 1983 crackdown.
When people talk about the strike hard crackdown today, the focus is mostly on criminal and evil gangs such as the Tangshan Kitchen Knife Team, or powerful children such as Zhu Guohua and "Erxiong" who have been punished, but they pay little attention to the deep-seated problems behind them, such as slow reform of the urban economic system and insufficient employment supply side.
Compared with the vast countryside, China's cities used to enjoy many privileges under the "dual system", in the words of the peasants, urban workers "eat commercial grain". At that time, in a large state-owned factory like Angang, the employees of a large state-owned factory wore factory uniforms and walked on the street, each with their heads held high, full of pride and superiority.
But this also poses two problems:
On the one hand, everyone wants to enter the state-owned factory, and looks down on the budding private economy. For example, in "The Long Season", the worker model worker Wang Xiangnian is here to send his son Wang Yang to Huagang Steel, even if Huagang is on the verge of bankruptcy at that time, he is not willing to go to a nightclub to earn a "high salary" of 300 yuan + tips per month.
On the other hand, however, because the reform of the urban economic system was later than that in the countryside, when the rural township enterprises were already in full swing, the cities still had various state-owned or collective units dominating the world. Although they have absorbed some unemployed young people by opening branches and taking up jobs for employees' children, it is obviously impossible to rely on these stock enterprises to solve all employment problems.
I remember a hit TV series "Sinful Debt" in the early 90s, from the perspective of children, telling the story of the hardships and warmth tasted by their children in the process of finding their parents from Yunnan to Shanghai after their divorce and returning to the city. But if we switch the perspective to their parents, it's another sad narrative. Unlike their brothers and sisters who stayed in the city, these people suffered for many years in the frontiers and in the countryside, but when they came back, they had to work and no work, and they had no housing.
Fortunately, in 1984, the second year of the crackdown, the reform of the urban economic system was comprehensively launched. Many people saved their first pot of gold by setting up stalls, running transportation, and even various "speculation" behaviors. On the contrary, respected and enviable state-owned enterprise workers like Wang Xiang, who once held iron rice bowls, became the protagonists of another wave of unemployment a few years later.
Regarding the pros and cons of the restructuring of state-owned enterprises at the end of the last century, there are still many debates from academic circles to non-governmental organizations.
On the one hand, with the deepening of market-oriented reform, in the face of fierce competition from foreign and private enterprises, problems such as rigidity, low efficiency, and overstaffing of state-owned enterprises have become more and more exposed. By the end of 1997, 6,599 of the 16,784 large and medium-sized state-owned enterprises nationwide had lost money, with a total loss of 66.6 billion yuan. It is no longer helpful to expand the autonomy of enterprises or promote the contract responsibility system, and property rights reform is necessary.
But on the other hand, property rights reform inevitably involves the diversion and layoff of employees, and the reform pain brought about by the large-scale layoff wave falls on every family, which is unbearable. Data show that between 1995 and 2002 alone, state-owned and collective enterprises reduced the number of workers by more than 60 million. To paraphrase Takeshi Kitano, the tragedy is not the fact that more than 60 million people were laid off, but that more than 60 million people were laid off.
The south is quite good, due to the development of the private economy and the large number of foreign-funded enterprises, the way out for laid-off personnel is quite wide, and there are many receivers of state-owned enterprises.
For example, the paper mill where my mother's family of five worked for two generations first sold my uncle's workshop and machine staff to a German-funded company, and the income of these people not only did not fall but also rose after the conversion. The remaining part of the main factory, because of the relatively light burden and the endorsement of the government, so the surplus employees adopt an "internal retirement system" - usually five to ten years earlier than the normal retirement age, after the internal retirement, you can get a few hundred yuan of "retirement fees" from the enterprise every month, and the government also provides some skills training for these 4050 personnel to help them re-employ.
The more miserable is the northeast, where there are many workers in state-owned enterprises, and secondly, there are few private enterprises and foreign enterprises. Some of the younger or skilled have chosen to go south after being laid off, forming the first wave of northeasterners migrating south - according to the fifth census, the northeast population in the 90s had a net outflow of 404,000.
But more families, because there are old and young, even skilled technicians like Wang Xiang have to stay where they are. The situation of this group of people is much more tragic. At that time, reports such as laid-off workers who had no money to pay heating bills in winter, who were frozen at home, who were sick and had no money to watch at home and wait for death, and even that husbands rode bicycles to send their wives to work at KTV.
"The Long Season" presents the bitterness of this part of the people. It is said that in the play, Liu Quanli took his son to pick up Li Qiaoyun, who was a wine escort in Victoria, from work, I remember that in those years, every time I went to the karaoke hall with adults, the song they sang the most was Liu Huan's "Start Again", the tune is high-pitched, but the singing voice is very bleak. A song will always be accompanied by a series of "Zuan export" for society and the factory director. So much so that later, Huang Hong was scolded by laid-off workers across the country for several years because he said in the Spring Festival Gala sketch, "Workers should think for the country, I will not be laid off".
Writing here, I suddenly remembered the "shock therapy" adopted after the drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which were criticized by many Chinese people, and believed that the law disrupted the economies of these countries and plunged the people into poverty. But in a sense, the reform of China's state-owned enterprises that began in the mid-to-late 90s was nothing less than a shock therapy.
But as we have seen in Eastern Europe, with the exception of a few countries such as Russia, most countries have only a few short years of pain after "shock therapy", after which the economy has begun to recover and rebound. China's luck seems to be better than in Eastern Europe, and in 2001, after the "three-year extrication of state-owned enterprises (1998-2000)", China formally joined the WTO, and the economy has since entered the fast lane and unemployment has fallen.
Therefore, when chasing the drama, I saw a comment that if Gong Biao had not beaten the director of the factory Song Yukun because of Huang Liru, he would have survived those years without being laid off, and a college student like him in the 90s would definitely be able to show his strength and have a bright future after entering the 21st century. This is also the reason why many viewers are most sympathetic to Gong Biao, not Wang Xiang, who died his wife and children.
Today, many young people who lack historical knowledge like to scold capitalists, thinking that all the bad things under the sky are done by capitalists, and they don't understand why people after the 70s and 80s worship the first batch of entrepreneurs on the Internet. But those who have experienced the planned economy era and tasted the pains of state-owned enterprise reform must have been deeply impressed by the factory directors of that era.
Nominally, the director of the factory is only the manager of the factory, and among them there have also been reform pioneers such as Zhang Ruimin and Bu Xinsheng, but such people are a minority after all, and more often, the director of the factory holds more power than many private business owners today, but bears smaller responsibilities -
In the past two years, due to the economic downturn, many private business owners have complained that "they are working for employees", and I think that back then, even if the efficiency of state-owned enterprises was poor, the factory director only reported to the government for help, and in front of the workers, he was still on his toes and said nothing. Workers have been wronged and have nowhere to reason, unlike now, labor arbitration or judicial procedures.
The space for corruption brought about by this unequal power and responsibility is most evident in the process of restructuring state-owned enterprises. At that time, who stayed and who was laid off was often the factory director, the chairman of the trade union, and a few other people had the final say. Even in "The Long Season", Gong Biao beat factory director Song Yukun because of Huang Liru's affairs, and the latter temporarily added his name to the list of layoffs.
What is even worse is that some factory leaders collude with foreign businessmen, smuggle materials, enrich their own pockets, and turn public affairs into private interests, but very few have been prosecuted like Song Yukun. All this provoked widespread indignation among the workers, and until a few years ago, there were major incidents in which the workers of the Jilin Tonggang Group protested against the reorganization and killed the new boss.
It is precisely because of these experiences that many people are full of gratitude for the great improvement in material life brought about by the rapid development of the market economy since the 21st century, and admire private entrepreneurs who have achieved success from scratch and without relying on power. At the end of "The Long Season", the old Wang Xiang's words to his younger self: "Look forward, don't look back", which is very representative of that generation's outlook on life.
But this progressive optimism won't last forever. From the perspective of world economic history, it is very rare and abnormal for China's economy to develop unilaterally and at a high speed in the past 40 years.
When the abnormal returns to the new normal and youth unemployment continues to rise, it is necessary to look back and look at the lessons and solutions from history. This is also the reason why "The Long Season" received higher ratings than reform dramas such as "Great Rivers" and "The World".
As the Russian thinker Herzen said: "Fully understanding the past, we can figure out the present situation; Deeply aware of the meaning of the past, we can reveal the meaning of the future; Looking backward is moving forward. ”