The title of "landlord" is quite far away from us today, but as soon as someone mentions it, it still immediately takes on a vicious face in their minds, as well as words such as exploitation, oppression, and ruthlessness.
It can be seen that the landlord class left a huge wound of the times on the people.
In the memory of the general public in modern times, the classic image of the "four landlords" must be lingering, but in fact, among these four people, Huang Shiren is a fictional image, and the story of Nan Batian has nothing to do with the prototype, only Liu Wencai is a real person and has indeed done countless evils.
As for the most famous Zhou Papi, it is an even more special example, and the life experience of his archetypal character is more than that of the interpretation in dramas and literary works......
Huangdiantun Village is located in Fuxian County in the central and western part of the Liaodong Peninsula, which belongs to Wafangdian City today, and in the early years of the Qing Dynasty, a group of Shandong people moved here from their hometown under the tide of breaking through the eastern part of the country, including a Zhou family.
Since they went to the eastern part of the country, of course, for a better life, the Zhou family has been very industrious and thrifty for several generations, working hard to earn money, and the money earned is used to buy some land.
The life of the Zhou family was very cold, and they were reluctant to buy the trouser belt, so they made it with strips of cloth. The leftover vermicelli is reluctant to throw away, so take it out and dry it and eat it. ——"Zhou Papi's "1947": A Pioneer National History"
So after many years of painstaking management, by the time Zhou Chunfu arrived, the family already had some assets.
This so-called asset is actually more than 100 acres of land, which was considered poor in those days? Of course, it is not, but for a family of more than 20 people, it is at most solid.
Moreover, the Zhou family's fields are not rented out at all, and they are all cooked by their own families, so Zhou Chunfu was a rich peasant at best when he was young.
However, like his ancestors, he loved to buy land and was good at managing it, so later the land increased to 240 acres, and there was also an oil mill, a mill, a dyeing mill, and a grocery store.
It's just that when his family business is indeed increasing, Zhou Chunfu naturally begins to be too busy, so he can only start to hire long-term workers to help take care of it, and he pays these workers wages and takes care of food, and these people help him work.
This is Zhou Chunfu, most of his life can be described as extremely boring, there is nothing to talk about, but it can also be said to be quite stable and happy.
After all, in such a turbulent era, the Zhou family has land and money, and the family has a wife and children who are hot on the kang, and his life should have ended silently without anyone knowing.
But everyone, including Zhou Chunfu himself, probably couldn't have imagined that in his later years, as well as behind him, countless earth-shaking changes would take place, and even push this little old man to the foreground of history, affecting the memories of several generations of Chinese......
In October 1947, when the clarion call of the Liberation War had been fully sounded, a vigorous land reform movement was also launched in the rear of the revolutionary area.
Zhou Chunfu was actually not "classified" before, he was classified as a rich peasant for the first time, and because he already had a workshop, he was classified as a double rich peasant, which is all pertinent.
In December of that year, everyone in Huangdiantun was notified and rushed to the playground of the village primary school, where a group of representatives of poor and middle peasants stood in front of Zhou Chunfu in turn to speak, that is, to accuse him.
During this period, there were a few people, all of whom had a holiday with Zhou Chunfu, and took the opportunity to speak and kicked him a few times. And most of the people who have been in contact with Zhou Chunfu have a relatively peaceful attitude towards Zhou Chunfu.
At that time, Zhou Chunfu was already quite old, coupled with perennial illness, he died not long after returning home.
As a result, those who had been at odds with Zhou Chun in the past began to fan the flames again, saying that they had succeeded in overthrowing a landlord with the power of the peasants, and that they had set an example.
In fact, Zhou Chunfu can be said to be completely wronged, first of all, as mentioned earlier,
Secondly, Zhou Chunfu's treatment of the long-term and short workers under his hands not only does not have any "cruel" behavior, but can be said to be quite conscientious, and today, I am afraid that he can be regarded as a good boss.
This is not made up out of thin air, because in Huangdiantun Village at that time, there were many people who had worked for the Zhou family, and these people left a lot of their true testimonies.
Changgong Wang Yizhen later recalled:
At that time, his body was relatively thin, but Zhou Chunfu said that as long as he could hoe the ground and could carry food. When he was 20 years old, his mother made a white coat, and Zhou Chunfu also asked people to get his own dyeing workshop to dye him for free.
- Du Xing, "All walks of life, Zhou Papi is a kind person"
Another long-term worker, Kong Xiande, said:
When he worked in Zhou's house for a year, he not only paid money, but also had good food and drink, and he could earn 8 stone of grain a year, which supported his family.
In the 60s, Kong Zhaoming, a former Zhou family worker, also said:
"At that time, what we ate at Zhou's house was cakes, bud rice porridge, and tofu. ”
Since everyone knows that Zhou Chunfu is a good person, why did so many people hate Zhou Chunfu back then?
In fact, on the one hand, he does have a small amount of assets, and on the other hand, it is the confession of many people in the village, accusing him of "oppressing his family", saying that he has arranged rotation work for his four daughters-in-law, and they have to work all month long, and other family members are not allowed to relax, they have to be busy with their hands.
"The five sons have their own division of labor and can work, but they are very harsh on their daughters-in-law, and they and their children are required to wear patched clothes" —— —— "Zhou Papi's "1947" - Pioneer National History
Based on the impression of the landlord at that time, I suddenly felt that if you are so ruthless to your family, wouldn't it be even more inhumane to squeeze the common people, which is already evidence of ironclad.
And there is another very important reason, that is, Zhou Chunfu himself "owes", according to the recollection of long-term worker Wang Yijiao:
"The old man was willing to buy land. When talking to people on the ground, ask, "Do you sell your land?"
In addition, Zhou Chunfu is not poor in the first place, which naturally makes people equate him with the landlord.
But in fact, according to the detailed evidence collected in the future, we can know that the Zhou family has worked hard for several generations to get rich, and Zhou Chunfu believes that hard work is the source of the current family business, so he strictly disciplines his children and does not let them be pampered, but he is very generous to others, and has never oppressed workers.
Speaking of which, everyone understands that Zhou Chunfu was not only wronged, but he himself is quite a kind person, but after he died, how did he become "Zhou Papi"?
In April 1955, an autobiographical novel "Gao Yubao" was published in the China Youth Publishing House, and the story told in the book was very simple, that is, a doll named Gao Yubao was oppressed and exploited by a landlord surnamed Zhou since childhood, and then tried his best to escape, and finally embarked on the revolutionary road in the army.
As soon as the book was published, it became an instant hit across the country, and because of the positive energy of the story itself, and the empathy of the vast majority of peasants who hated the landlord class at that time, it quickly became a super bestseller, with a total of more than 5 million copies printed, distributed in 7 languages in China, and translated into more than 20 languages overseas, setting a new record for best-selling novels at that time.
Especially in the 9th chapter of the book, it is said that this landlord nicknamed "Zhou Papi", in order to get the workers up early to work, even got into the chicken coop himself, and learned the chicken crowing before dawn, so the plot is both profound and funny, and has become a classic.
However, outside the book, the author Gao Yubao himself is a native of Wafangdian, Liaoning, so many people think that the prototype of "Zhou Papi" in his pen is Zhou Chunfu.
What's wrong with that? Actually, there are a lot of problems.
First, Gao Yubao actually has nothing to do with the Zhou family at all, at most he heard about this family at that time, because after "Gao Yubao" became famous, from the descendants of the Zhou family and many long-term workers of the Zhou family back then, they all unanimously proved that they never remembered such a person.
Later, a person from the same village met Gao Yubao and naturally asked him if what he said in the book was true, and Gao Yubao said that this was actually "an artistic problem of literary creation".
But that wasn't the end of the story, and much later, even more surprising news appeared.
In 2008, someone anonymously posted an article on the Sichuan Ziyang Literature and Art Network, directly stating: The book "Gao Yubao" was not written by Gao Yubao himself at all, but by a Ziyang writer Guo Yongjiang.
This incident soon attracted widespread attention, in order to effectively collect evidence, Zhou Chunfu's grandson Meng Lingqian found Wang Honglin, a writer of Ziyang Historical Records, through the chairman of the Ziyang Writers Association, who was Guo Yongjiang's close friend before his death, and it was through his testimony that everything was revealed.
Gao Yubao was born in a pure poor peasant family, he has not read any books since he was a child, he did study on his own after joining the army, but he definitely did not reach a high level of literary literacy, so how can he write a novel with objective writing, smooth plot, and some depth?
It turned out that Gao Yubao was a typical person who liked to ask questions at that time, so Guo Yongjiang found him and asked Gao Yubao to "revise" his autobiography.
said that it was a revision, but in fact, there was not even an original manuscript at all, and it was completely written by Guo Yongjiang based on some oral statements by Gao Yubao.
At that time, it was Guo Yongjiang who finished writing a chapter, and Gao Yubao took it to copy a chapter, and then took it to publish, and the manuscript fee was divided equally between the two people.
And both the article and the novel must be accompanied by annotations at the end to prove that the book was completed with the help of Guo Yongjiang.
For example, Guo Yongjiang (pen name: Huangcao) once wrote a letter to the Ziyang County Zhi Office, mentioning:
"The Biography of the Wild Grass" took a long time from data collection to collation...... thirteen chapters of the novel "Gao Yubao" are still being sorted out.
And now more scholars have found that many ingenious plots such as the classic "rooster crows in the middle of the night" in the book are likely to be fictionalized by the author:
The "midnight rooster crow" itself lacks scientific basis,...... The re-excavation of the predecessors by Zhou Chunfu's descendants refutes the rationality of "rooster crow in the middle of the night" to a certain extent.
——Huang Hua, National Symposium on Journalism and Communication, Communication University of China, "An Investigation of the Ideological Mechanism in the "Politics of Beliefism": A Case Study of the Textual Evolution of "Chicken Crow in the Middle of the Night"
But later, due to compositional reasons, Guo Yongjiang was beaten as a bad guy when he was "anti-rightist", so his name completely disappeared from "Gao Yubao".
After that, people no longer knew that the book had anything to do with him, and Guo Yongjiang only revealed it to his family and friend Wang Honglin.
Facts have proved that sometimes, the story outside the story may even be as wonderful as the story itself, and the image of "Zhou Papi" extended from Zhou Chunfu has penetrated into the hearts of tens of millions of Chinese people, but he is indeed a loyal and honest man, a kind and diligent rich peasant, such a bizarre difference, more of a microcosm of a small person in the tide of the times.
But non-good and evil are at ease in the hearts of the people, in Huangdiantun Village, no one really regards the Zhou family as a feudal landlord bully because of a novel, on the contrary, many long-term workers who worked in the Zhou family back then have even maintained a good relationship with the descendants of the Zhou family......
And the reason why the images of "Huang Shiren" and "Zhou Papi" are deeply rooted in the hearts of the people is mainly because they contain too many shadows of the old society. The actions of these landlords in novels and film and television dramas make the suffering people feel the same way.
At that time, I worked hard day and night, but I could only beg for a living, and even I was tired to death, and I couldn't be buried like a landlord's dog......
Nowadays, although that era is gone, the people and events of that era are still ringing above us like an alarm bell:
Zhou Chunfu is not "Zhou Papi", but in the land of old China, there are "Zhou Papi" everywhere!