In many film and television works, it has focused on describing the romantic years of the literati of the Republic of China, and the grievances and hatreds between many masters of the Republic of China, as well as the ups and downs, have also made us have endless fantasies about this era.
Like some remarks such as the absurd and beautiful Wei and Jin eras, many film and television works and online articles have also hinted to us more than once that the Republic of China was a very romantic era, and people like Gao Xiaosong praised the Republic of China as a beautiful era.
Indeed, if we only focus on the lives of the masters of the Republic of China, we can indeed feel the romance in it. However, the Republic of China is not only the masters of the top society, but also more ordinary people.
It was a time when there were not only poetry and harmony, but also endless wars, poverty and famine. This article will combine historical materials to take a look at the real ordinary people of the Republic of China.
In modern society, we often joke to ourselves, what do those so-called general trends have to do with people with a monthly salary of 3,000.
From these remarks, it is not difficult to see that a monthly salary of 3,000 often becomes a very low but common salary figure, and you can't afford to buy a house, a car, and even more so any better luxuries.
However, despite self-deprecation, a basic salary of 3,000 yuan can still meet our basic needs.
The average price of rice on the market is only 2 yuan9, and even the more expensive rice is only 5 yuan, and 300 yuan is enough to meet our basic food needs.
As for oils and salts, a bottle of ordinary vegetable oil is 68 per bottle, which is enough to consume for three months or more. Salt is only two yuan a pack, enough to consume for two months or more. As for meat, the average price of pork in the market is only 134, and the monthly salary of 3,000 yuan is enough to meet the consumption of meat once or twice a week.
Therefore, even if the rent of 1,000 yuan a month is put aside, in fact, the bottom people can still meet their basic living conditions through the basic salary. Although we complain about the poor jingle bell, we will never suffer from hunger.
However, there is a cruel statistic in history, we did not announce until 1987 that the basic solution to the problem of food and clothing was basically solved, and before 1987 there was still a relatively common problem of hunger and food and clothing in the country.
For this alone, the Republic of China is far from being as good as we imagined, the so-called romance is all nonsense, and most of the people at that time were still struggling for a full meal tomorrow. Of course, these are just fictions, so let's look at the specific data.
First of all, in terms of income, this paper uses the research data of scholars such as Bu Kai and Li Jinghan to show the national income survey during the Republic of China, and takes the most representative peasant households as the main body of the survey.
According to statistics, between 1921 and 1938, scholars sampled the total annual income of some farmers across the country, of which the average income of farmers in Zhejiang was 186, 250 in Anhui, and 145 in Hebei.
According to Bu Kai's statistics, from 1921 to 1925, the average annual total income of peasant households in the country was 334 yuan.
In other words, nationwide, the annual income of a farmer is about 334 yuan, and when it is distributed to various provinces, this figure is even less, especially in Hebei, which is only 145 yuan.
You must know that this is not a personal income, but a family's income, although the original money is worth more than now, but even in modern society, we hear that a family's annual income is only 3,000 yuan, and we will still be shocked.
It can be seen that during the Republic of China, the income of the people at the bottom was quite low.
In addition, from 1921 to 1925, scholars conducted a sample survey of the economic conditions of 2,866 peasant households across the country, taking the Emei Mountain in Sichuan Province as an example, their income from crops accounted for only 20% of household income, livestock income accounted for 27.4%, household industry income accounted for 22%, tree income accounted for 14%, and labor income accounted for 13.6%.
According to this data, it can be seen that the people at the bottom of the Republic of China are not just like us, they can get a salary of 3,000 by fishing, but they need to do various jobs to get this basic income.
First of all, it is the main business of farming, which is the core work of all farmers at that time.
As a result, most of the peasants at that time also raised chickens and pigs.
Taking the farmers in the Chengdu Plain as an example, the average farmer in the Chengdu Plain raises 6~8 pigs per family. In addition, there is also large-scale chicken raising, and chickens can also lay eggs in exchange for money, and they can also be exchanged for money, but the income is only equivalent to the income from farming, which is still very meager.
Therefore, women in peasant families will also supplement cottage industries, such as silkworm raising, weaving and weaving straw hats, which is the traditional model of male farming and female weaving society, which was very common at that time.
But this is not enough, for example, some homesteaders in Tujiayan, Sichuan, in addition to the above jobs, they also need to work as vegetable carts and laborers.
After all these efforts, the farmers of the Republic of China were able to get the low wages that we all look amazing today.
Think about what we have encountered in modern society, many young people do their own work for housing and car loans, work 8 hours during the day, take a extra income after working overtime, sit in front of the computer every day and stay up until one or two o'clock, the spirit of work is exhausted, and they have to continue to work at 8:30 on the second day.
We laugh at ourselves as social animals, but compared to the people at the bottom during the Republic of China, what is one or two jobs? Many of them have to do four or five jobs to make a living, which is a contrast that is not the same as now.
So far, we have explained how low the income of the peasant families in the Republic of China was and how difficult it was to earn income, so what was the price level of the Republic of China at that time? Because the price fluctuations in the Republic of China at that time were quite large, and the range of fluctuations up and down could reach 100,000 times, we will investigate the proportion of expenditure and the average price.
Taking Hebei as an example, according to Li Jinghan's survey, at that time, a considerable number of rural households in Hebei rented houses, and only 24 of them lived in their own houses.
According to Lee's survey, the monthly rent of each ordinary house is 0.3 yuan, and the rent of a better house is 0.4 yuan. Therefore, the annual rent of the 71 rented houses he surveyed was 721 yuan, with an average of 10.15 yuan per house and an average of 0.85 yuan per house per month.
As for clothing, according to Li Bozhong's survey, it is estimated that the per capita cotton cloth consumption of a family of five in Jiangnan is 8.4 horses, and the average per capita is 1.7 horses. Farmers in North China use 1 horse of cloth per capita per year.
According to the price level at that time, the per capita cotton consumption of farmers in Hebei at that time was only 2.3 yuan per year.
In terms of food, according to Li Jinghan's survey data, the price of vegetables in Hebei is about 0.011 yuan per catty, beans are 0.063 yuan per catty, meat is 0.169 yuan per catty, and wheat is about 0.076 yuan per catty.
It seemed that the prices at that time were much lower than now, but the result was unexpected, and under such low prices, the consumption of rural households in Hebei was still stretched at that time.
According to Bukai's 1922 survey report on 150 peasant households in Yanshan County, Hebei Province, the local peasant households' consumption of beans accounted for the majority of consumption, with each household's annual consumption reaching about 150 kilograms, but the consumption of meat and eggs was pitiful, with a total of only 4.1 kilograms, of which the amount of meat consumption was only 1 kilogram.
What's even more surprising is that, according to a detailed study of the data, only 15 of the 150 farmers at that time bought meat, and more than 100 other households did not see meat all year round, except for the staple food of beans, which could only be supplemented with turnips, carrots and pumpkin.
In addition, according to Li Jinghan's survey of 34 farmers in Dingxian County, Hebei Province, per capita per capita per year consumption of vegetables and beans accounts for the mainstream, of which cabbage, soybeans and pumpkin account for the largest proportion. As for meat consumption, the per capita consumption of pork per year is only 2.52 catties.
What is this concept? A person can't even eat three pounds of meat a year. In the past, we often heard the elders say that we never saw meat, and we could only eat a little during the Chinese New Year, but this time we didn't feel anything.
But now looking at these specific data, it is simply sad and tearful.
In this regard, some people may say that the counties inspected by scholars are too poor, and whether the average of the whole province will be different. However, according to the statistics of scholars, the per capita annual consumption data of farmers in Hebei Province is about 58 catties of beans, about 198 catties of vegetables, and only 7.6 catties of meat.
According to the standard of a typical family of six, Hebei farmers consume 348 kilograms of beans, 1,188 kilograms of vegetables, and only 45.6 kilograms of meat throughout the year. If we convert this data, how often does an ordinary peasant family in the Republic of China eat meat on average? I'm afraid that even if we drink broth, we can only smell it once a week.
Therefore, we can conclude that the Republic of China is not at all the romantic era we imagined, and not everyone is like a talented woman like Lin Huiyin, who only needs to focus on academics, only need to focus on love, and only need to wear cheongsam to maintain elegance in Shanghai.
It's more about the daily exhaustion of work, the same coarse grains every day, and the endless reverie of meat every night, keeping the hunger to sleep.
It is said that the 3,000 basic salary of people today is not as good as that of dogs, but compared with the low-level farmers in the Republic of China, our 3,000 basic salary today is not panicked, which are completely two concepts.
Moreover, we can know from the analysis of historical materials that the Republic of China was an era of extreme suffering.
First of all, during the Qing government, because of the large amount of indemnities owed and the division of China by various powers, the people at the bottom were already living in poverty. For details, please refer to some newspaper cartoons at the time, and the pressure of one tael of silver per person in the Xinchou Treaty was enough to force every low-level Chinese citizen to death.
Later, although the Republic of China was established, the Republic of China has always owed foreign debts, and it has to repay Gengzi indemnity, and even the government of the Republic of China has collapsed because of the lack of money, where can the people have a better life?
In addition, there has been a warlord war since the Republic of China, taking Hebei and Sichuan as examples, for example, the tax collection in Goose City, which let the bullets fly, has been collected in modern society, and Sichuan at that time was more serious, and Hebei was also in charge, and the people had already been squeezed dry.
It was difficult to live on their own, coupled with the chaos and taxes at that time, more people not only couldn't afford to eat meat, but even lived was a dream.
Even in Chiang Kai-shek's so-called "10-year golden period of the Republic of China", Chiang Kai-shek's new economic policy did not really improve the situation, and then it was the Central Plains War, the Anti-Chiang War, and the War of Resistance Against Japan.
In fact, we can also see from Li Jinghan's data that the income of the low-level peasants in the early days was only more than 100 yuan, but later the increase suddenly reached 500,000 yuan, and by 1938, it reached a terrifying 1 million yuan.
This was not because the peasant households at that time had become rich, but because the government had over-issued gold dollar coupons, which led to serious price inflation, and money could not buy food.
This is the Republic of China in real history, and this is the truth under our fantasies.
References: "Research on the Living Standards of Sichuan Residents in the Republic of China", "Research on Farmers' Consumption and Living Standards in Hebei Province since Modern Times: Focusing on the 30s of the 20th Century". 》