As we all know, Let the Bullets Fly is a critically acclaimed magic realism film. Various film reviews and interpretations of it have also emerged in recent years. Many people focus on the metaphor behind it and forget the historical reality behind it. In fact, many of the seemingly magical bridge sections in it are the most authentic displays of history. Director Jiang Wen himself said:
"There are no metaphors, it's all true"
In the movie, there is a scene in which after the bandits and shiye took office in Goose City, Shi Ye found that the previous county governors had taxed Goose City to 90 years later, that is, in 2010 AD.
Let the bullets fly movie pictures
Is there such an exaggeration? Is this true?
As we all know, in the early years of the Republic of China, it was an era of warlords, attacking each other and fighting each other, grabbing money and grabbing territory, and taking the city for three days without sealing the knife, this is a common thing, not a big news.
But after the tax revenue was reduced to 90 years, this thing can be done more than bandits. But remember, this happened in real time.
The prototype of Goose City is a certain county town in the hills of eastern Sichuan, in the early years of the Republic of China, Sichuan was also full of wars, warlords were rampant, and the people were fat sheep to be slaughtered in their eyes, or the kind that ripened at any time and used at any time.
In the melee, the strength of the Sichuan warlords is also expanding, from more than 100,000 people in the 1916 Patriotic War, to the 1930s, when The Sichuan Second Liu Xiang and Liu Wenhui fought, the strength of the two sides had exceeded 700,000, counting other small and medium-sized warlords, Sichuan had nearly one million troops, accounting for half of the number of troops in the Republic of China at that time.
With so many troops, the number of salaries has also risen. In order to solve this problem, the Sichuan warlords unanimously set their sights on the honest and obedient peasants.
At the beginning, it was only two or three years of field tax, so it should be urgent. Later, it was collected four or five times a year, and each time it was collected for four or five years, or even more than ten years. So much so that some farmers have only lived for decades themselves, but they have paid their great-grandchildren's taxes.
For example, in Xinfan County, Sichuan Province, in 1933, it was taxed five times in a row, and the tax was collected for two years at a time, which was equivalent to ten years of tax paid by labor in one year.
A corner of Xinfan County, Sichuan
This is only a tax of legitimate reputation, and when the army goes out on a campaign, it will be temporarily added to the tax for another year. The 28th Army of the Sichuan Army was stationed in Xinfan County for 4 years, collected taxes for a total of 50 years, and accumulated the tax revenue to the 80th year of the Republic of China, that is, 1991, when many readers in front of the screen should have been born.
Such a pre-levy system has also been implemented in Anhui and Fujian, but it is a temporary policy. In these places, taxes are collected in advance for several years at a time, but as long as they have not collapsed, they may be able to relax a little in the next few years.
But only in Sichuan can taxes be raised decades later. The emergence of this situation is certainly not that the warlords in other provinces are more "benevolent" than the Sichuan warlords. Instead, sichuan's field tax has been low since the Qing Dynasty.
At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, Sichuan was in the midst of war for a long time, the population loss was very large, and the productive forces were seriously damaged. Faced with such a situation, the Kangxi Dynasty adopted a policy of "never adding endowments" in the last years, attracting the population by reducing the burden.
Kangxi
Therefore, the field tax in Sichuan is very low, with an average of only 0.1 taels of silver per mu of land, which is one-eighth of the Jiangnan region in the same period. The lakes of the Qing Dynasty filled Sichuan, causing a large number of people to pour into Sichuan. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, Sichuan's population had exceeded 40 million, and the area of arable land had expanded by 40 times, but the field tax remained at the standard of the Kangxi Dynasty, so Sichuan's agricultural tax was much lower than that of other provinces. Therefore, Sichuan has become a tender leek in the eyes of warlord leaders, and Zeng Guofan once collected several years of field endowments in Sichuan as military expenses.
At the time of the fall of the Qing Dynasty, Sichuan's field tax combined was only nearly 3 million silver, which was only a quarter of the Jiangnan region in the same period. This explains why the peasants are constantly being squeezed into misery, but the warlords can still grab money with impunity.
Of course, the most direct reason is the "defense zone system" formed by the Sichuan warlords, in this case, not to mention the central government of the Republic of China, that is, the Sichuan Provincial Government can not control. The one who can really manage every county is the army.
But in the melee, the garrison will change at any time. Today this county may still be under the management of your Liu Division Commander, and tomorrow it may be replaced by Commander Li Jun.
As Mr. Lu Xun said: "The banner of the great king of the city's change."
But the taxes collected by the previous king will not be remembered by the next king.
Sichuan warlord division map
For example, in Pi County, Sichuan, there used to be a saying: "Jinwenjiang, Yinpi County", which refers to the prosperity of Wenjiang County and Pi County. PiXian has 300,000 mu of paddy fields, can produce 200 million catties of grain, and has a positive annual field tax of 80,000 yuan. As a result, this rich land has also been targeted by warlords.
From 1918 to 1923, PiXian was occupied by Liu Cunxun's Third Army, and Liu Cunxun pre-levied taxes three times, and the tax was collected until 1927.
In 1924, the Third Army marched west, and Pi County fell into the hands of Deng Xihou's Second Army. From 1924 to 1935, in the past ten years, Deng Xihou collected taxes a total of 64 times, counting the taxes of the previous Third Army, pi county's taxes have been received in 1992. Of these, 19 years of tax were collected between 1933 and 1934.
The reason is that Deng Xihou first participated in the Erliu War we mentioned earlier, and then began to attack the base areas of the Red Army in northern Sichuan. In order to make up for the loss, the frenzied exploitation was carried out from the peasants.
Fortunately, Pi County's economic foundation is good, the social order and agricultural production have been relatively stable, there is almost no resistance, and it has even been commended as a model county.
But what kind of urine the warlords are, everyone knows, they have no lower limit, and what is more terrible than the field tax pre-levy is the so-called additional tax.
How much additional tax a place can collect depends entirely on how many names the local warlord can come up with.
Many counties have as many as 30 to 40 kinds of additional taxes, including but not limited to local fees, tuition fees, judicial fees, car and horse fees, labor costs...
Some warlords really can't think of it, so they directly call for miscellaneous fees and miscellaneous taxes. In the beginning, the warlords would still make up a few nice tax names, after all, they could still make faces.
Later, the warlord melee reached the white-hot stage, and some warlords directly stopped pretending, that is, they came to rob you of your money, can you pay this money?
The Twenty-first Army of the Sichuan Army has created a tax called "emotional donation", and guess what this tax is for?
But it is not a new person who gets married, and when he has feelings, he has to pay money, and the people of the Twenty-first Army explained it like this:
"Thinking that the military and the people need to contact feelings, so they collect taxes"
Mr. Huang Yanpei once studied that the amount of additional taxes in many places in Sichuan has exceeded 20 or 30 times that of the positive taxes. The most exaggerated in Sichuan Leibo County, the additional tax is 73 times the positive tax.
That's just the numbers released by the warlords, and maybe the real numbers will be higher. Later, even rich places like Pi County could not support it.
In 1927, the county magistrate posted a notice that whoever could not pay the tax would cut human flesh to make up for it. The county magistrate of Nanjiang County even said such inhumane words as: "Killing people is forgivable, and it is difficult to tolerate arrears."
The peasants were squeezed to such an extent that many small and medium-sized landowners also went bankrupt.
The tradition in Sichuan is that landlords collect grain from farmers and then exchange these for money themselves. At that time, grain prices fluctuated greatly, and landlords could hoard grain to earn the difference.
However, in the face of warlords who collect taxes more than a dozen or twenty times a year, small and medium-sized landlords cannot get money, and can only sell grain at a low price, and in the end they can only sell their land.
At this time, the warlord spokesmen, the "Huang Silang", will come to buy land, and the "Huang Silang" will not pay taxes, and their taxes will naturally fall on ordinary farmers.
At the same time, unlike the small and medium-sized landlords, the "Huang Silang" people have martial arts and regimental training, and when necessary, they can use force to ensure their own income.
There is such a thing in the book "Collection of Sichuan Literature and History Materials": In Jiang'an County, Yibin City, Sichuan Province, there is a farmer named Wan Yihe who really cannot pay taxes, and said to the people of the collection bureau, I can't pay taxes after selling all my grain, so I might as well hand over the land to the state, and as a result, the local tax bureau naturally does not allow it.
Peasants like Wan Yihe were everywhere in Sichuan at the time, either fleeing to other provinces with their belongings or simply joining the warlords.
Twenty years after the Republic of China, Sichuan has ten rooms and nine empty spaces, comparable to hell on earth. In 1934, 400,000 of the 600,000 people in Hechuan County could not eat, and half of the 23,000 peasants in Chongqing were too weak to lift their hands, becoming a "ghost town" in the real sense.
It was not until 1935 that Chiang Kai-shek's forces entered Sichuan, ending the warlord melee. In order to appease the people of Sichuan, it was ordered that the military expenses of all armies should be paid uniformly by the government, and the provincial field tax was only collected once a year. Later, however, it was requested that the collection of land taxes be accompanied by temporary military and security fees.
However, with the Japanese invasion in 1937, the Nationalist army was defeated again and again in the frontal battlefield, Chiang Kai-shek fled to Chongqing, in order to solve the military expenditure, in 1939, Chiang Kai-shek appointed himself as the chairman of Sichuan Province, personally micro-operated the tax collection work of Sichuan.
Until 1945, Sichuan collected a total of 21 million stones of grain, which was equivalent to collecting field taxes 10 times a year according to the grain price at that time. In the 8 years of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, it is equivalent to the 80 years of field taxes levied in Sichuan, and with the previous warlords, it is expected that the taxes will be collected until the 22nd century.
At that time, an acre of paddy field could produce 4 stones of grain, of which 2.5 stones were handed over to the state, and after the rest was exploited by the landlords, there was almost no left, and the peasants almost planted and handed over how much. Pure white dry, no matter the rice.
Therefore, at that time, when the autumn harvest was in full swing, anti-donation activities would break out in various places, and in the spring of the following year, there would be a large-scale grain rush in the city. So when the People's Liberation Army finally marched into the great southwest, Sichuan was quickly liberated.
After understanding these histories clearly, we will understand that what Master said about taxation after 90 years is not an exaggeration or a magic, but a realistic and the most authentic expression of history.
Finally, I would like to summarize it with a sentence from the instructor:
"Everything in the War of Resistance, everything in life, was essentially given by the peasants."
Welcome to a friendly discussion in the comments section!