Xie Yong Shi Ke'er: skdyh8
This is one of countless narrative versions of China's ticket economy: "In 1950, faced with a nearly collapsed economy after the war, New China began to brew a planned supply of grain to meet the food and clothing of the people of the whole country. In 1955, the country's first set of food stamps was officially circulated, opening the curtain on China's 38-year-long 'ticket economy'. It was not until 1993 that food stamps, cloth tickets and other tickets officially left the stage of Chinese history. ”
In fact, many people's memories of tickets are gray but beautiful. Because of scarcity, you can be happy for a few days after eating a cream popsicle, watching a movie, reminiscing about the smiles of the characters over and over again, and will be excited about the sex of the female agents. And today, how many meals are worth savoring? Media person Gong Xiaoyue once said a very bullish saying, called "find the right person, eat the right meal." This slogan is really difficult for the current Chinese to achieve. Before listening to Mr. Zhou Xiaozheng of Renmin University talk about their ongoing happiness index research, I have always wondered in my heart, if we really use this standard to understand human society, is the country on the east side that borders us rank first in the world? Because they repeat it in their mouths, people all over the world envy us...
Envy our words Chinese will not be strange, many years ago we have also repeatedly chanted with our own lips, so today, there will be unspeakable complex emotions, kindness, tears, luck, disgust... This is actually a complex experience of how we treat our past growth.
The change starts with getting rid of the ticket. In 1978, Fangcun, Guangdong Province, was the first to liberalize the prices of river fresh, vegetables and pond fish, taking the prices of agricultural products as a breakthrough in the reform of the traditional price system, and taking the lead in opening up prices in a planned manner throughout the country. After 1985, while Guangdong liberalized the prices of important non-staple foods such as fish, meat and vegetables, it also liberalized the prices of a large number of industrial consumer goods, which caused a strong shock throughout the country. By 1987, in addition to the six varieties of grain and oil in Guangdong Province, the prices of other agricultural and sideline products had been fully liberalized. In 1992, Guangdong took the lead in liberalizing grain purchases, sales, and prices, and abolished grain stamps, which was one of the most important contributions made by Guangdong to China's reform and opening up.
Although tickets have been lost for decades, in fact, in Guangzhou today, those tickets are not difficult to see, they are carefully packaged, collected into books, and collected into collections, which are said to multiply in value as time continues to pass. In these collections, how many are true and how many are false, it is difficult to confirm, because realistically speaking, the artistic aesthetic value of these tickets is really not high, and there are no anti-counterfeiting measures, and it is still difficult to distinguish the counterfeiting of banknotes today, let alone these shoddy bills? However, the mood of the Chinese people behind these collections is more worthy of attention: nostalgia and the pursuit of wealth and fanaticism.
It's just that we got rid of these tickets and made them a decoration today, and we really got rid of scarcity?
The Experience of Scarcity in China actually continues to this day: gluttony, greed, luxury... The people of this land quickly went from people in need of food stamps to people who wore Prada, and people frantically pursued their own piece of land and the buildings on it, although they only had the right to use it for only seventy years. If you think about it carefully, it is not difficult to find that these are actually about the shadow of that shortage era in today's projection.
Moreover, the ticket does not only mean lack, it also symbolizes the management and control of each individual member of society by an omnipotent public power, which is replaced by a set of numbers, and the ticket means that the public power permits the individual's desires, allows to eat, allow to wear, permit to procreate, and permit to walk freely on the land that belongs to you. One of the most interesting stories I've seen in memory stories about tickets is that of a newlywed couple on a honeymoon trip, who, because of the lack of national food stamps in the end, had to buy a staggering amount of steamed buns in a certain province and persisted until they returned home. Limited national food stamps minimize mobility.
Saying goodbye to the ticket, material abundance means saying goodbye to hunger, but it does not mean saying goodbye to scarcity once and for all. In fact, we are still lacking, because in addition to basic survival, we have a richer humanity, body, spirit, faith, morality, and so on. In the future, I hope that we can gradually bid farewell to the lack of these levels. This ongoing change and abundance may be more difficult than the road that has already been taken, but we still look forward to a bright future.
[Excerpt from: "Extraordinary Knowledge" Xie Yong / by China Democracy and Legal Publishing House]