Opening remarks
Founded on April 7, 2016, "Ili Old Stories" is an online publishing platform for original works focusing on Ili old stories. Over the years, the platform has adhered to the main theme of socialism, worked hard to help the party's cultural work, and launched a large number of works that the masses like to hear, which have a certain influence in Ili Prefecture and even the whole of Xinjiang. In order to further strengthen the integration of soldiers and land and promote cultural sharing, this platform will join hands with the "Ili Old Story" WeChat public account to launch a number of real and touching stories that are close to the people, close to life, and reflect the past and today of Ili Land
Author: Feng Hui
Ili Wool Spinning Factory is the most precious collection in the photo album of the memories of a generation of Ili people! The textile women workers of the wool spinning factory are the most beautiful, most confident, and most refreshing and heroic walking through the female soldiers on the land of Ili in the years of ruhong; their sonorous and powerful footsteps seem to still echo under our feet; their various postures, like the meandering Ili River, flow quietly in our hearts, day and night, month after month, year after year!
- Author's inscription
The waters of the Ili River are turning in waves,
There is a woollen mill next door.
The big girl of the wool mill,
Chewing in the mouth is bubble gum,
I'm wearing something really good,
……
This is a folk song that was popular in Yining City in the 1970s, and it is a song written according to the melody of Cigangnaqiga, which sings about the textile workers in woollen mills.
Yili Wool Spinning Factory is a large-scale state-owned wool spinning enterprise in the industry that is well-known in western China in the 1970s and 1980s, and has been guided by national leaders many times. Employees and their families nearly 10,000 people, products are exported to home and abroad, 32 products won the title of national excellence, ministry excellence, district excellence, a number of economic indicators in the national textile system and Xinjiang in the same industry ranked among the best, is a bright pearl on the banks of the Ili River.
In the 1960s, my grandmother and I went to see my aunt in a woolen factory, and for the first time I saw a textile worker wearing a white hat and a white apron; the first time I walked into the staff canteen and ate snow-white steamed buns; the first time I walked into the staff dormitory, I saw the large bathhouse next to me: for the first time, I found that in addition to Han Ren Street, there is a "small city" here. For the first time in countless times, I have a sacred yearning for the woollen mill, and the woollen mill has been fixed on my heart since then.
Wang Minbin, a female worker on the wool production line, provided a photo
Wool mills are different from tanneries, flour mills, agricultural tool factories, and machinery factories, which are basically handicraft workshops, where old workers work; unlike power plants, power plants are places of heavy physical work, basically male workers; wool mills are textile enterprises, with a high degree of modernization, basically relying on exquisite hands to complete operations, and the welfare is very good, so it has become a temple for young and beautiful girls in the Ili area.
In the glorious period of the 1970s and 1980s, the wool mill basically pocketed the beautiful girls in the Ili area, which was called by the Ili people: "Ili has a daughter country, and there are many beautiful women in the daughter country." Therefore, in those years, many families in Ili chose daughters-in-law or young people to find a partner, and the first choice was the girl of the woollen factory, because they represented youth, beauty and the glory of large state-owned enterprises. Indeed, at that time in Ili, the girls of the woollen mill could be recognized at a glance, they were fashionable and beautiful, they were affectionate and confident, they laughed loudly, and they held their jaws full of superiority.
Group photo of the once beautiful female textile workers of yili wool spinning factory in the factory area
The lads who could not eat the grapes and wanted to see the grapes; the young lads who could not pick the flowers and wanted to smell the flowers, would come early in the afternoon to the power plant, next to the knotted head tree, waiting for the young weavers who came down from the morning shift. When the female workers with fashionable curly hair, fashionably dressed and riding manganese steel bicycles float past their eyes, their eyes are like the scopes in the hands of soldiers, slowly moving with the target until they disappear...
The girls in the wool mill have made many handsome men feel affectionate and sleepless all night. However, do you think they are only beautiful? Then you're dead wrong!
Photographed in 1986 by Wang Minbin, a female worker blocking a car at the Yili Wool Spinning Factory
The literary and artistic propaganda team of the wool spinning factory, with female workers as the main body, was the most professional amateur performance team in the Ili Prefecture Amateur Propaganda Team at that time, which was completely comparable to the Ili Prefecture Song and Dance Troupe. In the Yili women's amateur basketball team, the wool spinning factory women's basketball team is a strong team, and the leader is Yila (Irina), who has established outstanding merits in the Xinjiang women's basketball team, she was selected for the national youth women's team in 1962, and transferred back to the Xinjiang women's basketball team in 1964, which was the absolute main force of the Xinjiang women's basketball team at that time. She changed the traditional model of women's basketball push shooting with both hands at that time, with a masculine one-handed shooting, and she became the focus of the audience's attention in every game.
In 2018, some of the women's basketball players of Ili Wool Spinning Factory took a group photo at the party celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of Ili fifty years later
The wool spinning mill was once a large profit and tax household in the Ili region and even in xinjiang, and every copper plate handed over was cast by these beautiful girls with the sweat of youth. They are also the "March 8" red flag bearers, production pacesetters, new "Long March" commandos, and outstanding female workers on the national textile front in autonomous prefectures, autonomous regions, and even the whole country.
Lang Li, a female worker in the original wool workshop, and Jin Xin, a female worker in the spinning workshop, won the champion of operation experts in the textile industry skills competition in the five northwest provinces. In order to reward Jin Xin for her excellent results in the competition many times, the factory rewarded her with a set of buildings, and this heavy special prize spread throughout the streets of Yining City at that time.
Yili wool spinning factory original wool workshop Lang Li at work
However, the socialist economic system has developed to a new stage, entered a planned market economy, in the context of the restructuring of state-owned enterprises throughout the country, coupled with the end of the last century to the beginning of this century, the domestic consumer goods market has also undergone tremendous changes, the original textile high-end products worsted and woolen wool, replaced by a variety of low-end and medium-grade fabrics. The main product of Yili Wool Spinning Factory worsted woolen fabric has been slow to sell for many years, although all the staff and leaders of the wool spinning factory have taken a variety of contingency measures such as setting up distribution points and changing the product structure, and have not changed the situation of loss. Eventually, it will lead to bankruptcy reform.
After the restructuring of the wool mill, the workers encountered the problem of re-employment, but they did not bow to the difficulties, let alone add trouble to the country, and began a difficult second entrepreneurship when people reached middle age.
Some of them opened a husband and wife restaurant, some went to the Khorgos port to do border trade, and some continued to study and recharge. One year, I took a taxi driven by a female driver, and she said: She used to be a worker in a wool mill, and there are nearly 100 female drivers in the Yili taxi industry, most of whom are laid-off women workers in wool mills. This surprised me that in the small frontier town, where the taxi ownership was very low at that time, there was such a high probability of female drivers, and many of them came from wool mills. Their optimistic attitude towards life, their tenacity not to bow to fate, and the unique essence, qi and spirit of female textile workers made me involuntarily extend my thumb of admiration to the female driver.
There are many wool spinning factories, laid-off unemployed and not discouraged, hard work to compose new songs, Bao Xiaoying is a typical representative, she founded the enterprise from a small workshop with only a few employees, to Xinjiang's top ten national clothing brand enterprises - Yining Kunmo Garment Co., Ltd., which has more than 400 employees. From business owners to Communist Party members who do not forget their original feelings of home and country; from the simple operation of enterprises, to technical poverty alleviation, industrial poverty alleviation, and even during the epidemic period, enterprises have turned around in a hurry and produced a large number of urgently needed masks and other epidemic prevention materials for the Ili River Valley. She has been successively rated as a model worker in the autonomous region, a red flag bearer of the autonomous region's March 8th, and a deputy to the people's congress of the autonomous region.
Many years have passed, and the girls in the wool mill have grown up for generations, and most of them are already grandmothers and grandmothers. In the model team of Ili University for the Elderly, you can see their dashing figures; in the riverside park on the Ili River, you can see their happy figures; on Douyin and Kuaishou, you can still see their happy figures.
On August 3, 2018, the former employees of the wool mill spontaneously organized a grand gathering attended by hundreds of people to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the factory. They laughed, they reminisced, the joy of the long-lost reunion, the scene when they met, I had mixed feelings. Those former female workers, full of the plot of the years, let me seem to see the dazzling when they once bloomed, smell the fragrance of the long-lost.
In 2018, the female textile workers of Yili performed a small chorus at the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the factory
Although their lives have a little twists and turns, they are still happy; they were once the most strife and colorful blossoms in the Ili River Valley; they were the Venus in the hearts of many Ili boys; they were the "March 8th" red flag bearers who created wealth for the country; they were heroes who did not bow their heads in the face of difficulties, did not yield, and walked through the bumpy journey of the years with their heads held high!
The girls of the woollen mill are the memories of our generation, the bookmarks of that era full of Ili stories. I firmly believe that the girls who have experienced the ups and downs of the wool mill and the infinite scenery, as well as the bystanders who have witnessed the ups and downs and rises and downs of the wool mill, will always treasure it and them in the title page of life!
In 2018, the flowers and guli who were like flowers and jade are now rare people, but the temperament is still not reduced! The picture shows a web excerpt
Author's Epilogue:
There is a force in the darkness that connects me closely to the wool mill, and it is inseparable. In 1964, when my aunt joined the wool mill, my grandmother often took me to see my aunt, which was my happiest moment, because I could eat the snow-white steamed buns in their staff canteen. After going to school, there were classmates in the class who were in the wool mill, especially in middle school, and many of the students were children from the wool mill of the Tenth Primary School in Yining City. After "going to the mountains and going to the countryside", more than twenty of our classmates in our grade were recruited to work in the wool mill, becoming the proudest special group of that era.
In the early 1990s, state-owned enterprises entered the stage of transformation and upgrading, during which my classmate Xu Yan (then director of the Yining Municipal Taxation Bureau) introduced me, I approached the leaders of the wool spinning factory, hoping that the wool spinning factory would create opportunities in the reform of the marketization of state-owned enterprises, the shareholding system, and even the diversification of equity, and strive to make a difference in the capital market. But in the end, the wool mill was stranded in the voyage of market-oriented reform.
Later, I heard many inspirational stories about the second entrepreneurship of female workers in wool mills, especially in the American chapter, I saw the touching scenes of female workers gathering together to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the factory, which made me feel a thousand emotions! I have always wanted to write an article to record this company that has created miracles, to reproduce those textile women workers who I admire immensely, to commemorate the huihong era, and now I have finally fulfilled this wish.
In 2018, some old employees of Yili Wool Spinning Factory took a group photo at a party celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the factory.
Image credit: Provided by the author except by attribution
The final interpretation of the content involved in the article belongs to the "Old Story of Ili"
Source: Ili Old Story
Edit: Dang Yanli
Review: Cui Kai She Guanghui