Dazhai (Xiyang)
Dazhai ( 大 寨镇 , Dàzhài Zhèn - "great fortress") is a large community in Xiyang County (昔阳 县), which belongs to the prefecture-level city of Jinzhong (晋中 市) in the Chinese province of Shanxi . Dazhai is about 200 kilometers southwest of Beijing. The large community has an area of approx. 183 km² and almost 33,000 inhabitants (end of 2009).
Administrative structure
Dazhai is made up of 61 villages. These are:
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The Dazhai Village
The village became famous in 1964 as a model of socialist agriculture recommended by Mao Zedong .
Dazhai is located in the Taihang low mountain range, which offers unfavorable starting conditions for agricultural use. For this reason, Dazhai was an extremely poor village with around 400 inhabitants until it was collectivized in the mid-1950s. The politically committed agricultural worker Chen Yonggui (1913–1986) took the initiative there as the local secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, through maximum collective mobilization of the entire population, to build terraces on the hills with paved fields, mostly accessible by tractors, and to create an irrigation system . It was also possible to plant fruit trees on the Tiger Head Mountain ( Hutoushan ) near Dazhai . Dazhai also operated the breeding of silkworms and bees as well as the mining of bauxite and had its own workshop for repairing machines. All families got solid houses instead of the old huts, school education and health care were guaranteed.
This policy corresponded to Mao Zedong's conviction that the masses of simple workers and peasants, guided by the right political line, can free themselves from poverty through heroic efforts and redesign their living conditions. "Learning from Dazhai" meant: "relying on your own strength", not short-term and personal advantages, but rather placing the long-term and conscious social transformation of the country at the center of action. Especially since 1968, when the Cultural Revolution tried to mobilize the whole country in this way, Dazhai has been constantly visited by study groups from all over China.
In September and October 1975, a national conference on learning Dazhai was held. The previously unknown Politburo official Hua Guofeng gave the main speech . He announced that efforts to create Dazhai-type circles should be stepped up across China. While at that time the basic economic unit of cooperative agriculture was predominantly the "production group" consisting of about a dozen families, in the Dazhai type the whole village formed a direct economic unit as a "brigade". Hua described this as a prerequisite for extensive mechanization, which was to be achieved by 1980. At the same time, speeches at the conference emphasized that the collectives must not be guided by selfish interests, but always have to keep an eye on the interests of others, from neighboring villages to the whole country, which is why constant raising of political awareness is necessary be.
Hua Guofeng succeeded the late Mao Zedong in October 1976. Chen Yonggui played an important role in his management team. Hua had by the arrest of the so-called " Gang of Four stoked" the excessive ideological duration mobilizations by the extreme left, which constantly quarrels, an end and put on a program of modernization of the country, where he continued holding on to Dazhai model and continuity of the Wanted to preserve the foundations of the Mao era. However, he was soon sidelined by the growing reform movement around Deng Xiaoping . The dispute over agricultural policy played a decisive role in this: The Deng wing rejected the Dazhai model and strove in the opposite direction of decollectivization, based on the observation that the private plots that the farmers in many places were still allowed to cultivate in addition to the collective arable land , delivered greater yields. After initial experiments by reform politician Zhao Ziyang in the province of Sichuan, the Dengists conceived the "system of responsibility": Initially, it was allowed to dissolve poorly functioning agricultural collectives and distribute the land to the farming families for cultivation. In 1981/82 this was made a general rule, while Hua Guofeng lost his offices.
The reprivatisation of agriculture was associated with a fundamental change in China's development strategy. Mao's policy was based on the principle of avoiding any dependence on foreign countries, relying on one's own strength and achieving development through heroic mobilization in labor-intensive large-scale operations. Dazhai was an example of this: it was possible to remodel a rough and barren landscape in the Chinese interior, to multiply agricultural production and thus to free resources for industrialization. However, the general propagation of the Dazhai model did not bring the hoped-for successes. The reformers' strategy aimed at first promoting the material interests of the family economy and developing markets in agriculture, while at the same time the coastal areas were made the engine of growth and modernization by opening up to foreign capital.
In order to enforce this turnaround, Deng Xiaoping has now staged a regular smear campaign against Dazhai. The previously praised model brigade was suddenly exposed to ridicule by claiming that it did not achieve its services on its own, but with state help, and that the success statistics were all falsified. Chen Yonggui and his family were personally discredited. In 1983, Dazhai was forced to return to the family economy. In 1987 statistics were disseminated which were supposed to prove how much the "system of responsibility" was superior to the old collective system. The American expert on China and agriculture expert William Hinton has pointed out how these statistics were manipulated. He had visited Dazhai many times and was now seeing a decline.
This accelerated in the late 1980s. Guo Fenglian, party secretary of Dazhai since the early 1970s, finally succeeded in reorientation by founding a communal company that mainly produces textiles and spirits under the brand name Dazhai. Agriculture is hardly practiced in Dazhai today. Claims that the Dazhai irrigation system was actually built by the state in the 1960s is firmly denied by Guo Fenglian, who was then one of the famous "iron girls of Dazhai". In the meantime, not only do the 500 or so residents of Dazhai defend their story, but the Chinese media as a whole are once again portraying it in a more benevolent and balanced manner.
Web links
- Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Posters: Dazhai
- William Hinton: Mao's Beloved Model Village
- People's Daily: Dazhai at the Turn of the Century
- People's Daily: China's Model Village: from Political Symbol to Brand Name
Coordinates: 37 ° 34 ' N , 113 ° 43' E