by Weijian Shan
Baoquan shared a room with me and four others. He was always fastidious about how he dressed. He would spend hours altering the uniforms himself to make them fit better. He washed his clothes more often than anybody else, explaining that he was old enough to have a girlfriend, so it was important to make himself look presentable. It should come as no surprise that he absolutely loathed crawling on cow manure. He would try to escape those training sessions as often as possible by hiding when the whistle blew.
Once, the company commander caught him and punished him. As we all stood in line and watched, Baoquan had to go through the crawl routine right on a steaming pile of fresh cow poop. We were all amused to see that even then he tried not to touch the ground with his clothes. He crawled quickly on his hands and feet, with his posterior raised high. It was a funny sight. The commander stepped forward and put one foot on his rear end, and he collapsed to the ground onto the manure. We all laughed. Nobody was sympathetic, because we were all covered with manure.
* * *
The worst part of these training sessions was that the drills came every other night, and sometimes several nights in a row. We had to be prepared for emergencies at any time, for it was unpredictable when the Soviets would invade. The Soviets were said to have air-dropped 21 spies, of whom 18 had been captured. But there were three still roaming around somewhere, and we had to be especially alert.
The bugle would usually blow at two or three o’clock in the morning, when most of us were in our deepest sleep. We would jump out of bed, bundle our bedding in the prescribed manner, and rush out to make a formation. In a few minutes, an order would come, and we would start a “rapid march” to an undisclosed location. Nobody knew where we were headed in the darkness. It was always a military secret.
Then, shortly before dawn, we would find ourselves back at the barracks. We would be told it had only been a drill, but that we should not relax our vigilance, because the next time might be real. We would then unload our bedrolls, wash our faces, and get ready for a day’s work or military training. Usually the company leader on duty for that night would go back to his room to sleep.
One night, I remember, we were running toward an undisclosed location in formation. It was pitch dark. Suddenly, the person in front me just disappeared. I instinctively jumped out of the way. I thought he must have stumbled on something and would get up to follow the group, so I kept running. When we returned to our barracks, I learned that several boys had run onto the frozen surface of a cesspool and fallen through the ice. When they walked in later, they smelled so bad that we would not let them into the room. They had to go to the well and wash in the below-freezing night.
Each time there was a drill, the company leader would tell a different story to convince us that it was really an emergency. One night, for example, he announced that intelligence sources had reported that Soviet troops had been spotted in the vicinity. The next night, the “sources” would report the discovery of enemy spies. I never believed any of the stories and hated these exhausting emergency marches.
Soon enough, almost everyone grew used to the stories. Only a fool would have believed that there was a real threat. Li Baoquan did his best to dodge the marches, begging me to answer roll calls for him. Since it was dark, no one would find out if one person were missing. Soon, more and more people were doing the same thing. The company leader began going through our rooms after the bugle sounded to make sure that everyone was out. Even so, some people would leave the group and sneak back to bed in the middle of our marches.
Then one night, I was awakened by a burst of gunfire. I jumped out of bed with the others. Platoon Leader Liu’s bed was in the outer room. He was already up, and sternly ordered us to hit the ground. The rapid gunfire outside continued. We were stunned. So after all, the Soviets had invaded! Despite all the training sessions, we didn’t know what to do. It was completely dark. After a pause, Liu spoke softly. By the sound of the gunfire, he said, we were surrounded. Just then, an object with a burning fuse flew through the window.
“Grenade!” he shouted.
I instinctively covered my head with my hands. This is it, I thought. Then I heard the explosion. It was deafening. When it was over, I was surprised that I could still feel and think. I was still alive. I tried to feel if I was wounded but could not find anything wrong. Then I heard Zhou Wanling crying in a corner and Platoon Leader Liu saying, “Stop that. The enemy will hear us.”
Liu called our names one by one in a low whisper. Miraculously, everyone was alive. There was no time to check if anyone was wounded. Liu said that we had to break out now. Otherwise, we would all be killed in here. Liu ordered us to crawl to the corner of the door to grab our shovels. Then he said that he was going to charge out. We should all follow him and then disperse in different directions. Nobody should stay in the room because the enemy would certainly bombard the house and kill anyone left behind.
There was no time to feel fear. Liu opened the door and ran out. Suddenly, through the open door, I could see gunfire coming rapidly toward him. He fell to the ground.
“Charge!” someone shouted.
“Charge!” we all shouted. Shovels in hand, we all rushed out of the room amid heavy gunfire.
I hit the ground as soon as I stepped out the door and crawled over to Platoon Leader Liu to check if he was still alive. He was, but he could no longer move. He urged me to go ahead and not to worry about him.
Just then, the gunfire stopped. Several flashlights shone from the source of the gunfire. I heard the voice of the company commander. “All right,” he shouted, “the exercise is over!”
An exercise! I looked at Platoon Leader Liu. He was already on his feet. And he was smiling too. An exercise! I could not believe it. What about the gunfire and explosion? Did anyone get hurt?
It turned out that it had all been a setup. The grenade was a dummy grenade that only made a loud bang, very much like a powerful firecracker. The guns had been loaded with dummy ammunition, all blanks. Platoon Leader Liu, of course, had known this all along.
We went back into our room. It still smelled of gunpowder. Zhou Wanling was sitting in a corner. He looked at us incredulously, still sobbing. For a while, I did not know if I should laugh or cry. But I finally laughed, together with the rest. Platoon Leader Liu said he appreciated my coming to his rescue.
After this exercise, I knew that we would not care if the entire Soviet army attacked.
After the “gunfire exercise,” things quieted down a little. There were still emergency drills, but they didn’t take place as frequently.
Then the Army Corps leadership had a new idea. Each squad had to build two air-raid shelters. This time, even Platoon Leader Liu thought the idea was stupid. If the great leader’s strategic thinking was to abandon this piece of land when the Soviets invaded, why should we spend our efforts and resources to build air-raid shelters? Why didn’t we build more storage places for potatoes? Besides, who would care to stage an air raid on the Gobi, where you could go for miles without seeing a soul?
But an order was an order, and the deadline was strict. We started right away. Every inch we chiseled out of the frozen ground took many hours of effort. We had to collect dried grass and cow manure to build fires to warm the earth before we could dig. This process was grindingly slow. And the project became more difficult as the hole became deeper. The entrance was very small, allowing only one person to crawl in at a time. It was almost impossible to turn around once you were inside. We had to take turns crawling in, scratching at the earth with a sawed-off shovel, and passing a basket of dirt to the person behind. Inside, I felt like an ant digging tunnels in an ant colony.
Every day we would come back tired, our faces covered with dirt and sweat. We all wished that the Soviets would invade already. We would have felt better about fighting a war with the Russians than about digging this hole in the ground.
Finally, after several weeks of hard work, the project was completed. There lay our air-raid
shelter, a deep hole in the ground. Ours was one among many that now dotted the land in front of our company compound. I thought it must have been a strange sight from the air to see all these holes. I wondered if the Soviet pilots would mistake them for storage places for secret weapons.
Once the air-raid shelters were finished, we were ordered to build trenches along one side of the company compound. We didn’t know or care anymore if the Soviets would attack us from that particular direction. It was easier to build these trenches than to dig holes in the ground. But it was hard nonetheless and progress was slow. Nobody thought for a minute that these trenches would be of any use. Why would the Soviets fight in trench warfare with us to take over a few run-down mud shacks? But who knew? Perhaps the Soviets were that stupid.
In any event, by the end of November, the war preparation projects were completed. Our company was so well protected that there were trenches and air-raid holes everywhere. In fact, it turned out that these projects did have lethal powers. That winter, many of the cattle and horses roaming the land in search of dried grass fell into the ditches and died from being trapped.
We hadn’t had emergency drills at night for several weeks, because the work building air-raid shelters was exhausting. But the second night after the air-raid shelters were built, emergency whistles woke us up. This time, we were told, Soviet bombers had been spotted about a few hundred kilometers to the north. Before the commander could issue an order, a messenger came rushing over to report that the aircraft were now only 50 kilometers away. The commander ordered us to run to the air-raid shelters.
We rushed to our shelter. I was leading the pack of our half squad of people. The hole was just big enough to squeeze into. I soon reached the bottom and could feel the hole being filled by the bodies of others. There was too little room and it was pitch black. I was suddenly overcome by a strong sense of fear. What if the shelter collapsed? I knew I would have no chance of surviving.
As we were waiting for the Soviet bombers, my feeling of fright became more and more acute. Finally, I could take it no longer. I shouted I couldn’t breathe. By then, everyone was frightened, fearing the hole could collapse. There was a unanimous shout and everyone hurried to squeeze out. Finally, all of us did, emerging like ghosts from graves. I felt enormously relieved. But we had to keep quiet in case the platoon leader saw us and ordered us to go back in again.
The Soviets never came. But there were human fatalities nonetheless. There were accidents in other companies. People were killed digging these shelters. Some of them collapsed, burying people inside.
The next spring, when the ice melted and the grasslands turned green, some friends and I took a walk to the air-raid shelters.
None had held up. We even had a hard time finding the location of the one we’d built. All that remained was a slight concavity where it had collapsed into the ground.
* * *
It was not until the 1990s, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, that China and Russia finally settled their border disputes on Zhenbao Island by dividing it between them. It was also in the 1990s that China signed a treaty with Kazakhstan, which was already independent from Russia, to resolve the border dispute in the Terekti region.
Chapter 8
Repairing the Earth
In the 1960s and 1970s, China was still a largely agrarian society. The numbers are staggering when compared with those of the United States. In 1970, about 83 percent of China’s total population were farmers or rural residents, compared with 4.6 percent for the United States. Yet the Chinese population was four times that of America’s; China’s agricultural population was 70 times that of the United States.
The United States and China are of roughly equal size, in terms of total area. But the United States is endowed with much greater agricultural gifts: Cultivated land in the United States represents 17 percent of its total territory whereas in China it is only approximately 13 percent. Therefore, China’s cultivated land is only 73 percent of that of the United States, but worked on by 70 times as many farmers, to feed 4 times the population.
As such, China’s rural areas were extremely poor and farming was backward and primitive. We worked the earth with shovels, hoes, and sickles, tools that were mostly unchanged from those our ancestors had used 3,000 years ago. Some agricultural jobs, such as seeding (e.g., wheat, corn, vegetables), planting (e.g., rice, potatoes, saplings), and weeding, were done by hand, as ancient people had done probably 50,000 years ago or even earlier. With such ancient tools or no tools at all, the yield was meager even from the most fertile land. It is fair to say that Chinese agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s was barely enough to feed the population even in the best of times.
Whereas US farming had already been largely mechanized for decades, Chinese farming in the 1960s and 1970s was by and large done by manual labor. Farming was hard work anywhere in China, but it was much tougher in infertile areas like the Gobi, where peasants could barely scrape out a subsistence living.
It is estimated that during the Cultural Revolution approximately 16 million educated youth, representing about 10 percent of China’s urban population, were sent to the countryside, particularly to remote border areas and poor regions. Whereas much of the rest of the world was undergoing a process of urbanization, China, uniquely, was doing the opposite, forcing millions of young urban dwellers to migrate to poor rural areas. Official newspapers hailed the Cultural Revolution as “unprecedented in history.” It truly was, in many ways, against historical trends.
* * *
Our mission in the Gobi was to farm. I doubt that anyone had seriously considered the feasibility of large-scale farming in the Gobi Desert, but the idea was not entirely crazy. Our farm was located only about 15 kilometers (∼9 miles) from Lake Wuliangsu and about 50 kilometers (∼30 miles) from the Yellow River. West of the lake lay the Hetao (“River Loop”) plain, where the Yellow River takes a sharp bend to the north before looping down and continuing its eastern course to the ocean. This was the river’s most fertile region. Periodic flooding from the sediment-rich river and a well-developed network of irrigation canals made the area ideal for farming. It produced an abundance of crops familiar throughout northern China, such as wheat, corn, sorghum, potato, pumpkin, watermelon, and other types of melons.
The Hetao region was already well populated and the land was well cultivated since the Qing dynasty (1636–1912). Our place was outside the Hetao, however, and our land was barren and sandy, which is what the Gobi is known for. Our mission was to cultivate new land, carving farms out of the Gobi. There already were a few pockets of land that had been made arable. Urat Farm, where our company was based, had been one example, a small agricultural enterprise run by the dozen or so old-timers we called “old farm workers.” Over time we learned that the “complicated backgrounds” of these old farm workers, about which we’d been warned, referred to their checkered personal histories. Some of them used to be homeless; others had run afoul of the law and served their time. The government sent them here to cultivate land for agriculture in order to feed themselves. Over the years, they picked the best land and built a modestly sized farm. They were producing enough to feed themselves and still have a surplus to sell.
Then we arrived. Our first challenge was water. Farming requires water, and, of course, there was not much of that in the Gobi. But Lake Wuliangsu was nearby. The Yellow River was not far away. It was possible to channel water from either one to our land. Indeed, that was the brilliant idea of our leaders. They reckoned that as long as we could build an irrigation system of canals and ditches, we should be able to turn the arid land into a fertile farm. All it took was our labor, which was plentiful and cheap.
For that purpose, we were made to dig ditches throughout the year, every year, in all kinds of weather conditions, rain or shine, scorching heat or freezing cold. With a vast area to cover, there was no hope we would ever complete our work, so we worked on digging ditches endlessly. According to Liu Baoquan, diggin
g ditches was one of the four most tiring things in the world (the other three were making bricks, harvesting wheat, and having sex).
Regardless of how much water we managed to bring to our land—and we built enough canals and ditches to bring in plenty—we had no hope of producing crops in a meaningful way on much, if not most of, the land, we tried to cultivate. This had to do with the soil conditions.
The land in the Gobi was usually covered by sand and gravel, much of which had to be removed before the soil could be transformed into farmland. But that was just the start. In much of the Gobi, the soil was highly saline and alkaline, so much so that large tracts of land looked like they were covered by dirty snow in the hot summer. The saline-alkaline crust prevented the soil from “breathing,” suffocating crops. Most crops, especially wheat and corn, whose tolerance for saline is low, do not grow in such soil. Only some tough thorn bushes grew here, and even those struggled to survive.
We made an effort to treat the soil. We mixed it with sand carried over from wherever we could find it. Supposedly, sand aerates the soil to allow the water to nourish crops more effectively. That sounded good in theory, but in reality it did not really work. To treat a large area of land required much more manpower than a few hundred of us, with our bare hands, could provide.
You might think that irrigation would help improve the soil, flushing out all the salt and alkali. To the contrary, it only made the problem worse. The water we channeled to our land came from either Lake Wuliangsu or from the Yellow River. The lake water itself was somewhat saline, and the water from the Yellow River picked up salt and alkali from the ground it flowed through. Irrigation with such water only made the soil worse as salt and alkali in the water seeped into it. When you ponder what it cost in terms of labor and resources, the project was an enormous drain from the beginning.