1932: Playing with the Japanese Communist Party with a doll

"Mushroom Digger!"

"That's right! This is a good boy." Then he looked at Liu Yunbin:

"Yunbin, what about you? You're already 9 years old. Tell me honestly, do you like taking extra classes after school?"

,

Liu Yunbin, who was usually taciturn, looked at his father Zhao Ziqi's face, then looked at his sister Liu Aiqin. He hesitated for a few seconds and was about to speak when Fujiwara Kanezane suddenly added:

"If you're not lying, I'll ask your sister Yi Liu to come back and see you after she finishes her New Year's work."

"...I...I'm really behind in my studies, so I really need to make up for it..."

Zhao Ziqi felt heartbroken at her eldest son's precocity.

Even though he had no time to pay attention to Liu Yunbin, he still carefully learned about the situation when the other party first arrived in Northeast China.

In his hometown in Hunan, Liu Yunbin did farm work every day and had almost no opportunity to receive education. Compared with other children, his academic foundation was indeed weak.

The same thing happened to Liu Aiqin, who was fostered in a workers' home in Hankou. If Li Desheng had not led the Red Army into Wuhan, she would have been sold to someone else as a child bride by the impoverished workers.

Perhaps this is why they are particularly sensitive to phrases like "Now that you have a good life, you should study hard," and remain silent about tutoring.

"But...I really don't like tutoring..."

Liu Yunbin mustered up the courage to say:

"I study very hard during school, and I want to go out and play with my friends on Saturdays and Sundays."

Zhao Ziqi frowned and said nothing. "Xiao Aiqin, do you think so too?"

"I...I listen to my brother...I don't like it either...I just come here to play with my brother..."

After soliciting the children's opinions, Fujiwara Kanezane asked Lu Xun again: "Xun brother, what do you think?"

"How do I watch it? I just watch it with a smile!"

Lu Xun was flipping through a book of exercises he had plundered from a student in a cram school. He sneered at the words:

"How can I view treating children as mere puppets for exams and tools for achieving so-called family glory? If they are not treated as human beings when they are young, they will not be able to be human beings when they grow up!"

As we all know, Lu Xun opposed "examination-oriented education," "traditional education," and the utilitarian values ​​of "scores determine the future." He advocated "liberating children, respecting nature, and abandoning enslavement," and called for protecting children's imagination, desire for play, and spirit of exploration.

Even when Fujiwara no Kanezane wanted to implement the current examination system, he raised many objections and "supplementary suggestions". Naturally, he hated the idea of ​​"after-school tutoring".

I didn't lose my temper and curse at anyone just now because I was considering the presence of the children and the face of several people.

Chen Kui and Zhao Ziqi looked unhappy.

Even though they did not take the initiative to ask their children to take extra classes, and even though Fujiwara Kanezane also said that it was not their wives' original intention, violating the ban is violating the ban and there is no way to wash it away.

Lu Xun even put forward:

"The current education system must be corrected! If they dare to send their children to Liaoyang for secret tutoring today, tomorrow they will send their children to a rural area in Harbin for tutoring! This cannot be solved by a few bans!"

Although Lu Xun himself hated using children as test subjects, he was not an unsympathetic person and understood the thoughts of many other parents:

take an exam!

take an exam!

take an exam!

Only by passing the exam can you succeed! Only by passing the exam can you have a future!

Therefore, as long as the examination system itself does not change, tutoring will never be completely eradicated!

If we can have an "autumn outing" today, is it strange to have a "summer camp" tomorrow?

,

Zhao Ziqi and Chen Kui were hesitant to speak about Lu Xun's statement, while Fujiwara Kanezane remained silent. He just continued to rub Chen Zhifei's face and continued to ask:

"Wang Yong, when you were Zhifei's age, what did you usually do? Catching dragonflies and digging out bird nests, doggy-paddling in the river with your bare bottom and getting covered in mud, being chased around the yard by your elders with brooms?"

"Uh... almost..."

"Ziqi, what about you? I know you love studying, but you can't be like them, forcing yourself to study in a place like this even on Sundays, right?"

"Well... that's not the case..."

"Xun'er, what about you?" "Runtu, you haven't seen it?" "That's right!"

Fujiwara Kanezane clapped his hands with a smile:

"This was the childhood of our generation: playing with friends, catching cicadas and digging wild vegetables, growing wildly like weeds... Don't look at me like that, I was the same way. My parents doted on me too much and didn't want me to receive a suffocating traditional aristocratic education."

This is true.

Regardless of whether it was the parents in this life or the previous one, and regardless of their purpose, the outcome was similar—Mark or Fujiwara Kanezane had very happy (extremely wild) childhoods, but only later on did they take different paths.

Lu Xun and the other two were thinking in their hearts.

No wonder this guy doesn't look like a Japanese noble at all. "But this is us, not them."

Fujiwara Kanemaki changed the subject and his tone became serious:

"Comrades, have you ever thought about whether our next generation, or even future generations, will have the opportunity to live this kind of life? What kind of society will they face in the future?"

"This...you might as well explain it more clearly."

635 The Future of Future Generations

Fujiwara no Kanezane's question was so broad and grand that even Lu Xun didn't know how to answer it for a moment, and could only come up with a classic line:

"You might as well explain it more clearly."

"Why are you so angry all of a sudden...Okay! This is actually a systemic issue involving education, society, industry, agriculture, and other dimensions. I'll just ask you a few key questions."

Fujiwara Kanezane snapped his fingers:

"First, our new nation must achieve complete and thorough industrialization in order to become truly powerful. Do you all agree on this?"

"Um"

The three of them nodded.

Lu Xun recalled the conversation before the establishment of the Ministry of Education about the future direction of the education system. Fujiwara Kanezane had emphasized this to him earnestly:

"...Industrialization must be pursued. No one can stop it, no one can stop it, because it is the only way for us to forge our dilapidated mountains and rivers into a steel behemoth, the only way for the Chinese people, and even East Asians, to stand up proudly."

"So, I think the quality-oriented education you've been advocating is theoretically correct, but at this stage, the practical conditions for its implementation are lacking."

"Because apart from benefiting a bunch of children of the rich and powerful, the majority of the people will not benefit at all. Instead, they will be dragged into the bottomless pit of 'make-up classes,' exacerbating social injustice."

Lu Xun did not understand industry, but he personally experienced phenomena such as "the sharp drop in prices of industrial products after production" and knew that this was beneficial to the people. Therefore, he was extremely supportive of industrialization and temporarily gave up the idea of ​​fully implementing "quality-oriented education."

Education at the national level is fundamentally different from education at the individual level. After experiencing what happened today, he thoroughly understood why only a "unified exam-oriented education" system could be implemented, and grasped the cruel reality that "even if exam-oriented education is inhumane, it is the least bad option for the vast majority of people."

You see, just making up for the academic subjects has almost become the exclusive domain of the children of the "rich and powerful" like Zhao Ziqi and Chen Kang. How can ordinary people possibly afford the "quality education" that requires more resources to be effective?

Ultimately, such a system may select "talents", but they are most likely "exclusive talents" for the powerful class, rather than the talents that the country really needs.

He would rather not have that kind of future.

"Secondly, in order to build an industrialized power, our established national policy is to completely centralize power, crack down on feudal conservative forces and local tyrants, break up clan power, and reshape the social structure into atomized small families. Is that correct?"

The three nodded again.

That’s right, cracking down on “big families” is one of the established core national policies.

Was the frantic extermination of landlords in Northeast China really just for their small plots of land and gold and silver?

Is it just to distribute land to farmers and win over the people?

no!

The fundamental purpose is to destroy the networks woven by large families, disintegrate their ruling foundations at the grassroots level, and truly realize "the central government's will and power sinking to the individual"!

If the central government cannot even control the grassroots government, then what's the point of industrialization? Not only can you not even gather qualified workers, the resistance from the grassroots rural areas alone is enough to make you cry.

Ironically, this set of established national policies from the Chinese Communist Party was questioned in later generations:

Look at that guy, he was so angry that he would do this and that if he didn't have the protection of his clan, he would completely forget how the clan had oppressed and exploited ordinary people in the past thousands of years.

Although this will undoubtedly harm the family interests of Zhao, Chen and Lu, who come from a family of farming and reading, a family of generals and a family of scholars respectively, Fujiwara no Kanezane, who comes from a wealthy family, does not care, so they are even less likely to mind.

"Third, for a late-developing country like ours, the industrialization process is inevitably accompanied by enormous social costs, including but not limited to a significant decline in fertility. Do you all understand and agree with these views and the theoretical basis behind them?"

This time, Zhao Ziqi and Chen Ying were silent for a moment before slowly nodding. These views were not something that only emerged in later generations.

As early as the time of Marx and Engels, they observed this trend and pointed out in Capital that "industrialization transforms the warm and affectionate family relations into 'pure monetary relations'";

John Stuart Mill, a contemporary of the same period, predicted in his Principles of Political Economy that "industrial civilization will prompt people to rationally control fertility through methods such as birth control, leading to a structural decline in the population's fertility rate."

Later, British sociologist Charles Booth found through empirical research in his book The Life and Labour of the London People that the average number of children born to female factory workers (2.3) was significantly lower than that of housewives (4.1).

In modern times, American demographer Warren Thompson systematically expounded in his book The Problem of Population that "birth rates decline with industrialization, urbanization, and the popularization of education."

French demographer Adolphe Landry pointed out directly in his book The Population Revolution:

"The core drivers of the decline in fertility rates are the decline in the economic value of children caused by industrialization (from labor (productive assets) to burdens (consumption burdens)) and the reduction in child mortality (no need for excess births to ensure survival)."

Such knowledge, especially the papers collected by Fujiwara no Kanematsu from various countries, was naturally not worth considering during the revolutionary period when everything had to give way to "survival".

But now that the CCP has become the ruling party, it has begun its naive exploration of how to build a new country. Almost every CCP member sent to the Northeast is learning eagerly.

Today, "industrialization will inevitably be accompanied by the pain of social transformation, and the population growth rate will naturally slow down with development" has become a consensus among Northeastern Communist Party members and related researchers.

At the very least, the absurd calculations made by some third-rate demographers, such as "the population in 1953 was more than 6 million, with an annual growth rate of 2.2%, and the population would soar to 26 billion 50 years later", and the extreme birth restriction policies such as "one wife, one child" proposed based on this, will only be ridiculed.

"Once the behemoth of industrialization begins to unleash, it will crush many things—the extended families living together on the ridges of the fields, the villages where relatives support each other, the clan ties that connect us even if our bones are broken... Then, problems will arise."

Fujiwara Kanezane raised his finger:

"It's almost impossible for our descendants to grow up with a large group of uncles and brothers like us. They may only have one or two, or even no brothers or sisters, and most of the time they can only keep themselves company;"

"If their parents are too busy with work to spend time with them, and if they are forced to attend various cram schools, they will be deprived of even the pitiful happy time they have on Saturdays and Sundays;"

"As a result, the child has almost no other opportunities for social interaction throughout the year, except for his tired parents after get off work and limited contact with classmates at school. His life will fall into a kind of structural loneliness;"

"So, I would like to ask, what will be the world view, outlook on life, and values ​​of children growing up in this environment? Will the national governance system and social operating rules we have built at this stage be able to adapt to the future that may come soon or perhaps decades from now?"

Lu Xun's face had become completely serious. He let out a long sigh, and suddenly the name "Runtu" appeared in his mind.

Taking up children's rest time for cram school lessons is very similar to "Runtu had to do heavy farm work at a young age" in that it deprives children of their childhood and stifles their spirituality.

It also takes up the children's play time and gradually grinds the light in their eyes, turning a brave, intelligent and energetic teenager into numb, dull and cautious.

The future?

In a daze, Zhao Ziqi recalled the scene when he first came to Northeast China and had a long conversation with Fujiwara Kanezane on the train about "what the communist society would look like."

The question or possibility raised by Fujiwara Kanezane was actually something Marx had already seen: "He tore off the veil of tender affection that covered family relationships and turned them into pure monetary relationships."

But before, he just thought capitalism was abominable and never thought in this direction:

Industrialization is inevitable, but as it advances rapidly, how many things we take for granted will be uprooted?

Are we really ready for this kind of radical change?

Chen Ling pulled his son, whose face was distorted but still grinning foolishly, into his arms and asked directly:

"What bad things are they going to become, and what changes do we need to make to prevent that?"

"Let's talk about the first issue first. Although it can't necessarily be said to be a bad thing, it does deserve our high vigilance."

Fujiwara Kanezane, whose toy was taken away, pouted in dissatisfaction:

"Just like textbook knowledge needs to be learned, social skills such as interpersonal communication, emotional expression, collaboration and empathy must also be acquired through real-life interpersonal interactions. However, if children are confined to books and exercises all day, they lose the opportunity to learn these interpersonal skills."

"The consequence is that, compared to their parents, these children may generally lack 'human touch', despise interpersonal relationships, have rigid thinking and are inflexible, tend to be silent and keep everything to themselves..."

Seeing Zhao Ziqi was about to speak, Fujiwara Kanezane waved his hand:

"I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. You don't have to worry too much about Yunbin's personality. Scientific research requires this kind of focus and patience. Someone who's too lively and active doesn't necessarily make a good engineer..."

"However, when people with this personality type encounter setbacks or pain, they often don't even know who to talk to, and they won't easily confide in others, relying solely on themselves to cope with the situation."

"If you adjust well, it's fine. But if you don't, you'll easily fall into confusion and greater pain, and then fall into a vicious cycle or even self-destruction..."

"

Lu Xun and the other two all felt a chill in their hearts. They were somewhat unable to understand, but inexplicably felt that it was reasonable.

Zhao Ziqi had many children - 3, but Chen Wei and Lu Xun only had one each, and the latter probably only had one in his lifetime.

If their children have no time to play with friends, can only keep company with books all day, and have no brothers or sisters to communicate with at home, it is indeed very easy for them to fall into this predicament.