Hello, viewers! Welcome to “Century Truth”.
In January 1935, at the foot of Huaiyu Mountain in Jiangxi Province.
When Fang Zhimin was dragged out from the haystack, people from Yiyang, Shangrao, and Nanchang flooded the streets as if celebrating a festival, just to witness the capture of the monster that had kept them awake at night. Children were lifted by their fathers, adults were crowded and could hardly move, and some even set off firecrackers – not to celebrate the victory of the Nationalist Army, but because they could finally have a peaceful sleep.
This was the last memory that the living Fang Zhimin left for the people.
But a few dozen years later, the same person was written into textbooks, becoming the “great proletarian revolutionist, military strategist, outstanding leader of the peasant movement” in the eyes of the Communist Party, a martyr sacrificed for “national liberation”.
Today, let’s turn back the pages of the textbooks, tear off that layer of sugar coating, and see what’s really inside.
In 1899, Fang Zhimin was born in a village in Yiyang, Jiangxi, with the original name Fang Yuanzheng.
His grandfather was a local gentry, the family was relatively affluent, but by his generation, they had declined and became self-sufficient farmers.
He attended a private school for a few years in his youth, and at the age of seventeen, he entered a county-run high school. It was the era of new ideological trends after the May Fourth Movement, and he began to read some books introducing the Soviet Union and communism. The books described a society of equality where there was no gap between rich and poor, which deeply attracted him. From that moment on, he renamed himself “Fang Zhimin”.
In 1919, he entered Jiangxi Provincial First Class Industrial School. He was radical in nature, often organizing student movements, and was eventually expelled from school in 1921.
He then entered a church school – Jiujianan Weilie Middle School. Although it was a school run by the church, he participated in the “Non-Christian Alliance” and became engrossed in books like the “Communist Manifesto” and “Das Kapital”. He believed that communism could save China.
In the summer of 1922, due to poverty at home, he dropped out of school and went to Shanghai. Shortly after, he joined the Chinese Socialist Youth League and officially became a member of the Communist Party two years later.
In 1924, he returned to his hometown of Yiyang and established a small Communist group, beginning to lead peasant movements, but he quickly encountered resistance.
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