Painting History: China’s Revolution in a Global Context By Jiawe ...

peasants. Another option was for students to travel far from home to work on farms in remote frontier regions, and for this they were paid a state salary. I had volunteered to serve in Heilongjiang Province, and was assigned to the 42nd regiment of the 4th division of the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps with its base located 4,000 kilometers from home, and just ten kilometers from the Soviet border. All Heilongjiang regiments were stationed in Beidahuang (a.k.a. the Great Northern Wilderness), a vast terrain of black earth along the linked basins of the Ussuri, Songhua, and Amur Rivers. Decades earlier when the Japanese Army occupied the region and established the puppet state of Manchukuo, many Chinese were forcibly relocated there to cultivate the land. Then in 1957 and 1958, respectively, large numbers of former workers from the Railway Engineering Corps, and equally large numbers of volunteers demobilized from the PLA after service in the Korean War were resettled there to create farmland out of the virgin soil in a huge conglomerate called the Agricultural Reclamation Corps. During that period, some farms were also converted into huge labor camps for criminals and so-called “rightists.” Dispossessed farmers from Shandong Province were also sent there. After 1963, when the Soviet Union became China’s new enemy, the labor camps were relocated elsewhere.

In June 1968, Mao issued a directive to the PLA of the Shenyang Military Region to take charge of the Agricultural Reclamation Corps and to reorganize it as the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps. When I arrived in June 1970, about 400,000 middle-school graduates had already joined the ranks of the tens of thousands of resettled soldiers and laborers already there. The Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps consisted of more than sixty regiments. Each regiment of 20,000–30,000 persons was based on a former farm, and each company within a regiment had regular soldiers on active duty. While regiments had soldiers ready to fight Soviet Russia, most of them had no weapons, and were farm workers. Beidahuang was the nation’s granary; and as crops including soybeans and rice were being used for foreign exchange, agricultural production continued to be the real priority.