PureInsight | February 25, 2013
[PureInsight.org] My family lives in Manzhouli city. My uncle is now 65 years old and in the 1960s he was only 10 when the so-called “three years of natural disaster” occurred. It was in fact anything but a natural disaster; all the grains were levied by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to allegedly prepare for war and disasters. It was the same in cities and rural areas—people were starved and desperate to find something to eat. One autumn, all the cabbage roots were finally eaten with nothing else left so people panicked and wondered what they could do to find food. There was a big cornfield in the southwest of Manzhouli so people flooded to the field to pick up kernels dropped during harvesting. There were too many hungry people; the kernels were not enough to fill a person’s mouth, let alone a empty stomach.
It wasn’t long before people were at their wit’s end. Then somebody thought about digging up grains stored by voles (similar to small mice). Everyone knew voles were good at storing grains, so people went to “borrow” grains from them. I say borrow, but the correct term was looting.
The vole burrows were not straight, but were in twists and turns about 5cm in width. When excavated, the burrows were quite exquisite, nearly the same as human beings’ houses with bedrooms, bathrooms, and storage barns all well-arranged. Food is the number one necessity of living beings, and rodents are no exception. Some vole storage barns were stocked with abundant amounts of mustard seeds, beans, and kernels in separate piles. It really filled people with deep admiration. However, during that era of food shortage, not all vole holes were so fortunate. Some barns were laid with nothing but grass roots, making people feel strange and sad for the voles. There was not a single kernel and the voles would have to depend on grass roots to feed themselves for the whole winter—they had it harder than human beings.
There were some really hard-working or very fortunate voles whose holes were found to have dozens of pounds of food grain. Hearing that food grain could be found by digging up these holes, starved people flooded to the farms southwest of Manzhouli to look for them. Wherever there was a hole, it would be dug up in a frenzy, causing the land to be dotted with scars. Even my uncle found two holes and dug up several pounds of food grain. However, the holes were limited in number so when people could find no more to dig up, the voles were so grieved that they began to climb up to high places and jump off to kill themselves. Even such small creatures were driven to death by this man-made famine created by the wicked CCP.
From then on, no matter how hungry my uncle was, he would never dig up vole holes for food. Old people often tell us: “Set aside rice for the mice, light no lamp for the pitiful moth.” Though he did not think rodents were good, he did find the small creatures somewhat pitiful. They stole some food from people, but they were much better than the bureaucrats at different ranks in the wicked CCP, who brazenly ate and drank until full and seized from the people and put them into hard times. It seemed that those corrupt bureaucrats in the wicked CCP had worse morals than rodents.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/node/113854
