Family story: Pick 20 cucumbers and 15 tomatoes for Chairman Mao

The name of “Sijiqing”

Li Molin was a good vegetable planter. His greenhouses had high yields and he produced a great variety of good quality vegetables. This won extensive acclaim for the cooperative. There was a saying in the 1950’s and 60’s, “In the Soviet Union there is Michurin, in China there is Li Molin.”

In 1954, the cooperative was further enlarged and was able to produce vegetables all year round. That year, the cooperative was formally renamed “Sijiqing vegetable producers' cooperative,” as Sijiqing meant that “there would be green vegetables all year round.” This explains the origin of the name Sijiqing.

Before the Spring Festival of 1954, Li surprised people by selecting 20 fresh cucumbers and 15 tomatoes of the same size to send to the janitor's office of Zhongnanhai. He asked the janitor to deliver the vegetables to Chairman Mao. The next day, the Sijiqing cooperative received a letter from the General Office of the CPC Central Committee thanking them for Li’s present.

Two years later, something happened to surprise Li at the second session of the second CPPCC National Committee held in 1956, when Li represented the farmers to report good news to Chairman Mao. Li recalled that, as they shook hands, Chairman Mao asked him which unit he came from. Li was too excited to answer immediately. When he learned that Li was from the Sijiqing cooperative, Chairman Mao said, “You are Li Molin, aren’t you?” Li and his family would never forget this.

Now the photo of Chairman Mao and Li shaking hands hangs in Li Dexi’s living room.

The cooperative members had high incomes

After Li became a household name, an unending stream of visitors came to his house to sightsee or gain knowledge. Li Dexi recalled that his family had little furniture apart from a table and several stools. Guests usually sat on the edge of kang (a bed made out of brick). The edge of the kang was not covered by anything and only bricks could be seen. As a result, he found that the hard angles of the bricks became round and smooth because so many people sat on them.

The families had good incomes. Cooperative members received the same income regardless of their initial contributions to the cooperative. They had a fixed salary of 50 to 60 yuan per month and a dividend at the end of the year. Li Dexi said that cucumbers at that time were priced at one yuan per jin. Calculated by the price and income at that time, one jin of cucumbers would cost a day’s wages. Therefore, the cooperative made a sound profit and each household had an annual income of over 1,500 yuan.

In 1969, the prosperous cooperative was abolished, Li Molin was criticized and denounced, and the 2,500 greenhouses were distributed to separate production teams. Li Dexi said that most greenhouses could not continue, because the separated production teams were all short of technology and funding.

In 1971, Li Dexi inherited his father’s career and started to cultivate greenhouse vegetables in a production team. But he found that the production team couldn’t even afford grafted cucumber seedlings, so he had to enter a supply and marketing cooperative and sell meat. Although the registered permanent residences of his four sisters were all in rural areas, the four had all entered factories or enterprises and none of them carried out greenhouse vegetable cultivation again.