introduction
*This article is excerpted from the first volume of "Cao County Cultural and Historical Materials" (August 1985), Shen Jianhua, Guo Shoushe, the original title "The Origin and Fate of the Traitor Zhu Xiaotang"
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One day in the summer of 1947, 10,000 people flocked to the Confucian Temple Square in Cao County from all directions to attend a meeting to judge the traitor Zhu Xiaotang. At more than three o'clock in the afternoon, Zhu Xiaotang, who was tied up with five flowers, was escorted into the venue, and suddenly, angry people shouted, some scolded loudly, and some stretched out their heads to ....... This hardcore traitor, who used to betray the country for glory and do evil, and who was famous and powerful in the political arena of Cao County, has now fallen into the people's restored legal net and trembled under the deterrence of justice.
Zhu Xiaotang, a native of Zhulou Village in the north of Cao County, was born in 1900 in a fallen family. When he was in his twenties, he served as a second-class patrol officer in the Cao County Patrol Police Battalion under the wing of the Beiyang warlords. In 1928, the Northern Expeditionary Army's Ji Hongchang Division conquered Cao County and destroyed the old regime of warlord Jiang Mingyu. In the winter of 1938, the Japanese invaded and occupied Cao County. Soon, his cousin Zhu Xiaolou colluded with the ruffians and hooligans, and formed the "Cao County Self-Defense Regiment" under the support of the Japanese invaders, and became the head of the self-defense regiment. Later, when Cao Gu's puppet garrison brigade was established, Zhu Xiaolou became the deputy of the puppet garrison brigade (the main position was concurrently held by the puppet county magistrate, and the deputy held real power). Zhu Xiaotang, who was good at speculative drilling, saw the opportunity and hurriedly joined Zhu Xiaolou's men and became a quartermaster. In the spring of 1940, the Kuomintang diehards "Shi Army", (i.e., Shi You 3rd Division), were defeated by our Eighth Route Army north of the Yellow River and retreated to the southeast of Cao County. Our party members and cadres and anti-Japanese forces were forced to transfer, and Zhu Xiaolou's traitor forces took the opportunity to expand and established district departments in some places. Zhu Xiaotang was placed in the five districts of Guyingji, nominally a military quartermaster, but in fact he held real power. Because of this person's skill, deep knowledge of officialdom, and relying on Zhu Xiaolou's power, he quickly grabbed the title of the head of the fifth district.
In 1942, Zhu Xiaolou, deputy of the Sixth Cao County Garrison Team and head of the Self-Defense Regiment, excused himself from his illness and traveled to Jinan to eat, drink and have fun. Before leaving, he transferred Zhu Xiaotang to the county seat and asked him to command the puppet army in Cao County together with his cousin Zhu Haiyang. Zhu Xiaotang took the opportunity to make friends with private parties, cultivate cronies, and expand his personal power in order to further seize high positions. In the spring of the following year, Zhu Xiaolou returned to Cao County due to an overdose of opium and his life was difficult to protect. Zhu Xiaotang has coveted the two laurels of the deputy of the Cao County Garrison Brigade and the head of the self-defense regiment for a long time, and he thought that it would fall on his head. Unexpectedly, he only became the head of the self-defense regiment (later changed to the head of the self-defense regiment), and the deputy of the garrison brigade, who had already made him salivate, was snatched up by the Japanese secretary Du Jiezhi. In this regard, Zhu Xiaotang was greatly annoyed, and threatened that the country was fought by Zhu Xiaolou, and the surname Zhu should inherit it, and plotted to kill Du Jiezhi. Taking advantage of Du Jiezhi's trip to the provincial meeting, he intercepted Du's car in the area of Panbai Liuzhuang. However, Du stayed in Shangqiu and did not return, was not in the car, and only shot a police officer named "Hei Ziquan" to death. When Du Jiezhi heard the news in Shangqiu, he was frightened and did not dare to return to Cao County, so he asked to be transferred to other places.
At this time, it was Huang Zongbo who served as the pseudo-county magistrate of Cao County, this person was an old scheming and proficient official oilman, and he was the old fellow of the pseudo Caozhou Daoyin Zhu Jinggu. Usually, he is deeply dissatisfied with Zhu Xiaotang's flying and domineering. This time, when I saw Du Jiezhi being scared away, I was shocked again, and I felt that Zhu Xiaotang was cunning and insidious, and it was difficult to control. In order to weaken and bring down Zhu Xiaotang, he used various means: First, in terms of appropriating and appropriating supplies: he set up the "Cao County Painting and Maintenance Co-ordination and Marketing Committee", with himself as the director, and the supplies of all military, political, police, and educational personnel in the county were all allocated by the committee, and no one was allowed to ask for money from the district or township without permission, thus depriving Zhu Xiaotang of the right to arbitrarily approve and support supplies. Second, politically, it adopted the strategy of "using Zhu to govern Zhu" and engaged in divisive activities. The cavalry captain Zhu Haiyang and the head of the special service regiment Zhu Yingguang (Zhu Xiaolou's son) were wooed in a big matter, and reported to the puppet Shandong governor Tang Yangdu to appoint Zhu Haiyang as the deputy of the Cao County Garrison Brigade, in an attempt to pull him out of the Zhu group in order to disperse the Zhu forces. In this way, the contradictions between Zhu and Huang gradually intensified, and by the early winter of 1944, this dog-eat-dog power struggle had reached an irreconcilable point. The treacherous Zhu Xiaotang made a desperate bet and secretly ordered his puppet army to pull out of the city one night, threatening: Huang will not be fed, so he has to go out of the city to eat. At that time, except for the puppet army to which Zhu Yingguang belonged and the two districts of Zhu Yaoqing and Zhu Jiechen, the rest were all pulled away, and even Zhu Haiyang, who Huang Zongbo had worked hard to woo, also went out of the city. This caused the defense of Chengguan to be empty, and the Kuomintang recalcitrant Shi Fuqi took the opportunity to rob the merchants and people of Dongguan, and the people of Chengguan were panicked. The Japanese, also because of their weak troops, feared being attacked by our anti-Japanese army and civilians, so they came forward to mediate and promised a heavy responsibility, and Zhu Xiaotang led his troops back to the city to maintain law and order. However, because Zhu Haiyang had just been appointed as the deputy of the Cao County Garrison Brigade, it was difficult to take back his fate, so he had to appoint Zhu Xiaotang as the deputy captain of the Cao County Garrison Brigade to grasp the actual power of the garrison brigade. Huang Zongbo suffered this change and felt that he was alone and could not stay in Cao County, so he took a Japanese car to Jining to file a complaint with the Japanese secret service.
Zhu Xiaotang skillfully used tricks to single-handedly direct this "palace forcing drama", drove away Huang Zongbo, and combined the two positions in one, making him even more ambitious. On the one hand, he organized personnel to check Huang Zongbo's financial income and expenditure; On the one hand, he sent people to Jining to accept (give) bribes and dredge joints. At that time, the Japanese army and the puppet Shandong Provincial Government also saw that outsiders were unable to preside over the political situation of Cao County, so they pushed the boat down the river and appointed Zhu Xiaotang as the puppet county magistrate of Cao County.
Since the beginning of the summer of 1944, under the heavy blows of our anti-Japanese army and people, the Japanese invaders have lost their cities and land, suffered heavy losses, suffered heavy losses, lost their morale, and become increasingly war-weary. Our Eighth Route Army and local armed forces often approached the outskirts of the city and attacked the enemy. Zhu Xiaotang was terrified, and had a premonition that the situation was not good, so he slyed the rabbit camp cave and operated the back road. Militarily, on the one hand, he had deep ditches and high forts, and added open and dark forts; On the one hand, under the instructions of the Japanese invaders, an assault regiment was formed, and Zhu Haiyang was appointed as the commander of the regiment, equipped with capable personnel and excellent weapons, and planned to resist stubbornly when necessary, in order to succeed. Politically, he saw that the general trend of the Japanese invaders was gone, so he found another backer and took the initiative to collude with the Kuomintang. At this time, in order to seize the fruits of the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Kuomintang reactionaries wantonly recruited the armed forces of the traitors and expanded their reactionary forces. Zhu Xiaotang entrusted his sworn brother Sun Shouyi, and took advantage of his relationship with Li Zhongxun (that is, Li Tongwei), the head of the personnel section of the Kuomintang Shandong Provincial Government, to go to the provincial government (exile in Fuyang) to carry out activities, and hooked up with Mou Zhongheng, the chairman of the Shandong Provincial Government at that time, Zhu Xiaotang accepted the name of the Kuomintang and was appointed as the commander of the 19th Brigade of the Shandong Provincial Special Service.
Two
After Zhu Xiaotang threw himself into the arms of the Japanese invaders, he often led the puppet army or accompanied the Japanese invaders everywhere to "crusade" and "sweep" our anti-Japanese base areas, brutalized our anti-Japanese soldiers and civilians, burned, killed, captured and plundered, and committed all kinds of evils. Here are just a few:
Late one night in 1942, Zhu Xiaotang led his troops to surround Zhongdiquan Village in the south of the city with a squad of Japanese invaders, first shooting at the village, and after entering the village in the morning, he did not even see the shadow of the Eighth Route Army, so he wantonly burned and looted. When he learned that the Dehengquan Hotel was a place where our traffic personnel often frequented, even though his subordinates used more than 1,000 catties of liquor in the store to wash their feet and bathe, they were trampled down.
One day in July of the same year, Comrade Lao Sun, our underground traffic officer, was arrested by Zhu Xiaotang's subordinates after passing through the Dongguan of the county seat while transmitting letters from Cao Dongnan to the organs of the Cao Northwest Prefectural Committee. Just as we were trying to rescue him, Zhu Xiaotang learned the news and was afraid that his subordinates would release him, so he ordered Comrade Sun to be handed over to the Japanese secret service and imprisoned.
In September of the following year, the Japanese invaders "swept up" the base area in the northwest of China, and Zhu Xiaotang led his troops to go with him, looting everywhere he went. What is even more outrageous is that I also arrested more than a dozen young students who cooperated with me in collecting public rations, and killed all of them.
In June 1945, when the Japanese invaders had reached the end of their rope and our War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was nearing victory, Zhu Xiaotang even more frantically brutalized our party cadres and their families. When he suspected that Hu Xingyuan, the principal of Dongguan Primary School (a member of our Chengguan Special Branch), had opened the Eighth Road, he instructed Zhu Chaoxuan to send someone to shoot Comrade Hu Xingyuan at the north embankment of Xiaozhulou in the south of the city. One night a few days later, he secretly ordered his subordinates to assassinate Cao Zirui, the sister of Comrade Cao Zhizhen, a party cadre, on the edge of the reed pit at the mouth of the South Embankment of Dongguan.
Zhu Xiaotang's family originally had nothing, and since he became a traitor, he has wantonly looted people's wealth to fill his pockets. In addition to often going to the countryside to loot, he also used various means to extort money from the gentry and merchants in the city. He often led his entourage to some shops to eat and drink, and when he left, he not only did not pay a penny, but also extorted money in the name of borrowing money. Every festival, all businesses and factories have to send money and goods, otherwise disaster will come and there will be no peace. In just a few years, Zhu Xiaotang has purchased more than 1,000 acres of land, as well as many properties and shops. With Zhu Xiaotang's development, some of his dog party fox friends also followed Tengda, snatched it skillfully, and filled their pockets. After relying on the power of his brother-in-law to become the head of the Ninth Regiment of the Cao County Self-Defense Regiment, his brother-in-law Wang Qiuhao purchased a set of houses with more than 20 tiled houses in the city and bought more than 200 acres of land in the countryside.
Three
On 14 August 1945, Japan imperialism announced its unconditional surrender, and the Japanese invaders who had invaded Cao County at night fled to Jining in embarrassment. However, Zhu Xiaotang not only did not surrender his arms to our anti-Japanese soldiers and civilians to confess his guilt, but instead led a group of traitors to continue to entrench in the county town and harass the people in his capacity as the commander of the Kuomintang's "19th Brigade of Shandong Provincial Special Agents." Therefore, the Hebei-Shandong-Henan Military Region instructed the Southwest Lu Sub-district and the Huxi Sub-district to recover Cao County as soon as possible and liberate the people of Cao County. The Southwestern and Huxi Divisions immediately set up siege headquarters and led their troops to encircle the town of Cao on 11 September.
In order to prevent the destruction of public property and buildings in the ancient city as much as possible and to minimize the loss of people's lives and property, the sub-district and the commissioner's office of our Southwest Lu Army issued an order to urge the surrender, and Comrade Yuan Juemin, head of the Cao County People's Government, also wrote a personal letter, urging Zhu Xiaotang to abandon the darkness and turn to the light and atone for his crimes. However, Zhu Xiaotang, who was desperately an enemy of the people, tried in vain to resist stubbornly with his strong fortifications and his 2,700 rabble, and after receiving the order to surrender and Comrade Yuan Juemin's handwritten letter, he was furious, scolded again and again, and refused to accept it. He hurriedly dispatched troops and deployed city defenses, putting the minions who thought they were fierce in battle, loyal and reliable, in important positions. He also set up a banquet to entertain the leaders of the traitors, big and small, and made a fake telegram, falsely saying: "The Chen Daqing Department of the National Army stationed in Xuzhou has galloped to Cao County in the starry night, and Wu Xi is waiting for help", so as to coax the traitor's subordinates to work for him. In view of Zhu Xiaotang's stubbornness and no possibility of persuasion to surrender, our army launched several powerful offensives in succession from the 16th. After several fierce battles, at 11 o'clock on the night of the 18th, the county seat was conquered and the puppet army was completely annihilated. But while the cunning Zhu Xiaotang ordered his subordinates to resist desperately, he led a few cronies to escape from the tunnel that had already been dug in the northwest corner of the city while it was dark.
After Zhu Xiaotang escaped, Huang Zongyan, the commander of the 24th Division of the Kuomintang who had led the remnants to join Shangqiu, had no choice but to have his own strength collapsed, his men were empty, and no one paid attention to him, so he had to run to Jiazhuang in Minquan County, Henan Province, and hide in the house of his relative Jia Shimin. In the summer of 1947, when the guerrillas of our army sub-division were operating in the area, the masses reported Zhu Xiaotang's hiding place, and our guerrillas immediately arrested him, escorted him to the military sub-district headquarters, and then handed him over to the special office of southwest Lu and escorted him back to Cao County. Comrade Yuan Juemin, the head of the company, personally interrogated him in the hall of the county government, and in the face of conclusive facts, Zhu Xiaotang could not deny it and confessed his heinous crimes one by one. The county people's government was indignant at the people, and sentenced the traitor to death, first paraded through the streets, and then convened a meeting of 10,000 people to announce the crime and execute him. This scum of the nation, who had been rampant for seven years and had a lot of blood debts, ended his sinful life in the midst of the victory cheers and gnashing of teeth and spitting of the people.
Sources:
"Cao County Cultural and Historical Materials" Volume 1 (August 1985)