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<p style="padding:25px; margin-bottom: 20px; font-style: italic; background-color:#ffeaee;">It's Communism Week at CRP. All this week, we're learning Chinese through the lens of historical and modern CCP propaganda, speeches, stories, essays and songs.</p> 

<strong>Quick reminder:</strong> To maintain a polite, language learning-focused environment, political comments – positive, negative, or neutral – are not allowed, and will be deleted. Dinner table rules, please.

Zhu De (朱德 [pinyin]zhu1 de2[/pinyin]) is an early Communist folk hero, and the founder of the People's Liberation Army (解放军 [pinyin]jie3 fang4 jun1[/pinyin]), also called the Red Army (红军 [pinyin]hong2 jun1[/pinyin]). He was applauded as a people's general, and this popular revolutionary story - in which Zhu De helps his regiment carry grain (粮食 [pinyin]liang2 shi[/pinyin]) up a mountain on a carrying pole (扁担 [pinyin]bian3 dan[/pinyin]) - shows his willingness to toil alongside the common soldiers. The story spawned many popular posters of him, like this one:

<img src="http://chinesereadingpractice.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/chinese-reading-practice-communist-language-learning-zhude-carrying-pole.jpeg" alt="Beginner Chinese Reading Practice Exercises: Communist Folk Stories Revolutionary Heroes" width="425" height="500" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2387" /> 

Zhe De is a revolutionary from the early days of Chinese Communism. For those who don't know their CCP history: modern China was founded in 1949, but for the 20-odd years before that, the Red Army was fighting various wars for control of the country. Zhu De was instrumental in these wars, and after 1949, he became a key Party leader and politician. This story is set in the early days of the wars, in 1928. It's crazy to think that Zhu De, who was born in 1886 and died in 1976, lived to be 90 years old, but spent three or four decades of his life doing nothing but fighting battles. Considering how many people died in those wars, or were purged in political upheavals afterwards, this guy was a real survivor. 

<h4>Some language stuff</h4>
This is an example of a story that will look much harder on first glance than it actually is. That's because some of the vocab is intermediate, but the sentence structure is beginner. The intermediate vocab is also used repetitively, so once you look up the tougher words, you'll immediately have an opportunity to see them again in the text. The first two sentences are much rougher than the rest, because they're almost entirely made up of intermediate words, so push through those and it'll be easier going from there. If you break the sentences down patiently, and you are at HSK 3 or up, I promise you can get through this. 

We have a few proper names here: 
朱德同志 [pinyin]zhu1 de2 tong2 zhi4[/pinyin] - Comrade Zhu De 
红军 [pinyin]hong2 jun1[/pinyin] - the Red Army
井冈山 [pinyin]jing3 gang1 shan1[/pinyin] - Jinggang Mountain 

We also have some military words: 
队伍 [pinyin]dui4 wu[/pinyin] - troops 
敌人 [pinyin]di2 ren2[/pinyin] - enemy
战士们 [pinyin]zhan4 shi4 men[/pinyin] - soldier 
打仗 [pinyin]da3 zhang4[/pinyin] - to fight a war

Another word that comes up quite a bit is 粮食 [pinyin]liang2 shi[/pinyin] - Also just 粮 [pinyin]liang2[/pinyin]. This is a general term for "grain", could be wheat, rice, millet, oats, or whatever. In this story, Zhu De's troops go down the mountain to 挑粮 [pinyin]tiao1 liang2[/pinyin], or "gather grain".

And one phrase that might be a little hard to understand:

<strong>争着去</strong> [pinyin]zheng1 zhe qu4[/pinyin] - 争 means "to fight" or "to struggle", 着 is a present-tense grammar word, and 去 means "go" or "leave". At first glance, 争着去 looks like it means "fighting in order to leave someplace", but it's not. In this case, it's describing a group of people pushing and shoving to be the first to volunteer to go somewhere. Imagine a group of soldiers asked to undertake a hard mission - one person says, "I'll go!" and someone else says, "No, choose me, I'll go!". This is 争着去. 
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<h4>朱德的扁担</h4>
1928年，<span class="highlightText">朱德同志</span>带领一支<span class="highlightText">红军队伍</span>到<span class="highlightText">井冈山</span>。山上是<span class="highlightText">红军</span>，山下不远就是<span class="highlightText">敌人</span>。
 
<span class="highlightText">井冈山</span>上粮食不多，常常要派一些人到山下的田园去挑粮。<span class="highlightText">井冈山</span>离田园很远，山高路窄，非常难走。可是每次挑粮大家都<span class="highlightText">争着去</span>。
 
<span class="highlightText">朱德同志</span>也跟<span class="highlightText">战士们</span>一起去挑粮。他穿着草鞋，挑起满满的一担粮食，跟大家一起爬山。白天挑粮，晚上还常常整夜整夜地学习怎样跟<span class="highlightText">敌人打仗</span>。大家觉得他要做的工作太多，就把他那根扁担藏了起来。可是<span class="highlightText">朱德同志</span>又找到了一根扁担，写上“<span class="highlightText">朱德</span>扁担，不要拿走”八个大字。大家见了，更敬爱<span class="highlightText">朱德同志</span>，不好意思再藏他的扁担了。
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In 1928, Comrade Zhu De lead a detachment of Red Army troops to Jinggang Mountain. The Red Army was on the mountain, but down the mountain not far away was the enemy. 
 
Not much grain was produced on Jinggang Mountain, so [they] often had to send a few people down to the fields below to tote back some grain. Jinggang Mountain was far from the fields, the mountain was high and the roads were narrow, it was very hard going. But each time grain had to be carried back, everyone fought to be the one to go.
 
Comrade Zhu De also went along with the soldiers to carry grain. He wore grass shoes, carrying a pole packed full of grain, and climbed the mountain with everybody else. During the day [he] carried grain, and during the evening he often spent the whole night studying how to make war on the enemy. Everyone felt he had too much work to do, so they took his carrying pole and hid it. But Comrade Zhu De found another carrying pole, and wrote 8 big words on it: "Zhu Du's carrying pole, please don't take it". Everyone saw this, and loved and respected Comrade Zhu De even more, and were too ashamed to hide his carrying pole again. 
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