Background of Ba Jin's Spring Silkworms

Spring Silkworms is not Ba Jin's, but one of Mao Dun's "Rural Trilogy".

The inspiration for Spring Silkworms came from a newspaper report that said, "The spring silkworms in eastern Zhejiang had a good harvest this year, and the sericulturists went bankrupt one after another. The work takes the Jiangnan water town as the background and sericulture as the main line, describing the sericulturist Lao Tongbao's family's intense and arduous labor, which won an unprecedented harvest of spring silkworms, but on the contrary, they went into debt, sold their land, and came to the end of "compensating for fifteen quintals of mulberry land and thirty dollars in debt", reflecting the brutal social reality that the rural economy in the early 30's had been reduced to destitution and the peasants were plagued with a plentiful harvest. The work not only depicts the true reality, but also shows the history of the decline of the modern Chinese countryside from the perspective of an old farmer through the old Tongbao's memories of his own past.