Ban Ye Ji Jiao

半夜鸡叫 • • Finished Airing

Synopsis

This animated puppet film is adapted from Gao Yubao's novel of the same name. In the "old society," the landlord class employed a wide array of tactics to exploit the peasants, including imitating roosters' crows in the middle of the night. With the Lunar New Year approaching, landlord Zhou Paopi, in an effort to dismiss his farmhands who had toiled all year and deny them their wages, devised the cunning tactic of imitating roosters' crows. As soon as the farmhands, exhausted from a day's work, lay down, he tiptoed into the chicken coop and imitated a couple of rooster crows to induce the roosters to crow. Then, at his urging, the farmhands struggled to get up and work in the fields. Zhou Paopi calculated that the farmhands' bodies would soon tire from such torment, giving him ample excuse to fire them. However, his scheme failed.

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