Chapter 91: Just Ask Whether It Makes Life Easier

Having led a prefecture-level city for many years, he had not lacked ability; his mind had simply grown rigid and could no longer easily accept new ideas. His professional skills were, in fact, superb.

What Lan Weidong had never imagined was that the old leader would bring the conversation full circle to the nonsense with which it had begun and conclude by saying, “I hope you can try to help secure the establishment of this baby carrier factory in Shangzhou, so it can pull this backward industrial environment forward.”

Lan Weidong, champion of reform and opening-up, was utterly bewildered. “Please don’t be fooled by the fact that it’s just a fastening buckle. The difficulty is even greater than that of an electrical appliance factory. A lot of the details and materials involved are things we simply can’t achieve right now.”

Instead, the old leader laughed. “When Yu Qili talked to me about these things, he first thumped his chest and boasted he could definitely do it, and in the end he came away empty-handed, asking for money and grain all over the place. That’s exactly why I believe you can succeed. And you won’t come asking me for money and grain, will you?”

Lan Weidong adopted the same guileless look he had once used with Shi Tou. “You can’t bully a child like this, can you? You want the horse to run, but won’t feed it grass. No, no, that won’t do.”

The old leader laughed even harder. “Very well. All the state-owned and collective factories in Shangzhou—you may choose any of them to lead. Isn’t that support enough?”

Having been an old security guard for forty years, he knew perfectly well the mentality of such people. In private they referred to the bureau chief and the party secretary with shortened nicknames like the big boss and the grand boss, as though the whole world consisted only of their own unit or enterprise.

Many employees of state-owned factories went through life knowing only which factory director came and went, never caring about changes at the national level, as if theirs were an independent kingdom.

Countless people never dared imagine becoming a factory director; to them, that was the summit of life itself.

But Lan Weidong immediately waved his hands vigorously, just as he had done when refusing Factory Director Cheng at Xishan Factory the last time. “Hey, hey, hey, don’t put it like that. If I were Zhao Yun and you gave me eighteen iron cavalrymen, I could carve a path seven times in and seven times out at Changban Slope. But now I don’t have that fighting strength to begin with, and you’re still handing me a whole mess of the old, the weak, the sick, and the disabled. I wouldn’t be able to break out, and I’d have to look after them too. What then? No, no, absolutely not.”

The old leader stopped laughing, though not with severity; instead his expression turned gently paternal. “You would look after them, wouldn’t you?”

Lan Weidong fell silent.

Then the old leader began to wear down his defenses with a more systematic sort of persuasion. “You broke out, cured your father’s disability, and improved your family’s life. Shangzhou has over 138,000 urban residents, ten counties and county-level cities under municipal jurisdiction, ninety-nine county districts, six hundred eighty-two communes, six thousand seven hundred sixty-six production brigades, and a population of 7.38 million. How many families among them will face the same kind of hardship, and what kind of outcome will they receive? You should know that very well.”

Lan Weidong still said nothing.

Seeing persuasion by emotion was having some effect, the old leader pressed on. “What I ask is not much. Whether you produce baby carriers or camera straps, use what you have seen and learned outside to transform one factory. That is both your answer to me and the model of reform and opening-up you keep talking about. Otherwise, on what grounds are you asking the masses to believe in reform and opening-up?”

Lan Weidong lifted his head and met his gaze.

The old fox remained ruthless. “It may seem that you and Yu Qili are both waving the banner for economic opening-up, but there is a fundamental difference between you. So show me. As long as you can prove this is right, then Shangzhou can move even more firmly to the forefront of reform and opening-up!”

Just yesterday Lan Weidong had been telling Dong Xueying to draw a firm line in time: if no one came out, they would leave without hesitation.

Today, when summoned, he had come with the attitude that since he was already here, he might as well see whether he could influence matters and get Old Yu out.

He had not expected to receive such an answer.

It was certainly an option that stirred his heart.

He had lived here for forty years, and though he had hardly ever stepped beyond the tax bureau compound, this remained the homeland he knew best and felt deepest in his bones.

There could be no lack of feeling.

So after a few seconds of eye contact, he said, “Let me think it through carefully, and then I’ll come back and report my thoughts and decision to you.”

The old leader was very satisfied. “Yes. If I am responsible for more than seven million people, I cannot rashly decide to open things up. That would be the real way to cause a huge mess. Those who keep thumping their chests and saying there’s no problem are often the ones who create the problems, and after the trouble starts they often vanish without a trace. Only those who think deeply and tread like they’re crossing thin ice are the ones who dare to act and dare to take responsibility. I’ll wait for you to tell me about your plan.”

Lan Weidong was still a little inexperienced.

He said his decision was that he had not yet resolved whether to make a move in Shangzhou, but the man wanted a plan, and that already meant a choice had been made.

Having failed to catch that implication, he quietly nodded and agreed.

The old leader even, with a trace of teasing, found a document on his desk and told him to take it back and study it carefully.

An Overview of Shangzhou City Enterprise Directory.

Dong Xueying stared in astonishment at the few pages of documents. “You can choose any one to manage?!”

This region was very poor, but Shangzhou itself was not.

Just as later, when Jiangzhou became a directly administered municipality, many people from outside never understood why Jiangzhou, so famous and prosperous, still received year after year of paired support for poor regions from other places.

In truth, direct administration meant Jiangzhou was being used to drag this impoverished area forward, and before it became a municipality, Shangzhou had already been doing that work.

Within all of Sichuan there was the saying of “Rong, Jiang, Shang,” meaning it ranked third after Chengdu and Jiangzhou.

The later Jiangzhou, which would become the country’s largest municipality, had simply been merged with this vast and impoverished Shangzhou.

Standing at the gateway to the Three Gorges, a place where merchants had gathered since ancient times, native old-timers like Yu Qili and Dong Xueying’s generation should each have inherited a tradition of commerce, which was why there were old houses and ancestral businesses.

That was why, for nearly a century, this place had been one of the foreign-opened treaty ports. In other words, this inland heartland had actually had customs offices more than a hundred years ago.

Jiangzhou had not.

So Shangzhou’s industrial and commercial foundation was not bad after all.

And now Lan Weidong could actually choose any one of them to transform and manage.

“Old Yu once dreamed of nothing else…” The young married woman could hardly believe it. “No, he never even dared to imagine leading and managing one; just getting some cooperation from the factory would already have been good enough.”

Lan Weidong held the child and lay back in a bamboo chair with his eyes closed. “They’re afraid that if he takes over, he’ll tear it apart and sell it for money, or that one man’s success will leave a field of bones behind him. If he made a name for himself and left a mess in his wake, what then?”

Dong Xueying took a palm fan and gently fanned them both, sending a cool breeze and driving away the mosquitoes. “Then would you take it over and do it?”

Lan Weidong countered with a question. “Are there any good enterprises in Shangzhou?”

There were indeed two or three. One was a machinery factory under the province, with a military-industrial character and a fairly large scale, certainly beyond their reach; it was said that its rank used to be on par with city leaders.

But the Shangzhou battery factory sold well and even exported to Southeast Asia. The fruit-canning factory had worked with others and was currently doing rather well. As for the bean paste from the sauce factory, it was practically a household essential for cooking in the southwest.

Dong Xueying immediately began counting on her fingers, enumerating them like precious family heirlooms. “Back when my family sold sauces, mule caravans and river boats on the Sichuan River were traveling north and south all the time. Hee hee, I think the sauce factory is pretty good.”

Without realizing it, she had leaned against the bamboo chair, gentle and full of longing.

After coming back from the city, Lan Weidong ate lunch and sat down in the shade of the trees in the back courtyard to discuss it.

The great boss lay in that kind of bamboo slat chair, like a zero-gravity airline seat in later years.

The young married woman, wearing a floral shirt and a long black skirt, sat on a small square stool beside him, leaning slightly.

Even the river in the distance seemed to be alive with a hundred boats contending.

His heart, too, could not help but open wide.

In truth, Lan Weidong’s mind already had a rough idea of these few enterprises—they were the city’s major taxpayers.

They were also bound to go bankrupt quickly in the future.

Just as he inhaled the lingering fragrance and opened his eyes, he saw a heavy curve close at hand and quickly shut them again, shaking his head. “Even if we were handed a soundly built enterprise, would it be easy to run?”

The young married woman responded at once. “Right! If they’re already doing well on their own, why would they bother to reform and change with us? It would only be easier for them to slack off and sabotage things!”

This was far more relaxing than chatting with a girl, and Lan Weidong grunted in agreement. “And if everything’s already done well, then we’re just adding icing to the cake. No matter how well we do, it’s hard for people to notice, so if we’re really going to do something, we should pick the kind that isn’t very good to begin with. That way the results show up fast.”

Dong Xueying clapped her hands in delight. “Yes, yes, exactly like that…”

The infant, drawn by the sound, opened his eyes. Seeing the bowl of food ahead, he immediately climbed toward it, stepping on Lan Weidong’s chest and face as he went.

Over a year old now, full of energy and joyfully mischievous, Lan Weidong opened his eyes with a flush spreading over his face.

He hurried to steady the child, took him over to feed him, and could no longer lie still himself, getting up at once.

He also kept talking, trying to steer everyone’s attention elsewhere. “Glass factory, soap factory, leather factory… hmm? What about a shoe factory?”

As the weather turned hot, the suede shoes he had bought earlier in Jiangzhou had long since been replaced by the canvas basketball shoes Dong Xueqing bought for him in the provincial capital.

Lan Weidong had always loved playing ball, and the fool had even remembered to buy him high-tops. The canvas upper wrapped his ankles for better protection, and the good-quality rubber soles already counted as high-end goods in those days.

The drawback was that they trapped sweat and stank horribly, so Lan Weidong only wore them when necessary.

Now that the idea had struck him, he suddenly remembered that when he had taken Erfeng and the others to buy a lot of shoes in the factory district on the south bank of Jiangnan, there had been a whole stretch of shoe factories of all sizes there.

Having become a married woman, Dong Xueying rarely blushed anymore, yet now her face was burning.

She busied herself with her work, but still listened intently. “You’ve never done that before. And Shangzhou never seemed to have any shoe factories, did it?”

Lan Weidong’s thinking was certainly ahead of its time. “The surrounding villages can only raise a little pork to supplement their income, right? But pork hides have always counted as a product in Shangzhou. Yes, during the War of Resistance, pig bristles were even exported to American warships as strategic supplies. If we bring people and equipment over from Jiangzhou to make leather shoes, as long as the quality is acceptable, the key is still how to sell them. I’ve got a giant panda for advertising.”

There’s a saying: you don’t have to run the fastest; you only have to run a little faster than your pig-teammates.

Products in the eighties did not need to be astonishingly superb. They only had to be a little better than everyone else’s, and as long as they became “well known” quickly in an age when information did not flow freely, many famous brands later broke through and conquered their territory in exactly that phase.

Of course, given Lan Weidong’s lazy nature, the shoes would almost certainly be called the X brand too. Simple, convenient, and it would save the trouble of registering a new brand.

So after X-brand camera and X-brand tape recorder, there would be X-brand leather shoes as well.

Lan Weidong had no concept at all of a brand conglomerate; it was purely a matter of saving effort and making things easy.