Chapter 131: Deals Worth Hundreds of Millions Are Mere Pocket Change

[Page 1 of 3]

And it was not only the Jiangzhou Supply and Marketing Cooperative. Rang Weidong immediately went out to the post office to place a long-distance call, hoping to contact the National Supply and Marketing Cooperative Federation through Yu Songhai or the headquarters of the Sunlight Daily.

That was the advantage of having seen the wider world.

If he had never gone to Pingjing and attended all those symposiums and other formal occasions with the Sunlight Daily, Rang Weidong would never have known that behind the unremarkable supply and marketing cooperatives in the countryside stood an enormous nationwide network, with a central administrative body above it.

Without the later concept of chain stores, no one could have imagined how significant it was to embrace the cooperatives so decisively.

Unexpectedly, when Rang Weidong called the Rongdu newspaper office, he was told that Yu Songhai had just been transferred to a district cultural center. Before he could ask anything more, the other side hung up.

That reaction alone made Rang Weidong decide to go to Rongdu at once. He had to visit Yu Songhai’s home and find out what was going on.

At the same time, he still had a series of long-distance calls to make. He left messages with universities across the country, asking them to call back through the company extension at the guesthouse.

Finally, he called Dong Xueying to give her some instructions. Whenever the various sales teams called back, she was to confirm that sanitary pads would be sent to them for trial sales.

The Pingjing sales team was especially important. He hoped they could take advantage of the sanitary pads’ special characteristics and their widespread popularity in Jiangzhou to approach several reporters they had previously worked with at the headquarters of the Sunlight Daily. The reporters might then recommend the sanitary pads to the National Supply and Marketing Cooperative Federation. Dongsheng Company could even supply the federation with the products on extremely favorable advance-payment terms.

Naturally, the sales pitch would focus on the tremendous changes sanitary pads brought to women during their menstrual periods.

When Dong Xueying heard that he intended to leave for Rongdu overnight, she did not merely feel relieved.

She became even gentler. “Reporter Yu is a good man. You really should go and see what happened. We must do our best to repay those who have helped us. Don’t worry about things at home. Tomorrow I’ll go to the factory and speak with Comrade Shen again.”

Then, worried that Rang Weidong might not be able to manage everything alone, she added, “Should we have Xiaoqing go with you? She studied in Rongdu for several years.”

Rang Weidong’s heart had already been soothed into perfect contentment. He laughed aloud. “Forget it. She’s spent nearly all her time at school and hardly ever gone anywhere. What help could she be? Besides, she works for the post and telecommunications bureau now. Don’t disturb the girl’s iron rice bowl. I’ll go myself. I’ve also got several salespeople and two fellow villagers with me.”

His girlfriend reminded him once more, “Remember to stop by the Postal Equipment Factory and discuss the tape recorder business. It wasn’t easy to cultivate a project like that. Don’t abandon it just because you’re upset.”

Rang Weidong felt comfortable all over again. “Okay, okay, roger that!”

There was no dramatic farewell, no endless kissing and clinging. Their relationship was refreshingly clean and straightforward.

That left the uneducated Miss Dong scratching her head in innocent confusion. When she returned home that night, she even asked her younger sister what “roger” meant.

Fengchu finally had her chance. She forced her sister to explain exactly what she and Rang Weidong had been doing that evening.

Was one or two times not enough?

Shen Cuiyue would not have asked so many questions. Still, she pushed her younger brother toward him. “You ought to take at least one person with you. Let him broaden his horizons. Besides, having someone with you to run errands is useful. Sometimes even an extra pair of eyes can help.”

That reminded Rang Weidong of his first trip to Jiangzhou. In hindsight, things had been much easier with Goudan along.

He nodded. “All right. I’ll take… Shitou. As for you, just give the word. We’re not hiring permanent staff anyway. What’s wrong with taking on temporary workers paid by the piece? The more people, the better.”

Shen Cuiyue nodded in agreement.

Rang Weidong knew that traveling from Jiangzhou to Rongdu meant spending an entire night on the train, but with a letter of introduction in hand, he was not anxious.

He stayed behind to receive the city leaders before setting out.

This was where the difference in his knowledge, shaped by three or four decades of later experience, became obvious.

Tax offices were often summoned to attend inspections by leading officials. As Old Shi put it, their job was to play the straight man and keep the officials’ performance going.

Whenever a leader inspected a place and found something satisfactory, the tax authorities were expected to make some favorable statement or offer some preferential treatment.

They had to show support and enthusiasm at every such occasion.

That was why photographs of these inspections appeared constantly on the bulletin boards in the tax compound: the bureau leaders had accompanied some official to inspect this place or that.

The guards were the ones who posted and replaced the photographs. Even without the use of one hand, Rang Weidong had once been forced to prop himself up with a scraper and help with the work.

That was why, almost instinctively, he had built attractive high-temperature sterilization towers at the food factory and insisted on making a good-looking cold-storage room.

Those things were all prepared for official inspections.

In Shangzhou, he had had a clear purpose. In Jiangzhou, it was simply a habit.

Wasn’t he supposed to build a sterilization compartment?

Rang Weidong had people construct a wooden framework to divide off half the workshop.

[Page 2 of 3]

The framework was fitted with large panes of glass.

After the sterilization conveyor belt had been modified, the high-temperature section carrying the freshly produced sanitary pads was enclosed in stainless-steel casing and extended through a sealed opening into this completely enclosed “glass room.”

The tradition of falsifying performance figures and making things look good had already become widespread in the 1960s and 1970s.

There were plenty of staged displays in industry and commerce as well.

But the way Rang Weidong was doing it now represented a genuine technological school of thought.

The city leaders, who had arrived in a convoy of Shanghai-brand sedans, had originally approached the inconspicuous old two-story building on the school grounds with some disdain. They might even have wondered what such a place could possibly offer.

But when they entered the workshop, they saw three nearly identical machines lined up, spitting out sheets with a loud rattling roar.

Workers in white coats were using brand-new large bamboo trays to scoop up batches of sanitary pads and dump them onto the conveyor belt beside them.

The pads were then sterilized and sent into the adjacent “glass room.”

It was a striking sight.

The walls had all been carefully covered with pink wallpaper. That was why Rang Weidong had been so adept at decorating his own home with floral cloth—he had practiced here first.

The glass room looked exceptionally clean without being stark and hospital-like.

All the “packaging workers” wore white coats, protective goggles, and rubber gloves, making the place look like a carefully sterilized isolation workshop.

They sat around the edge of a huge table resembling a ping-pong table, manually packaging the products as they emerged from the conveyor belt.

In reality, apart from the white coats, the rest of their equipment had been borrowed at the last minute from Jiangzhou University’s materials and laboratory departments.

But the effect was excellent.

The reason Rang Weidong had insisted that people wear white coats when inspecting the high-temperature sterilization tower was that, to outsiders, white coats carried an unmistakable air of expertise.

Now the whole place looked like a sealed sterilization workroom.

Surely the leaders could understand that this represented extremely high sanitary standards.

From the outside, the building was gray and shabby. Inside, however, everything was carried out with such apparent seriousness. Very impressive indeed. It lived up to the praise offered by the female officials assigned to introduce the facility.

Rang Weidong had originally considered arranging for the leaders to put on white coats before entering, but the site was too small. It would have looked overly contrived.

Instead, he had Mao’er stand to one side and take photographs for the record.

Factories with such a refined environment were genuinely rare in those days.

People seemed to think factories ought to be careless, dirty, and disorderly. No one expected a place with the atmosphere of a high-tech industry from a later age.

The leaders were therefore extremely satisfied.

They had brought their own photographer, and one of them even issued instructions on the spot. “Excellent! But can your current output keep up with demand? I saw several vehicles lined up outside just now. Since you’ve proven that there is no problem with production, you must expand output as quickly as possible and serve the people as soon as possible!”

Rang Weidong was accustomed to official rhetoric. He assumed this was merely another ceremonial speech, so he responded obediently, saying yes to everything and thanking the leaders for their concern.

As soon as they had been smoothly seen off, he left too.

Everyone hurried to remove their gloves and goggles. They were not used to such equipment, and it slowed them down.

People born after the year 2000 probably had no experience of it, but in many urban households during the 1970s and 1980s, the whole family had to supplement its income by folding and pasting paper boxes at home.

The state had been forced to mobilize neighborhood factories and similar operations to solve problems at the grassroots level.

Now, in effect, it had cultivated a large pool of experienced workers for the sanitary pad factory.

Everyone was already accustomed to working this way.

The only difference was that they had to report to the factory and work together in one place.

They could not take the work home and paste it together like medicine boxes or matchboxes.

Rang Weidong left with the children, while Shen Cuiyue immediately found herself surrounded by officials from every level.

The city leaders had spoken. Now everything had to be arranged at once.

There was a pharmaceutical factory nearby, just across the main road. It had once produced ampoules and injectable medicines, but production had stopped the previous year.

[Page 3 of 3]

After a brief discussion, the officials decided that the factory buildings could be vacated and given to the sanitary pad factory.

This was where Shen Cuiyue’s difference became apparent once again. Deep down, she instinctively distrusted the government. Was this some scheme to swallow up her family’s business?

“Wait a moment. What exactly are the terms for the building? I’m not asking for ownership, but at the very least, how many years will we be allowed to use it? Is there an official document to prove it? If you can’t provide one, I wouldn’t dare move there.”

The people in charge were all district officials, and they were approaching the matter with the attitude of people eager to rid themselves of a burden.

Transferring the property itself was obviously impossible. No one dared touch the fundamental issue of land ownership. But granting the sanitary pad factory the right to use the premises was entirely possible.

An empty factory would remain empty anyway.

Shen Cuiyue’s professional instinct was practically that of a con artist. Even when she was not deliberately deceiving anyone, she was exceptionally skilled at reading people’s expressions.

Once she realized that she had gained the upper hand, how could she not press her advantage?

She quietly let slip a piece of information. “We intend to sell a nationally distributed product and eventually advertise it on television. A few years of use certainly won’t be enough. At the very least, you’ll have to grant us… twenty years of use.”

In her mind, twenty years already seemed an extremely long time.

Who could have imagined that the other side, having heard that the product would be advertised on television, would be thinking only of keeping the factory in their district for as long as possible?

“Fifty years! But you must guarantee that you’ll maintain the entire factory compound properly.”

Shen Cuiyue had no way to contact anyone for instructions—mobile phones did not exist yet. She gritted her teeth and summoned the bold, streetwise nerve that came from years in the underworld of business.

She signed the relocation and usage agreement.

The result made it look as though the district authorities were the ones begging the factory to move in.

Thus, both sides forgot an extremely important issue that later generations would consider obvious: rent for the use of the premises.

Apart from the guarantees that the factory would expand production, create jobs, and increase tax revenue, the agreement did not mention that money would have to be paid to rent the vacant factory buildings.

Before the 1980s, after all, every factory had been state-owned.

The land and buildings of a state-owned factory belonged to the state. Who would have thought of charging rent?

The district leaders and Industrial Bureau officials who signed the agreement with Shen Cuiyue had no such awareness at all.

They only wanted to sign the agreement quickly and smoothly. As long as the matter assigned by their superiors did not get stuck with them, everything was fine.

Although ownership of the factory land and buildings had not yet been transferred to Dongsheng Company, fifty years of usage rights were already an enormous asset.

The factory stood within the core zone of the district, only eight hundred meters from the central roundabout along a major road. If anyone later wanted to demolish or relocate it, they would have to spend a fortune buying out those usage rights.

It could be said that this single agreement had already elevated Rang Weidong to the ranks of billionaires.

Of course, Third Brother Shen had not realized this yet, and Rang Weidong himself knew nothing of it either.

He still took the two brothers with him. He had been about to set out with Shitou when Mao’er’s attempt to suppress his curiosity and disappointment made Rang Weidong laugh and invite him along as well.

The three of them drove the little red van to the railway station. Rang Weidong even took a blank letter of introduction from the glove compartment before suddenly realizing that the letter was useless.

His military uniform was gone. Even with a letter of introduction, he could do nothing but join the surging tide of migrant workers and queue up to buy a ticket.

Even with separate ticket windows, Rongdu was packed with people.

When he glanced back at the parking lot beside the square, where he had planned to leave the little red van, Mao’er was already discussing with Shitou how many fellows there were in the square. They had casually spotted several pickpockets.

Rang Weidong made up his mind.

Forget it. He would drive to Rongdu himself.

With the attitude of a man in the underworld who believed that every extra mile traveled today meant arriving one day earlier to seek Old Yu’s help tomorrow, he hurried out of the city before five o’clock.

Who could have guessed that this little four-wheel-drive van with a 1.2-liter engine would prove even more ferocious on the road than a double-cab truck?

In June, the summer sky did not grow dark until eight in the evening. By then, Rang Weidong had parked the vehicle in a county town more than 160 kilometers away.

Maintaining an average speed of over fifty kilometers per hour on national and provincial highways was already very fast.

Rang Weidong had become quite practiced at this. He took the two younger brothers out to find the local specialties, ate and drank his fill, then parked the van on a roadside as close as possible to the county government compound and went to sleep.

Sleeping in his clothes, he certainly never imagined that he had already become a billionaire.