Li Ye's bully-boy image thoroughly frightened Chu Shixiu.
This damned young man was going to send her to prison!
A few years ago, trucks would often parade reform-through-labor prisoners through the streets for public humiliation. Chu Shixiu had watched with great relish, but if she were tied up on one of those trucks herself, she did not know whether she would collapse into a puddle of mud.
"Send her to the police, send her to the police—Comrade Li Ye, can't you stop making mountains out of molehills? Why do you always go to the police over everything? We have our own Security Department. Why trouble the police?
"Do you know that our unit has already been marked by the local police? They say the atmosphere in our unit is bad and the impact is extremely vile."
"..."
Going to the police whenever there was trouble was an ingrained instinct in Li Ye's mind, but people in this era believed in "taking troubles to the unit." They simply were not thinking along the same lines.
So at the crucial moment, Niu Hongzhang still displayed his "kindness" and tried to smooth things over.
Of course, he was not doing it for Chu Shixiu's sake. He was doing it for himself.
Now, it seemed highly likely that this child was not Old Xie's. If the truth came out, where would that leave Niu Hongzhang's face?
Forcing one of his employees to accept some wild child—wouldn't that be utterly devoid of conscience?
So the best solution was to handle it internally, turn a major matter into a minor one and a minor one into nothing, then muddle through it all.
Niu Hongzhang knew that First Branch Factory had a good relationship with the police. Last time Wang Dazhen jumped off a building, Niu Hongzhang