"I don't care about household registration. If I can't come to the First Branch Factory next year, I'll transfer back to Ji Province."
After Zheng Qiang said those words, he anxiously waited for Li Ye's reply.
The moment the words left his mouth, he had already left himself no way back.
Back when he had come from Ji Province to Beijing brimming with confidence, it had not been because of his family's Beijing household registration. After all, the Northeast in 1987 had not yet become the "outside the Pass" of later generations. Ji Province's automobile industry was among the best in the country, and Beijing was nowhere near as superior as it would become later.
But after Zheng Qiang arrived at his workplace and joined the 1041 technical improvement project, he learned what it meant to fight alone, and what it meant for two fists to be no match for four hands.
As the leader of a technical reform team, he seemed to possess all sorts of special authority in technical matters, yet any technical change he wanted to put into practice required him to explain and argue with a whole crowd of people.
Even without you, we could gradually improve things ourselves. Now that you've come, are all our previous efforts supposed to make a wedding dress for you?
It was all about redistributing interests, responsibilities, and credit. For an outsider to take his own share from someone else's hands, the difficulty was plain to see.
But a master's student in the 1980s was nothing like the Master's and PhD students of decades later, when their numbers surpassed undergraduates. Any young person who could study for a Master's degree definitely did not have a low IQ.
That was why Zheng Qiang had kept coming to the First Branch Factory