The Heroic Spirit of Heaven and Earth, Still Awe-Inspiring Through the Ages

Eat until you threw up?

When he heard Xu Yun say that,

Wang Aimin, who had graduated from college less than two years ago and was still relatively young and excitable, immediately widened his eyes and blurted out:

"Consultant Xu, are you serious?"

Eating dumplings until you threw up.

For example,

The most successful enterprise last year was a certain state-owned agricultural machinery factory in southern Sichuan whose name began with the character "Two." It mainly produced blades for plowing equipment and had more than five hundred employees.

Several Japanese rotary tiller brands had yet to enter the domestic market, so this factory had made a great deal of money last year by relying on its own production.

So, for the New Year, the factory slaughtered thirteen pigs—local pigs with delicious meat but little fat, each weighing only around a hundred jin. Every employee received about two jin of pork.

You had to understand,

at least 70 percent of those employees weren't bachelors. They had elders to care for and children to raise. Even in a dual-income household, if they cooked just one dish per meal, that meat would last only three or four meals.

And yet this seemingly ordinary benefit had made it into some national newspaper, leaving countless people green with envy and drooling.

State-owned factories in many places had even called on their employees to learn from the factory whose name began with "Two," and set themselves the goal of giving every employee at least one jin of meat as a New Year's benefit this year.

That showed just how scarce supplies were in those days. The phrase "eat as much as you want" was generally reserved for plain boiled water.

So, not long ago,

when word began spreading around the base that everyone would get to