Uniting Our Thinking, Racing to the Finish! (Part 1)

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Seeing Wang Yougong's astonished expression, Xu Yun thought for a moment, then continued:

"Comrade Yougong, I remember you're from Shanghai, right?"

Wang Yougong nodded.

"That's right."

Then he thought about it and added:

"Shanghai as in Puxi, not Pudong or Northern Jiangsu."

Xu Yun:

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Well, that one sentence alone was enough to show that Wang Yougong had bona fide Shanghai roots.

Xu Yun took a deep breath and traced a neat square in the air in front of Wang Yougong.

"Comrade Yougong, as I recall, there are still a lot of alleyways in Puxi, right?"

"As far as I know, quite a few of them put a television in the main alley or in a shared courtyard, and at least dozens of people gather to watch every time."

"In some places with more room, it's perfectly normal for the crowd to exceed a hundred."

"And there are plenty of places like that, so the actual audience reached by these more than 500,000 television sets could easily be multiplied tenfold."

Shanghai's alleyways were a distinctive feature of the era. Hundreds, even thousands, of people typically lived in a single alleyway.

At a time when most households still used chamber pots, it wasn't unusual for the alleyways to put on the astonishing spectacle of hundreds of people emptying and rinsing them at once.

Of course.

Xu Yun hadn't brought up the alleyways to share tips with Wang Yougong on rinsing chamber pots. He was trying to make another point:

At a time like this, a single television could reach at least a dozen viewers.

Across from him, Wang Yougong's pupils contracted slightly.

He—or, for that matter, most of the scholars present—had a wealth of experience, but when it came to television, they'd fallen into a mistaken way of thinking.

The