Inside the safety zone, the small urban district had already begun leveling the ground.
Everywhere Chen Shouyi looked, workers crowded together in dense masses.
Many of them had potbellies and clearly had never done hard labor. Most were refugees who had only recently moved here.
Ever since the upheaval, unemployment had remained stubbornly high. Only in the newly established safety zones had employment rates returned to pre-upheaval levels.
Outside the safety zones, across all of Hedong City, perhaps only one or two people out of every ten could find work. The vast majority were unemployed and could only rely on relief stations to survive.
Did the city government have any money right now?
It certainly did. A great deal of it.
Ever since the banks could no longer operate normally, vast sums of money had piled up inside them, then wound up in the city government's custody. If that money were divided equally among the people, each person could probably receive one or two million.
However, no ruler with even a shred of sense would do such a thing.
Money was, at its core, a contract between its holder and the market regarding the right to exchange. Fundamentally, it was an agreement among its holders. Strip money of its essential nature, and it was nothing more than a piece of paper—pretty to look at, perhaps, but utterly worthless.
Under the current circumstances, supplies in the market were scarce. If that enormous amount of currency were distributed equally among the people, the first thing they would do would probably be to buy up food and other supplies in bulk, hoarding them like hamsters preparing for winter.
The result would be inflation, a devalued currency, and skyrocketing prices.
Society as a whole would only become even more chaotic.
Prices had remained relatively