Jinling now had a population of one million. Only by selling expensive, high-value-added products could Jinling grow prosperous and its people live more easily.
Otherwise, if it relied purely on labor-intensive industries and the surplus value extracted from its people, Jinling would sooner or later lose its competitiveness. After all, costs were rising across the board, while people's needs grew with each passing day. If it did not earn enough or earn quickly enough, it would return to the predicament the textile mills had faced before.
Weak sales, pensions and medical care for retired workers, wages and benefits for active employees—these would gradually drag Jinling down.
That was why Wang Yan had continuously adjusted its industrial structure and developed new industries. Home appliances were what Jinling would tackle next.
Once the matter of merging the three counties into a city had been resolved, some industries would begin relocating elsewhere as appropriate. Basic shoe and garment manufacturing, for example, had little technical content and relied entirely on design and upstream chemical fibers.
Depending on the circumstances, shoe and garment production would then be moved out of Jinling, with factories built elsewhere. Jinling would retain the upstream chemical fiber and textile links, while keeping the design department in Jinling to roll out large numbers of designs and constantly iterate new products.
At the same time, heavily polluting plants such as steel mills would also be relocated out of Jinling to protect its environment.
In the not-too-distant future, Jinling would retain only high-tech industries—or rather, industries that generated technology—then use the factories it had invested in and relocated elsewhere to put that technology into practice. Jinling would use vast sums of capital to invest in all kinds of quality enterprises, leveraging this wave of the era's dividends to achieve enormous asset appreciation.
Together