As an ordinary person in the Main World, Wei Keng had always been keen on cutting everyday expenses.
GDP was chicken shit.
In the Main World, Wei Keng had been good at scrimping and saving.
A serving of fried noodles from a street vendor with a fried egg cost one yuan and fifty cents. Oh, then he could go to the cafeteria, brush a layer of oil onto a bowl, add some Lao Gan Ma, crack an egg into it, and pop it in the microwave for a minute—any longer and it would explode—to make a five-jiao soft-centered fried egg.
A braised chicken wing from a takeout place cost eight yuan. Wei Keng could get the cost down to two yuan. He bought frozen chicken wings at the supermarket for two yuan each, washed them, then put them in the Rice Cooker with a packet of Instant Noodles seasoning, its oil, and a small dish of water. That made braised wings even tastier than the ones outside—uh, later, the dorm supervisor confiscated his Rice Cooker.
In this world, Wei Keng had begun working on the problem of increasing employment. He started designing ways to lower consumer spending on paper while steadily improving every worker's actual standard of living.
Wei Keng: Wealth from manufacturing should circulate mainly within the manufacturing sector and be spent on the ordinary needs of its workers. Branding and sales design should play only a supporting role in the economy and serve the general public. They must not use exclusivity as a selling point.
An upper-class air and unique taste were forms of auxiliary specialization. A concrete example was giving mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival, wrapped in Gold Foil, with silver tableware inside. Eastern culture was obsessed with gift-giving; people said it was embarrassing to show up empty-handed. This supported a whole class of people who studied how to make something "gilded on the outside" without caring that it was "rotten within"—a hollow structure.
Old Master Wei thought this needed to change.
In 1969, Wei Keng began taking some of the Luoshui Group's assets into e-commerce. Three online retail companies were registered, and they began recruiting young people with clean records in the four western provinces to work in the Logistics Station business. At the same time, a large group of basic managers were selected from among the Industrial park's junior workers and sent to villages across Shenzhou. There, in local Ancestral Halls, they signed a series of Processed Food Contracts. Once all these plans were in place, in the midst of the current economic depression, they financed automobile manufacturers that were on the verge of bankruptcy and began transitioning them into production of Electric Scooters, Single-Person Assist Mechs, and other products.
These measures left the heads of the old industrial conglomerates—the groups responsible for the Pillars of the Nation—perplexed. The Luoshui Group was a major industrial conglomerate, too. Why had its business gone backward, until it was now tinkering with pins and thread?
Throughout the history of world industry, inferior goods had flooded the market only during World wars. That meant consumer demand was outstripping supply, and the market had drastically lowered its standards for products beyond basic utility, absorbing huge amounts of production capacity.
But during wartime, the state paid for the public's consumer demand!
When the economy was poor, the first reaction from the upper strata was always to blame the market: the Leeks weren't consuming anymore. Only after the crisis had become unavoidable did they shamefacedly admit that the prices of goods they had put on the market, as people who controlled the means of production, might simply have exceeded what ordinary people could afford.
What if—what if prices were lowered enough? Capitalists would say they couldn't. The first price cut would trigger a panicked slump in the raw materials market, leaving primary producers unable to recoup their costs! They'd have to let their products expire and rot.
In textbooks, the classic example of an economic crisis was the farmer who poured out his milk to keep prices up rather than sell it on the market. Why wouldn't he lower his prices? Wouldn't recovering even a little of his costs be better? This question had puzzled Wei Keng for a long time.
Later, he roughly understood the logic. The people buying milk were often merchants, and often independent merchants with no principles!
When primary producers had ten portions of milk, lowering the price of the first by ten percent triggered market fluctuations. As a result, even if they lowered the price of the remaining nine by fifty percent, they might not sell them.
The middlemen who controlled distribution weren't buying milk to drink. They wanted to resell it for profit. Their logic was simple: if there was room for the market price to fall further, they'd hold on to their money and keep pushing the price down. They didn't care whether the dairy farmers lived or died, or whether consumers needed milk. It was just like the practices of rice merchants in classical China—one and the same!
The dairy farmers anticipated what would happen and thought, Ugh! Better to cut our losses and dump half the milk than let them keep pushing down the price. We'll stick to full price.
But what if the buyers were large-scale purchasers? Buyers who genuinely intended to meet the enormous market demand by taking the cheap milk off their hands?
Whenever the upper-tier market contracted, these buyers would clear out all your inventory at a low price—slightly above the cost of production! They could sell it to the lower- and middle-tier markets, or process it and store it.
That way, no matter how the market fluctuated, every portion of milk would still be an asset that could be sold in full. The dairy farmers, confident of that, wouldn't choose to dump their milk.
History in the Main World during the 21st Century had proven that once goods became cheap enough, people would suddenly discover the vast consumer potential of the countryside!
And what about this world? People with little productivity had been abandoned, left to do low-value work and unable to afford the meat, eggs, and milk sold through the world's traditional distribution channels.
So they had never been considered part of the market.
On April 1, 1969, the Online Grocery Store appeared. It offered large quantities of grain and oil at rock-bottom prices, as well as vacuum-packed, frozen cured meat.
Customers could earn coupons by checking in daily. New members could check in once a day and claim one coupon. After a hundred days of membership, they could check in twice a day and claim two. After a full year of uninterrupted daily check-ins, they could check in once more each day and claim an additional coupon.
For people with jobs, these check-ins didn't create a daily task burden.
All the Luoshui Group's factories updated their Punch Clocks. The clocks could connect to the e-commerce platform, and workers would automatically check in on the platform when they clocked in each day.
Wei Keng said, "This is how you tackle employment and consumption together." He added silently, I'm already sick of going to work every day. I don't have time to check in on an app.
In the current economic crisis, Shenzhou's marginalized population was growing rapidly. They couldn't afford Toiletries that cost more than twenty yuan or clothes that cost more than a hundred. They couldn't even guarantee a steady supply of food and oil. They refused low-paying jobs because they feared that even after doing hard labor, they still wouldn't be able to support their families.
That year, Wei Keng took all the excess goods piling up in the market and listed them on these low-cost e-commerce platforms.
Naturally, the mainstream business papers in Shenzhou mocked the sale of such shoddy, inferior products as if it were perfectly respectable. They didn't believe anyone would buy them. After all, when city dwellers were surveyed by phone and newspaper, ninety-nine percent said they "wouldn't try them."
But modern sociology textbooks taught that when sampling, one had to ensure the sample was representative and diverse. These media surveys had ignored that entirely.
Was shopping a test of taste, or was it about meeting practical needs?
To Wei Keng, who had eaten Instant Noodles as a college student in the 21st Century, shopping was simply about satisfying a need. In the 27th Century, when he had been struggling to finish his thesis, he had invited an older student and the student's girlfriend to a meal of Gongfu Cuisine—that had been about putting on a good show.
"Different material conditions" meant different ways of understanding social and economic activity! When people with a certain set of ingrained values formed a closed circle, they collectively ignored economic activity happening elsewhere.
For example, could people in the 1970s understand the economic activity surrounding collectible figurines that cost thousands of yuan in the 1990s and 2000s? Could a wealthy young woman in the city imagine the economic activity of an old man collecting scrap under a bridge?
There were still plenty of poor people in this era.
So what happened next left the mainstream media stunned. Those cheap goods they had thought no one would buy—sold out? In their economic models, individual markets were already oversupplied. Past market data clearly showed that the consumer base wasn't this large. This obviously exceeded demand. The market should have been saturated already. How could everything have been snapped up?
These economists, accustomed to reducing people to numbers, might have gotten one thing wrong.
If consumers drank a cup of milk every two days, they'd write "I don't like the taste" on a survey, rather than shamelessly admit "I can't afford it." In truth, a twelve- or thirteen-year-old could drink milk as if it were water.
[A figurine that cost over a thousand yuan: the earnest, conservative Wei Keng said, "I wouldn't buy one. That thing's too embarrassing and doesn't suit my taste. I don't like playing with little plastic people." When the price dropped to a hundred yuan, the open-minded Wei Keng said, "I think I could follow the trend."]
A few months later, the check-in discount craze showed no sign of slowing. Large quantities of agricultural products were sold not only to the new Industrial park's workers through the platform, but also to their relatives and friends. These people represented the consumer population in the urban-rural fringe.
Soon, the wave spread even further, blossoming in both the purely rural and urban markets.
Cheap cups and kettles, Black and White Televisions with technology ten years behind the times, and Satellite Iron Pots—all this outdated production capacity the Luoshui Group had salvaged from the scrap heap—spread rapidly through the countryside.
The countryside received loans to upgrade agricultural production techniques. The improved-quality agricultural products didn't just spread through Luoshui's new Industrial park; because they were so cheap, they also made it into the big cities, taking a share of the market among people in upper-class professions and creating a cycle.
In the first half of 1970, after confirming that this cycle was viable, Wei Keng gave it another push.
At a meeting of the Luoshui Group's board of directors, they decided to promote the renewal of the western road network and continue investing in the power grid. After all, the villages that had contracts with Luoshui needed electricity. The solar power Industrial park's output fluctuated throughout the day, making it unable to secure orders from the cities, but it was a perfect fit for small rural businesses.
Shenzhou already had a decent foundation for its road network. Only a few branch lines needed work.
The power grid was an even more established national industry, sustained by the old Bureaucratic System. It received funding year after year, and much of its infrastructure was already in place. It just hadn't been profitable because the economy had been stuck in a cycle of depression.
Shenzhou's General Consultative Assembly tacitly approved the Luoshui Group's economic expansion.
In its serious, sober mood, the Luoshui Group had Wei Keng write down the following in its 1970 goals and plans: "The economic foundation of the Third Industrial Age—the scale of light industry, agriculture, and heavy transportation—will determine the demand for the IT industry."
The larger the scale of the Textile industry, agriculture, and economic activity, the heavier the burden of gathering and processing information. The traditional solution was to keep hiring clerks! That was how Soviet Russia's planned economy worked. There were more and more clerks, and government offices grew more and more bloated.
In the Information Age, all that tedious work could be done by a software program on an electronic device.
In other words, large-scale economic activity could generate demand for the IT industry. Only when such a market existed could it support the IT industry. In the Main World during the 20th Century, India, the "world's office," served Europe. Its own domestic economic activity didn't need the IT industry.
IT could serve civilians as well as the military! It was part of the information technology revolution.
Wei Keng had set up this whole game on an enormous scale. He had begun laying the groundwork as soon as the information industry's training school opened. Surely no one could see it.
Even in later generations, when Shenzhou's integrated intelligent systems for combat machinery showed their advantages on the battlefield, people who studied only military technology and neglected the social economics and civilian technology of this period might not notice the tiny butterfly wing behind all these changes.
Wei Keng sighed. "Of course, maybe now, and even in the future, people will still think I'm a businessman with a bad reputation."
Wei Keng opened some documents. They described a serious product complaint that had come up recently during sales.
If a product sold on the platform had a problem, they could compensate the buyer, revoke the supplier's right to sell on the platform, and follow the proper procedures. With so many rural factories being set up, there were bound to be a few that were better or worse than the rest. In the larger transformation of society, those problems weren't the main issue, but the news had made a huge fuss.
After all, these e-commerce platforms were subsidiaries of his own group. In the East, every time-honored brand had a reputation to uphold, and this was undoubtedly damaging theirs.
Having anticipated some of the trouble ahead, Wei Keng, the reformist, no longer had the fighting spirit he'd had at the beginning. Reform was often unrecognized in its own time, and future records wouldn't give its achievements much space either.
When an economic group focused on the lower classes, it became estranged from the upper classes.
Yet ten or twenty years later, when today's lower classes had risen, they too would turn to the upper class. People were vain. They used cheap goods because they had no money, but once they could afford better, they would chase trends. If society's ideology didn't fundamentally change, consumers' tastes could shift upward. Once this era had passed, the Luoshui brand and reputation would remain fixed among the lower classes, while the market it had created would ultimately go to the brands of groups that had sat back and waited.
Wei Keng said, "Reform, reform—by the time it's done, I'm the one who's finished."
What made Wei Keng feel even more chilled was that, as a reformist, he had already taken enough concrete action, while the so-called revolutionaries were still all talk. He had thought they would do something, but they hadn't taken advantage of the opportunity to develop in the countryside or researched and managed those new markets supporting rural industry. They hadn't even formed new unions in the cities.
Wei Keng wasn't afraid of unions now. In fact, he needed them to provide information about workers' incomes and the proportions they spent on education and healthcare, so he could make the next assessment of the market.
But the progressives were all busy with things that didn't matter. For example, coeducational schools! Increasing the proportion of modern poetry in textbooks! And so on. Wei Keng thought, I'm so damn tempted to find a lamppost and hang myself from its southeast branch.
Ding-dong. The system issued a warning, showing that Wei Keng's heart rate was too high.
He had to cultivate his composure, absolutely had to. Wei Keng took deep breaths and tried to steady himself. If he wanted to develop True Qi soon, he had to keep his heart rate stable every day. Oh, the Daoist method required a good temperament and strict observance of its precepts.
For example, if he wanted to play video games, that would count as gambling, making cultivation absolutely impossible. Losing a single life would make his mood fluctuate wildly.
But Wei Keng was just an ordinary person, impatient and restless.
That evening, Wei Keng lay down in the Life Support Pod again and activated the monitoring system. Seeing how dismal his cultivation results were, he sighed and mocked himself: "I arrived full of ambition, but the moment I started practicing, it was an endless sea of suffering. I should've known what I was like."
On April 1, 1970, an explosion suddenly occurred in the backstage area of the Cuju field during the Fenghou Group's No. 34 factory sports meet!
After the blast wave had passed, Bai Jingqi, who was in charge of developing the Longyan Individual Combat System, stared pale-faced at the pile of ashes in front of him and the person who had vanished.
Two minutes earlier, Bai Jingqi had given the opening speech for the match as a senior department official, then headed to the transit area to rest.
There, he saw someone dressed in a way that was completely out of place.
The man called out his name and smiled as he held out his hand to shake. Bai Jingqi didn't know what to make of it. Eastern etiquette called for a bow, but he wondered if he'd met the man before. He decided to shake his hand first, then ask what he wanted.
Just then, a mysterious voice sounded in his ear, warning him. He quickly called for security. A guard twenty meters away pulled aside a curtain, spotted the stranger, and rushed over to stop him, realizing he had failed in his duty. But the man approached Bai Jingqi with a mysterious smile and open arms.
The mysterious voice warned Bai Jingqi to retreat. He quickly stepped backward, only to see electric arcs flickering in the other man's palm. In that instant, a force field yanked Bai Jingqi three or four steps back. The guard finally rushed forward—and promptly turned to ash.
Ke Feijia, who had come to watch the match with senior Fenghou Group executives, was seventy meters from the crime scene. He had been the one who sent Bai Jingqi the warning. He had practically witnessed the assassination attempt that had never occurred in other timelines.
From the intended target, it was clear that in the original future, Bai Jingqi of the Fenghou Group would have become famous for his work designing intelligent weapons.
Oh, Old Master Wei Keng had already withdrawn from the competition for the military's overall weapons procurement contracts.
What? The software the military would use extensively in the future came from the increasingly advanced IT industry. So why hadn't the time travelers assassinated Wei Keng?
Even if Wei Keng was the one directly providing the software, the manufacturers of the weapons were far more prominent. Wei Keng was just a purveyor of cheap goods. The people from the future might have overlooked this "mediocre" fellow.
But now that an assassination across time had taken place, the original future had disappeared. Uh, a new future lay ahead. If the problem still hadn't been solved in this new future, who would they choose to assassinate next if they remained unhappy with the past?
Ke Feijia furrowed his brow and thought, He—Wei Keng—must have some way to protect himself.
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