Over the next sixty-two days, Great Han scarcely had a single truly quiet day.
The families that had once thought moving their gold and silver overseas would solve everything soon discovered that Lin Cuo had become so practiced at purging the wealthy that the process almost resembled an assembly line.
First, inspect the shareholdings. Then freeze the financial instruments. Then take over the board.
Next, turn private mansions into housing for military families, convert collections and jewelry into wartime bonds, and finally comb through the account books to find which officers, bank managers, and local councilors had taken money.
Lin Cuo grew increasingly fond of this kind of asset restructuring.
A sprawling garden estate covering hundreds of acres meant nothing to the war effort; tear out its artificial hills, turn its ponds into firefighting reservoirs, partition its opera theater into technicians' quarters, and squeeze a factory into the back grounds, and production capacity materialized.
He even summed it up at a Secretariat meeting: "Real engineers are allowed to live better than ordinary workers. Procurement officers are not allowed to acquire ten villas just by signing their names."
Once the professional pay system went into effect, the drive within Luoyang's industrial district really did seem to have been suddenly unleashed.
Senior technicians who could consistently keep Gao Hai joint tolerances within specifications had their wages raised to four times those of ordinary assembly workers; engineers who could independently calibrate Linear Cannon fire-control systems received not only fixed salaries, but also testing allowances, hazard pay, and shares of patent revenue; pilots of high-load KMFs earned even higher annual salaries, while death and disability benefits directly covered their parents, spouses, and children.
People who had previously been poached by casinos and foreign conglomerates began returning, and the price soon became apparent.
Senior engineers,