Shaohua City Government. Reception room.
Finance Bureau Director Deng Xianrui was patiently waiting for the mayor to summon him. Secretary Liang had told him that the mayor was meeting two important guests.
These past two years and more had been the most comfortable days of Director Deng's life. Although he was still only a conduit for funds, with money flowing out like water on every project, every penny had gone where it mattered: into Shaohua City's thriving economic development, steadily improving public welfare, and advancing education and healthcare.
No one knew better than Director Deng just how vast the difference was between having no money to spend and having enough to spend freely!
All right, "spend freely" might have been a slight exaggeration. But Shaohua's pillar industries were now thriving, especially the increasingly prosperous Shaohua Economic Development Zone. Local finances had developed a steady capacity to generate their own revenue, with fiscal income growing consistently at twenty percent for two years running.
Even more heartening, all five of the city's national-level poverty-stricken counties had shed their poverty designation. Jigao County, which had the strongest foundations and the best execution, had actually surpassed one billion yuan in fiscal revenue the previous year thanks to the booming Cangwu Mountain Tourism Special Economic Zone.
In short, Shaohua's current situation was this-
2011 was something else: happiness came knocking, poverty was driven out, and the people lived and worked in peace, all praising the Party's leadership. The mayor and Party secretary were especially hard to match, focused on developing the economy and never wasting time on political infighting. Today they surveyed the villages, tomorrow they looked into social security. After establishing a special economic zone, they were moving on to bridges and islands. Across the entire province, nowhere looked brighter than here.
The central