Li Xiangqian submitted the proposal and also contacted the Pastoral Team through the Supply and Marketing Cooperative, explaining the idea to them.
The Pastoral Team gave an ambiguous response. Li Xiangqian said no more. With this sort of thing, making the gesture was enough.
The snow disaster was already here. He had offered them an idea and even found someone to provide a fallback. Whether they agreed and wanted to do it was their business.
The Supply and Marketing Cooperative was a major organization with considerable influence at the time. It was not going to fawn over people who gave it the cold shoulder.
By contrast, the notice at the Purchasing Station drew an immediate response.
With the weather freezing cold, hides were about the only things the resellers could buy. Whatever other supplies remained from summer and autumn were incidental pickings; they would take whatever they could get.
But hides were not something they could simply get whenever they wanted. Game had to appear within their own little patch of territory before anyone could shoot it, skin it, and sell the hide.
Besides, money was hard to earn these days. Some part-time hunters skinned the Mongolian gazelles or red deer they shot and took the hides to the County Seat themselves. It was only another dozen kilometers or so. A reseller would pay thirty or forty yuan for a hide, while taking it to the Purchasing Station themselves could fetch fifty or sixty.
Why let someone else pocket that difference of nearly twenty yuan?
So buying hides was hard work for the resellers too.
Now that Li Long had given them a new way to make money, they were naturally happy.
Compared with large sheep farmers or pastoralists with extensive pastures, small-scale livestock owners were actually less able to