Chapter Thirteen: Build, Still Building

  "As long as you have the strength, as long as you have the determination to work hard and endure hardships, as long as you are willing to learn. I guarantee that from now on, you will never have to worry about food and clothing again! If none of you believe me, Yang Lao San's words, then I have nothing more to say!"

  Rumor has it that a super-large group has recently arrived in Guangxi, and this so-called group is an organization with many factories. Within the borders of Guangxi, they are opening up factories everywhere and building roads, requiring a large number of workers to be recruited. In order to quickly recruit enough laborers, they have hired influential locals from all over to spread the word about the group's recruitment conditions and benefits. A man named Yang Lao San is also a big mouth in a small town, so he became the propaganda person for recruiting workers in this town. After less than a week of training, he was sent back to the countryside to preach.

  Yang Lao San returned to the city, having gained a lot of experience. This time he came back with great fanfare, holding a folding fan and a pot of tea water, with a name list in his hand. As long as someone was willing to go, they would fill in their name and press their palm print on it, and then wait for a few days before following Yang Lao San to work. For every five people he recruited, Yang Lao San could get a big reward of one yuan, so he felt a great sense of responsibility. He wandered around the town, going wherever there were young people gathered to promote his cause. In recent days, he had gained quite a bit, with over 40 people signing up and pressing their palm prints. If things continued like this, by the time they went to the construction site in the middle of the month, Yang Lao San could get nearly ten yuan. Thinking about this made his voice even louder.

  "I'm telling you, this company is huge. They've got piles of stuff they bought from foreigners, like small mountains, and their own manufactured trucks, excavators, and those big iron things that rumble and roar, with wheels taller than me... it's all very advanced. Later on, they'll be manufacturing these things in Liuzhou too. If you follow Old Yang, you'll definitely get better treatment, and who knows, maybe one day you'll be working in the factory, and as long as you do your job well, the money will just keep flowing into your pocket!"

  "Mr. Yang, please sit down!" A housewife heard about such good conditions and quickly brought out the best chair in the house for Old Third Yang, wiped it clean with force and smiled to let him sit down, then said: "What's that thing called Asia Group? They're all advanced machines, but our family's that mouth can only plow fields and carry dung, what can he do if he goes? If he really could make those money-making things, who knows when he would go, right Mr. Yang?"

  "I'm telling you, big sister, you just don't get it. A company with tens of thousands of workers in the US has far more talented people than we do, so why bother bringing them back? It's all for the benefit of our fellow villagers. They must have thought this through before recruiting so many people. If your husband is willing to learn and can read, he can go to a technical school to become a mid-level technician, which means he can earn more money. Alternatively, he can directly enter the workshop and learn from a master craftsman, and it won't take three or two months to learn how to do things. If after three or two months he still can't learn, then your husband might as well not go out and just stay home to farm!"

  "Oh, I see. Can I go then?" The mistress wiped her hands and looked at Uncle Yang with great anticipation.

  "They say that this republic is really something, you know. If a girl like you had said she wanted to go out and work in the past, your family wouldn't have broken your legs? But times are different now. I saw many female workers at the group company the other day, but it seems they said that during this period, the main focus is on infrastructure construction, and factories for clothing and such won't be hiring for a while!!"

  Yang Lao San shook his empty tea pot and said: "If you can fill up your uncle's tea pot, your uncle will remember you. The textile factory in Ya Mei is going to hire female workers soon, and I'll make sure to find you first."

  "Okay, thank you Uncle!" The mistress happily took over Yang Lao San's teapot, bouncing and jumping to go refill the water, then remembered something and immediately shouted towards the man working on the mountain slope opposite the house: "Wa he die, he's back!"

  "This wife is really spicy!!" After sighing, Yang Lao San took a big puff of water smoke and then happily opened his own merit book to receive another worker.

  On the highway construction site from Fangchenggang to Liuzhou via Qinzhou, on the railway construction site from Fangchenggang and Beihai Port directly to Liuzhou, more and more people are starting to wear blue work uniforms. This is the most direct symbol of Yamei Group employees, and as soon as they put it on, they become a direct symbol of getting the highest welfare job in Guangxi during this period. And because of this, more and more people are rushing to sign up, although their cultural knowledge and cultivation are not worth mentioning, but they still have labor power.

  For road construction, there are bulldozers and excavators, road rollers, and other machinery that don't require a lot of manual labor. However, in some places, simple tasks such as reinforcing the roadbed on both sides of the highway still need to be done manually, using materials like stone or concrete blocks. But at this time, cement is likely being prioritized for use in more important construction projects like bridges and railways, so highways are mostly built with stones.

  The construction of the highway is proceeding at a rapid pace, with excavators and bulldozers rumbling along the designated route. Small excavators are slowly digging out drainage ditches on both sides, laying pipes to cross under the highway, and then workers manually lift massive stone slabs to serve as the roadbed, using stone plates to construct the drainage ditches. Next, dump trucks begin transporting crushed stones mixed with a certain amount of soil, which are then compacted by rollers until the highway's surface, drainage, flood control, and anti-landslide functions all meet inspection standards. A single highway is thus completed, and such a two-way four-lane expressway is expected to take only three months to build in Liuzhou. In contrast, building a similar railway would require nearly a year.

  There are many pure laborers on the construction sites of highways and railways, while in Liuzhou's steel companies, cement companies and automobile manufacturing bases, pure laborers account for a large proportion.

  The excellent traditional virtues of the Chinese nation are perfectly embodied at this time. Almost every peasant worker is a born master builder, and the frame-structured concrete factory buildings, although different from their homes in peacetime, still have many commonalities. Under the collaborative efforts of tens of thousands of workers and hundreds of technical instructors, one after another factory building rises from the ground, blast furnaces, machine tools, power transmission lines, even including small railways and highways within the plant area are all quickly completed. This speed that is hard for ordinary people to imagine has left many foreign technicians in awe, but they must not know that Shenzhen area in another time and space had achieved an even faster construction speed. Of course, such a construction speed is already surprising enough in this 20th century world today.

  Liuzhou suburbs, Taiyang Village, was originally just a small village with a population of only over a thousand. Under the exploitation of the military government, the villagers lived a simple but peaceful life. The arrival of a group of people quickly broke that tranquility and from then on, the villagers lived a lively and prosperous life.

  As the second most important resource of a country, cement is only next to steel in importance. As Asia Mei Group strives to become an industrial giant in southwest China and even the whole country, it must rely on various constructions. However, the cost of transporting cement and other materials from far-off America back to China is extremely unbearable. With the launch of subsequent construction tasks, the consumption of cement will be one huge astronomical figure after another.

  As a result, the cement company in the Asia America Group's plan began to prepare soon, and among the important production equipment returned home, except for those used by the steel mill, it occupied the second place.

  "The production equipment has started debugging, and the first batch of cement is expected to be officially launched in a week!" Zhou Jianran, as the current and also the first general manager of Liuzhou Cement Company, needs to be built, and doesn't care about being early or late.

  The construction of the railway is still proceeding at a moderate pace, while the construction of highways has accelerated significantly. The second phase of highway projects began immediately after the completion of the first phase. Highways connecting Liuzhou to important energy supply locations such as Hechi, Nanning to Pingguo via Baise, and Zhanjiang to Guigang via Yulin have been built, allowing for water transportation connections with Liuzhou. The second phase of highway construction prioritizes facilitating the transportation of various products and raw materials in the future. Unlike before, the cement used this time is no longer imported from distant America; instead, it comes from local cement factories that have begun production. These factories supply not only the major engineering projects but also the highways, leading to an increase in cement usage for the second batch of highway construction. As a result, some important mountain passes and bridges receive more robust protection, and certain bridges are upgraded from two-way two-lane roads to two-way four-lane roads, thanks to the sufficient availability of cement.

  All kinds of projects have been started, accepted and completed as scheduled, and the next batch of construction has begun, repeating continuously. Only one long-standing project has been hanging in the minds of Zhang Yu and everyone else, that is, the construction project of the steel company.

  Apart from attending the completion ceremony of the Wuzhou Cement Plant and the two bridges in Qianjiang, Zhang Yu did not go anywhere else. Some important events were left to Tang Guixin to handle, while he devoted himself wholeheartedly to the project of the Steel Company. His efforts paid off, and the Liuzhou Steel Company finally completed all its construction tasks on June 4, 1913, including the main production plants for coking, sintering, pelletizing, iron smelting, steel smelting, and rolling, as well as their auxiliary facilities. It was expected to start production formally on June 12, marking the first time Guangxi had its own steel company in Asia.

  "Liugang must complete the production capacity verification of all models as soon as possible. I don't want the Liuzhou Automotive Base, which has already started construction, to still need to import foreign steel after it is put into operation in the future. Nor do I hope that various construction projects within the province will continue to use imported materials. As for the iron and steel plant in Qinzhou, it is only used as a manufacturing base for marine steel. In the future, shipbuilding industries will definitely be arranged along the coastal line, and Liugang will not mix with them."

  Chen Bingxin, who also returned from the federal steel internship to take up the position of general manager of Liu Steel, did not receive such good treatment in his conversation with Zhang Yu. Perhaps it was because steel was too important for industry, engineering and the entire country, and Zhang Yu, who had always been careless, was particularly serious about things that could not be taken lightly. Chen Bingxin, sitting directly across from Zhang Yu, personally felt the work pressure brought by the importance of steel.

  "You're an old employee of the group, you know how much raw material usage fees the group pays every quarter. Steel of various models occupies the vast majority, and in the future, we will still focus on manufacturing machinery and automobiles, so the usage rate of steel is definitely the highest. Copper, aluminum, rubber, etc., we can all import, after all, these things are cheap in Southeast Asia, just like cabbage. But as for the steel that meets the needs of automobile manufacturing, no one knows better than us about its huge demand volume. **It's still better to grow on our own**." Zhang Yu said with a bit of humor, trying not to put too much pressure on the general manager in front of him, or else it would be really counterproductive.

  "Director, I understand all this. I will not betray the trust of the group. In addition, the group plans to build a new aluminum smelter in Pingguo and chemical plants in Nanning, etc. Many workers were recruited locally due to the construction projects of the steel company, and now that the major factories are about to start production, after some selection, apart from those who will enter the factory as apprentices or go to technical schools for study, there are nearly 3,000 people who need to find their next workplace. So..." Chen Bingxin clearly did not want too many workers, he kept all the ones he could, and the rest would have to be considered by the higher-ups for arrangement.

  "How many apprentices and students have you recruited?"

  Zhang Yu was also worried about these overly enthusiastic workers. Although the construction boom could bring a lot of income to the local area, this boom would eventually subside, and now that all the companies in the group had started production one after another, some construction sites were already overcrowded, and even the Liuzhou Automotive Base, which was still under construction, had an abundance of labor resources. How to find a way out for these surplus labor resources became Zhang Yu's biggest headache.

  "The technical school has 32 classes, each with a full quota of 20 people but all are over-quota by a few people, making a total of 960 people. There are 340 people who directly enter the factory as apprentices. Our company can accommodate a total of 1,300 people and has already reached its limit unless we expand the company's scale in the future. Otherwise, any additional workers recruited will become idle laborers."

  Chen Bingxin's opinion was very firm and clear: no more recruitment could be done. A small steel company like theirs could not afford to support too many workers; otherwise, it would not only fail to make a profit but also suffer losses."

  "You should set up more classes, such as driving schools, and train more drivers. In the future, transportation tasks will increase dramatically, so it's necessary to prepare in advance." Zhang Yu looked at Chen Bingxin, who had always been thrifty and hardworking, and said with some dissatisfaction: "At this time, the main purpose of our enterprise is not to make a profit, but to cultivate talent. With various talents, we can achieve anything we want in the future. As for the technical school, the group will allocate a special fund for it, so you can do it without worrying. No one will blame your company for not making a profit after being established for a long time. In fact, our entire plan to return to China didn't aim to make any money within two or three years."

  After a bout of mental work, Chen Bingxin was finally inspired and left satisfied. Zhang Yu still had to consider the next problem, which was much more difficult than the previous one and also more troublesome.

  PS: New author, new book, please forgive some mistakes, hope for your support and encouragement!