Chapter 50: Corruption

The maidservant rushed in, her shaved head glistening in the candlelight. But for Chang Shide, a man who had not been with a woman in half a year and was brimming with a potent cocktail of hormones, this was a minor detail. He seized A’Xiu and began to tug at her clothes. The simple belt gave way with a single pull, revealing a body unadorned by undergarments. His hands roamed freely, and he reveled in the tactile pleasure. A’Xiu was clearly no stranger to the ways of men. She began to pant under his caresses, collapsing onto the bed. He mounted her immediately. Eager to please her new master, she writhed and catered to his every whim, her moans a calculated enhancement to the atmosphere. Chang Shide, so long deprived, surrendered quickly. The immense energy that had been building within him for months erupted in a volcanic release. In just two or three minutes, his recovery rate was an astonishing 120%. He was immediately ready for another round. After several more encounters, A’Xiu’s energy began to wane. Seeing the woman beneath him growing still, Chang Shide, though not fully sated, finally finished. Though her body was sore and weak, A’Xiu managed to fetch water from the outer room to clean him before tidying herself and slipping away.

The old-fashioned house offered little in the way of sound insulation. The commotion kept the entire courtyard awake. The younger men were particularly agitated, forcing Zhou Shizhai to repeatedly order Li Biao back to his bed.

This is how a man should live, Chang Shide thought with deep satisfaction, sprawled on the bed, his body feeling as if it were floating on a cloud. I should teach this woman some new tricks. New positions. And I should get some sexy underwear. This all-natural look is a bit… boring. And her breasts will sag. As for the other two, I’ll need to train them properly. In the future, I’ll expand my collection. Add some Westerners…

The next morning, he woke early, feeling as if the sky had never been so clear, the air never so fresh. He stood under the eaves, greeting everyone who passed with a boundless enthusiasm, feeling infused with a youthful vitality.

“Old Wen, why are your eyes so dark?” he asked Wen Tong, who was yawning as he shuffled past on his way to the sugar factory.

“How could I sleep with you howling like a wolf all night?” Wen Tong grumbled.

“I know, I know,” Chang Shide apologized sincerely. “Old Wen, do you want me to have A’Zhu serve you tonight?”

“I don’t have the energy for that,” Wen Tong replied evasively, though the thought had crossed his mind. He quickly made his escape.

Wen Tong arrived at the factory office and began to sift through the reports from the various plantations. He struggled to decipher the crookedly written, not-quite-fluent classical vernacular. He had to enlist Wen Qing’s help. The lack of cadres was their biggest headache.

The reports indicated that more than half the sugarcane had been harvested, and raw sugar production was proceeding smoothly. But being a landlord in this unfamiliar land was a difficult business. Over the past month, Wen Tong had felt a growing sense of unease. A manager at one of the mills had repeatedly reported that the sugar master’s poor skills were resulting in a significant loss of sugarcane juice. The amount was staggering, nearly a fifth of the daily extraction. Wen Tong knew that no matter how inept the master, the losses couldn’t be that high. He had the escort agency investigate and discovered that the manager and the sugar master were colluding to embezzle twenty to thirty kilograms of raw sugar every day. The news infuriated him. He knew this was not an isolated incident. He informed Liao Dahua and asked him to dispatch his most capable men to investigate all the mills. As he had suspected, the cheating was rampant. Even the newly arrived indentured servants had joined in. They couldn’t get their hands on the sugar, but they could cheat with the sugarcane. The village chief, his deputy, and the militia captain of one plantation had colluded to sell sugarcane on the side, underreporting the yield by a significant margin.

If this continued, the situation would spiral out of control. Greed was a contagious disease. Left untreated, it would become a frenzy. The big shots would steal big, the small fry would steal small, and those who dared not steal would simply slack off. Once morale collapsed, the sugar company would be hollowed out by parasites before it had a chance to grow. Wen Tong had initially planned to turn a blind eye to some of the shortcomings, to focus on production and deal with the problems after the harvest. But the current situation was intolerable.

“What do people learn the fastest? Corruption!” Chang Shide, summoned by Wen Tong to discuss countermeasures, swore with a righteous indignation that completely ignored his own abuse of public funds the day before.

“We need a plan,” Wen Tong said, his voice laced with worry. “We have no reliable people. Counting the Wen brothers, the maids, and the slaves you bought, we have no more than ten people we can trust.”

“What about the Qiwei escorts?”

“They are reliable, but they are martial artists, not sugar experts. These are just the problems we can see. Who knows what’s happening in the shadows.”

This was not Lingao. If Lingao was a liberated zone, Leizhou was a guerrilla zone. Their power here was minimal, their prestige nonexistent. It was not enough to deter the new immigrants and the locals, who viewed foreign investors as fat sheep to be fleeced. Without the groundwork laid by Qiwei, things would be even more difficult.

“We must ask Lingao for cadres,” Wen Tong insisted. “People from Du Wen’s workshop, or the National School’s training class. We need to fill the grassroots positions…”

“Wouldn’t that make us look incompetent?” Chang Shide disagreed. “We’ve just started, and we’re already crying for help. How will we manage in the future? Besides, the Executive Committee is short on cadres itself.”

“Then what do you propose?”

“A combination of carrots and sticks,” Chang Shide said. “The key is to win the loyalty of the immigrants. They are our future. As for the mill workers, we crack down on a few and win over the majority.”

“Isn’t that just empty talk?”

“First, we establish a sound wage and welfare system. Second, we make an example of the ringleaders.” Chang Shide’s approach was simple. If you want employees not to steal, they must have a sense of ownership. They couldn’t fool the people of the Ming Dynasty into believing the Leizhou Sugar Company was their property, but they could increase their sense of identification by letting them share in the profits.

“The first part is easy enough,” Wen Tong said, “but how do we punish the corrupt? Fire them?” Lingao had a police force, a labor re-education team, a complete apparatus of state violence. Here, they had nothing but a dozen escorts.

“Firing them won’t be much of a deterrent. And the Executive Committee has invested a lot in these immigrants.” Chang Shide pondered for a moment. “We need to make an example. Let’s ask Liao Dahua. He’s a local. He might have a solution.”

They sent for Liao Dahua. After hearing their story, he smiled. “This is easy. Patron Guo is on good terms with Aide-de-camp Lü, a favorite of the Governor-general. For a bit of silver, we can get a letter from him and have the government make an example of someone.”

It was a solution. The authority of the government was paramount. If they could get the government involved, it would deter the local troublemakers. They looked at each other and nodded.

“Is it troublesome?”

“Not at all,” Liao Dahua said. “It just depends on how big you want to make it. If you want to take a few lives…”

“It doesn’t have to go that far,” Wen Tong said quickly, “but it can’t be too light either.”

“Then it is easy. But government officials are never easy to deal with. They only recognize silver. With a letter, they will do the job, but to have it done well, you must spend money. Over a hundred taels for all the connections. And the tricky part is that it involves another county. We will have to bribe the officials in Haikang as well.”

An expense of two to three hundred taels. They had the authority, but it was a large sum. Both men hesitated. Finally, Chang Shide gritted his teeth. “Let’s do it.”

Wen Tong agreed. If they could rectify the situation, they could easily make a few thousand taels this harvest season. It was worth it.

They discussed the details. Wen Tong wanted to gather solid evidence, but Liao Dahua assured him it was unnecessary. The charges would depend on the size of the bribe. If they were ruthless, they could frame them for colluding with pirates. But Wen Tong insisted on having evidence.

A few days later, four yamen runners from Xuwen were dispatched. They set out with Chang Shide and the escorts and arrested the managers and village cadres of the two most corrupt plantations, taking them to the county yamen. The matter was handled with astonishing speed. Wen Tong’s evidence was useless. As soon as the prisoners arrived, the assistant magistrate held court. Without any interrogation, he convicted them of “theft.” The tally sticks were thrown down, and the prisoners were given eighty and one hundred strokes of the cane respectively. Liao Dahua, knowing the manager wanted to make an example, had bribed the yamen runners who administered the beatings. They showed no mercy. The hall filled with the sounds of tearing flesh and blood-curdling screams. Chang Shide had the managers, workers, and village cadres from all the plantations brought to the yamen to watch. The timid didn’t dare to look. Some wet their pants.

After the beating, the indentured servants were returned to their original masters for re-education. The others were put in the cangue for a month.

Wen Tong couldn’t bring himself to be present. Chang Shide watched the whole thing with a cold face, but he regretted it. As a modern man, he was not accustomed to such cruelty.

But it was effective. When he arrived at the other plantations with the yamen runners and demanded that those with problems “confess for lenient treatment,” the terrified workers flocked to him to hand over their ill-gotten gains.

A few days later, he toured the plantations in Haikang with the local yamen runners. This time, he gave everyone a chance to “reform.” The menacing yamen runners, with their clanking chains, struck fear into the hearts of the corrupt. They obediently handed over their loot. Those who thought they could get away with it were dealt with in the same brutal fashion. After paying the runners and sending gifts to the magistrate’s secretary, the bloody spectacle of “killing the chicken to scare the monkey” finally came to an end. Wen Tong and Chang Shide returned to the South China Factory in silence. The job was done, but the process had left a bad taste in their mouths.

“Actually,” Wen Tong said, “I think our original time was somewhat lawful.”

“Yeah,” Chang Shide agreed. “Today, I finally understood what it means to be a real ‘commoner’.”

With the matter settled, Chang Shide dismissed all the managers, regardless of the severity of their offenses. He and Wen Tong had decided that in the future, all such cadres would be selected from among the immigrants. Then, he summoned all the village representatives, the factory workers, and all the employees of the South China Factory to a meeting.

Looking at the sea of black heads filling the courtyard, Chang Shide walked up the steps. His words were simultaneously translated by Liao Dahua and Wen Xiu.

“Most of you came from the refugee camps in Guangzhou. You all remember the life you lived before you entered those camps. I don’t need to tell you how many people die on the streets of Guangzhou every day. The great manager of the Zicheng Firm took you in, gave you food and drink, treated your illnesses, and gave you new clothes. You were never hungry. Now, you have come to Leizhou. The conditions are not as good as in Guangzhou, but you get three full meals a day. Even your children and the elderly can eat their fill. Ask yourselves, in this day and age, how many masters can do this?”

“Though you have all signed contracts, and according to the rules, we only need to feed you for seven years, the sugar factory still pays you wages. Man, woman, old, or young, if you work, you are paid. You can ask around at the surrounding plantations. See what kind of treatment the laborers of other families receive.”

“You have all heard the saying: ‘Pies don’t fall from the sky.’ Neither the Zicheng Firm nor our South China Sugar Factory are charities. We give you good food and drink so that you will work. You have eaten our food, worn our clothes, and taken our wages. You must work hard.”