Chapter 54: Hon Gai Station

During this period, Bei Kai established a complete set of rules and regulations. The locally recruited miners from North Tonkin were issued work point cards based on the amount of coal they dug, and cart pushers were issued cards based on the number of carts. During periods of injury or illness, they were also given enough food rations to avoid starvation. After work each day, the workers went to the cooperative’s Delong agency to exchange their work point cards for circulation coupons. The workers used the circulation coupons to buy food, alcohol, clothing, and other goods sold by the cooperative. Besides alcohol, cigarettes and candy were the most popular items. The tools used by the miners also had to be purchased, but for now, they were on credit. Bei Kai deducted 10% of the miners’ daily wages to offset the cost of the tools until the debt was paid off.

If it were a more vicious and greedy capitalist, they could have used “loans for tools” to play simple economic tricks to make the miners heavily indebted and never be able to pay off the price of the tools—after all, tools wear out. But the elders had always believed that exploitation must be moderate. In the long run, moderate exploitation is conducive to the long-term extraction of surplus value from workers, rather than treating them as disposable consumables. In the Lingao system, labor is precious.

In terms of remuneration, Bei Kai, following instructions, provided appropriately favorable terms—at least to make the common people feel that working in the coal mine was slightly better than farming. Hon Gai Station needed to recruit enough local workers to be miners, and reputation was very important.

Li Mei’s design for the mining area’s commerce was that workers could get everything they needed without leaving the mining area—in this time and space, most local commerce was a blank slate. Now that there was a community of more than 600 people with a certain consumption capacity, it would be a shame not to develop some commerce. Commerce would first build up the reputation of the circulation coupons and prepare for the next step of promoting the circulation coupons.

The circulation coupons issued to the workers were quickly spent in Hon Gai Town. The circulation coupons were issued at the beginning of the month, and most of them were recovered by the end of the month. The heavy physical labor required the workers to consume a lot of food, and working in the wild and in the pits meant that clothing was also consumed in large quantities. However, the cooperative bought back old clothes at a discount: they were bought back by weight. The old clothes were cleaned and disinfected and then sent back to Lingao for papermaking.

The consumption of bachelors without families was even greater. Every few days, they would go to the small restaurants to eat something good and drink some wine. Some people learned to smoke—because some of the naturalized workers who were at the upper level of the labor force smoked, the local workers from North Tonkin also regarded this habit as “fashionable” and started smoking.

At the beginning of the second month, dozens of local workers from North Tonkin left. Although Bei Kai was a little disappointed, he still instructed the cooperative to exchange the circulation coupons held by the departing workers for rice or copper coins. To his surprise, after the workers returned to their hometowns, they soon brought their families and fellow villagers to work at the mine. When Bei Kai was inspecting the mine pit one day, he was really shocked to see many local women wearing conical hats carrying coal in the pit. Although he had seen women among the naturalized citizens in Lingao doing things like breaking stones at the quarry, working in the fields, and even working on construction sites—the women of Guangdong and Fujian were famous for their ability to do heavy work—this was the first time he had seen women carrying coal in a mine pit.

“This is too wasteful,” Bei Kai’s eyes fell on the women carrying coal. Because carrying coal wore out clothes a lot, almost all the miners were in rags—and the women were no exception. Although they looked dark-skinned and small, the skin exposed under their tattered clothes still aroused some of Bei Kai’s fantasies. In particular, a few of the women were still quite petite and well-proportioned.

With his authority here—his power was the same as Tang Menglong’s at the Jiazi Coal Mine. He had the power of life and death over everyone at Hon Gai Station. It would not be a big deal if he got horny and played with a few local women. But Bei Kai still managed to control his impulse to act recklessly. However, it was too wasteful of resources to let women dig and carry coal like this!

Bei Kai sent a telegram to the Ministry of Colonies and Trade, asking them to send agricultural technicians and rice seeds. Although the soil here was not good, the Baitang River was close by, and it was convenient to draw water to grow rice.

“It’s just right to put the things pulled out by the miners to use. Our slogan is: no waste!” Bei Kai said to Dugu Qiuhun, the inspector from the Ministry of Agriculture’s Tiandihui, who came to inspect.

Dugu Qiuhun pulled at his East German People’s Army spring and autumn uniform and grunted a few times. Although he had been in the agricultural sector for a long time, he was still not very interested in agricultural matters. After a few months in the agricultural sector, Dugu Qiuhun was officially appointed as an “inspector” by the organization department. Wu Nanhai and Ye Yuming both knew that Qiuhun was not cut out for agriculture, so it was better for him to go around and look at the basic construction of farmland. Now that most of the agricultural technicians were from naturalized citizens, having an elder go on inspection tours frequently to supervise and encourage them would make them work harder.

This time, when sending rice seeds and agricultural technicians, Dugu Qiuhun came to Hon Gai with the ship—there were some legends about Vietnamese girls among the elders, and Dugu Qiuhun was also very curious about this.

But the Vietnamese girls who were selected to grow rice and do farm work in front of him disappointed him greatly—the quality of these girls was really average, to be honest, not even as good as the naturalized citizens. And their skin was dark and their figures were small and thin. It was really not very interesting.

“The difference is too big,” Dugu Qiuhun secretly regretted his request to go on a business trip to Hon Gai. The Vietnamese girls in his plan were obviously not like this.

“It’s okay, local farmers from North Tonkin are constantly arriving, and there will always be a few good ones. I’ll save them for you…” Bei Kai said.

Dugu Qiuhun sighed: “Forget it, if the Senate finds out about this kind of thing, they will all pounce on it and bite… Besides, there is the hygiene problem—I heard that the antibiotic inventory is almost gone.”

Dugu Qiuhun came to Hon Gai not only to “escort” the rice seeds, farm tools, and agricultural technicians, but also to write a fishery report—although the Ministry of Agriculture failed to completely regain the fishing rights, the navy refused to hand over the fishing rights on the grounds that fishing was a supplement to maritime power. After negotiations between the two sides, a final agreement was reached: the navy would continue to control the original fishing fleet under the navy, implement fishery supervision, and collect the “fishing May Day tax” on their behalf. The Ministry of Agriculture was responsible for organizing the native fishermen to form fishing cooperatives.

After defining the scope of authority of both sides, Wu Nanhai and Li Di of the navy held a joint meeting on fishery work to discuss in depth how to implement the navy-agriculture fishery management agreement. Both sides agreed that the potential for collecting seafood taxes was great, but the production scale of the local fishermen was too small.

According to the navy’s figures, the total fishery tax collected by the Maritime Forces Department in 1630 was 4,500 piculs, a total of 500 tons. The total catch of all fishermen who paid taxes to fish in the waters near Lingao would not exceed 2,500 tons—most of which was sold to the Lingao regime. In the old timeline, during the peak of Lingao’s traditional fishery from 1934 to 1936, the total annual catch of Lingao was as high as 20,000 tons. Obviously, even without modern fishing boats and fishing gear, using traditional fishing methods, the production potential in the Lingao area was still very large.

By extension, the fishery potential that could be tapped in the entire Qiongzhou Strait, the waters around Hainan Island, and even the Gulf of Tonkin was amazing. Compared to aquaculture, which requires a strong agricultural foundation, marine fishing is the only source of protein and fat that can be provided quickly, cheaply, and in large quantities. The population under the control of the Lingao regime was constantly increasing, and the demand for protein and fat was also increasing.

To expand production, one is to expand the scale of production, in short, to increase the number of fishing boats and fishing gear; the second is deep-sea fishing, the Gulf of Tonkin, not far from Lingao, is a natural large fishing ground. In 1956, Lingao fishing boats went to the Gulf of Tonkin in groups to fish, and the total catch in one fishing season reached 32,000 tons. The third is to adopt new fishing gear and fishing techniques, improve nets, and increase the fishing depth by a few meters, and the increase in production will be considerable.

The director of the Planning Institute, Wu De, who was born into a fishing family, saw an opportunity in these figures. He proposed to launch a “fishery cooperative” campaign for the native fishermen.

Integrating the native fishermen in the Lingao-controlled area under one banner, promoting new types of fishing boats and fishing gear, implementing multi-boat collaborative fishing, and then conducting deep-sea fishing operations are all benefits for the people’s livelihood. The indirect benefit is that the navy can integrate and control the originally scattered fishing boats at sea, which is equivalent to obtaining a maritime reserve force. Fishing boats can not only serve as reconnaissance, transportation, and patrol vessels, but can also serve as warships when necessary.

Wu De believed that fishermen originally had the tradition of buying boats and fishing in partnership, and their business management awareness was stronger than that of farmers. He himself came from a fishing village and had a good understanding of the fishermen’s way of thinking. It is possible for the transmigrator group to take the lead in establishing fishery cooperatives and implement a joint-stock system. It may even be smoother than the agricultural promotion of the Tiandihui.

The matter of establishing fishing cooperatives became another project of the Tiandihui. However, this project did not progress as smoothly as imagined. In this time and space, fishermen are an independent and closed group with a completely different lifestyle and code of conduct. It is easy to force them to pay taxes to fish—the regulations are clear at a glance, but it is not easy to persuade them to join an organization and engage in joint-stock cooperation. Therefore, the promotion of the entire fishing cooperative has been difficult. Initially, only the fishermen near Bopu and Ma’niao were integrated. In 1630, the second anti-encirclement campaign took place, and the work of the fishing cooperative was temporarily suspended. It was not until after this fishery work meeting that it was restarted.

Riding on the east wind of the great victory in the second anti-encirclement campaign, and with the demonstrative effect of the modern fishing gear of the navy’s direct fishing fleet, the work of promoting the fishery cooperative has become much smoother. By the end of 1630, the fishery cooperative under the supervision of the Tiandihui had already controlled more than 80% of the fishermen in Lingao. They raised funds to purchase several new and larger fishing boats.