Chapter 172: The Qiongshan County Office

The Senate’s Qiongshan County Office—this was the official internal designation. At the entrance of the Provincial Administration Commission’s yamen, which had been taken over, hung the official external name: the Qiongshan County Post-Disaster Consultation Bureau.

The Provincial Administration Commission was one of the few magnificent official residences in Qiongshan Prefecture. Not only was the architecture neat, but it was also large, more than enough to accommodate the new Qiongshan County leadership team.

The leadership team of Qiongshan County was established according to the “Government Organization Measures” formulated by the Central Government Council. Unlike other newly occupied prefectures and counties, Qiongshan was the best in Hainan in terms of population, industry, commerce, and transportation. As a new form of county-level government structure, the Central Government Council planned to use Qiongshan County as a pilot.

Because Lingao was an “old revolutionary base area,” for a long time, manpower and material resources were integrated and operated without distinction between local and central. Many things, whether in construction or local administration, were handled personally by the Elders. This model was difficult to maintain in the long run. The brand-new administrative experience of Qiongshan County had direct significance for the Executive Committee, whose sphere of rule was constantly expanding. The Executive Committee also hoped that Qiongshan County would become a new training ground for local administrative cadres. Having a small number of Elders lead a large number of naturalized citizen cadres in local administration would be the main administrative model for the next five years.

In a small courtyard in the Qiongshan County Office, guarded by sentries, in the main building, a laptop suddenly emitted a “dududu” warning sound. A pop-up box jumped out and covered the entire screen.

A hand pressed the “OK” button on the mouse. Liu Xiang closed the pop-up box. It was almost time for the regular meeting. This was a small scheduler program that Liu Xiang had written himself to avoid delaying things.

He quickly reviewed the last part of the document translation and saved it to a USB flash drive. He would have his secretary send this USB flash drive to the confidential section later, to be sent back to the Grand Library through the Elders’ dedicated transportation channel.

Since someone had issued a warning to the Executive Committee and the Senate about data security—according to the average service life of electronic products, if they did not start backing up data now, they would irretrievably lose a massive amount of data when the first batch of storage devices suffered irreparable failures—the Elders finally felt a sense of urgency and began the work of paperizing and sinicizing the documents. At first, everyone took it for granted that the translation work should be handed over to those whose major was “English.” But after the work began, they soon complained that they could translate every word, but when it came to professional terms, if they didn’t understand the general meaning of the term, they didn’t know where to connect the long string of modifiers, and the grammatical structure would thus be fragmented. Under these circumstances, the Grand Library could only assign tasks to the Elders who were good at both their profession and English, half by force and half by inducement, to help with the translation of documents.

Liu Xiang was also a PhD from a famous science and engineering university in the original timeline. He had been trained by reading three foreign language documents a day, so translating documents in fields like computer science, mathematics, and cryptography was very easy for him. The one he had just finished was a document on chaos theory. “There are not many Elders who can still do calculus by hand. More than 500 people will also be engaged in a lot of administrative work in the future, and these skills will inevitably be abandoned.” Liu Xiang thought as he put the USB flash drive into the Elders’ special envelope, “We can’t just start from scratch with Lagrange’s mean value theorem when we open a university in the future.”

Seeing that Liu Xiang had turned off the computer, Guo Ling’er, the secretary who had been pedaling the power-generating bicycle, got off and walked over, wiping her sweat with a towel. Guo Ling’er was a refugee from the mainland. It was rare that she was a “fellow villager” of Liu Xiang, from Hubei. The name given to her after purification was Guo Rong, but when she was sent to Liu Xiang as a maid, this name struck Liu Xiang as very funny. Just as he was thinking of changing her name, the music from the Legend of Sword and Fairy happened to be playing on Liu Xiang’s laptop, so she got the name Ling’er.

“Go take a shower first, then send this to the confidential section.” After saying this, Liu Xiang picked up another laptop and walked towards the meeting hall.

This laptop, numbered “B,” contained everything related to the work in Qiongzhou, such as the “Qiongzhou Key Figures Relationship and Data Topological Analysis Tool” and the “Qiongzhou Land Situation Inquiry System.” Compared to paper materials, he still preferred electronic things.

The main tasks of today’s regular meeting were: first, for each person in charge to return the task cards issued last week and make a work summary; second, to convey the instructions on disaster relief work that had been urgently transmitted this morning; and third, to formulate a corresponding work plan for this instruction, form the work arrangements for the next week, and assign responsibility to individuals in the form of task cards.

Liu Xiang had not actually done basic administrative work. He had only been a foreman for IT migrant workers, the so-called project manager. He believed that management methods should be universal, and the methods that could manage a development team well could also be transplanted to an administrative team.

The naturalized citizen team assigned to him was a “crack force” by Lingao’s standards. Two-thirds came from the cadres of the villages and communes where the grassroots construction was already complete in Lingao, some retired soldiers and workers. One-third came from Qiongshan itself, including some of the military households who were captured during the second anti-encirclement campaign and were considered “reformable.” All these people had undergone C-level diploma training and corresponding administrative skills training. Finally, there were a small number of retained personnel from the original yamen.

He had tried this method in the “land measurement” and “county situation investigation” in Qiongzhou with his team of naturalized citizen cadres and had achieved good results. Many of the Elders were fascinated by his administrative methods and jokingly called it the “Qiongshan experience.” Some suggested that the Government Affairs Council should promote it across the board. But Liu Xiang himself knew that this method could not really be promoted. Not to mention anything else, just this “responsibility to the individual,” if it weren’t for the fact that Qiongzhou was still a training ground for the intelligence department and he could make full use of this system to supervise the cadres who were assigned tasks, the effect of this method would definitely not be as good as it was now. After all, administrative work was not like writing code, where every workload had tangible results that could be checked.

If it weren’t for this sudden typhoon and torrential rain, his original plan was to start promoting “political power to the countryside.” On the basis of having basically figured out the county’s situation in the first few months and having largely established the liaison system in each village, he would start training cadres for each village. In fact, the first batch of resident police recruited from the children of the military households of the various garrisons in Qiongshan had already been sent to Lingao for training.

But now, disaster relief had become the top priority. And this time, Liu Muzhou had also sent a special work team to preside over the disaster relief work. This made him a little confused, because not only were there Elders from the civil affairs department, but also people from the Ministry of Propaganda. Could it be that the Ministry of Propaganda wanted to do some disaster relief propaganda work?

“Let’s start the meeting,” Liu Xiang said without much ado after sitting down. He didn’t even introduce the several Elders who had been specially appointed for the disaster relief work. He said directly, “From left to right, report on last week’s work.”

Due to the flood, the daily work in the county had come to a complete standstill. Currently, the main tasks were to count the affected area, population, crop damage, and the current number of refugees. There was also the problem of distributing temporary relief grain and providing shelter for the victims. With so many people gathered on the streets outside the east gate, it not only affected the normal order but also easily led to epidemics.

The naturalized citizen cadres reported the current progress of their assigned tasks one by one. Liu Xiang listened and recorded the data in his notebook. After the report was over, he would fire off a series of questions: “What is the percentage of the ‘about’ you mentioned?”, “How much is ‘most’? Sixty percent or eighty percent?”, “What do you mean by ‘many people’? How many people exactly?”, “Yesterday, your report said that the entire Nanxian Village had left, why are there still four households and fifteen people in the reported data of the remaining village population?”, “Dushui Village obviously grows rice, how did it become taro?”

…

The naturalized citizen cadres were all trembling, looking at the paper notebooks in their hands from time to time. They knew that the chief was very difficult to fool. Even the old clerks in the county were no match for him. With a few clicks on the black notebook in his hand, he could find the loopholes in what they said and question them to death in a few words. Not only that, the “chief’s” understanding of many things was far deeper than they imagined, which was what frightened them the most.

As a member of the Ministry of Health sent to do epidemic prevention work, Lei En watched this meeting scene with a cold eye, thinking to himself, “Comrade Liu has this trick up his sleeve! No wonder he got on the ‘Lingao Times’ after a few months in Qiongshan County and came up with a ‘Qiongshan experience’.”

Soon, it was the turn of the head of the county health section, a naturalized citizen, to report on the current epidemic prevention situation. For a “newly liberated area” like Qiongshan, the main work of the Ministry of Health was not to popularize medical care but to do epidemic prevention—that is, the prevention and control of infectious diseases.

The head of the health section first reported the current number of deaths, the cause of death, and the method of corpse disposal. The corpse collection team, recruited from the disaster victims, had collected and disposed of about four hundred bodies in a few days. At the same time, the feces, animal carcasses, and plant remains in the flooded areas were uniformly cleaned up and piled up for harmless fermentation treatment. The houses in some areas where the water had receded had been disinfected by spraying with bleaching powder solution. Larger-scale cleaning and disinfection work would have to wait until the water had completely receded—according to the current rainfall, it would probably take more than a week.

He then reported on the current disease situation among the refugees. Intestinal infections and colds were the main epidemics at present, with an incidence rate of around 10%. However, no large-scale epidemic outbreak had been found yet. Lei En thought to himself that this conclusion was honestly very hasty. With the level of the naturalized citizen health workers from the crash course of the quarantine section under the Qiongshan County Health Section and the simple instruments they were equipped with, it was seriously doubtful whether they could accurately distinguish those pathogens from the excrement. When the epidemic prevention department of the Ministry of Health trained them, the focus was on symptoms rather than biochemical tests.