I See through Everything

Chapter 245: Chapter 136: Ferment

Inside the conference room of the Meilong Town government office building.

The village leaders from all 31 administrative villages had gathered.

Wasting no time, Chen Xingang had copies of the project proposal Jiang Miao had left that morning distributed to the more than one hundred people in attendance.

"Take a look, everyone. This concerns the future development of your villages."

The village leaders who received the documents opened them with varied expressions and began to read carefully.

After reading for a moment, a look of surprise crossed the face of Lin Anmin, the chief of Xin Cun Village. He turned to his village’s director, Tian Changgeng, and whispered, "Old Tian, this project is huge!"

"Hailufeng Company always makes big moves. This is a good thing," Tian Changgeng replied with a smile.

"An increase of six to seven thousand yuan per mu is certainly good. Otherwise, with all the villagers clamoring to dig up their rice paddies, we’d be in a tough spot," Lin Anmin said, shaking his head with a wry smile.

He had heard too many discussions and complaints these past few days. Clearly, the villagers were green with envy over the profits from the fishponds.

Planting rice yielded only 1,100 to 1,200 yuan per year. After deducting the costs of pesticides, fertilizer, seeds, transplanting, plowing, and harvesting, a single mu only netted 500 to 600 yuan—and that didn’t even account for their own labor.

To toil for four or five months for such a meager sum, especially when each family’s plot of land was so small, made it impossible to earn any real money.

After all, Meilong Town had a local population of just over 100,000, but only had less than 60,000 mu of farmland in total. That was an average of 0.6 mu per person. Even after excluding city dwellers, migrant workers, and fishermen, the average was still only a little over 1 mu per person.

With such a small area of farmland per person, there was no way for villagers to prosper from farming unless they cultivated cash crops or got into aquaculture.

This was the agricultural dilemma currently facing the entire Lingnan region.

The village leaders and the town government were caught in an incredibly awkward position in this conflict; taking heat from both sides was inevitable.

Chen Pengfei, the chief of Xinyu Village, was sitting next to Lin Anmin and nudged him with his shoulder. "Anmin, Hailufeng Company is investing in a factory in your village. Your cousin’s hit the jackpot."

"Hah, hit the jackpot? He nearly got me killed." A look of lingering fear crossed Lin Anmin’s face as he thought about his cousin, Lin Anshun.

"What happened?" Chen Pengfei asked, surprised.

"It’s a bit complicated. This isn’t the place to discuss it."

Glancing at Chen Xingang and the others at the front of the room, Chen Pengfei understood. He then whispered, "With Hailufeng Company expanding its procurement of Egyptian Fish by so much, can their feed mill even handle it?"

"They should be able to, right?" Lin Anmin wasn’t entirely sure.

As they talked, the other leaders gradually finished reading and began discussing the proposal in low voices.

In an instant, the conference room became as noisy as a marketplace.

This was especially true for the leaders from the major rice-growing villages; they were the ones under the most pressure.

After all, villages like Xin Cun Village and Xinyu Village had historically made their living from the sea. Over the past two or three decades, they had reclaimed land from the sea to create vast aquaculture zones. Most of their villagers owned fishponds, so the conflict between rice paddies and fishponds was less pronounced.

In contrast, for villages like Weihu Village, Shizhou Village, Nanshan Village, Pengcuoliao Village, Xinliao Village, Gaozhong Village, Meilian Village, Messi New Village, and Jinpanwei Village, the conflict between farmland and fishponds—and between rice and cash crops—was far more intense.

Now, seeing Hailufeng Company’s "Rice-Bean-Fish-Lotus Project," they could finally breathe a sigh of relief.

As long as the villagers’ overall income could be raised, the conflicts would naturally subside.

Sima Qian recorded a saying in the *Records of the Grand Historian*: "Only when the granaries are full will people know propriety and etiquette; only when they are well-fed and clothed will they know honor from disgrace."

While economic development wasn’t a panacea, for the various parts of Shanmei, and indeed for the entire Eastern Guangdong Region, economic issues were the root cause of their conflicts. Therefore, developing the economy would be like a shot in the arm for the local area, with immediate and effective results.

Geographically speaking, what Shanmei City should do is fully embrace the Pearl River Delta market. It should position itself as a key supplier of agricultural products for the Pearl River Delta Region, while also building its brand as a tourist destination to attract consumers from the area.

As for other industries, it really held no competitive advantage.

After all, Shanmei’s labor and living costs were relatively high. It had already missed the window for developing labor-intensive industries, and with the government continually tightening environmental regulations, it was in a poor position to absorb the outdated industrial capacity being offloaded by the Pearl River Delta.

Previously, environmental crackdowns had crippled Meilong Town’s gold and silver jewelry processing industry and Ketang Town’s gemstone jewelry industry, from which they had never recovered.

Hailufeng Company’s business might look like a labor-intensive industry, but it was actually a technology-intensive one.

Take the Egyptian Catfish farming and durian cultivation industries, for example. At their core, they used technology to achieve high profit margins, which in turn allowed them to sustain the high labor costs.

Only the surge in productivity brought by technology could drive high-quality development in underdeveloped regions.

Otherwise, Shanmei and other areas in the Eastern Guangdong Region had fundamentally no potential for development.

Simply absorbing outdated industries from the Pearl River Delta Region was not a way to defy fate and turn their fortunes around. After all, Eastern Guangdong’s costs for labor, living, environmental compliance, and raw materials simply couldn’t compete with places like An Nan. Only its electricity and infrastructure costs, backed by the nation’s massive industrial system, allowed it to hold its own against An Nan and other parts of the Southeast Asia Region.

But places like An Nan and other regions in Southeast Asia were also developing; their power and infrastructure would improve as well.

In this respect, the potential of the Eastern Guangdong Region was even lower than that of places like Gannan and Xiangxi.

After all, places like Gannan and Xiangxi could leverage their inland location and relative transportation barriers to compete against products from the Southeast Asia Region.

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