Chapter Fifty-Seven: Collaborative Cement Factory

  PS: With everyone's support, I must try my best! Today is the third update!

  Before coming here, he had already figured out that Zhu Jingyuan was a man of responsibility and courage, who could unhesitatingly devote himself to industry under such social conditions. It takes considerable guts and vision to do so, given the era where warlords, politicians, hoodlums, and bandits held sway, and laws were like dog shit that anyone could trample on. Chinese businessmen are still essentially no different from their ancient counterparts, often becoming the fat meat for ambitious people to carve up at will. To venture into this situation itself is a kind of bravery.

  Zhu Jingyuan may not be like Miao Handong, a man from a prominent family with considerable local influence and a massive business empire. To move him would require careful consideration and calculation, as the social connections of these aristocratic families are far-reaching and not easily understood by ordinary people. No one would dare to provoke them lightly. Zhu Jingyuan, on the other hand, came from a humble background, despite having some family property, but often became a money tree for warlords and politicians. In this era, it can be said that those who ventured into business either had a strong background or extraordinary courage and charisma.

  Actually, Zhu Jingyu was dissatisfied with Shi Fa's work as a technician for a long time. To build a factory at that time, the equipment didn't have any electronic control, just simple mechanical devices that were easy to install and use. It wouldn't take more than half a year to prepare everything, and the rest of the time would be spent on trial production and debugging. If it were in the hands of a real technician, this process would only take a few months, or even less than a month for a true master. But Shi Fa had been dragging his feet for so long, saying there was no problem was impossible.

  However, Zhu Jingyun himself was also helpless. At that time, China's basic industries had just started, and various knowledge talents had not been cultivated yet. As a result, whether it was military or civilian industry, many key technologies were in the hands of foreigners. Moreover, there were not many foreigners who were willing to come to the East to make a fortune, and those who had never studied abroad did not know where to find these technical experts. It was also through friends' introduction that he found Shi Fa, a German. If he were just a native Chinese businessman, he would not have had such channels.

  Zhu Jingyuan had suspected that Shi Fa was a swindler, but he himself didn't understand the technology and couldn't make a comparison, so there was no concrete evidence. Moreover, he couldn't find any technical personnel to replace him, so for now, he could only watch helplessly as his funds were slowly depleted.

  There is another issue that exists among the Chinese people of this era, which is the fear of foreigners. Since the Qing dynasty's defeat in the First Opium War, the big-nosed and blue-eyed foreigners, who had been familiar to the Chinese for thousands of years, suddenly became the most terrifying species. The Chinese, who had been fooled and brainwashed by the Qing dynasty for 200 years, were so scared when they saw foreigners with guns that they thought they had seen a regional evil spirit and didn't know how to react. They forgot that during the Ming dynasty, countless Han people held firearms and cannons and fought against foreigners at sea, achieving great feats.

  After the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the powers carved up China and enjoyed special privileges. They became lawless and reckless, while the Chinese people, who had been intimidated for decades, lost their backbone. The so-called Republic was just a big circus, with a group of monkeys fighting to be the king of the mountain in their cage. The Western masters, who were enjoying the show, would occasionally throw in a few bananas to encourage them, and then they could see even more intense fighting and killing.

  The common people under the feet of these beasts are even more unable to make decisions for themselves, they either follow these beasts in their battles and killings, or muddle through day after day in a dull haze, completely unaware of the world around them.

  In this era, the literati and businessmen are actually a group of awakened individuals who try to extricate themselves from this endless beastly life through their own efforts. The difference lies in that the literati strive to transform themselves into onlookers outside the cage, for which they do not hesitate to shed their skin, forget their original surname and past glory, and do not think about how to strengthen themselves to break free from the cage and fight for their dignity and honor. Instead, they want to be like dogs, serving as servants, trying to gain recognition from the onlookers through mimicry, and then obtain a few seemingly benevolent but actually empty and fleeting words of praise, which makes them infinitely happy.

  Businessmen, on the other hand, are trying to regain their dignity through self-expansion, but they also have a bias - they lack the awareness of establishing new order and system. They cannot find a real solution or direction, and they try to imitate the trajectory of Western powers' rise to strength, hoping to break free from constraints in the same way. However, they forget that all this is under the surveillance and control of others, their every move is within the system and control of others. No matter how hard they try, they will eventually find that it's just a tiny ripple in a huge wave, and as soon as the other side stirs up the whirlpool, this seemingly beautiful scene will sink to the bottom, without even a bubble emerging.

  This limitation is not something that one generation or a group of people can easily get out of. This fence, it's also not something that a little bit of success and a few so-called great men can reverse. In history, this kind of major change, major turmoil, its duration is often calculated in centuries. The Western powers, in order to reach where they are today, spent 400 years fighting for dominance on the seas. How many nations were annihilated, how many civilizations disappeared, how many humans were slaughtered and plundered, how much evil accumulated in the cracks of that glorious facade? That bloody stench is something that even after thousands of years cannot be eliminated. The Chinese people, with their benevolent hearts, how can they possibly follow this path to revival through imitation?

  No one can truly see through all the changes of this era, no one can grasp the rise and fall of everything with one hand, and no one can predict all the changes like a prophet in this era, leading all development. This is a big game with countless hands participating, you don't know what kind of card will be turned over next.

  Chen Xiaoqi can't either, so all his efforts are based on "what I want, what I want to do", rather than "doing this will definitely succeed". The world is not certain, there is no absolute, maybe his great cause will be completely destroyed in the long river of history just because of a trivial car accident or sea disaster. He hasn't become so arrogant that he thinks he's absolutely immortal, and God isn't just for him alone.

  Influencing more people, influencing the most fundamental worldview, values, and creativity is the most effective way to pull a nation out of the mud. However, it is also the most difficult thing to do. For this goal, Sun Yat-sen struggled hard for his whole life but never achieved it until his death. Countless sages have thought about it for thousands of years, yet they still ended up being carried forward by the tide. Even science, which was initiated by Descartes and had driven the world forward for 500 years, found itself still trapped in the realm of religion when quantum mechanics developed to this day. Scientists were astonished to discover that everything seemed to be still within the scope of religion, as if the wise men thousands of years ago had already predicted such an outcome. Those who developed materialism to its extreme finally realized that idealism had never left this world. They suddenly understood that in the ancient Chinese classics, which are now barely readable, the concept of "the unity of heaven and man" was already well-known 5,000 years ago, and both idealism and materialism have their own biases.

  Unlike others, Chen Xiaoqi has never had the idea that Chinese people are inferior to foreigners. On the contrary, he has always believed that Western culture and art, compared to China's thousand-year-old civilization, do not even have the qualifications to be mentioned in the same breath. This pride comes from his understanding and recognition of his own traditional culture, rather than the kind of half-baked or completely ignorant criticism of Chinese culture and Confucianism that some people indulge in.

  So, he is one of the few people in this era who has no psychological barriers when facing foreigners, so his style of doing things is so unique and independent. Unconsciously, it also gradually influenced the compatriots around him, and their spiritual temperament gradually became different from that of the people of this era.

  People like Zhu Jingyuan are representatives of the ambitious and wise among Chinese people in this era. They have their own dignity deep down, but they succumb to the environment of this great era. They hope to shake off and break free, but there is no better way or outlet for them. They hope to change through their own efforts, but find that under someone else's system, they cannot help but rely on others' power. This method will prove to be ineffective from decades ago to decades later.

  Transcendence, the only reliable forever is oneself. To defeat others in their most skilled field, you have to pay countless hard work and efforts, and also hope that others will stop and wait for this absurd situation to happen - despite it being absolutely impossible. In the face of the Western powers' hundreds of years of developed industrial technology, the Qing Empire's curved knife became as useless as a pigtail braid. If the Ming Dynasty at its end could still keep up with the West, then after nearly three hundred years of decline, it is unknown how many years it will take to rise again and catch up.

  Zhu Jingyu didn't doubt for a moment that when he informed Shi Fa about the transformation he was going to make, this hypocritical German swindler's face would be extremely ugly. A swindler and scoundrel from a Germany that had already been defeated today, still dared to shout loudly in front of Chinese people, vowing revenge, punishment, and fighting for his own interests with force. This is the face of industrialized powers, but also the sorrow of China in this era.

  The German scammer left with a big pile of threats and insults. He walked away so abruptly that he didn't even receive his last salary, hastily rolled up his bedding, moved out of the villa where he had lived for several years, without even saying goodbye, and directly bought a train ticket to escape, unknown whereabouts.