When Qian Hongming returned home, he found his wife and mother-in-law already asleep. His sister was just coming out of the guest bedroom. Seeing him, she asked, “What’s Liu Jun’s situation?”
“He’s gotten a bit stubborn and plans to stay.”
Qian Hongying said, “Oh,” smiled, and went into the bathroom. Seeing this, Liu Jun suddenly wondered if his sister might be Liu Shitang’s helper. At the beginning of the year, when preparations were being made for Liu Jun’s return, his sister had put in quite a bit of effort. Qian Hongming felt uncomfortable, unwilling for his sister to always be entangled with the Liu family. He decided not to mention anything about Liu Jun to his sister from now on.
Liu Jun continued to limp to work at the Shi Yiji suburban branch factory. He didn’t bring a pack of cigarettes to hand out everywhere – he was fundamentally the most averse to smoking in work environments. However, time revealed that people’s hearts gradually became hardened day by day. In the workers’ eyes, Liu Jun remained very annoying because he was extremely demanding about quality. But the workers also saw Liu Jun’s consistent attitude, not the troublemaking of an ignorant person, nor malicious opposition to the workers. This made it difficult for everyone to continue harboring ill will toward Liu Jun. At the same time, Japanese machine tools would always develop a little cough or sneeze during operation. Liu Jun didn’t stand by idly just because it wasn’t his concern. His advantage lay in his knowledge and his love for machinery. He could always play a leading role in solving high-end machine tool problems, and he always unreservedly explained the principles to everyone. First, the workshop technical personnel became close to Liu Jun – they often listened to Liu Jun’s explanations in the workshop office for one or two hours. Then the workshop management personnel became compliant – they no longer treated Liu Jun as an outsider and began to cooperate wholeheartedly with Liu Jun’s work. Their attitude was the best weathervane, and the entire branch factory opened doors with some warmth to Liu Jun.
Therefore, during the heat treatment stage, when Liu Jun proposed “unreasonable” requirements like sealing off the temperature display instruments and clearing the site during material feeding, everyone had slight objections, but seeing that Liu Jun’s handling didn’t affect the work, they all cooperated well. Liu Jun felt greatly relieved by this – finally, he had secured a key link in product manufacturing.
Of course, Liu Jun was also grateful and reciprocating. During the month-plus of cooperation, he often treated everyone to meals at nearby restaurants and was frequently teased into getting drunk by them, sleeping in the branch factory office, and waking up covered in mosquito bites. At first, Liu Jun was quite annoyed by this kind of dining, often mentally reciting while eating: “A gentleman does what he must do – material means must be used to express goodwill.” But as he gradually became familiar with everyone and work-related exchanges increased, the dinner table was no longer a burden. He also learned various drinking games and how to shout and call while forcing drinks on others.
It was then that everyone told Liu Jun that they had initially disliked and resented him because he was an outsider, a young upstart backed by the boss, coming to their turf to point fingers, which was very damaging to their face. Only after getting to know each other did they understand that Liu Jun was someone who did what he said, was consistent inside and out, and was someone with real substance who was very genuine in his dealings and persistent in his principles. In everyone’s words at the drinking table, Liu Jun had earned their respect.
However, even with such a good relationship atmosphere, product quality remained Liu Jun’s big headache. Not for any other reason, but because everyone was already accustomed to “close enough” and “so-so.” Some people even very kindly educated Liu Jun privately that the client might not pursue precision so strictly – with the whole country as one chess game, they had experience. Liu Jun was helpless and could only endure being teased and complained about by workshop managers every day, while never forgetting quality for even a moment. When the final products rolled off the line, he felt like he was becoming the Tang Monk from “A Chinese Odyssey” that Qian Hongming had lent him. Not only was Liu Jun nearly exhausted, but the workshop personnel he was familiar with also joked that this month-plus had been almost more tiring than when managed by the Japanese. Liu Jun naturally held a banquet to express gratitude, dragging his weary body. He, of course, invited Yang Xun, but Yang Xun didn’t attend.
The cooperation with Shi Yiji thus came to an end. Once again, Liu Jun hadn’t expected that transportation would also be a big problem. When he first returned to China, he had been tricked by a small swindler who did sleight-of-hand at traffic lights with the transport vehicle. So now, even thinking with his toes, he could imagine how many troubles they would encounter on the road with several trucks of goods going to the distant client – maybe a few pieces would be stolen and sold secretly as scrap metal. The overall commercial integrity of the entire environment was very primitive.
Liu Jun had to have his father manage the first vehicle of the convoy, himself manage the last vehicle, and two reliable apprentices handpicked by Uncle Huang manage the middle two vehicles respectively. In the scorching summer heat of the truck cargo holds, they coordinated front and rear to guard their property, not daring to close their eyes together the whole way, drinking countless boxes of mineral water. After two nights and one day, Liu Jun and the other two young men still had some color in their faces, but when Liu Shitang got out of the truck, his face was ashen. He immediately had someone perform gua sha scraping until it looked terrible before he finally broke out in large beads of sweat and regained his senses. But besides diligently serving tea, pouring water, handing medicine, and fanning, Liu Jun couldn’t help with anything else. After coming here before, he had learned that all business dealings had hidden ways and codes he couldn’t understand. He could only smile apologetically and follow behind his father to avoid causing trouble. His heart felt very powerless.
Sure enough, after they found a hotel to wash off the oil and sweat and changed into decent clothes to go to the client company, it was like the Monkey King following Tang Xuanzang through eighty-one trials. Everyone who handled things – those who inspected goods, warehoused them, wrote orders, did statistics, cashiers, accountants – everyone who touched the process wanted to reach out their fingers for a cut. Although father and son fought their way through, it still took two days to get partial payment, with over 300,000 yuan remaining to be collected two weeks later. By then, they would probably have to bleed again in the finance office. In Liu Shitang’s words, those who weren’t given benefits definitely wouldn’t do the work, and even those who were given benefits might not do the work for you.
Liu Jun learned knowledge through this dizzying social experience, understanding what invisible cost details needed to be added in future cost accounting. But Liu Shitang told him that the invisible costs in this deal were relatively few and reasonable because this enterprise had good returns and didn’t default on payments. At most, the final 300,000-plus yuan would be delayed a few more days, or they’d give a banker’s acceptance bill. When encountering those who default, the payment could be like meat buns thrown to dogs – gone forever. Speaking of past hardships in debt collection, Liu Shitang very emotionally told his son that he absolutely preferred making export products – the money was paid clearly, and costs could be calculated clearly in advance.
The other two batches of goods were for export. Sure enough, the foreign party’s domestic agent came to inspect the goods themselves. Although Liu Shitang brought his son to treat them attentively, it saved much worry and effort. The two batches of goods passed inspection without problems, were shipped in containers, and didn’t require the father and son to escort them. Afterward, they simply cashed the letter of credit and settled the payment. By comparison, the invisible costs were as rare as phoenix feathers.
Liu Jun originally thought he could catch his breath, reward himself with a few days of vacation, then continue investing in R&D. During this busy period, his originally healthy, dark complexion had transformed into that of a pale scholar. Looking in the mirror, even Liu Jun himself didn’t dare recognize himself – he urgently needed to engage in various healthy sports. However, a technician he was close to in the workshop called him, telling him the boss had assigned a task. They had already made over 200 semi-finished products following photocopies of blueprints previously provided by Qianjin Factory, and now this batch of semi-finished products was waiting to enter the heat treatment workshop to try obtaining data from various temperatures and surface strengthening treatments. The person in charge was the deputy chief engineer of the main factory.
As expected, Yang Xun coveted the profits of this high-tech product. Even Yang Xun’s point of entry was not beyond Liu Jun’s expectations – for Yang Xun, only that corner of heat treatment was something Yang Xun couldn’t fathom. Faced with such blatant yet expected counterfeiting, Liu Jun could only sneer coldly, picked up the phone and called Yang Xun, asking if he intended to counterfeit.
Yang Xun readily admitted, “Yes, there are no walls in the world that don’t leak. Didn’t you also learn about my company’s secret trial production?”
Hearing this, Liu Jun didn’t know whether to laugh or cry – the thief crying “stop thief!” But he still tried to reason, “Mr. Yang, if we continue cooperation like the first batch, with mutual benefit and steady flow, wouldn’t that be very good? Now you’re spending enormous resources and can at most trial-produce one item from the entire series, with a limited market and limited returns. Moreover, you’re different from me – you can’t hold first-hand information. The products you spend enormous resources on trial-producing can easily be pirated by other companies. Wouldn’t you be drawing water with a bamboo basket?”
Yang Xun still said matter-of-factly, “I plan to invest 200,000 yuan to try. If it exceeds 200,000 yuan without concluding, I’ll immediately give up, and we’ll continue our past friendly cooperation.”
Liu Jun could only stamp his feet, cursing “scoundrel” in his heart, finding it difficult that Yang Xun could speak of such scoundrel behavior so righteously. But Liu Jun at least gained one conclusion – Yang Xun planned to invest 200,000 yuan. With Shi Yiji’s foolish method of not doing sophisticated calculations and experimenting with entire sets, this 200,000 yuan wouldn’t last long and would quickly be exhausted. He thought to himself: let’s wait and see. But did this mean that, as Yang Xun said, if Yang Xun failed to pirate after throwing away 200,000 yuan, he would have to obediently return to cooperate with Yang Xun in the future? No! Liu Jun told himself he must start making long-term plans and establish his processing base.