August in Chengdu.
The rainy season that had brought flood warnings to the Dujiangyan irrigation works had only just passed, leaving behind a small, lingering tail — an annoying autumn drizzle kept knocking leaves from the trees, still assailing in fits and starts this ancient city that had become the political and cultural center of the Huaxia Army. These past few days, the mud in the streets seemed cursed by every enemy under heaven, never once drying out.
Yellowed leaves were knocked down by the rain and fell into the irritating mud, waiting to add even more pressure to the old city’s drainage systems. On the roads, countless pedestrians hurried or picked their way carefully through the lanes, but caution never lasted long — sooner or later the muddy water on the road would splash onto those fine, new trouser legs, and so, after grumbling about it, people gritted their teeth and gradually stopped caring.
Some children, still innocent to it all, played and roughhoused beneath the eaves along the road, building little dams out of soaked mud in front of doorways to hold back the “floodwaters” sweeping the street. Some got covered head to toe in mud and, once discovered, were hysterically spanked by their mothers and dragged back inside.
Carts pulled by tall, sturdy horses wound their way through the city’s streets and alleys, occasionally stopping at fixed platforms, where people dressed in styles new and old climbed down, dodging the mud and puddles, opening umbrellas — the flow of people coming and going became a veritable sea of umbrellas.
In weather like this, the taverns and teahouses, big and small, did even better business than usual. People meeting for all sorts of purposes gathered at appointed spots, stepping into street-facing private rooms, sitting by open windows with their tea tables, watching the crowds below scrambling wretchedly through the rain. As always, they first complained about the weather for a while, and then, over warm tea and snacks, began discussing the actual reason for their meeting.
“You don’t know it, but the roads outside the city are far worse than here.”
“The Huaxia Army is building on a massive scale — the area outside the city has grown by a whole ring, didn’t you see it in the Tiandu Gazette? Chengdu has been the center of Shu since ancient times — who knows how many generations of Shu kings’ tombs are buried here. They say that last year, while digging, they disturbed one of the royal tombs…”
“The Huaxia Army’s offices say that development has moved too fast and the drainage infrastructure hasn’t fully caught up — mainly there aren’t enough drainage outlets outside the city, so the water inside can’t drain either. They say there might be a new tax levied outside the city this year.”
“Digging ditches for drainage — now that’s a big contract. We’ve got connections; we should find a way to get a piece of it…”
“In July they were saying the army and the people are one family, and now in August it’s another rectification campaign…”
All sorts of information mixed together within this bustling city, becoming part of the fabric of urban life.
In the afternoon, in the new factory district outside Chengdu’s old city walls — the earliest built and now the most prosperous — some roads had grown even muddier from the constant coming and going of carts and horses. Lin Jingmei, wearing a straw raincoat and carrying her waterproof work satchel, walked step by uneven step alongside her partner, a middle-aged woman.
She had not been posted to Chengdu for very long and was not yet familiar with the surrounding conditions, which was why she had been paired with a veteran Huaxia Army cook who had long been involved in developing the factory district here. This female cook’s name was Shen Juan — big-boned and sturdy, illiterate. At first Lin Jingmei had not understood why such a woman would have been transferred to work in the education department, but after a few days she came to understand: this woman had the temperament of a mother hen, able to control children while also fiercely protective of them. Lin Jingmei’s partnership with her more or less made up for the other’s shortcomings in written work.
The two of them were now going from workshop to workshop in the nearby factory district.
“We’re from the Ministry of Education. Regarding the ‘Benevolent Learning’ program that’s about to begin, you should have already received a notice from above. This is the original text of the order, and this is the record of migrant children in your area, previously compiled by the household registration department — we need to compare and verify it against your records now. By early September, all the children in this area must attend the ‘Benevolent Learning’ schools; they can no longer be left to run wild outside. Here are the fee arrangements…”
“We have to pay too?”
“The Huaxia Army is covering the bulk of the basic costs — we’re responsible for the daily meals — you only bear a portion, and in the future it can be deducted from the taxes you owe. This should have already been explained at your meeting at the end of July…”
“You people hold so many meetings and issue so many documents, how are we supposed to keep up? Look at our little workshop here — no one ever told us we’d have to send the children to school. And why would a girl need schooling? She’s a girl…”
“Girls must attend school too. But — as long as you let your children attend school, whenever they have a rest day, we’ll allow children of appropriate age to work in your factories to earn money and help support the family. See, you can apply for this arrangement; if you don’t apply, then it counts as child labor. Starting in September we’ll be conducting inspections in this area, and the penalties will be severe going forward…”
“You people… children helping the adults with work is just how it’s always been… they don’t want to go to school. Since ancient times, book-learning has been a rich man’s business — how can you do this? Think of how much it’ll cost. These are all poor families; they came here to earn money…”
Of the ten workshops they visited, they ran into all sorts of stalling and obstruction in eight of them — perhaps also because the Ministry of Education itself had no real means of enforcement, and on top of that, the two who had come were women. Some people cracked jokes to deflect, while others tried saying things like: “When they first came in there were this many children, but by the time they got to Chengdu, some of them, well… there just weren’t that many left…”
Shen Juan stood up at once. “What did you say?”
Lin Jingmei’s expression also darkened. “Are you saying that children here have died, or run off, and you never reported it?”
Checking the roster proved to be quite difficult work — occasionally they even ran into people with worse attitudes, who began bragging about their connections to some official or other in the Huaxia government, shouting at them to get out. In some workshops, the security guards were knocked flat on the ground by Shen Juan; at other times, Lin Jingmei would cheerfully ask the other party exactly who this “connection” of theirs was, take out her little notebook, and jot down a simple record, until the other person’s face began to twitch with uneasy suspicion.
This was clearly never going to be simple work to finish.
And besides the section she and Shen Juan were responsible for, at that same moment, all across the outskirts of the city, different people were pushing forward the very same effort.
“This July-August weather is really unbearable…”
After trudging through the mud all day until evening, Lin Jingmei and Shen Juan returned to the address of the new “Benevolent Learning” schoolhouse for their district. Shen Juan made dinner and welcomed back the school staff, who trickled in one after another to eat together, while Lin Jingmei washed her feet in the rainwater collected in the trough under the eaves of a nearby house. Her feet were nearly soaked through and wrinkled.
Peng Yueyun came by to mooch a meal twice, his tongue smooth as honey, lavishly praising Shen Juan’s cooking until she beamed with delight, thumping her chest and promising she would definitely take good care of Lin Jingmei while she was here. Of course, everyone already knew that Lin Jingmei now had someone waiting for her — it was precisely for the sake of her future husband, after their engagement, that she had been transferred to Chengdu from elsewhere.
For the time being, no one knew of their connection to Ning Yi.
After dinner, the two of them boarded the public horse-carriage back toward the inner city, the roomy carriage often crowded with many passengers. Lin Jingmei and Peng Yueyun squeezed into a corner and began talking about work.
“If it’s only the education side running around with no real stick behind it, these people will definitely keep playing games. The children brought into the southwest were originally meant to be their prearranged child laborers, and it’s extremely common now for them to be working alongside their parents in the workshops. We say we want to bring order to this phenomenon, but as they see it, we’re trying to snatch away something they already consider theirs. Father’s side says the children must be enrolled by mid-September, but it’ll probably take a joint operation between the Ministry of Commerce and public security to actually guarantee it. And there’s also the top-to-bottom rectification campaign going on right now — the rollout of ‘Benevolent Learning’ isn’t limited to Chengdu alone. With something this large in scale, will there even be enough manpower to spare…”
The great plan for a hundred years starts with education. Building the Huaxia Army’s education system had been something they’d started working on almost immediately after the regicide, but the scale of the Huaxia Army had been different at every stage. A few years ago, when they had been confined to small places like Heden and the Three Counties, the pool of trained teachers had nearly become sufficient — but then had come the leap out of the Chengdu Plain, another great expansion, and after crushing the Jurchens and opening up across the realm, there had been yet another round of expansion.
Although Ning Yi had thrown himself into establishing night schools and simplifying the curriculum, even if the number of people qualified to serve as teachers truly grew exponentially, it still took time to suddenly adapt to territory this vast. In the first half of this year there had already been a severe shortage of teachers, and by the second half, Ning Yi had racked his brains to squeeze out enough teachers to extend elementary schooling to the migrant children around Chengdu. In truth, the whole affair was being pushed through rather hastily.
Schools like these “Benevolent Learning” institutions were bound to be short on teaching staff, and bringing these migrant boys and girls who worked as child laborers into the schools was itself certain to provoke a wave of misunderstanding and backlash — yet Ning Yi had still decided to push forward with it. Lin Jingmei, in coming here, was also serving as an important “observer” embedded within this effort.
Having grown up at Ning Yi’s side since childhood, raised together with the most capable and outstanding figures at the very core of the Huaxia Army, she had originally handled a great deal of core work related to secretarial duties, and her vision and analytical abilities had long since been cultivated. What worried her now went beyond just the matters immediately in front of her.
“…What worries me most, honestly, is that this whole effort might end up making things worse for people outside the system. These refugees sent into the southwest already have no homes — the reason the nearby factories and workshops let them bring their children along in the first place was that they wanted to take advantage of the children as cheap labor. Bringing order to this is, of course, something we absolutely must do — but once it’s done, the human trafficking coming in from outside might well tear even more families apart. Some children who could otherwise have made it in might no longer be allowed in at all… Isn’t this a bit like — I never killed Boren, yet Boren died because of me?”
Peng Yueyun smiled faintly. “Sometimes, that really is how it goes.”
He did not offer his own view on the matter, because similar thoughts were surfacing constantly at the very core of the Huaxia Army. Every single move the Huaxia Army made now sent chain reactions rippling across the entire realm, and the reason Lin Jingmei felt this pang of melancholy in this moment was only because she was sharing these sentimental thoughts with him. Yet there was another side to her temperament too — a resolve and toughness uniquely her own, and it was this fusion of softness and steel that made her, in his eyes, a woman like no other.
“Liu Guangshi and Zou Xu are fighting fiercely now… Liu Guangshi currently has the upper hand…”
They chatted about this and that on the carriage, with passengers boarding and getting off along the way. By the time the carriage reached its final stop at the Huaxia Army’s residential district, night had already fallen, the evening sky clear as water. The two of them walked inside side by side, talking. They were not yet married, so each had their own room, though by now no one raised an eyebrow even when they occasionally stayed together. They talked about all sorts of things, and Chengdu’s rapid transformation alongside the Huaxia Army’s gave them no shortage of topics to discuss.
At around the same time, on the other side of the city, Yu Hezhong, who had become one of the important figures in the southwest, paid a visit to the residence of Li Shishi. Over the past year or so, the two of them, as friends, would typically meet up about twice a month; an evening visit was not common, but since night had just fallen and Yu Hezhong happened to be passing by nearby, it seemed natural enough to stop in and see her.
Perhaps having just come from some social engagement, Yu Hezhong carried a faint smell of wine about him. Shishi thought nothing of it, called for tea and refreshments to be brought out, and received him warmly.
“In July it was flood relief, and your newspapers couldn’t stop singing the army’s praises — now that August has come, this rectification campaign of yours is quite the production…”
Facing Shishi, Yu Hezhong had long grown used to getting straight to the point — he knew that his little schemes could never escape her notice, so he always spoke plainly. And these matters, in truth, had already become entangled, in countless invisible threads, with him — this so-called “man of leisure with money to spare.”