Chapter 134: New System (Part 1)

"Finding wives for the men—let's table that discussion for now," Ma Qianzhu said.

"So we're moving on to finding women for ourselves, then—"

"No, that's not what I meant either." Ma Qianzhu cut him off with an impatient wave. "What I want to discuss is labor utilization. We've brought all these people to Bairren, fed them, housed them, put them to work. But then what?"

"Then they keep working, obviously."

"What I mean is—" He paused, searching for the right framing. "Land distribution. Labor systems. Compensation structures. Governance."

Wen Desi raised a hand to speak. "Before we can discuss labor systems or any of these larger topics, we need to establish clear status hierarchies for the natives. Without that foundation, there's no meaningful way to talk about differential treatment."

At present, the transmigrators classified their directly controlled native laborers into three tiers.

Slaves possessed no personal freedom and performed forced labor. They received clothing and food but no wages. This category consisted primarily of captured prisoners who remained at this level until they had been properly screened and reformed.

Laborers retained personal freedom but were assigned work by the transmigrators. They received free food and housing—and for now, clothing as well. The transmigrators paid them wages for their labor.

Workers occupied the highest tier. In practice, their duties mirrored those of laborers, but they received wages twenty percent higher.

These tiers were designed to be fluid. Slaves could earn their way to laborer status; industrious laborers could be promoted to workers. Such social mobility helped stabilize society—at least among those who lived under transmigrator rule.

According to the Committee's long-term plan, the worker class would form the foundation of their governance: a pool from which they would draw qualified industrial workers, low-level administrators, and soldiers.

Workers enjoyed superior benefits and represented the Committee's brightest hopes for the future. Yet curiously few laborers showed any interest in attaining worker status. To date, workers numbered less than a quarter of Production Team One. Most laborers still thought like hired hands—they weren't truly ready to board the proverbial pirate ship.

Where had things gone wrong? Wu De had given the matter considerable thought and reached a conclusion: the worker system's limited effectiveness stemmed primarily from insufficient incentives. Workers received only twenty percent higher wages. They had been promised housing and private plots of land, but none of these promises had materialized. Even the earliest workers still lived in tents and sheds alongside everyone else. As for the private plots—Lingao's wastelands were abundant, but without irrigation infrastructure, cultivation demanded enormous amounts of human labor. Laborers already worked more than twelve hours a day. They had neither the time nor the energy left to work additional land.

Beyond these practical failures, there was a deeper problem. The transmigrators still wore the label of pirates. Though county officials had reached a peaceful coexistence with them, this did not mean the local population recognized their rule as legitimate. Earning just twenty percent extra in exchange for the risk of "joining pirates"—the risk-reward ratio was clearly unbalanced. Peasants might not understand formal economics, but they could do that kind of simple arithmetic.

"Should we seek amnesty quickly then? Become respectable, reassuring short-hairs?"

"Amnesty isn't that simple. It took Zheng Zhilong years to secure his, and he was a Fujian native with deep local connections. We're complete outsiders. If the officials decide to treat us like barbarians—the same way they treat the Jurchen Wild Boar Skin—there won't be anything to negotiate."

The solution, Wu De argued, was to think in reverse. Since the risk could not be reduced, the rewards had to be increased. When risk and reward reached equilibrium, people would naturally be willing to take chances. There was a ready example close at hand: Zheng Zhilong continuously recruited sailors and soldiers in Fujian precisely because piracy offered greater benefits to the local population than legitimate work ever could.

"Right now, a mere twenty percent income increase doesn't create meaningful differentiation among laborers."

The starting point would be implementing the worker housing policy. Committee members who had lived in rural China understood the enormous enthusiasm peasants had for building houses. After the household responsibility reform, improving peasants had almost universally built new homes. Even today, many peasant families—despite having children who had settled in cities—still built village houses for them.

Having a home of one's own mattered immensely. Temporary dwellers could never develop a true sense of belonging. Only when people had their own houses would they view a place as their homeland—something worth building and protecting. Otherwise, they were merely passing through, and other people's property meant nothing to them.

The production team housing currently under construction outside South Gate embodied this experiment. The Committee had instructed Engineering to build these structures as genuine villages rather than mere collective dormitories.

The Construction Group had comprehensively considered rural living habits, land efficiency, and material conservation, ultimately producing designs for apartment buildings. Each building would have three floors with three residential units per floor. Each unit contained a fourteen-square-meter bedroom, a sixteen-square-meter main room, and a ten-square-meter kitchen. There would be no in-unit toilets—instead, each floor would share one communal toilet. Sewage would be piped to biogas pools for treatment. The buildings lacked running water, electricity, and independent drainage, but the designs reserved positions for future installation.

The apartments would primarily house families. These unit sizes were tight for large families but well-suited to households of four or five.

The buildings used brick-concrete construction. The first batch would have wooden floor slabs; Engineering planned to transition to precast concrete slabs in the future to reduce fire risk.

"What about property rights?" someone asked, studying the blueprints and renderings.

"Since land policy hasn't been finalized, houses will temporarily only receive house deeds. Once land policy is confirmed, supplementary land deeds will be issued."

Land ownership had generated considerable disagreement among the transmigrators. Most wanted confirmed private ownership, while some insisted on state ownership. Others proposed copying this timespace's policy—selling land-use rights rather than outright ownership—but without the peculiar term limits.

The Committee had no intention of providing welfare housing for laborers. Free things were inevitably undervalued. Each unit would cost sixty taels of silver. Anyone could buy one, and installment payments would be accepted. Workers received a ten percent discount.

The reasoning was obvious: workers with mortgages would defend the transmigrators' existence more fiercely than anyone else. If the transmigrators fell, their housing dreams would shatter with them. Committee members had seen firsthand how local tenant farmers, laborers, and small farmers lived—such apartments would have been unattainable for them in several lifetimes.

"I have a question," Xiao Zishan said, raising his hand. "Peasants typically raise livestock. What about apartment residents? If they want to keep pigs or chickens, surely they can't be raising them in the hallways?"

"Livestock sheds and pigsties will be collective facilities, separate from residences," explained Mei Wan, who was presenting the project. "This arrangement is better for hygiene. Similarly, the new village will have collective granaries, which will minimize losses to pests and rodents."

"With such generous worker benefits, laborers will all want to convert. There should be conditions."

"Exactly," Wu De said with an approving nod. "We need to make worker status somewhat difficult to attain. That creates competition."

He had drafted the following application conditions:

1. Personnel with specialized skills recognized by the transmigrators who were willing to serve—for example, craftsmen, scholars, or soldiers.

2. Those who had served continuously as laborers for twelve months or more and wished to continue.

3. Those who had made major meritorious contributions.

"But the current system, with only worker and laborer tiers to differentiate people, is no longer adequate for our needs," Wu De continued.

Regardless of differential treatment, the labor model remained identical: collective labor for all. Except for rare skilled craftsmen and intellectuals, most people worked according to daily dispatches based on various departments' labor requests, all arranged by Wu De.

This system served them well during the current phase of massive construction. It ensured sufficient labor for every priority project while strengthening control over the workforce.

However, as many enterprises prepared for production, specialized industrial workers would inevitably emerge. Industrial workers were, by nature, specialized—daily dispatching was inconvenient for production organization and made specialized workforce training extremely difficult.

Moreover, the migrants from Gou Manor—designated Production Team Two—contained many family units, which was completely different from the predominantly single men of Team One. If the men were laborers, what was the status of their women and children? Currently, many women and children also worked—how should their wages be calculated? For families with multiple young children, nurseries alone were impractical. Which budget category should cover nursery resources and expenses? Countless such issues reminded the Committee of a pressing need: they required a civil administration system to properly manage their first batch of subjects.

The transmigrators had many options for civil administration. Salt Field Village and Damei Village had adopted village autonomy models, with village committees managing local affairs. Ready templates existed, and the system worked reasonably well. But under such arrangements, entrenched interests wielded too much power—a few individuals would inevitably monopolize the major positions. Salt Field Village offered the most typical example: politics there were almost entirely controlled by the Tan brothers. Though the Tan brothers were transmigrator protégés and seemingly loyal, this arrangement was still inferior to direct control.

(End of Chapter)