Chapter 939 – Qiongshan County Liaison Office

The Senate Qiongshan County Liaison Office—this was the official internal designation. On the door of the commandeered Provincial Administration Sub-Commissioner's yamen hung its public name: Qiongshan County Post-Disaster Consultative Bureau.

The Provincial Administration Sub-Commissioner's office was one of the few imposing government buildings in Qiongzhou Prefecture. Not only were the buildings well-organized, but the compound was spacious—more than sufficient to accommodate the new Qiongshan County leadership team.

That team had been organized according to the "Government Organization Methods" formulated by the Central Administrative Council. Unlike other newly occupied prefectures and counties, Qiongshan stood apart as Hainan's best in terms of population, commerce, and transportation. As a new-model county-level government structure, the Central Administrative Council intended to use it as a pilot project.

Because Lingao was an "old revolutionary base," it had long operated as an integrated whole, with local and central authorities sharing manpower and material resources. Many aspects of construction and local administration had been handled directly by transmigrators—a model difficult to sustain long-term. Fresh administrative experience from Qiongshan would have direct significance for the Executive Committee as its territory continued to expand. Moreover, the Executive Committee hoped Qiongshan would become a training ground for new local administrative cadres. A handful of transmigrators leading a larger corps of naturalized citizen cadres to manage local affairs—this was to be the primary administrative model during the Second Five-Year Plan period.

In a small courtyard within the Qiongshan County Liaison Office compound, its gate guarded by sentries, a laptop in the main room suddenly began beeping an alarm as a notification box popped up, covering the entire screen.

A hand clicked "OK" on the mouse. Liu Xiang closed the notification—it was almost time for the regular meeting. He had written this simple scheduling program himself to ensure he never missed an appointment.

He quickly reviewed the final portion of a document translation and saved it to a USB drive. In a moment, he would have his secretary take the drive to the Classified Section to be sent back to the Grand Library via the transmigrator-exclusive transport channel.

Ever since someone had issued a warning to the Executive Committee and Senate about data security—pointing out that given the average lifespan of electronic products, if they didn't start backing up data now, they would lose massive amounts of data irretrievably when the first batch of storage devices suffered terminal failures—the transmigrators had finally felt a sense of urgency. They began printing documentation and translating it into Chinese. Initially, everyone naturally assigned translation work to those whose specialty was "English." But once work began, the complaints flowed: they could translate every word, but when professional terminology appeared, if they didn't understand what a term roughly meant, they couldn't parse the long strings of modifiers, and the grammatical structure collapsed. Under these circumstances, the Grand Library had to use a combination of coercion and incentive to assign translation tasks to transmigrators with both professional expertise and strong English skills.

Liu Xiang had been a PhD student at a prestigious science and engineering university in the old timeline, trained by reading three English papers daily. Translations in computing, mathematics, and cryptography came easily to him. What he had just completed was a document on chaos algorithms. Not many transmigrators can even do calculus by hand anymore, he reflected while stuffing the USB drive into a transmigrator-exclusive envelope, and the five hundred of us will increasingly be doing administrative work. These skills will inevitably atrophy. Surely we won't have to start research from the Lagrange mean value theorem when we open universities later.

Seeing Liu Xiang switch off the computer, the secretary who had been pedaling the power-generating bicycle dismounted and approached, wiping sweat with a towel. Guo Ling'er was a refugee from the mainland—and unusually, a "fellow villager" of Liu Xiang's, from Hubei. The name assigned to her after purification had been Guo Rong, but when she was first brought before Liu Xiang as a maid, that name had given him a shock. Just as he was considering changing it, the media player on his laptop happened to switch to music from The Legend of Sword and Fairy, and so came the name "Ling'er."

"Go take a bath first, then take this to the Classified Section." With that, Liu Xiang grabbed another laptop and headed for the conference room.

This laptop, labeled "B," contained only Qiongzhou work-related material: "Qiongzhou Key Personnel Relationship and Data Topology Analysis Tool," "Qiongzhou Land Situation Query System," and similar programs. Compared to paper materials, he still preferred electronic tools.

Today's regular meeting had three main items. First, all supervisors would return last week's task cards and deliver work summaries. Second, they would relay the urgent instructions regarding refugee relief that had arrived early that morning. Third, they would formulate work plans corresponding to these instructions, establish next week's schedule, and assign personal responsibility via task cards.

Liu Xiang had never actually done grassroots administrative work—he had only been a project manager overseeing IT workers. But he believed management methods should be universal; techniques that worked for a development team could be transplanted to an administrative one.

The naturalized citizen team assigned to him was, by Lingao standards, "the best of the best." Two-thirds came from cadres in Lingao villages and communes where grassroots construction was fully complete, along with some discharged wounded soldiers and workers. One-third came from Qiongshan itself, including military household personnel captured during the Second Counter-Encirclement Campaign who were deemed "reformable." All had earned Certificate Level C and received corresponding administrative training. Finally, a small number of retained personnel from the original yamen rounded out the team.

He had piloted this method with the naturalized citizen cadre teams working on "Land Survey" and "County Situation Investigation" in Qiongzhou, achieving excellent results. Quite a few transmigrators found his administrative approach novel, jokingly calling it the "Qiongshan Experience." Some even suggested the Administrative Council should promote it widely. But Liu Xiang knew the method truly couldn't be broadly implemented. Just consider the "personal responsibility" system alone—if not for the fact that Qiongzhou was still a training ground for intelligence department personnel, allowing him to fully utilize that system to monitor cadres assigned tasks, this approach wouldn't be nearly as effective. After all, administrative work wasn't like writing code, where every unit of work produced a concrete deliverable to verify.

If not for this sudden typhoon and rainstorm, his original plan had been to begin advancing "bringing political power to the villages": building on the foundation of several months of understanding county conditions and establishing liaison systems in each village, they would begin cadre training work across all villages. In fact, the first batch of resident police recruited from Qiongshan's military household sons and daughters had already been sent to Lingao for training.

But now disaster relief had become the top priority. And this time, Liu Muzhou had dispatched a special work team to preside over the relief effort—which puzzled Liu Xiang somewhat. The arrivals included not only transmigrators from the civil affairs department, but also people from the Propaganda Department. Was the Propaganda Department going to conduct disaster relief publicity?

"Let's begin." After Liu Xiang sat down, without preamble and without introducing the transmigrators specifically dispatched for disaster relief work, he said directly: "From left to right, report on last week's work."

Due to the flooding, the county's routine operations had ground to a halt. The current focus was on statistics: affected area, population, crop damage, and current refugee numbers. Then came the immediate problems of distributing emergency relief grain and arranging refugee housing—with so many people gathered in the streets outside the east gate, normal order was disrupted, and epidemics could easily break out.

The naturalized citizen cadres reported progress on their assigned tasks one by one. Liu Xiang listened while recording data in his laptop. After reports concluded, he fired off rapid questions: "You said 'roughly'—what's the percentage probability?" "How much exactly is 'most'—sixty percent or eighty?" "What does 'very many people' mean—exactly how many?" "Yesterday your report said Nanxian Village had completely fled, so why do the remaining population figures still show four households with fifteen people?" "Dushui Village is clearly growing rice—how did it become taro?"

The naturalized citizen cadres were all on edge, constantly glancing at the paper notebooks in their hands. They knew the chief was extremely difficult to fool. Even the county's veteran clerks were no match for him. He pressed a few buttons on his black notebook and immediately knew exactly where the holes in their words were, pinning them down with a sentence or two. More terrifying still was his understanding of many matters—far deeper than they had imagined.

Lei En, dispatched by the Health Department to handle epidemic prevention, observed this meeting with a cold eye, thinking: So Comrade Liu has this skill too! No wonder he made it into the Lingao Tribune within a few months in Qiongshan County and created the "Qiongshan Experience."

Soon it was the naturalized citizen section chief of the County Health Section's turn to report on the current epidemic prevention situation. For a "newly liberated area" like Qiongshan, the Health Department's primary work wasn't popularizing medical care but epidemic prevention—that is, the control of infectious diseases.

The Health Section chief first reported current death counts, circumstances of death, and methods of corpse disposal. The body collection teams recruited from the refugees had collected and disposed of approximately four hundred corpses over the past few days. Simultaneously, feces, animal carcasses, and plant debris in flooded areas had been uniformly cleared and piled up for harmless disposal through fermentation. In areas where floodwaters had receded, disinfection work had been carried out by spraying bleaching powder solution. Larger-scale cleaning and disinfection would have to wait until the water fully receded—based on current rainfall, probably over a week.

Next, he reported on disease conditions among the refugees. Intestinal infections and colds were the main prevalent illnesses, with infection rates around ten percent. So far, no large-scale epidemic outbreak had been detected. Lei En thought this conclusion was frankly quite hasty. Given the capabilities of the crash-course-trained naturalized citizen health workers in the Qiongshan County Health Section's quarantine division and their crude equipment, whether they could accurately identify pathogens in excreta was highly questionable. When the Health Department's epidemic prevention division had trained them, the focus had been on identifying symptoms, not biochemical testing.