Chapter 941 – Application of Success Studies

Ji Denggao was Cantonese and could speak excellent Cantonese—which Qiongshan locals could also understand. By trade, he had been a failed fortune-teller who wandered the streets and alleys everywhere, blessed with a silver tongue. He was to play a crucial role in this relief operation.

"Fellow villagers, that we can meet here today is nothing but fate—a simple word, 'fate,' that binds our hearts tightly together. As the saying goes: a single meeting requires five hundred years of shared boat crossings!"

He chattered on, ingratiating himself with the refugees, occasionally tossing in a smattering of pidgin Qiongshan dialect. The initially anxious and confused refugees began to relax.

"Since fate has brought us together here today, I'm giving each of you a rice ball!"

After this opening designed to build rapport, Ji Denggao ordered the workers to distribute the prepared small rice balls to the refugees below.

"Don't crowd, take your time—everyone gets a share!" Ji Denggao shouted through his megaphone. Several soldiers carried large baskets full of rice balls and handed them out one by one—one per person, fair to all.

The rice balls were made of cooked brown rice with a little salt, vinegar, and pickled plum, wrapped in perilla leaves—essentially Japanese-style onigiri. In summer, these could be kept for a short time. The taste was passable, and for refugees who had been food-deprived for so long, it was practically a delicacy.

But the portion was far too small. A small rice ball barely exceeded the size of a walnut, and the vinegar actually stimulated the already-suppressed appetites of the starving refugees. Many swallowed it in one gulp, then gazed longingly at the large rice balls and bubbling, fragrant soup on the platform, their eyes fixed and hungry.

Seeing the moment was ripe, Ji Denggao stepped forward again with the megaphone:

"Fellow villagers! How was that rice ball?"

"Delicious!" "Never tasted anything so good!" Several Propaganda Division agents planted among the refugees shouted loudly—these people had all been carefully selected for their short stature and sallow complexion, so their well-fed condition wouldn't stand out.

The refugees had been dizzy from hunger, and this sudden mouthful of rice ball temporarily lifted their spirits.

"Fellow villagers! I used to be just like you..." Ji Denggao launched into an impassioned recounting of his own "family tragedy." Though the entire piece had been written by ghostwriters, it wasn't without Ji Denggao's genuine experiences—he was of urban poor origin and had indeed known hard times.

Ji Denggao was after all a fortune-teller by profession, and his delivery was vivid and moving. At the moments of greatest suffering, whether acting or genuinely touched by painful memories, he couldn't help but break into sobs. For a time, he stirred the emotions of every refugee below.

Ji Denggao's speech bore no resemblance to Wei Aiwen's "remembering bitterness, thinking of sweetness" education—the refugees had no "sweetness" to speak of right now. His script actually followed the combined approach of "success studies" and pyramid selling.

The first step was building rapport with the refugees. The second was extrapolating his own experience to others, using success to tempt the failed, creating before-and-after contrast. These were classic pyramid-selling techniques.

Ji Denggao's success-studies speech began with "my life story"—how poor he had been as a child, herding sheep and ducks; how as an adult he had toiled as a hired hand and tenant farmer, suffering every form of oppression and hardship. This material wasn't entirely fabricated. Besides his own experiences, much was excerpted by the Propaganda Department from volumes of refugee testimonials.

"...Why are we so bitter? Why are we so poor? Generation after generation, working like beasts of burden, yet still unable to get enough to eat?!" Ji Denggao's eyes widened as he thundered at the crowd below.

Liu Xiang thought: if this were a revolutionary film right now, he would know exactly what lines would follow. But he wasn't quite sure in this case. Because except for a very few, the transmigrators had no intention of overthrowing the exploiting classes.

Then Ji Denggao analyzed the reasons for everyone—why so bitter? The answer was that their strength wasn't being used in the right place. They only knew to work hard for a living, but not how to work hard for a living.

"...It's all working for others, making a living by labor. But when you tenant someone else's land, before a single seed is in the ground, you've already signed away several dou of grain! The landlord gives you no seeds, no oxen—even the rake for harrowing is your own. Spring means paying for fertilizer, summer means paying to pump water—all from your own pocket. After a year of backbreaking work, once you've paid the rent, kept seed grain, and settled fertilizer debts, how much do you have left? When the court levies extra taxes, supposedly on the landlords—doesn't it get passed right down onto your heads? Don't you all feel like suckers for doing this?"

He saw the refugees' emotions stirring—the heavy exploitation of tenant farmers was the same everywhere. Many things the farmers had only vaguely sensed before were now being spoken plainly. It immediately struck a chord. Especially in recent years, with the court's extra levies for the Liaodong campaign and various suppression efforts, the burden on common people had grown ever heavier. Life was getting harder and harder.

"...When I arrived at the Chiefs' place wearing nothing but burlap sacks, someone asked me why. Why seek refuge with overseas people like this? I said I wanted to find the dream in my heart. When I sweated under the blazing sun working for the Chiefs, digging ditches in their fields, someone asked me why I was toiling on land that wasn't my own. I said I wanted to realize the dream in my heart. Life has dreams, life is like a dream, but after all, life isn't a dream. We have no money, can't read—for generations we've faced our backs to the sky and our faces to the earth, yet we don't even have a patch of land to stand on. We're despised and oppressed; we don't even have the right to dream. So today I'm taking everyone into a world where dreams come true. Everything there comes from our own hands. Our hard labor isn't for the pitiful scraps left after paying rent, but for our own and our children's future..."

Ji Denggao struck while the iron was hot, extolling the various advantages of the Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui) farms: after being hired or buying shares, workers could be assigned a standard house—even gaining ownership through a 20-year mortgage; all children in each household could attend school; regardless of age or sex, everyone who wanted to work had a job, with the farm paying wages—full meals every day without tightening belts through the spring famine; those willing to bring land as equity would even receive dividends at year's end...

Ji Denggao had a glib tongue. His speech contained not just vague promises but constant, specific personal examples. These cases weren't fabricated—the cooperative farms run by the Heaven and Earth Society in Lingao had already been piloted in several communes, with remarkable success.

"Such a good deal—can't be a scam, can it?" someone in the crowd said loudly.

This was a propaganda agent planted among the refugees beforehand—in the Lingao system, such people were unofficial personnel who had normal livelihoods but often secretly carried out tasks at government direction, receiving small stipends. Informants under the Political Security Bureau's control were one type. The Propaganda Department controlled its own cadre of agitators.

Ji Denggao had been waiting for exactly this. He immediately responded:

"Brother, you said it well! Rice doesn't fall from the sky for free. The cooperative farms have to be built through everyone's hard work. The Australian Chiefs just lead us in the work. As for the Australian Chiefs' trustworthiness—is there anyone who doubts it? What did Lingao look like before, and what does it look like now? Even if you haven't seen it, surely you've heard!"

The Australians' various deeds in Lingao—especially their generous treatment and benefits for subordinates, and their almost magical farming skills—had long spread throughout Qiongshan. After Ji Denggao's words, many poor tenant farmers and landless hired hands were genuinely moved.

Where you work for a living is working for a living, isn't it? Even if things weren't as wonderful as this man claimed, at least the fact that the Australians fed their people until they were full was no lie.

Yet for the moment, no one dared step forward. Fortunately, the Propaganda Team understood that such matters required someone to lead—rural folk feared sticking their necks out. Leaders had already been prepared. Two or three local Qiongshan undercover team members immediately volunteered.

"I'll go!" shouted a burly man in his forties, striding forward. He turned to the crowd and declared: "Wherever you work the land for someone, at least working for the Australian lords means eating your fill—I hear in their communes it's brown rice and sweet potato shreds every meal, all you can eat! Every week there's even a feast!"

His words immediately caused a stir. Then several more undercover team members stepped forward, shouting and agitating among the refugees. Ji Denggao immediately had the workers give them two large rice balls and a bowl of thick broth.

"Eat up first, build your strength. No rush. From now on, this is what you'll be eating every meal."

The refugees below, seeing the fist-sized rice balls being eaten and smelling the broth's wafting aroma, could no longer contain themselves. Immediately a large group shouted:

"Go! Go! We're willing to go!"

Just as Liu Xiang had anticipated, the work team's primary purpose in coming to Qiongzhou was to exploit this natural disaster, deploying propaganda techniques to recruit laborers to Lingao on a large scale. Through recruitment, they would drain massive amounts of labor from the local area, thereby destroying traditional labor production relations—drawing tenant farmers away from landlords' land, sending them to Lingao to enter factories and state farms, artificially creating a labor shortage in Qiongzhou. Since the tenant system was still mainstream among Qiongzhou's major landlords, the Executive Committee believed that by pulling away tenant farmers, they could force local landlords into production difficulties, making it impossible to maintain the old system. This would cause labor prices to rise and land prices to fall. Combined with tax policies and the Heaven and Earth Society's operations, they could then push centralized land management and agricultural policies in Qiongshan.