Chapter 161: Agriculture and Livelihood

When the first spring wheat crop of the Hetao Irrigation District was harvested, Agriculture Director He Mingyuan squatted on the Tian Geng, rubbed a wheat ear open in his palm, counted the grains, and counted them again. Then he stood up and said a sentence to the statistician behind him, keeping his voice as calm as possible, but the fingers holding the pencil trembled slightly: "Two hundred and eighty jin per mu."

The statistician wrote the number down in a notebook. Two hundred and eighty jin was nothing in Jiangnan, where paddy fields could yield four hundred jin of rice per mu. But this was the grassland, fallow land that had been covered in waist-high wild grass just last year, abandoned manors deserted by the Western Xia nobility for at least five years. Harvesting two hundred and eighty jin of spring wheat on newly opened virgin land meant something to He Mingyuan—it meant the soil of Hetao could truly sustain people, that the two hundred thousand mu irrigation district was not just a pie chart on paper, and that the hundred thousand-plus mouths who had crossed mountains and valleys from Western Xia would no longer have to rely on the base area's reserve grain. Not only would they not need support, but the grain they harvested themselves would, by autumn, flow back into the base area's granaries.

Harvesting began in early August. All three agricultural regiments of the Hetao Corps were deployed, and two thousand people were temporarily drawn from the militia to help. There were not enough sickles, so the blacksmith shop of the cooperative worked day and night, forging the last batch of stored iron ingots into sickle blades. Zhang Chu'an approved a note, squeezing a low-power steam engine out of the steam hammer workshop in the arsenal, which ran continuously to drive a threshing machine transported from Jiangnan. On the day the threshing machine arrived at the field, everyone in the agricultural regiment gathered to watch. Old Zhou squeezed to the front, watching the iron beast swallow whole bundles of wheat and spit out a golden waterfall of grains from the other end, his mouth hanging open for a long time without closing. In his life, he had always threshed wheat with a flail, beating it stroke by stroke, threshing only a hundred or so jin in a whole day. The grains this iron beast threshed in the time it took to smoke a pipe were more than he could thresh in three days.

"How much can this thing thresh in a day?" he asked the technician beside him. The technician was a young Miss from Jiangnan, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, her face smeared with chaff and sweat. She smiled and said, "Grandpa, if it doesn't stop, it can thresh twenty thousand jin a day."

Old Zhou asked no more. He squatted down and grabbed a handful of wheat grains from the pile spilling out of the threshing machine. The grains were plump and heavy, rolling around in his palm. He poured the grains into his mouth and chewed, tasting sweetness. Then he stood up, tucked his sickle behind his waist, and turned to walk toward his own field. After a few steps, he suddenly stopped and said a sentence to his youngest son, Zhou Mancang, who was following behind him. Zhou Mancang later wrote this sentence into the autumn harvest summary of the Third Regiment of the Hetao Corps; the summary is still locked in the Corps' filing cabinet—"Your father, for the first time in his life, feels that the grain is his own."

After the autumn harvest ended, the total yield of the two hundred thousand mu of the Hetao Irrigation District was reported. He Mingyuan personally compiled the figures, working the abacus all night in the mud-brick room of the Corps headquarters. Early the next morning, he delivered the report to Zhang Chu'an's desk. Zhang Chu'an read the report, said neither "good" nor "too much," simply handed the report to Guo Jing beside him, and then wrote a line on the back with a fountain pen. Guo Jing took it and looked—the number on the report was fifty-six million jin. What Zhang Chu'an wrote on the back was: "Next year, three hundred thousand mu."

The first change after the grain entered the granary was at the cooperative counter. In previous years, before winter, the cooperative's grain counter was the quietest place—reserve grain had to prioritize military needs and factories, herders' rations were supplied by quota, with a fixed number of jin per person per month; there was no way to buy more. After this autumn's harvest, the wooden sign on the counter was replaced. The old sign read "Monthly ration purchase limit: thirty jin per person," but on the new sign, while the characters remained the same, a small line appeared after the "thirty": "If there are additional needs, unlimited purchase is allowed with labor vouchers."

Unlimited. These two characters carried more weight on the grassland than any slogan. An old herder who grazed on the former lands of the Kereit stood before the counter, reading the characters on the wooden sign three times—he could not read, so a female clerk of the cooperative read them to him word by word. After listening, he reached into his chest, pulled out a cloth bundle, and opened it layer by layer; inside was a thick stack of labor vouchers of various denominations, saved up for a full year. He placed the cloth bundle on the counter and said, "Give me fifty jin of white flour." The female clerk paused: "Grandpa, can you eat fifty jin?" The old herder pushed the cloth bundle forward again: "I can't eat it. I'm making steamed buns for my grandson. Steamed white flour buns."

On the grassland, white flour was a luxury. Previously, white flour buns were only seen on the tables of nobles and Nayan; ordinary herders ate coarsely ground oat paste and potatoes. Now, behind the cooperative's grain counter, bags of white flour were stacked higher than a person, and piles of potatoes in the warehouse were overflowing; some were cut into dried potato strips, and some were brewed into alcohol to supply the solvent workshop of the arsenal. In his report to the Logistics Department, He Mingyuan used a rustic phrase he had never used in university to describe this year's grain reserves: "Pigs can't finish it, people can't finish it, and there's still enough to exchange for salt."

Salt indeed arrived. The first batch of refined salt from the Hexi Salt Industry Company arrived at the base area's cooperative in late autumn. Previously, herders ate coarse salt, black and bitter, which made the throat feel astringent if eaten too much. The refined salt was snow-white, with uniform granules, packed in one-jin coarse cloth bags printed with the six characters "Grassland Salt Industry Company." The price of salt at the cooperative was set extremely low—so low that a herder could exchange two jin for the smallest denomination labor voucher. When the price was set, someone raised an objection, asking if such cheapness meant a loss. Zhang Chu'an's answer was only one sentence: "Salt is not a commodity, it is life. Life cannot be priced."

Arriving with the salt was cotton cloth. In this autumn, textile factories in Jiangnan transmitted the core components of a batch of hand-cranked sewing machines via software; the grassland's own woodworking workshop equipped them with frames and wooden tabletops, assembling the first fifty hand-cranked sewing machines. These sewing machines did not enter factories; they were all distributed to cooperatives in various settlement points, where female members were trained by the cooperatives to operate them, establishing "Convenient Sewing Stations." Herders brought their own cloth; the sewing stations made clothes for free, charging nothing for cutting or sewing, only taking the cloth.

Old Zhou's wife was the first herder's family member to walk into a sewing station in the Hetao settlement. She brought three chi of machine-woven cotton cloth to make a new jacket for Old Zhou and a new headscarf for herself. The female workers at the sewing station measured her dimensions and cranked the wheel of the hand-cranked sewing machine so fast it spun. From the buzzing sound of the needle and thread, she heard a rhythm she had never experienced before; later, she said a sentence to Old Zhou to describe that sound: "Like the water in the river in summer."

The improvement in living conditions began before winter. The first batch of brick-and-wood permanent houses in the base area landed in the core settlement points of the Hetao Irrigation District. These houses were no longer semi-subterranean—while semi-subterranean warm rooms were warm, they were low, damp, and poorly lit, and staying inside them for long during winter caused coughing. The new houses were brick-and-wood structures; the walls were built of blue bricks, the roofs were red tiles framed with wooden beams, windows were fitted with glass, and the floors were paved with rammed lime three-composite earth. Each household had three rooms—a main hall, a bedroom, and a storage room—with a small courtyard behind, where chicken coops and sheep pens were built. Pressure water wells were uniformly drilled next to the houses; the wellheads were cast iron, and pressing the handle made groundwater gush up with a splash.

The day Old Zhou's family moved in, his wife stood in the main hall for a long time, then did something no one expected—she took off her broken boots, stepped barefoot onto the rammed lime three-composite earth floor, stepped again and again, then raised her head and smiled at Old Zhou. There was no excitement, no tears in that smile, only a stability smoothed out by something. "Husband, this ground is flat." Old Zhou did not answer. He squatted on the threshold, lit a cigarette, and watched the pressure water well in the courtyard shimmering with iron-gray light in the sun.

His neighbor was an old miner's family who had fled from the Heishui City mining area. The old miner, surnamed Liu, had bent his back carrying ore in the Western Xia mines for thirty years, his spine curved into a bow. On the first day of moving into the new house, his son—who now operated the winch in the Mining Regiment—carried something back for him from the cooperative. It was not food, not clothing; it was a wooden chair with armrests. Old Liu had worked in the mines for thirty years and had never sat in a chair with armrests. He sat in the chair, leaned his back against the backrest, placed his hands on the armrests, closed his eyes, and remained silent for a long time. Then he opened his eyes and said to his son: "This chair is better than any Nayan's chair I have ever seen."

Regarding changes in education, Zhou Mancang felt it most deeply. He was now the clerk of the Third Regiment of the Hetao Corps, but after winter, the Education Bureau of the base area issued a new notice: all young adults under twenty-five, whether employed or not, must attend winter literacy classes, with three nights of classes per week. The textbooks were newly compiled, with the characters "Grassland Literacy Textbook" printed on the cover; every lesson inside was accompanied by illustrations—the illustration for the first lesson was a steam locomotive, with the two Mongolian characters for "train" written below; the illustration for the second lesson was a cooperative counter, with the characters for "labor voucher" written below. The instructors of the literacy classes were students transferred from the Military and Political University; each was responsible for one settlement point, teaching literacy after arithmetic, and teaching simple practical writing after arithmetic. Zhou Mancang was already a clerk and did not need literacy training, but he voluntarily signed up as an assistant instructor for the literacy class. On the night of the first class, looking at the dozens of adult herders sitting densely in the classroom—some shepherds, some miners, some female clerks who had stood behind the cooperative counter all day—each of them held a stone pencil in their hand, writing their own names crookedly on a slate. He suddenly remembered two years ago, when he himself, under such an oil lamp, had written the three characters "Zhou Mancang" on a slate for the first time.

The change in healthcare began with a number. After winter, the base area's field hospital conducted a census of smallpox vaccination rates for the entire population, and the result was ninety-seven percent. The remaining three percent were new immigrants who had just fled from Western Xia before winter; they were still in quarantine, and they would all be vaccinated after the quarantine ended. The director of the field hospital was surnamed Sun, the young doctor who had given Old Zhou his first injection at the Guihua Reception Station back then. In his annual report, he wrote this passage: "Two years ago, half of the newborns on the grassland did not survive past the age of five. The causes of death were mainly smallpox, tetanus, pneumonia, and diarrhea. Now, the annual incidence rate of smallpox is zero. The incidence rate of tetanus has dropped by ninety percent. The mortality rate of pneumonia has dropped by seventy percent. The mortality rate of diarrhea has dropped by sixty percent. Behind these numbers are the widespread use of vaccines, penicillin, disinfection standards, and boiled drinking water."

Old Zhou's wife did not recognize these numbers. But she knew one thing—her youngest granddaughter, now two years old, was conceived after arriving at the base area. When the child was born, Dr. Sun personally delivered her, using sterilized scissors and gauze. On the day the child completed her first month, Dr. Sun rode a horse over to vaccinate her and left two packs of sulfonamide powder. Now the child runs all over the ground, speaks a mixed language of Mongolian and Tangut, and points to the red flag at the cooperative entrance calling it "flag flag." When her grandmother held her in the courtyard sunbathing, she suddenly said a sentence to Old Zhou that she had never said before; this sentence was later relayed by Old Zhou to Old Liu next door, then by Old Liu to his fellow workers in the mine, and somehow eventually reached Zhang Chu'an's ears. After hearing it, Zhang Chu'an was silent for a while, then said: "This sentence is the meaning of everything we do."

What she said was: "This child will live better than us in the future."