Chapter 227 Acquaintance
"By the way, Brother Song, I called Brother Zhengguo the day before yesterday and asked him to come to Yangcheng to meet me after he arrived in Pengcheng. But there is no place to stay in Pengcheng now. There is only one shabby guesthouse with only a few rooms. And I asked when I went there last time, and now all the rooms are booked until the end of the month. There is no place to stay unless I ask the local farmers to lend me a place."
At the end, Gu Jie remembered this matter and told Song Yuanchao about it. Song Yuanchao frowned after hearing it. He didn't expect that Pengcheng would be like this now.
At first, Song Yuanchao arranged to meet in Pengcheng, because Pengcheng was closer to Hong Kong and convenient for travel. Secondly, the special zone of Pengcheng would be officially established in a few days, and Lin Daoyuan would meet them in Pengcheng. But now Gu Jie actually said that there was no place to stay in Pengcheng, and the guesthouse was already fully booked, which caught Song Yuanchao off guard.
After thinking about it, Song Yuanchao put the matter aside for the time being. He planned to take some time to call Lin Daoyuan to ask about the situation. If it really doesn't work they will go to Pengcheng and back that day. It is convenient to have a car anyway, and it will only take some time on the road.
Song Yuanchao had a relatively good understanding of Pengcheng's later situation, but he knew little about the days when Pengcheng Special Economic Zone was first established.
Actually, it is not Song Yuanchao's fault. After all, Song Yuanchao was just a temporary worker in an engineering company affiliated with the telephone bureau at that time. His daily job was just dealing with things like wires and telephones. He was tired like a dog at work, and when he got home, he only thought about food, clothing, and shelter, so how could he care about national affairs?
What's more, these national affairs were too far away from Song Yuanchao, an ordinary person at that time. At most, he knew some related news from newspapers and TV. When Song Yuanchao went to Pengcheng later, it was already the early 1990s. Pengcheng at that time was no longer the same as before and had changed a lot.
This is indeed the case. When Pengcheng Special Economic Zone was first established, the conditions in the entire Pengcheng were extremely poor. Just as Gu Jie described, the roads were difficult to travel on, the living quarters were not good, there were frequent water and power outages, and there were large tracts of farmland all around. It could be said that there was nothing you needed.
There is no future for such a place, and no one would believe that in just less than ten years, Shenzhen would develop at a speed that would shock the whole world, thus completely opening up the pace of rapid reform and opening up.
There were no hotels in Pengcheng before 1981. The only hotels were what Gu Jie called guesthouses. The first hotel in Pengcheng was Zhuyuan Hotel in Luohu, which was also the first Sino-foreign joint venture hotel in my country (I remember it was, please correct me if I am wrong).
With the completion and opening of Zhuyuan Hotel, Pengcheng finally had a place to receive traveling merchants. The opening of Donghu Hotel in 1982 kicked off a construction boom of a series of hotels in Pengcheng. In 1986, the first five-star Nanhai Hotel in Pengcheng was completed and opened, marking that Pengcheng was at the forefront of the road of reform and opening up.
"There's no rush for this. There's still a few days left. Let me think about it."
"Brother Song, there's one more thing..." Just as Song Yuanchao was frowning in thought, Gu Jie suddenly remembered something. He approached Song Yuanchao and said mysteriously, "I ran into someone on the street a few days ago . Guess who I ran into?"
"How can I guess that?" Song Yuanchao laughed when he saw him like this. The world is so big, and someone he knew said so. He was asked to guess based on a random sentence. He was not a worm in Gu Jie's stomach.
“Zhang Bin…!”
A familiar name came out of Gu Jie's mouth, which made Song Yuanchao stunned. How long had he not heard this name? It had been a year and a half.
After the Spring Festival in 1979, Song Yuanchao returned to Shanghai from the northwest. The first thing he did in Shanghai was to get Li Daqi, Gu Jie and others to do the clothes hanger business.
The clothes hanger business earned Song Yuanchao and others their first pot of gold, and it was the gains from the clothes hanger business that led to a series of subsequent developments.
When the clothes hangers were being made, there were actually two other people besides Song Yuanchao, Li Daqi and Gu Jie, namely Zhang Bin and Wang Jianjun.
Zhang Bin and Wang Jianjun were not only Li Daqi's friends, but also Song Yuanchao's junior high school classmates. They were brought into the group because they were all acquaintances and also because they were classmates, because they were all educated youth who had returned to Shanghai at that time. They had no jobs and no income, and their lives were not going well after they came back.
But Song Yuanchao and his friends never expected that when the clothes hanger business just got on the right track, Zhang Bin and Wang Jianjun, blinded by the desire for profit, broke up with Song Yuanchao and his friends. After the breakup, Zhang Bin and Wang Jianjun not only secretly poached Song Yuanchao's people, but also found a few people to go out and work on their own, and even formed gangs for profit and engaged in bullying and market domination.
Everyone knows what happened later. Because Zhang Bin and Wang Jianjun had gone too far and were reported, the police led a team to raid their lair. At that time, Wang Jianjun and several young men who were working with them were caught red-handed in an air-raid shelter where they were making clothes hangers. Zhang Bin happened not to be there . After hearing the news, he ran away from the vegetable market with complicated terrain. After he ran away, no one knew Zhang Bin's whereabouts ever since.
When he ran away, Zhang Bin took away the money that Wang Jianjun had left with him. The money was originally used to purchase raw materials, but something went wrong before Zhang Bin could purchase the raw materials. So when Zhang Bin ran away, the money disappeared along with Zhang Bin.
According to what Wang Jianjun said later, the amount of money was more than 4,000 yuan, but if the money Zhang Bin himself owned was added, the total amount would probably be more than 5,000 yuan.
Not to mention last year, even now 5,000 yuan is not a small amount. If calculated based on the average worker's monthly salary of about 50 yuan, 5,000 yuan is the total income of an average worker for more than eight years. It is an absolute huge sum of money.
Let’s not talk about Wang Jianjun for now. This guy did something bad to himself and was eventually arrested. I don’t know where he is sitting in prison now.
Zhang Bin disappeared with the huge sum of money. The police had been looking for him for half a year but couldn't find him. But who would have thought that he would appear in Yangcheng now.
"Are you sure you didn't see the wrong person?" When Song Yuanchao learned that Gu Jie saw Zhang Bin in Yangcheng, he was surprised and couldn't help but ask.
"How could I be wrong? I would recognize this guy even if he turned into ashes." Gu Jie said firmly, "I was driving and stopped at a traffic light to light a cigarette. This guy walked straight in front of my car. For a moment I thought I was dazzled. When I reacted and planned to get out of the car to chase him, the guy had disappeared."
Gu Jie recounted the scene when he met Zhang Bin. He was driving to deliver a batch of goods that day, and on the way back, when he was waiting for the traffic light, Zhang Bin, who was fashionably dressed, walked past his car. At first, Gu Jie really thought that he was dazzled and recognized the wrong person. When he reacted and looked carefully, wasn’t the person who passed by Zhang Bin?
Although Zhang Bin was dressed differently from before, with longer hair than when he was in Shanghai and wearing a pair of microphone glasses to look like a real man, Gu Jie would never make a mistake. Just like he said, he would recognize Zhang Bin even if he turned into ashes.
"Just this one time?"
"Yes! Just this one time." Gu Jie nodded and said, "I went there a few times later but never ran into this guy. I don't know if he just happened to pass by that day or what. He looks like he is doing well. He is dressed in a formal manner. I don't know what he is doing now."
Song Yuanchao frowned, thought for a while, shook his head and said, "Forget it, don't tell anyone else about this, just pretend it never happened. Although Zhang Bin is a bad guy, he was a good friend in the beginning. Now we go our way and he goes his way, who cares what he does."
"I understand." Gu Jie nodded and didn't mention it anymore. At this time, Li Daqi came back, knocked on the door and came in. Seeing Song Yuanchao and Gu Jie chatting, he also sat down. The three continued to talk for a while. Soon it was lunch time and everyone went downstairs to eat together.
They had lunch on the second floor. Because there were so many people and it was usually busy, Gu Jie specially invited a local grandma to help them cook.
The food cooked by grandma is good. Although not as good as that in the restaurant, it has the taste of home cooking. After the meal, everyone went back upstairs to rest. Song Yuanchao took a shower, changed into dry clothes, and lay on the bed thinking about something.
That night, Song Yuanchao called Lin Daoyuan in Yanjing and told him what he had heard about the accommodation in Pengcheng. Lin Daoyuan was not very clear about the information Song Yuanchao gave him, so he asked Song Yuanchao to leave his phone number and call him back later.
An hour later, Lin Daoyuan called again and told Song Yuanchao that the conditions in Pengcheng were indeed not very good, so the original plan to let Song Yuanchao and Lin Yan live together in Pengcheng was now unrealistic. Even Lin Daoyuan himself would probably return to Yangcheng on the same day, so he asked Song Yuanchao and the others to stay in Yangcheng and set off early that day before meeting up in Pengcheng.
Since Lin Daoyuan said so, Song Yuanchao made the arrangements. After confirming the time on the phone, Song Yuanchao hung up.
The next day, Song Yuanchao and Li Daqi, accompanied by Gu Jie, visited various markets in Yangcheng and took a look at the specific situation in Yangcheng. They even had lunch outside and did not come back until the evening.
Lin Yan has been with Ying Caixia all the time, and since Gu Jie is not around, Ying Caixia needs to be in charge of Gaodi Street. Lin Yan is very interested in Ying Caixia's work, and takes this opportunity to help out in the store and also get familiar with their business in Yangcheng.
On the third day after Song Yuanchao and his companions arrived in Guangzhou, Qin Zhengguo, who came from Hong Kong, also returned from Pengcheng via Luohu customs.
On the day Qin Zhengguo came, Song Yuanchao and Gu Jie went to pick him up in person, and by the way, they also took the opportunity to see the specific situation in Pengcheng. When they arrived, Song Yuanchao was sure that what Gu Jie said was absolutely correct. The current Pengcheng was not the Pengcheng of the future. Fortunately, they made arrangements early, otherwise they might not even find a place to stay if they gathered in Pengcheng as originally planned.
