CHAPTER 1550: CHAPTER 1467: A LAND SCARRED BY WAR

Many officials who engaged in corruption and bribery once had their own ideals and ambitions, but they couldn’t resist temptation and ultimately chose to fall.

This may not be entirely accurate. Besides temptation, the bribe-givers have too many methods, and inducement is just one of them; sometimes coercion or even threats are options too.

From Tang Mo’s standpoint, such bribers are virtually destroying the officials he carefully cultivated, nearly undermining the Empire’s foundation.

Thus, he seriously considered whether to severely punish the bribe-givers as well, allowing those bastards willing to corrupt the Empire’s officials with money to experience his methods.

Frankly speaking, in an Empire, as long as the Emperor consents, some shady departments have the full capacity to let a person experience what it means to live a fate worse than death.

However, his legal advisor reminded him that if bribers are punished the same as those who take bribes, they would form an unbreakable alliance, concealing and hiding from each other, making cases harder to solve and reducing the possibility of mutual reporting and betrayal.

Everything has two sides, so Tang Mo also has to carefully consider whether amending the law would create more trouble for himself, outweighing the benefits.

Fortunately, he still has some special departments within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. If he truly cannot vent his anger, he can order Yulin to find other excuses to send those damned bribers to the guillotine.

In a country under an imperial system, the legal level is flexible. However, this flexibility, as a country gradually decays, starts to continuously shift towards serving the privileged class.

In the most recent year, the Tang Empire’s iron, petroleum, rubber, electricity, and other production capacities have all increased, and by a significant amount: having occupied such vast lands, all indicators naturally need to become more extensive.

Integrating the work from all regions still requires time, but restoring production is indeed the common desire of all the people.

After ensuring grain production and beginning the mass elimination of famine, all the indicators in Tang Country are developing positively. Everywhere is busy; everywhere is under construction, reminiscent of Huaxia in the fifties.

Everyone is filled with enthusiasm, and the environment where producing anything can bring profit indirectly encourages all the laborers. Unlike Huaxia at that time, Tang Mo has too many new technologies to unleash; Tang Country’s technological development path has no bottlenecks or constraints.

With technological support, almost every region has gained new points for economic growth. Officials everywhere are busy letting the people get rid of poverty and become rich, focusing on earning money, and have no time to consider other issues.

However, even after more than half a year has passed, many corners of the Tang Empire still bear the marks left by the war.

This land was once scarred everywhere; many building walls still bear mottled bullet marks, even after being painted over several times, those small pits still record the fierce battles of that time.

Many of the filled-in bomb craters have been excavated; new sewage systems and civil defense systems need to be rebuilt. Streets that weren’t spacious to begin with have become congested due to construction, too much city development happening simultaneously, making many cities seem as if they’re back in a war-state.

Some cars forcibly requisitioned by the Qin Country military were temporarily distributed to various regions. These cars soon became incapacitated due to lack of parts and were then discarded in the corners of some factories, corroded by time, becoming rusty.

Some of these cars didn’t even have doors, some had engines with only a few dozen horsepower, and some even had wooden wheels.

This industrial waste, frantically produced by Qin Country before its demise, finally began to be scrapped on a large scale after barely half a year.

And the gaps left after these cars were scrapped forced the Tang Empire to madly expand its own automotive industry—ultimately, Tang Country decided to build a large automobile factory at Qingluan Port, to increase Tang Country’s annual automotive production capacity by another million...

Distance to water can’t solve immediate thirst, building a new automobile factory is a long-term plan; in the short term everyone can only find ways to solve the problem of lacking vehicle transport capacity.

So, during this period, many things happened that made people both laugh and cry: two villages each had two incapacitated scrapped cars, and after everyone discussed, they simply pieced the two cars together, repaired one that could be used, and the two villages continued to make do with it.

Some places find craftsmen with some ability, who manually make parts temporarily to use. Craftsmen able to manufacture simple parts saw their worth increase dramatically overnight, sometimes even becoming too busy to rest.

Those closer to Tang Country’s core developed areas, or those with friends with connections, had it even easier. They simply wrote letters asking friends to find associates to have workers in large factories in Tongcheng or Linshui help process some parts with waste materials, ensuring their own cars could be barely used.

Anyway, everyone was showing their skills, and for a time in many places of Tang Country, the cars running on the streets emitted a postmodern cyberpunk wasteland vibe.

You could see wooden car doors in some city’s streets, trucks with bamboo mats as top covers for the truck beds, as well as old Qin Country trucks parked by the roadside with military numbers still painted on their engine hoods.

This world is so magical, in Chang’an when the subway opened and people started commuting via electric subway, in another part of the same country, incandescent bulbs weren’t even fully popularized yet.

It’s definitely not a joke; after occupying Qin Country, Tang Country’s officials were surprised to find many impoverished areas of Qin Country hadn’t connected to electricity yet!

To let these regions quickly improve their living conditions and keep up with the development pace of the Tang Empire, the first task for the new local officials was to find ways to extend the power grid to the doorstep of people who’ve never used electric lights in their lives.

No choice, after all, letting people hear the Great Tang Empire Radio Station’s broadcasts earlier would subtly influence them sooner, making it easier for them to accept their new identity as subjects of the Great Tang Empire.

And with electricity, agricultural production can become more efficient... new problems follow suit, more electricity usage leads to insufficient power production capacity, because local infrastructure is really poor, and indeed there are too few power plants.

So, Tang Mo had to allocate funds again, to build 30 super-large thermal power plants in the west, 4 super-large hydroelectric power plants, and 57 medium-sized hydroelectric power plants in one go.

Unfortunately, as the saying goes, distance to water can’t solve immediate thirst, development still needs time; Tang Country hasn’t ruled the Western Continent for long, so they need to continue increasing investment to achieve results.