My Lord, you need to stand up!

Chapter 419 This Pandora's box will be opened sooner or later.
Because if the exterior is pristine and imposing, it is the interior that truly exudes an aura of dominance!

It does not refer to a magnificent or opulent style.

Instead, Wu Shengyun actually recruited private commercial organizations from various counties and cities around Jiangzhou to set up offices in this building!
The office building lobby, with its dark brown marble floor, beige marble walls, and white plaster ceiling, isn't very large; it feels like the size of a typical business hotel.

But as you walk through the huge white marble pillars and archways on both sides, you immediately see the "Dongsheng International" sign in both Chinese and English on the wall behind the reception desk.

Standing on the side of the building, it looks like the whole building belongs to Dongsheng, and the "side" facing the street is just a few side shops, while this side is the main building.

Because it's not just the front desk area with its various brands listed from top to bottom: "Dongsheng Trading," "Dongsheng Electronics," "Dongsheng Apparel," "Dongsheng Shipbuilding," "Dongsheng Foreign Trade," "Urban Construction Development," "Jianggang Real Estate," etc.

On the other side is another long row of signs: "Fudu City Chamber of Commerce Jiangzhou Office", "Shangzhou City Chamber of Commerce Jiangzhou Office", "Zhuxian County Commerce and Trade Jiangzhou Office", and "Wuxian County Commerce and Trade Jiangzhou Office"!
Stepping inside, you're immediately overwhelmed by the commercial atmosphere; it's almost suffocating!

Wei Dong was instructed to pick up all the city officials, as well as relevant leaders from real estate companies and housing construction departments, from the sales office of the Zoo Elevator Building and bring them to the city center in one car.

Sitting in a 19-seat van, he explained, "These are medium-sized vans produced locally in Jiangzhou. They're being used as a trial for various models we've procured to support local automakers, and we're also providing feedback to the manufacturers. The goal is to further assist the development of local industrial manufacturing in Jiangzhou, just like how this glittering building in the city center was erected to establish Jiangzhou's leading role in the national sales network..."

They kept trying to warn me, saying that my building was really just for show for the sales staff, not luxurious, not extravagant, not for showing off...

But all words seem utterly inadequate in the face of the pristine, seven-story building!

As we all know, the exterior wall construction techniques are relatively simple nowadays, without many fancy floor-to-ceiling window designs.

This is a large area of ​​white wall, with a ring of aluminum alloy sliding windows neatly embedded in each floor, the window area being much smaller than the white wall.

Instead, it made the white walls stand out even more.

It's so pure white it's almost blinding, and up close you can even see the jade-like quality of its luminous whiteness!

Everyone in the car gasped – so high-class!

It's even more upscale than the city's main hall.

While Wei Dong explained that this was a brilliant example of skillful maneuvering, all he wanted to do was grab Wu Shengyun and kick his ass.

Several cars turned to the back, where there was a passageway to the underground parking garage and a temporary parking area. It was clean and beautiful, with clear paint markings on the ground, definitely in the Hong Kong style.

As soon as they stepped into the lobby, even people from the city couldn't help but exclaim, "Even the offices of the six districts and seven counties in the city aren't this tidy!"

Wei Dong quickly explained, "Commerce and trade are all private commercial organizations. In this regard, Jiangzhou Commercial Company is able to connect township enterprises and private individual businesses throughout the city, providing strong support for the sales of products. It can also be considered as showing the whole country our Jiangzhou urban and rural sales model... This way, this way, get on the elevator."

Four elevators were designed, but only two have been installed and put into operation, serving only the podium building, specifically floors three, four, five, six, and seven.

Wei Dong led them into the elevator and then introduced, "The elevator branch of Hongyan Machinery Factory had some problems with the construction elevators last time. The branch leader had financial issues that stalled the project, and someone withdrew their investment, so we took over. As a result, in addition to the construction elevators, we have now trial-produced and launched passenger elevators. Notice that each elevator is equipped with an operator. This is how we solved the problem of having one or not."

There aren't many buildings with elevators in Jiangzhou City now, and many officials in relevant departments don't have much experience with elevators. They think that having an elevator operator is a prestigious thing to do.

Rang Weidong explained: "The biggest technical challenge of modern elevators is actually in automatic door opening and closing, precise car balance, door opening and closing sensors to prevent people from getting caught, and the order of going up and down floors. Simply put, it requires a high-precision computer board to control it. If you are not careful, it will make mistakes. We can't achieve that with our current technology, but adding a person to replace the computer board is not a problem."

The crowd then seemed to realize something.

Skipping the second floor, the third and fourth floors have a U-shaped internal structure. The outer ring is divided into offices of several tens or hundreds of square meters, filled with signs of trade and material companies from Jiangzhou and Shangzhou. The center is the office area of ​​several larger trading companies.

Everything is brand new and bustling!
That's right, it's the same trading company that previously stole sanitary napkins, a large collective, small collective, and private conglomerate mainly engaged in trade in the surrounding districts and counties.

After Wu Shengyun applied to Rang Weidong, he went back to his old employer to rent the venue.

True business people don't care about these ups and downs, putting into practice the famous saying that there are no permanent enemies or permanent friends in the business world.

The current dominant position of Weidong is a behemoth that these district and county commercial entities cannot compare to.

They couldn't get what they wanted, but now they have an opportunity to get closer to it.

Let Weidong recruit those shell companies from the military post guesthouse.

Duan Lixia then went to the clothing and electronics wholesale markets to promote the idea that individual businesses could also have offices. Without even soliciting investment, the two floors were instantly filled.

In Jiangzhou, a city that had never had a professional office building before, it immediately became an industry benchmark.

Besides having formal, high-end commercial office space to project a sophisticated image, the key feature is the availability of telephone lines, allowing for long-distance calls.

The project to build a 500-line semi-automatic program-controlled telephone exchange was completed at the end of July.

Originally, Dong Xueqing was supposed to stay and learn until the project was completed before leaving. However, now that the family business is expanding too rapidly, she still has her sights set on returning to take over the family business.

Once the project was confirmed to be connected and numbers were being released, I immediately applied for three lines through my former colleagues and former boss.

The factory area has one line, while the Liujin Building has two lines.

Then, a small switchboard is purchased from Hong Kong, and all the companies inside the entire Grand Tower can share one of the long-distance lines. In the end, the computer can generate a list of each company's call duration and share the call charges for this long-distance line.

Even such a small change could make these companies think that Dongsheng Trading had some amazing background and had pulled a "dedicated line" from the city.

It was just a matter of Wei Dong's clairvoyance and his sister-in-law's professional skills getting a head start.

In short, this allows these companies to skip queuing at long-distance call centers and directly leap into the communications era.

When Wei Dong led the city officials on a tour of various companies, he also emphasized this detail: "Currently, Jiangzhou has 500 semi-automatic program-controlled telephone lines, which is ahead of 99% of cities in the country. This will definitely make a huge contribution to Jiangzhou's economic development. However, this amount is far from enough. The demand for 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, and 10,000 program-controlled telephone lines will grow rapidly. This is urban public investment, and it will become larger and larger in the future... Hong Kong and Tokyo have already provided very clear examples here."

Now that the companies have confirmed Wei Dong's connections, the city leaders, along with officials from various departments, marched in a grand procession through the office building area.

They keep asking about the pros and cons of this commercial office building model, wondering if it's going too far towards capitalist commercialization.

Let Wei Dong stick to one point: "Last year, we were still debating whether the city should invest in building the Trade Building. These investments should be generated by the commodity economy itself. The government should just provide supporting services, such as the program-controlled telephones here, the bus station, water, electricity, gas, and sanitation facilities near the zoo building, the surrounding streets of the economic development zone, security, and supervision and regulation."

He gained his insights from the renovation of the new neighborhood in Shangzhou and the electronic park in the Economic Development Zone.

The city government immediately countered, "Then where's the money? The government isn't involved in these projects, and there's no revenue. Where will the money come from to provide these supporting services? Are we just relying on allocations from higher authorities?"

The veteran tax security guard understood perfectly: "Theoretically, this is the purpose of tax collection, but when the national and local taxes are divided, it seems far from enough."

So people in the city felt very comfortable talking to him: "That's why you have to be careful and cautious... Take the stairs, haha, this place hasn't been tidied up yet, it's so messy."

Let Wei Dong not be afraid to show off, and start rummaging through the messy fire ladder to remove the building and decoration materials: "We are racing against time. Construction here started even earlier than in Animal Village. The reason why the podium building has only been completed is that, on the one hand, everyone is still exploring the internal structure of commercial buildings, and on the other hand, our construction capabilities are not as good as those of the Urban Construction Company, which is a team of people who have been transferred from infrastructure construction... The fifth floor is the temporary office area of ​​the Hong Kong company."

Half of the entire floor is office space for companies like Colorful Jeans, Hilary Casual Wear, and Suits & Children's Clothing, but there aren't many office workers. The main workforce is in the factory area, and the people here are there to connect with the trading and transportation companies upstairs.

On the contrary, the other half of the Hong Kong-owned real estate companies are quite busy. They need to immediately start projects such as riverside residential apartments that are positioned higher than Zoo Village, resettlement communities with a density that is more crowded than apartments, four-star hotels, office buildings, and commercial centers in the Economic Development Zone, and then get approval for the land that has been allocated in the city center.

Now, the Hong Kong representatives, speaking with a Cantonese-accented Mandarin, were able to quickly showcase a series of project renderings and architectural models.

Of course, he also took the opportunity to praise Pitt for his very meticulous control over the entire investment process, requiring that the real estate project in the Economic Development Zone be started only after the manufacturing plant was up and running, and that the demolition and resettlement met all the requirements before starting the real estate project in the city center.

The city officials were satisfied when they entered the fire escape again. Wu Shengyun had already arranged for people to clear it, making it much more unobstructed.

Finally, Wei Dong revealed the answer that had been on the tip of his tongue: "We were just talking about government spending on the supporting infrastructure... Based on Hong Kong's experience, it should actually be the land transfer fee. Hong Kong real estate companies are willing to invest 3 billion for these three projects, a significant portion of which should be for land payments..."

Upon hearing this, everyone in the fire escape shook their heads: "How is that possible! This is the land red line. If the land is sold, everyone here will probably be stripped of their land rights!"

That's right, ever since the land reform began, this has become an absolutely unchangeable nature.

So far, the reason why Weidong has been building so many buildings so frantically is that they have basically not discussed land ownership. They are building on state-owned land, and from the real estate company to the homebuyers, they only own the property rights of the building.

But he felt he couldn't let Hong Kong businessmen acquire so much land so easily for free; they had to pay: "Lease it, a 50-year lease for the land use rights..."

Everyone's face seemed to say, "Damn it, Hong Kong was finally going to be taken back after being leased to the government for 99 years, and now this place is going to be leased out again?"
Who would dare to say that?

(End of this chapter)