Nanyang 1931: From piglets to giants

Chapter 102: Problems that money can solve are not problems
Faced with Zheng Yi’s bold words, the entire Penang management was stunned.

There is no need to really calculate the plan that Zheng Yi is coming up with. Just a rough idea is that all the bragging that Zheng Yi said at the meeting is impossible to achieve without tens of millions of Malaysian ringgits.

If converted into US dollars, it would be at least two million US dollars.

This is the case when He Shili is relatively frugal.

This does not even include the cost of building Li Xiaowei's police station.

Poor Li Xiaowei, he spent three days carefully considering the situation in Penang and came up with a plan.
This includes how the police force is formed, what the police's duties are, what equipment the police force should have, and what kind of training they should do in daily life. All of these are done seriously.

During these three days, he slept less than ten hours in total in order to work on this plan.

He was a young man, and it was his first time to take on such a big responsibility, so he was very excited. Especially since he brought many veterans who followed him from Guilin (all from Xinyi), it was a great honor for him.

Naturally, he would be more confident in explaining things to Bai and Li in China.

At the same time, he was indeed a little worried during these three days, fearing that he had not considered everything carefully and made mistakes, which would make him a laughing stock in the meeting. The pressure was particularly great.

result,

The meetings are over.

No one paid any attention to him.

Including Zheng Yi, they took a look at his plan, then put it aside and discussed the plans of Hu Wenhu and He Shili.

What are you doing?

You are really bullying me.

Police station!
Is this a... not very important department in Penang?

Especially since you all want to promote gun ownership for all. In a city where everyone can carry guns, isn't the police station very important?

Being a police officer is also dangerous.

As people started to disperse, no one mentioned his work at the police station.

Li Xiaowei looked at Zheng Yi pitifully: "Brother-in-law..."

Zheng Yi: "Just do as you wish. If you need money, tell me. If you need people, tell your dad. If you need connections, tell your brother. I trust you. Ah, if you don't agree, does that mean you are against it? I have something else to do, so I'll leave first."

Li Xiaowei: “…………”

It means... I agree...

Passed?
But why do I feel so unfulfilled?

And why do I feel so angry?

In a fit of anger, Li Xiaowei seemed to have simply cut out the police station's budget.

He changed the original amount of 10 million Malaysian ringgit to 30 million Malaysian ringgit.

I want to expand!

In particular, many auxiliary police officers and patrolmen who were originally only going to be equipped with wooden sticks and iron bars were all changed to be equipped with guns.

In addition to pistols, formal police officers must also be equipped with rifles.

I also want a powered delta wing for air patrols.

No, 30 million may not be enough. It needs at least 50 million, which is more than 3 million when converted into US dollars.

I told you not to take me seriously.

I'm going to spend more than Lao He, see if you're angry.

I told you to brag.

Say you have plenty of money.

snort!
This is actually just the willfulness of young people. Normally, no one would do things this way. A budget of 10 million was changed to 50 million at the implementation level without any prior notice.

This is because Li Xiaowei has a strong background. If it were someone else, anyone who dared to do such a thing would have been kicked out long ago.

Of course, he was just a child playing tricks on his child. He didn't really plan to spend the fucking 50 million. After all, the Malaysian ringgit is a much stronger currency than the domestic currency, and it can't be treated as paper flowers.

He was just waiting for the execution. When he asked his brother-in-law for money, he looked at his brother-in-law's face and said to him righteously: Who told you not to take a good look at my plan and not pay attention to it?

In fact, Penang is really short of money now, and there is a shortage of money everywhere. There are too many places to spend money.

The British don't care about grassroots governance and administration, they only collect taxes and don't care whether they live or die.

Although Penang was now autonomous, it was still subject to a tax-farming system. Zheng Yi had to pay the British one million US dollars in taxes, which, depending on the exchange rate, would be close to thirty million Malaysian ringgit. In previous years, Penang's annual tax contributions to the Colonial Office were only around ten million, which was a bit of a stretch.

After Zheng Yi took over, he did not change the tax rate and still temporarily maintained the British tax system. No new taxes were added, and some old taxes might even be reduced.

But Zheng Yi still planned to govern Penang well.

No matter how relaxed it is, governance still requires costs.

At the very least, you have to recruit civil servants and build office buildings, right?

We are all wealthy businessmen who pool our money to make ends meet.

Where is the money left?

The government has no money left, and Zheng Yi is about to empty the pockets of wealthy businessmen throughout Southeast Asia.

As for Zheng Yi's personal life?

Others may not know how much money Zheng Yi has personally, but how could the Li family not know?

He has no money.

Zheng Yi had been in Nanyang for just over two years, and in the first year he had been working for the Li family.

Even though he has many businesses and each one is making a fortune, he almost never gets any dividends.

Anyway, Taiyou Machinery has almost never distributed dividends.

All the money earned was used for reproduction, and now if the Li family wants to raise some cash they have to sell stocks.

But only a fool would sell such precious stocks. He just didn't believe that Zheng Yi would be willing to sell Taiyou's stocks on a large scale.

snort!
You must be bragging.

…………

On the other hand, He Shili was also trying to find ways to raise money.

Whether Zheng Yi can come up with the money or not is not the point for now, but he has to get the money anyway.

He also realized that Penang was just a makeshift team. There was actually not much money that was used from the public account. Everyone used their own private accounts and each had their own little calculations.

The reason why Zheng Yi was able to become the head of the overseas Chinese community was largely because he brought in Shell and DuPont, and relied on his personal credit to obtain a huge sum of three million US dollars.

It's just a makeshift team. The essence of Nanyang is that there are no rules. It's a lawless place, or at least the so-called legal system has not been established yet and is still in the exploratory stage.

If you have money, people and guns, you are awesome.

Without money, people, or guns, even if you are assigned an official position, you may not be able to control people.

However, He Shili did not feel uncomfortable about this. Instead, he felt like a fish in water.

Because he is also very rich.

Their family is the richest in Hong Kong Island.

Is a problem that can be solved with money a problem for him? It can even be said that it is a good thing.

You know, when He Shili just joined the Northeast Army, he once proposed that his He family pay money to help the Northeast Army purchase cannons and form artillery. It's a pity that the young marshal was very concerned about this kind of thing and did not agree.

Zheng Yi was actually willing to let big merchants like them participate in the construction of the army by paying money, which was exactly what he wanted.

These wealthy people in Southeast Asia have invested all their money in the Penang petrochemical project. Although the He family did not catch up with this project, they have now caught up with it by forming an army. This can be said to be a win-win situation.

No matter how much he invests, he has to invest some money to buy a share. If he doesn't invest money, no matter how Zheng Yi uses him, he is just an employee. If he invests money, he can become a shareholder.

Rather than being a city-state, Penang is more like a large-scale consortium run by a partnership.

Zheng Yi now wants to use his own money to build an army, which is clearly the general manager injecting capital to increase shares.

Then he has to invest as well.

But then again, no one in Nanyang could figure out how Zheng Yi was going to get such a large sum of money.

For half a month, Zheng Yi continued to do what he was supposed to do every day. He would go around his own factory one by one every day, then spend most of the day on the petrochemical plant site, and the other half of the day receiving foreign guests.

But he was not very attentive to the two banks, Citibank and Morgan.

And half a month later, a lot of things in Penang seemed to be about to get urgent, but he actually... patted his butt and left?

Business trip?
As for where to go, no one knows either.

(End of this chapter)