November 16, the 32nd year of Xuanping, Shanghai Bei'an Railway Station.
Accompanied by two attendants, Sun Xuekun entered the train station and boarded the express train bound for Jinling City.
After entering the first-class carriage and sitting down, Sun Xuekun quietly waited for the train to start, while also thinking about what the telegraph company should do.
He received an urgent message from Jinling City yesterday, asking him to rush to Jinling City immediately to take up the post of general manager of the newly established telegraph company.
As a veteran official of the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises, he successively served as deputy manager of Jiangnan Arms Company, general manager of Yangtze River Shipping Company, and later served as general manager of Zhili Railway Company, a subsidiary of Datang Railway Corporation.
His nearly 20-year political career was superficially political, with an official title of third rank, but he had actually been working in an enterprise affiliated with the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises from the first day he became an official.
To a certain extent, he is actually a professional manager, but he is only employed by the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises.
Most of the managers of enterprises in the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises like them are like this. Although they have official status, they are still different from orthodox officials.
If nothing else, at least the income is much higher than that of orthodox officials!
And this is still legal income. Their salary is basically comparable to the salary of private professional managers. If the company does well, they will get a lot of dividends.
But it is not without limitations. For example, now, he is working well at the Zhili Railway Company. When he is watching the double-track expansion plan of the Beijing-Shanghai section of the Jiangnan Railway that he sponsored is approaching completion, he is blocked by the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises.
By paper transfer order, he was directly transferred to the position of general manager of the Telegraph Company.
In fact, he really likes working on the railway industry. The sense of accomplishment brought by building the railway is greater than the sense of accomplishment brought by operating routes in the Yangtze River Shipping Company in the early years. Well, it also makes more money!
And so far, his knowledge of this telegraph company is limited to a few hundred words on the transfer document, and he still doesn't even know what this telegram is.
However, as an official of the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises, he enjoys political treatment that is better than that of ordinary businessmen and professional managers, and he also receives generous treatment that is comparable to that of professional managers. Naturally, he has to pay a price.
He couldn't refuse the transfer from the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises!
So he started handing over work overnight yesterday, and then rushed to the train station to take the train early this morning.
After waiting for a quarter of an hour, the express passenger train to Jinling City set off on time. The steam locomotive emitted white mist, and the huge iron wheels began to rotate, driving the many carriages behind it to move forward slowly.
At first, the speed was still very slow, even slower than the speed of human walking, but the speed became faster and faster, and soon the train was making a clanging sound as it raced on the tracks in the wilderness.
When the train finished speeding up and started cruising at a stable speed, Sun Xuekun knew that the train speed at this time had reached 50 kilometers per hour.
This is the current cruising speed of domestic passenger trains!
A few years ago, this speed was only 35 kilometers per hour, then gradually increased to 40 kilometers per hour, and in recent years, it has increased to 50 kilometers per hour.
Although it seems that the speed increase is not large, every speed increase actually means technological progress.
First of all, the horsepower of train locomotives is getting bigger and bigger, and the safety performance is also getting better and better.
After all, increasing speed is not just about speed, but also about ensuring safety. The faster the train, the harder it is to ensure safety.
After the train left the station, Sun Xuekun did not continue to sit, but lay down in the compartment to rest.
Although he was taking an express train and would only stop at a few major stations along the way to refuel with coal and water, the journey still took a day!
The train continued to clang and clang, stopping at Suzhou, Zhenjiang and other stations along the way. However, the stop time was very short, and it would continue moving after adding coal and water.
In the evening, the train finally pulled into Jinling East Station. After Sun Xuekun and his entourage got off the train, he hailed a carriage and headed to the old city.
After entering the old city, he stayed at an inn directly under the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises!
This is a guest house opened by the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises itself. It is not open to the public and only entertains officials from the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises for free.
However, Sun Xuekun was actually reluctant to live in a guest house because the conditions were so poor.
It is recognized in the empire that the conditions of government-run guest houses are not very good. This is because officials visiting and staying in the guest houses are free to stay, eat and drink, and the funds required for guest houses can only be allocated from the directly affiliated departments.
In the beginning, the conditions were actually very good, and the yamen were not short of money. However, a few years ago, after the prince paid a private visit to the guest house of the tax department, he was dumbfounded by the luxury inside. He said that the conditions in the guest house were better than his.
Both the East Palace and the East Palace are better.
Even better than Donggong!
This sentence caused a large number of people to be unlucky at that time. Many people lost their jobs and even more were sentenced to death.
After that, all yamen consciously cut their funding. Later, the Ministry of Civil Affairs directly listed entertainment expenses as a key assessment target. As long as the local entertainment funds were large, the assessment could not be expected to be as good as that.
As a result, officials no longer like to stay in hotels, but use official funds to stay in hotels outside.
But this did not last long. Later, the prince Li Hao made another move and directly suggested to the Holy Emperor Li Xuan that officials would not be given any subsidies for business trips in the country, and they could only stay in local guesthouses for food and drink along the way without spending any money.
Because guest houses are run by local yamen or institutions themselves, and all the local yamen’s money is spent. In order to control the entertainment funds and avoid poor evaluations, local officials are very stingy and generally only maintain the lowest level.
For basic operation, you will never pay a dime more.
Anyway, this guest house is where foreign officials stay, eat and drink, and local officials cannot go there.
After this continued for several years, the conditions in the official guest houses naturally became no better.
This situation is similar to that of officials in the pre-Ming Dynasty who did not repair government buildings. If you don’t repair, no one will criticize you. But if you repair too well, you have to be careful about losing your official position.
In the former Ming Dynasty, there were no government offices. Officials still lived and worked in these offices. As for the guesthouses in the Tang Dynasty, they were all owned by foreign officials and local officials did not live in them. Therefore, the conditions of the official guesthouses in the Tang Dynasty were
Bad, that's to be expected.
If you can't stand the environment in the guest house, you can also pay for your own money and live outside. The official will not object, but you will easily be targeted by the censor.
Fortunately, this is Jinling City, and it is also a guest house directly under the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises. Even if the officials of the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises do not want to be caught for the sake of their own political achievements and strictly control the public expenditure on entertainment, it still has a third-rate standard.
The hot water and other things are still good. Even if the room is still a three-person room, he and his two followers live in the same room. The dinner they eat is just a very ordinary meal, three people, three dishes and one soup. And he can be sure that the cook
His skill is that of an ordinary cook. If you hire such a cook, your monthly salary will not exceed five yuan.
Sleeping on a hard bed in a triple room at night, covered with a patched quilt, Sun Xuekun couldn't help but sigh: It's not easy to enter Beijing!
If it weren't for the influence, he would have just stayed at the Qinhuai Hotel.
That is the highest-grade private hotel in Jinling City, the favorite of high-end business people, and he, Sun Xuekun, is not short of money, and his annual salary and dividends add up to tens of thousands.
However, this time he came to Jinling City for official business, so he had to pay attention to the necessary impact, so he had no choice but to live in a guest house directly under the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises.
After all, as an official, even though you have money, you can't show it off, otherwise you can easily get into trouble.
Not every official can be treated like Chen Lifu and enjoy it without any scruples.
Because not every official’s money is as clean as Chen Lifu’s!
The Chen family was extremely wealthy before Chen Lifu became an official, with hundreds of thousands of cash hidden in the cellar. Later, the Chen family successively invested in a lot of industry and commerce. Although in recent years, in order to worry about the impact, they have not directly invested in some projects that are likely to cause problems.
Most of the troubled industries are based on fund stock investment, and the stocks purchased are often large companies, and they do not occupy too many stock shares in a company.
But over the years, the Chen family's assets have actually expanded very rapidly. In the early years, the family property was estimated to be only a few million, but now, even Chen Lifu himself doesn't know how much money his family has.
The most important thing is that the money came cleanly, and even the censor couldn't find anything wrong with it.
And Chen Lifu paid taxes honestly, not stealing a penny of taxes, so that the tax department could not find anything wrong with him.
However, there are too few people like Chen Lifu.
His butt is clean and he has more money.
Those with a lot of money are not as clean as his butt.
Therefore, Chen Lifu can spend whatever he wants, and he doesn't care much about other people's eyes. Even many officials avoid the taboo of private visits to Qingse Xiaolou. Chen Lifu does not avoid it. Of course, he will not go directly to Qingse Xiaolou.
Usually they are invited directly to go sightseeing or something like that.
As for Sun Xuekun, he didn't have the courage like Chen Lifu, and he didn't have the clean money, so he could only complain in his heart, and then slept an uncomfortable night.
Early the next morning, he got up, freshened up and went directly to the Yamen of the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises.
There, he met several senior officials of the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises and even the Minister of State-owned Enterprises.
The more senior people he met, the more Sun Xuekun was puzzled as to what exactly this telegraph company did and why it attracted so much attention.
After meeting many people and holding a meeting, he finally found out what the telegraph company he was about to serve as general manager was doing.
He is not a science professional, and he doesn't understand anything about electromagnetism, but that doesn't stop him from understanding the nature of the telegraph company!
To put it bluntly, isn’t it just a post company?
It's just that in the past, the post station system used horses, trains, ships, etc. to transmit information, but now, telegraphs are used to transmit information.
And after understanding the nature of the telegraph company, he understood why the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises paid so much attention to it.
And for such an important company to be run by himself, to be honest, now he is a little worried that he will mess it up.