Xu Lei and Ye Zhou and his group walked on the rural road to the experimental field. The solar street lights on the road lit up one by one as they passed, and then gradually went out. Ye Zhou looked at this scene with some strangeness and said to Chen Hao:

“Is this considered over-technology?”

Chen Hao was stunned and replied:

"It's not... This kind of induction switch is very cheap now and the failure rate is also low. I have read a report before, saying that this induction street light is very practical in rural areas. After adding solar panels, it can even be completely off the grid. Whether it is simplified installation or later maintenance, it is very convenient."

"Also, I remember that Hailan's batch of street lights started to be rolled out after sulfur silicon batteries, and the overall efficiency ratio should be better..."

Chen Hao mentioned sulfur silicon battery until the end, and Ye Zhou immediately understood what he meant.

OK, it's still something to do with me.

"so......"

Ye Zhou nodded thoughtfully and continued to ask:

"Infrastructure like this is now a unified allocation or fundraising?"

Xu Lei, who was standing beside him, replied before Chen Hao:

"There are both funding and fundraising. Generally, larger infrastructures are unified financial allocations, such as road construction, street lights, water and electricity communications, etc. The village has also updated the aging circuit this year, and it is used to allocate funds."

"However, smaller things are fundraising, and the most typical ones are large agricultural machinery."

"Now, in rural areas, large agricultural machinery has basically begun to be used in places with more fields. We used to study in textbooks and said that our country's arable land is relatively scattered and not suitable for large agricultural machinery farming. Now it seems that this judgment is gradually being broken."

"For example, in this village, there are two harvesters and 12 agricultural drones for spraying medicine, 4 of which are private, and the remaining 8 are all bought by fundraising."

"I don't know why, it seems that in the past two years, in the countryside, the publicization of means of production has begun again inexplicably."

Ye Zhou saw a harvester parked on the open space on the roadside in the direction of her finger, and said with some sigh:

"So this is also one of the technical dividends. After the cost of machinery has dropped, even for farmland with relatively scattered distribution, using machinery has become more cost-effective than employed people... In rural areas now, there are really big changes."

Hearing this, Wu Ping, who had been following him silently, suddenly interrupted:

"Yes, the most difficult time in rural China has passed."

Ye Zhou was stunned for a moment. He clearly heard a kind of sadness from Wu Ping's tone. This emotion was the first time that Wu Ping had been with him in the nearly two years.

"Brother Wu, you also came from the countryside?"

Wu Ping nodded, answered a brief "yes" and then stopped talking.

Today, after following Ye Zhou, I watched the rice fields, ate common foods in the countryside, and saw the countryside at night, he did have some urge to talk in his heart, but his long-term professional training has made him restrain this impulse.

Ye Zhou also saw this. He reached out and took out a pack of cigarettes from Chen Hao's pocket, took out one and handed it to Wu Ping. The latter hesitated and took it over. After a few seconds of silence, he finally spoke:

"Mr. Ye, you have actually been in the countryside and have also felt about rural life, but you should... have not experienced the most difficult period in rural China."

"I was born in 1985. In my memory, the 1990s and the early 21st century should be the most difficult time I have ever experienced."

"From the current perspective, the carrying capacity of the explosively growing population in rural China at that time, whether it is land or ecological environment, was almost at its limit."

"Hunger is a common thing, and overloaded physical labor is also very common. In 1995, I was just 10 years old, but I have already started participating in all the heavy physical labor at home."

"Planting rice seedlings, cutting pig grass, cooking pig food, plowing the land, fertilizing...everything requires the whole family to go into battle. As long as there is a link in the process, it means that grain production will be reduced, and even the harvest will be eliminated."

"That kind of pressure is terrible. As a farmer, you will never dare to make mistakes, because as long as you make a little mistake, you will have an extremely difficult year."

"But even if you really work hard to farm, the final harvest is just to ensure that you don't starve to death."

"That period was actually a bit less accurate when it was used to describe it as 'difficulty'. More accurately, it should be said to be 'terror'."

"We lack anything. Drinking water, irrigation water, firewood, meat, clothes, fertilizer, electricity, manpower, money... and a group of children, except for labor, think about doing every day is actually similar to what rural children do later I saw in the book, such as digging bird nests and catching fish. But the only difference is that we do these things not because of the so-called innocence, but to eat enough."

"I have a good friend - a brother since I was a child. At that time, we often acted together."

"We really do whatever we can do to eat in one bite. After we catch the fish in the small river, we will wait until the reservoir discharges floods. After we catch the sparrows, we will run to the graves in the deep mountains to catch pheasants. After harvesting each paddy field, we will release the water and turn it over several times, because there will be a lot of loaches in it, which can be sold for money."

"Not only that, we will also go to nearby steel mills to steal scrap steel, knock on steel bars on construction sites, and fry fish in the reservoir."

"My brother is stupid. He is always caught when he goes to fry fish. Every time I run halfway through and have to go back to save him. Because of these messy things, I actually fought many fights when I was a child."

"He is weak and can't fight, so I rush in front every time, and when I get home, he goes home to steal safflower oil to me--and he will inevitably get beaten by his father again."

"Once, we were really hungry, and we heard that there was a cave in the mountains with water and a pond, so we lit a torch to try to catch fish."

"As a result, the hole was too deep. The water was found and the fish caught. When I wanted to go out, I couldn't get out."

"We were stuck in the hole for a whole day, and then our family tied the ropes and found them in, and rescued us both. But do you know what the most outrageous thing is? Just after we found out we were lost, before we used up our torches, the last thing we did was to put the fish back in the water and keep them in the water."

"At that time, we didn't even think about whether we could go out alive, but thought that if we came back, the fish in this pond would be enough to eat for a long time."

"Later, when we came out of the hole, we were carrying seven or eight fish in our hands, as if we had won a battle, but we never thought that we almost died."

"My brother almost died later. When he was 16 years old, he was in the river and he had a hemiplegia."

"It was 2002 and I had already joined the army. He was defeated because he was not healthy and had no talent in studying, so he had to stay at home to farm."

"My mother called me and told me that something happened to him. I asked why something happened. My mother said that the electric fish had damaged himself."

"Just like this, he is the final conclusion."

"I thought it was a real pity at that time. I would probably have passed by myself in such a daze for the rest of my life."

"This is the situation of the farmers in that era. They were born, worked, and then died for various reasons, as if they had never come to this world."

"But, I really didn't expect that his life would have a turnaround."

"Two years, really two years----up to three years."

"As the beginning of 2000, the urban economy began to explode, industrialization was fully rolled out, rural population began to flow into cities, and the conflicts between people and land in rural areas suddenly weakened."

"In 2004, the rural policies began to be implemented."

"From that year, the living standards in rural areas have been as good as they take off, and they are getting better every year."

"He definitely can't grow any more, but he sat in a wheelchair and ate all the policy support behind him."

"New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme, targeted poverty alleviation, rural revitalization, technology going to the countryside, e-commerce entrepreneurship..."

"After eating this set, and having a flexible mind, their family has been poor to not be able to afford meat once a year. To this day, they sell local bacon, and they have built two floors."

"He really survived those two years. It was very hard. He lay in bed for two years, but he finally got through it."

Speaking of this, Wu Ping took a sip of the cigarette, then used his hand to remove the cigarette butt and put the cigarette butt back into his pocket.

After spitting out the smoke, Wu Ping continued:

"Last year, I went to see him when I went home on vacation. He looked good and was in good health. He bought an electric wheelchair and went to the pig farmer's house early in the morning to buy dozens of kilograms of pork, put it on his legs and transport it home, and then chop it himself, marinate it, dry it, turn it and go to the computer to put it on the shelf and ship it."

"Really, that scene had a big impact on me at that time--if you didn't see it with your own eyes, it's really hard to imagine that something with a huge contrast would come together."

"A disabled person, with a wall full of bacon. Under the bacon is a vacuum packaging machine, and opposite is a computer with a fill light for live broadcast."

"Ye Gong, you talk about the dividends of technology. Actually, I feel that this is the dividends of technology I see."

"What you said just now is that I can probably understand what it means, but I have a point of view, I don't know if it's right."

"That is, our rural revitalization is actually achieved through the feeding back of huge resources again and again."

"This kind of resource investment will inevitably be wasted. For example, as you said just now, there may be no need for this kind of solar street light."

"But, I think, this is actually a symbol."

"It symbolizes that most fundamental problems have been solved, and we have begun to pursue higher levels."

Wu Ping paused again. He first glanced at Xu Lei, then turned his head to Ye Zhou, lowered his voice to the extent that they could hear it, and then said:

"Mr. Ye, I know very little about what you are doing, but I know that this kind of pursuit depends on you; I also know what you are worried about."

"But you just do it, as for the outside, we are."

"If anyone wants to take away the things we have already obtained, even if we bite them with our teeth, we will bite him to death."

"I won't let my brother lie back on the bed."
Chapter completed!