Book Synopsis
Book Tags
Donation Rankings
Comment
0 Comments
You May Also Like
墨書 Inktalez
The midterm exam unfolded like "The Autumn Battlefield," and right after that came the weekend. Since my dad was organizing the teachers to grade papers and couldn't go home, I stayed at school, wandering around aimlessly.
On Saturday evening, after dinner, I remembered a popular TV drama that was airing, so I hurried over to Teacher Li's house to secure a good spot. Upon entering his home, I noticed the television was still off, and several teachers were busy sorting the exam papers from the morning into stacks, preparing to grade them. I heard that they had to finish grading by noon the next day and report the scores to the school, so they needed to work quickly.
Seeing that neither Teacher Li nor Teacher Deng had any intention of turning on the TV, I reluctantly stepped outside and continued my aimless wandering. As I passed by Teacher Li's door, he suddenly called out to me, saying, "Biaosong, could you help me grade these papers?" It turned out he had something urgent to attend to at home and was worried about missing the grading deadline. As a second-grade Physics Teacher who had taught us before, he knew my physics grades were good and that I could handle it since the answer keys were readily available.
Eager for something to do, I gladly accepted the task. I took the physics papers from three second-grade classes and first glanced at the answer keys. They weren't too complicated, so I spread out the papers on Teacher Li's desk and began grading.
I carefully compared each question with the answer key, especially focusing on the calculation problems. I meticulously checked every step taken by the students; if it matched the answer key, they received full points for that step. Even if their wording was similar but not identical, I would still award them eighty or ninety percent of the points. After all, as a student myself, I understood that my classmates hoped for scores in line with their first year of high school to report back to their parents and teachers.
After grading about ten papers, I became quite familiar with the standard answers and no longer needed to check each question individually. My grading speed picked up significantly. Just as I realized that there were still over a hundred papers left to grade, Yin Hongsong, who was also wandering around, knocked on Teacher Li's window and wanted me to join him for some fun.
Looking at the towering stacks of papers on the desk and recalling Teacher Li's instructions before he left, I hesitated to abandon this extra responsibility. However, I couldn't resist the temptation of having fun and wanted to find a way to balance both.
I first thought about asking Yin Hongsong to help me grade as well but quickly dismissed that idea. His academic performance wasn't great; even though he would be grading second-grade papers with answer keys available for reference, I still didn't feel confident in his ability. Plus, even if we teamed up, it would still take us three or four hours to finish grading all those papers—how much time would we have left for fun?
After some hesitation, I made my final decision: I'd invite others to help with grading—not just Yin Hongsong but also Luo Yongzhong, Wang Ruimei, and Deng Huayu from our class who hadn't gone home. We wouldn't split the papers evenly; instead, we divided the grading tasks into five parts: Yin Hongsong would handle multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions; Luo Yongzhong would grade true/false questions and explanations; Wang Ruimei and Deng Huayu would tackle analysis and calculation problems respectively; while I would grade the last two "difficult questions" and tally up the total scores.
With five of us sharing the workload, we surprisingly finished grading in less than an hour. While we played together afterward, little did I know that ten years ago in another place, someone had already attempted something akin to "Structured Contracting."
During the height of the Cultural Revolution, while "Capitalist Tail" had already led many loyal members of society through repeated hardships in Shaodong County—where each person had only three or four points of land—many coal mines emerged either collectively or individually. Though small in scale and primarily relying on manual labor for excavation and transport, these mines consumed far more human resources compared to centuries of small-scale farming practices. They absorbed a large workforce reliant on state or collective grain while also purchasing bamboo carts for transporting coal.
These bamboo carts were quite rudimentary; all one needed was to cut bamboo into rough strips and weave them into cylindrical shapes—far simpler than how Yunshi's family wove baskets. However, most people couldn't weave them well. There’s an old saying in my hometown: "Weaving baskets or bamboo carts is easy as long as you start well; anyone can weave them up high." This means that starting and finishing are indeed challenging; those who haven't learned cannot weave at all, while poorly trained craftsmen produce unsightly results—either misshapen or failing to hide ends properly.
In a small village in Shaodong lived a young man from one of those "Four Categories of People." Due to health issues preventing him from engaging in strenuous labor, he traveled several miles away at seventeen or eighteen years old to learn bamboo weaving. Upon discovering a demand for this skill in coal mines, he boldly calculated his "capitalist" venture.
He first contacted his former master from his weaving days and bought a large quantity of bamboo locally. After bringing it home and breaking it down into rough strips (he seemed to have even acquired a simple machine for this), he hired several weak workers and taught each one a specific weaving skill: making bases, bodies, or lids. He then assembled these semi-finished products himself before attaching handles and delivering them collectively to coal mines.
Gradually, he taught more people these three skills by distributing prepped strips for them to weave at home before collecting them back later as semi-finished products priced at five or six cents each. Once assembled and sold back to coal mines for fifty or sixty cents per cart (after deducting material costs), he earned about ten or twenty cents per cart.
After several years of accumulation, he expanded his product line beyond bamboo carts to include baskets and other items while his profits continued growing. However, good times didn't last long; in 1978 he was reported by an envious neighbor for "speculation" by local communes and spent months in detention while also being forced to return over a thousand yuan in "ill-gotten gains" (at that time one thousand yuan could build a high-end brick house in rural areas).
Of course, when I heard this story years later about this bamboo craftsman who had founded a multinational company worth over ten billion dollars today as an observer myself—I saw within his narrative a classic business model: Structured Contracting.
Comment 0 Comment Count