Guizhou's Problem
"There's a serious problem with the sugarcane farming?"
At Hwiyeom's question, the provincial governor of Guizhou let out a long sigh.
"There is. The water going into the sugarcane has left people short of drinking water, so disputes and lawsuits never stop cropping up."
"What?"
Hwiyeom's face went blank with confusion, and the governor gave a bitter smile.
"That look says you can't understand how a place as wet as Guizhou could have a water shortage. Once you hear me out, though, you'll see."
"Then would you explain it to me?"
"Of course."
Guizhou was a province with a truly contradictory water problem.
Rainfall there ran higher than the Central Plains average. The trouble was that most of the terrain was limestone soil and karst country, so surface water vanished underground with alarming ease. Where the rivers ran, flooding was almost routine; a short distance away, drinking water was scarce. With almost no proper waterworks to speak of, the contrast only grew sharper.
Even in the twenty-first century Hwiyeom had once lived in, the problem had never been fully solved. In this era there were no real aqueducts at all, and electric pumps did not even exist.
"Ah. So that's the situation. But there wasn't a problem until now, was there?"
"Because no one was growing sugarcane on this scale."
Sugarcane was a hardy crop that could manage with a fair amount of water and still thrive. It was not, however, a cactus; it still needed a decent supply.
When Hwiyeom had first opened the sugarcane plantations, he had left existing farmland alone and broken new ground on abandoned plots. Most of those tracts had no real trouble with water supply and sat close enough to sources that irrigation was easy—but their soil was so alkaline that people had long written them off as unfit for farming.
Once the sugarcane grown there began selling for more than ordinary food crops, the farmers of Guizhou grasped two things at once.
First: even land everyone had given up on could grow sugarcane, if you brought water in properly and bought fertilizer from the Sacheondang Family.
Second: sugarcane made money.
Those two ideas collided, and Guizhou plunged into an age of frantic cultivation. Like prospectors stampeding west after gold, the province's farmers rushed to clear every scrap of abandoned ground and plant sugarcane.
At first the governor had encouraged it. Land reclamation was the sort of work that cost a fortune in corvée labor and earned a government nothing but popular resentment if the state itself tried to force it. When the people cleared the land of their own free will and produced a specialty crop besides, what governor in his right mind would have told them no?
The trouble was that so many households piled in that Guizhou's farmland more than doubled overnight. The farmland grew; the province's water sources stayed locked in their old, uneven pattern of plenty in a few places and nothing elsewhere. Water disputes were inevitable.
"Lately even drinking water has run short. The sugarcane men seize the village wells and divert every drop onto their fields until the village itself goes dry. There have been quarrels over it—and murders, too."
"Good heavens…"
Hwiyeom's mouth fell open. The once-poor people of Guizhou had clearly lost their reason to the sweetness of sugarcane.
"That's why some villages have turned against sugarcane farming altogether. They freeze the planters out; in the worst cases they drive them off or kill them. The lawsuits that follow go without saying."
"If the hatred runs that deep, no one in a tight-knit rural community would dare try it. Wouldn't demand drop on its own?"
"For ordinary farmers, yes. The problem is the landlords."
The governor sighed again.
"Why wouldn't the landlords want a piece of the sugarcane trade? Once they caught the scent of money they started monopolizing the local streams and breaking new ground, and memorials have come in saying the common folk around them are dying of thirst. And yet punishing the landlords is awkward. All they're doing is reclaiming waste land and increasing the taxes paid to the state—exactly the work the court wants done."
"So whatever moral stains they carry, it's hard to call it a crime."
"If you were determined to dig through the whole chain of cause and effect, you could make a case. But that would only create another problem: you'd turn the entire landlord class against you. You know how it is in a backwater like Guizhou—every scrap of administration runs through the local strongmen, the landlords, the great families who have sat on the land for generations. The clerks who handle the paperwork, even the junior officials, are their kin or their clients. Cover-ups and quiet looking-the-other-way are the order of the day. Even if I or a county magistrate manage to catch them at it, once those clans take offense they start obstructing every single thing the government tries to do, and life becomes exhausting."
"For example?"
"They throttle the labor we need for public works. They send petitions straight to the central court to put pressure on us. In the worst cases they hire unorthodox sects to murder an official."
"Hmm."
"The government's power is real. But that power is strongest near the capital and grows weaker the farther you go. Out in the provinces, the great clans are kings. Doesn't the Sacheondang Family itself rule like a king across Sichuan and Yunnan?"
"We have never ruled anyone. We simply gave people a way to make a living."
"…Forgive me. But there is no better comparison for how much weight your family carries."
"I take your meaning."
"The Dang Family is an extreme case, of course. One ordinary clan, you can crush with official authority and bring to heel with the law. Turn every landlord in Guizhou into an enemy at once, though, and from that day forward the Guizhou Provincial Administration will be a vegetable."
"I understand."
Even in the modern world, sabotage by vested interests tended to spiral into every kind of nightmare—especially the farther you got into farming and fishing country. Most honest farmers and fishermen had nothing to do with it, of course, but the greedy local bosses and the political operators who rode their coattails always managed to produce a spectacularly ugly synergy.
Hwiyeom nodded.
"I understand the situation. Does Your Excellency have any plan of your own?"
"The fundamental fix would be waterworks. But any real hydraulic project means going hat in hand to the great clans, and that means surrendering the initiative. The new canals would end up running across their land. Ordinary people would still be short of irrigation and drinking water, and the resentment would only pile higher."
In other words: a solution existed, but trying to use it created new problems. It was as good as having no plan at all, yet Hwiyeom did not blame him. Failing to see this coming was only natural. He himself had not seen it either.
"Very well. I'll handle it."
"What method do you have in mind?"
"A full-scale hydraulic project is impossible right now. The state already has a backlog of works that need doing."
"…True enough."
"Besides, I always intended Guizhou's waterworks to be done on a grand scale. The plans already exist. There's no point in half-measures now."
"Hmm…"
"Instead, we'll solve the urgent problem first."
"And what is the urgent problem?"
"I'll secure drinking water."
"Drinking water?"
"Yes. If we make water that couldn't be used for drinking usable, that frees up an equal amount for agriculture."
"Is that even possible?"
"With a little imagination… and money."
At Hwiyeom's words the governor's face darkened.
"…Guizhou is poor."
"Don't worry. My family will lend you the funds."
"And the interest rate?"
"You have no money—charging interest would just be robbing Peter to pay Paul. Instead of interest, we'll take a fixed share of the profits from sugarcane production."
"On those terms, I can live with it."
In the end the provincial governor of Guizhou accepted Hwiyeom's proposal. Hwiyeom drew up the contract with him, affixed his seal, and returned.
"We'll put off going home for a while. Solving Guizhou's water problem comes first. I'll send a letter to the family. Ye-eun, starting tomorrow gather intelligence on Guizhou's local strongmen, landlords, and great clans. Lee Jinmyeong, draft a preliminary plan for construction-material procurement."
"Young Master."
Ye-eun, who almost never showed emotion, looked uncharacteristically flustered.
"There is no Minjeongwon presence here. We didn't bring black operatives with us, and our local intelligence capacity is limited."
"I know that. I'm not asking you to strip them down to the color of their underclothes. Find out the reputation they have among their own tenant farmers and the neighboring villages, and the extent of the land they hold."
"…That much, I can manage somehow."
"Good."
Lee Jinmyeong spoke up in equal haste.
"Do we procure materials from Sichuan, or locally?"
"Which is cheaper and which is better for meeting the schedule is something Secretary Lee will have to find out, isn't it?"
"Ah—yes. Forgive me."
"All right. Let's move."
"Hwiyeom, is there nothing for me to do?"
"Aunt…"
Hwiyeom thought for a moment, then said,
"If the clans decide their rice bowls are under threat and resort to extremes, I need you to protect us. Together with the Dokwadae."
"Same as always, then. Understood!"
And so they began Guizhou's waterworks.
The first thing Hwiyeom did was send word to the Sacheondang Family asking for tools and labor, then set about meeting Guizhou's great clans.
"You mean to drill wells for the villages?"
Hwang Jinsa, the foremost local magnate of Jinsha County in Guizhou, chuckled softly as he drank tea with Hwiyeom.
"I've no reason to refuse, but it will not be easy. This land lives up to its name—so much of it is sand that the water refuses to stay and drains straight underground. Even when someone manages to sink a well, the water is so bitter no one can drink it. Use it for farming and it ruins the fields. It isn't for lack of hands that we haven't drilled wells."
"We'll handle those problems ourselves. All I need from you, Jinsa, is leave to drill on the land and permission for the drilling itself."
"Ha ha. I'm no official. If you drill on land that isn't mine, what is there for me to permit or forbid?"
"I know. They say that even the provincial governor himself does not dare start anything in Jinsha County without your leave. That you can't cross the county without treading on Hwang land, or something of the sort?"
"Tsk tsk tsk. What power could a mere country elder like me possibly have…? That's all empty talk."
He laughed and waved a hand, but the pride he could not quite hide showed plainly on his face.
"Though it is true that our family has lived in Jinsha so long and done so much for the neighborhood that people tend to follow our lead."
"I see. Then may I take that as your consent?"
"Come now, why so impatient? I have a feeling there is more we ought to discuss…"
Watching Hwang Jinsa drop the faintest hint about a bribe, Hwiyeom gave a short, dry laugh.
The sort of men who hid out in the provinces and played at being kings—creatures who thought themselves something special, who slipped into the gaps left by absent central power and clumsy local administration, who strutted under borrowed authority and shook the whole machinery of provincial government. Hwiyeom had seen more of them than he could count.
At least this one was not a thoroughgoing corrupt like the former provincial governor of Yunnan. He was content to be treated with a certain "consideration" and to keep the current governor under his thumb—which meant there was still some hope of reforming him. For a frog that had never known how wide the world was, simply showing it the world outside the well was usually enough.
Hwiyeom opened his mouth to the smirking Hwang Jinsa.