PART VI

The Establishment of Locomotive and Car Factories

The railways projected in the Fourth Program will total about 62,000 miles; and those in the First and the Third Programs about 14,000 miles. Besides these, there will be double tracks in the various trunk lines, which will make up a grand total of no less than 100,000 miles, as stated in the preliminary part of these programs. With this 100,000 miles of railways to be constructed in the coming ten years, the demands for locomotives and cars will be tremendous. The factories of the world will be unable to supply them, especially at this juncture of reconstruction after the great world war. So the establishment of locomotive and car factories in China to supply our own demands of railway equipment will be a necessary as well as a profitable undertaking. China possesses unlimited supplies of raw materials and cheap labor. What we need for establishing such factories is foreign capital and experts. What amount of capital should be invested in this project, I have to leave to experts to decide.

I suggest that four large factories should be started simultaneously at the beginning--two on the coast and two on the Yangtze. Of those on the coast, one should be at the Great Northern Port, and the other at the Great Southern Port--Canton. Of those on the Yangtze, one should be at Nanking and the other at Hankow. All four are in centers of both land and water communication, where skilled labor can easily be obtained. They are also near our iron and coal fields. Besides these four great factories, others should be established at suitable centers of iron and coal fields when our railways will be more developed.

All the factories should be under one central control. The locomotives and cars of our future railways should be standardized so as to make possible the interchange of parts of machinery and equipment. We should also adopt the standard gauge, that is, the 4 feet 8½ inch gauge which has been adopted by most of the railways of the world. In fact, almost all the railways hitherto built in China are of this gauge. The purpose of the proposed standardization is to secure the highest efficiency as well as the greatest economy.

PROGRAM V

In the preceding four programs, I dealt exclusively with the development of the key and basic industries. In this one, I am going to deal with the development of the _main_ group of industries which need foreign help. By the main group of industries, I mean those industries which provide every individual and family with the necessaries and comforts of life. Of course, when the key and basic industries are developed, the various other industries will spontaneously spring up all over the country, in a very short time. This had been the case in Europe and America after the industrial revolution. The development of the key and the basic industries will give plenty of work to the people and will raise their wages as well as their standard of living. When wages are high, the price for necessaries and comforts of life will also be increased. So the rise in wages will be accompanied by the rise in the cost of living. Therefore, the aim of the development of some of the main group of industries is to help reduce the high cost of living when China is in the process of international development, by giving to the majority of the people plenty of the essentials and comforts of life as well as higher wages.

It is commonly thought that China is the cheapest country to live in. This is a misconception owing to the common notion of measuring everything by the value of money. If we measure the cost of living by the value of labor then it will be found that China is the most expensive country for a common worker to live in. A Chinese coolie, a muscular worker, has to work 14 to 16 hours a day in order to earn a bare subsistence. A clerk in a shop, or a teacher in a village school cannot earn more than a hundred dollars a year. And the farmers after paying their rents and exchanging for a few articles of need with their produce have to live from hand to mouth. Labor is very cheap and plentiful but food and commodities of life are just enough to go round for the great multitude of the four hundred millions in China in an ordinary good year. In a bad year, a great number succumb to want and starvation. This miserable condition among the Chinese proletariat is due to the non-development of the country, the crude methods of production and the wastefulness of labor. The radical cure for all this is industrial development by foreign capital and experts for the benefit of the whole nation. Europe and America are a hundred years ahead of us in industrial development; so in order to catch up in a very short time we have to use their capital, mainly their machinery. If foreign capital cannot be gotten, we will have to get at least their experts and inventors to make for us our own machinery. In any case, we must use machinery to assist our enormous man-power to develop our unlimited resources.

In modern civilization, the material essentials of life are five, namely: food, clothing, shelter, means of locomotion, and the printed page. Accordingly I will formulate this program as follows:

I. The Food Industry. II. The Clothing Industry. III. The Housing Industry. IV. The Motoring Industry. V. The Printing Industry.