Chapter 117: Wartime Planning for Various Industries (2)

Li Fengyi and his team had already conducted a specialized study of the National People's Congress system, feeling they had mastered its intricacies. They decided it was time to unveil the protective umbrella for the top leadership, mobilizing several former NPC deputies to handle the preparatory groundwork.

"Especially the term limit system," Li Fengyi emphasized. He was primarily signaling that he had no intention of clinging to a high position. He cast a pointed glance at Minister Jin of the Ministry of State Security, screaming internally, "Big brother, I just want to serve my term and be done with it! Please, no more 'imperial edicts' to extend my stay."

Li Fengyi stated firmly, "Once a term expires, whether for the highest leader or the lowest official, they must step down."

The first act of the People's Law was the "Planned Marriage and Childbearing Act," which merged the pre-apocalypse "Marriage Law" and "Family Planning Law." Its primary goal was to encourage reproduction. Women were required to have their first child by age eighteen, with a quota of at least one child per year until doctors declared them medically unable to conceive. Failure to comply resulted in heavy population taxes.

To ensure the children were raised well, the Special Committee provided various childcare institutions, such as kindergartens, and prioritized the establishment of schools.

Mothers who gave birth to many children were honored as heroines, enjoying top-tier rations during pregnancy. With the recovery of vast supply warehouses, this was easily manageable. Pre-apocalypse farmland was also being reclaimed; the issues of automated machinery being unsuitable for individual small-scale farming—which often led to conflicts—had vanished in the post-apocalyptic era.

The Medical Department protested, arguing that the minimum age for childbearing should not be below twenty-five, but they were magnificently ignored by the majority of survivors. The Chinese people had long believed that many children bring much happiness. With the population on the brink of extinction, the consensus was to restore numbers first and worry about quality later.

Some human rights activists protested, claiming that family planning violated human rights and that "planned childbearing" treated women as birth machines. Under the pretext of the "will of the people" passed by the NPC, these individuals were ordered to work at the crematoriums. There, they labored like ants among mountains of zombie corpses, dutifully burning the endless piles.

Others argued the plan was too radical, but the ordinary survivors who held legislative power dismissed these "heretical" notions. If the men could endure the labor, why shouldn't the women bear as many children as possible?

As for cloning, it was entirely disregarded. Pre-apocalypse, the technology had never reached maturity—it resulted in missing limbs, stunted growth, or latent diseases. Now, in the post-apocalyptic world, both the personnel and equipment were even scarcer, so it remained off the table.

This grand plan led to a radical surge in the Chinese population. At the most critical times, nearly every woman of childbearing age was either pregnant or nursing. This briefly caused strains on labor and resources, but the people gritted their teeth and overcame them.

The Special Committee established safe zones across various regions, primarily in mountainous areas. Whenever zombie hordes posed a threat, pregnant women, infants, and schools were concentrated in these protected zones. The implementation of this law meant that manual labor and military service became primarily the domain of men, while women, in this modernized context, focused largely on intellectual work.

Even before the apocalypse, universities were already dominated by female students; this law only accelerated that trend. By the time the zombies on Earth were eradicated, the Chinese population had recovered to over a billion, while the rest of the world’s population combined was less than 200 million. The globe was effectively assimilated.

Before that day was reached, however, the survivors endured immense hardships, teetering on the edge of extinction multiple times.

To date, the Special Committee has built three zombie captivity and observation bases. Livestock farms for food are widespread, with mutant animal farms located within Beijing and Tianjin. Mountain regions, aside from designated human safe zones, serve as wild animal breeding grounds, and rivers are used for edible fish farming—though caution is required to avoid predatory fish during harvesting.

The Old River Bend Observation Base was the first, housing one million zombies. The Daxing Mountain Observation Base holds 500,000. Near the Tianjin Port, after the area was reclaimed, a large number of zombies were introduced for containment to observe the relationship between zombies and mutated marine life.

The former Beijing Zoo serves as the primary mutant animal breeding site, the subway system as a mutant rat farm, and the skyscrapers of the Xizhimen area as a mutant avian breeding ground. All these are monitored under the auspices of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Because zombies are currently the absolute top priority for observation, the Ministry of Science and Technology has invested almost all its human and material resources into these bases.

On September 15, 2015, Minister Liu had compiled a thick stack of reports. He felt he finally had a presentation worthy of the Special Committee. Although the data was already uploaded to the committee’s internal OA network, he hadn't had a chance to show it off during the previous meeting, so he prepared to make a splash—scientists aren't just here to eat buns and waste research funding!

To emphasize its importance, he printed a massive stack and requested that the Special Committee hold a formal zombie briefing, inviting ministerial leaders, members of the NPC Standing Committee, and the NPC Zombie Hearing Group.

Before the briefing even began, the NPC dealt him a blow: they demanded stricter oversight of the Ministry of Science and Technology's funding. Clearly, the NPC included several disgruntled former university professors—mostly from the humanities, who had always been at a disadvantage in securing grants.

They declared that the research system, including universities and all institutions undertaking projects, must dedicate all research funding exclusively to scientific work. Researchers would no longer hold administrative titles. This meant Minister Liu would lose the right to report research findings; the individual scientists would have to present their own work.

Whatever researchers needed, they would have to apply for approval from a management body composed of researchers elected by their peers.

Pre-apocalypse, it was an open secret that only about 40% of research funding actually went to science. According to Li Fengyi’s experience with electronic companies collaborating with research departments, a project would be funded, a tiny fraction would be spent to hire an outside firm to execute the work—usually 20% to 30%—and the rest would be carved up by various power brokers, academic tyrants, and bureaucrats.

This time, the NPC demanded that research be strictly research. They implemented an annual salary system for researchers based on their actual output. Management bodies were to be elected by the researchers themselves, not appointed by the government. Naturally, they allowed for the presence of Party organizations at all levels, but these officials could not be scientists themselves—a condition tailored to China's national circumstances and the harsh realities of the apocalypse.