Back to 1983: King of Coastal Foraging Intel

In the autumn of 1983, in Chaowozi Village, Jiaodong, Chen Haisheng, a seafood procurement manager, suddenly died at a drinking table. He opened his eyes again at twenty-three. His fishing gear had been discounted to 120 yuan, his father had suffered a stroke and was paralyzed on one side, and the family had only 12 yuan and 30 cents left. Wang Mancang, the village Party secretary’s brother-in-law, pressed him for payment. His meaning was clear: give the village back that patch of mud on the western beach, and he’d give Chen twenty yuan for it.

In his previous life, Chen had accepted. Wang Mancang took the western beach, dug it up the following year, and made a fortune from razor clams. This time, Chen crouched by a bend in the tidal channel, picked up a handful of mud, and smiled. Beneath the broken shells was a razor-clam bed that had lain untouched for three years. He was the only one in the village who knew.

He had ten days to scrape together 120 yuan. With a bamboo skewer and his own two hands, he dug up his first basket of old razor clams before the money for medicine ran out. When Wang Mancang blocked the front entrance of the supply cooperative, Chen took the back door and had his fiancee, Lin Yue, help him get his goods out. When Wang cut off his sales channels, Chen went straight to the county food factory and signed a supply contract. When Wang dug a ditch to ruin his clam bed, Chen turned the damaged flats into a green-crab pond, making his rival pay to improve his farming conditions.

From torn fishing nets and leaky sampans to motorboats, a purchasing station, and a quick-freezing plant; from gathering clams on the beach and trapping shrimp to standardizing purchasing across the surrounding three villages. In the end, Wang Mancang came to his door with liquor to discuss a partnership. Chen gave him one condition: dispatch rights for the tractors belonged to the purchasing station.

The villagers went from laughing that he was "so desperate he’d lost his mind" to bringing their goods to his yard. Lin Yue went from giving him one chance to slapping the iron key to the supply cooperative into his palm. His father went from saying, "Forget the medicine for now. I can hold on," to hobbling around the yard on a cane, teaching people how to sort the clams and purge the sand. He became the technical supervisor.

In his previous life, he knew everything. He just hadn’t been there in time. This time, he was there for it all.