No Understanding of Rural Areas, No Understanding of China.

In *White Deer Plain*, there are two plot points to consider. (You might want to look up Fan Zhongyan’s accomplishments—he was a master of economics.)

One is about Bai Jiaxuan planting poppies and selling them to pharmacies in town. Seeing the profits, the villagers all started growing poppies too. Soon, gambling became rampant, and the entire plain descended into moral decay.

The other is about a famine year. Bai Jiaxuan organized the construction of the ancestral hall, using public works as relief, and that’s how they survived.

Now, if you no longer want to drive consumption through building ancestral halls, and if giving money directly to households isn’t working because people just gamble it away instead of spending it on local industries, how can you give people money while ensuring they spend it on the key sectors you want to support? What else needs to be done?

The most important thing is: **Do you have the right judgment about the industry?**

Don’t be like someone heading west to fetch scriptures but walking north—get eaten by polar bears before ever reaching the灵山 (sacred mountain). If there’s no competition at all, you might be going the wrong direction. In *Journey to the West*, if you walk north instead of west, you’ll never meet anyone on the journey.

The second point is **timing**. In entrepreneurship, being one year early makes you a pioneer; three years early makes you a martyr.

If you enter too early, you don’t just confuse the market—you even confuse the investors. Without follow-up funding, your capital chain will easily break. Enter too late, and there’s no room for you.