Chapter 221: Soft Power

Her appetite piqued, Lai Xiaoni shouldered her small backpack and rode her electric scooter toward the food street.

Employees from the pig farms, processing plants, and power stations were just getting off work and starting to look for their favorite restaurants for dinner.

Unlike ordinary residents in East Asia, very few families here in Hongsawaddy cooked at home.

For families where both spouses worked, cooking was too much of a drain on their time and energy.

Besides, all the restaurants were run by the company. Their raw ingredients were just as good as what you'd use at home, and the hygiene was certainly better than in most households. Thanks to economies of scale, restaurant meals were also cheaper than cooking, and the food was undeniably delicious.

Given the circumstances, eating out had become the top choice for the vast majority of families.

Since Lai Xiaoni was alone, she stopped at a stir-fried rice noodle shop and ordered a small portion. It was loaded with egg, shredded pork, green peppers, and bean sprouts, and only cost 3 yuan.

Sitting at a clean, natural-wood table, she picked up a pair of hollow stainless steel chopsticks and began to dig in.

Unlike typical hole-in-the-wall eateries, the restaurants in Hongsawaddy were very spacious. The tables were spaced far apart, and they had plenty of seating for single diners as well.

Because the various factories and farms used staggered work shifts, the food street was bustling but not to the point where people had to wait in line.

Normally, if lines did form, it would indicate that some restaurants were failing to attract customers, with patrons preferring to wait for establishments known for better service and food quality.

In such a situation, the consulting firms would inevitably launch an investigation.

As a result, every restaurant paid meticulous attention to service, hygiene, quality control, and pricing.

If a restaurant experienced a sharp drop in traffic or failed to meet its occupancy targets for a week straight, everyone working there, from the top down, would be investigated.

In Hongsawaddy, the deterrent power of the three major groups was immense, and employees were genuinely afraid of company punishments.

In the service industry, this performance-based operational model meant that competence—or lack thereof—was immediately obvious from the numbers.

'This is all very utilitarian,' Lai Xiaoni thought, but she had to admit that as corporations, the three major groups had effectively motivated their employees.

After all, in this purely utilitarian model, capable individuals quickly rose to the top. Getting promoted through seniority or nepotism was out of the question.

It was because of this system that many employees who conducted themselves with integrity had no reason to fear their superiors or colleagues. In this environment, diligent and responsible workers were more easily promoted and rewarded.

When promotions could be earned simply through hard work and a responsible attitude, the superficial games of office politics naturally became irrelevant.

At first, Lai Xiaoni had assumed this corporate culture was just a fantasy depicted in TV shows or an empty promise made by the three major groups.

But from what she had seen so far, the three major groups were genuinely putting this culture into practice.

To ensure this corporate culture was enforced to the letter, the number of employees across the three major groups' consulting firms, HR audit departments, and network data analysis departments had already reached a staggering 124,000.

This meant that roughly two out of every thousand people in Hongsawaddy were engaged in supervision, data analysis, and personnel reviews.

This was supplemented by the clandestine support of supercomputer systems and the Internal Affairs Division.

All this worked together to create the unique corporate culture of the three major groups.

Lai Xiaoni put down her chopsticks and took a long swig of iced tea from a glass bottle. She glanced up at the restaurant's TV, which was showing a rock-climbing competition.

Having little interest in sports, she opened her laptop, connected to the restaurant's Wi-Fi, and pulled up the TV series she'd been watching lately.

It was a series produced in Hongsawaddy called *The New Breed of Professionals*, a sitcom about daily office life.

She wasn't watching it just because it was a ratings hit in Hongsawaddy, but because its behind-the-scenes consultants were none other than the consulting firms of the three major groups.

In *The New Breed of Professionals*, all the storylines were adapted from real cases provided by the consulting firms.

This made the series an indispensable professional guide for anyone wanting to understand Hongsawaddy or who had just started working there.

A Chinese immigrant she'd met on her travels had told her about this shortcut: watching *The New Breed of Professionals* was the best way to understand Hongsawaddy's three major groups.

In addition to that, there were other series like *High-Mountain Rainforest*, *The Long River*, *The Pioneers*, *Operation Purity*, *Good Morning, Yangon!*, *A Century of Turmoil on the Oolong River*, and *Iron Wall*.

These shows were all exceptionally well-produced. They didn't focus too much on romance, instead depicting Hongsawaddy's social changes, daily life, individual struggles, the eradication of societal ills, and battles of wits along the border.

Through these series, Lai Xiaoni had learned all about the intricate web of gangs and warlords that once plagued the Golden Triangle.

She also learned what a great price Hongsawaddy had paid during the original "Operation Purity" (the shows had fictionalized many tragic cases to emphasize the difficulty of the task and the steadfast resolve of the Hongsawaddy side).

The seemingly authentic cases had brought tears to Lai Xiaoni's eyes.

In any case, when it came to crafting characters and their backstories, the entertainment divisions of Hongsawaddy's three major groups were extremely professional, modeling their approach on companies from East Japan.

As the power behind the scenes, Homo Sapiens Company placed great importance on the development and profitability of the cultural industry, providing it with substantial support.

Currently, the three major groups each had their own television stations, TV production companies, social media apps, web portals, film studios, cinema chains, talent agencies, broadcasting companies, music labels, animation studios, and publishing houses.

To compete with the influx of global cultural products, the three major groups were progressively cultivating their own pool of entertainment professionals and building a complete, vertically integrated industry chain.

For products like television series, films, anime, music, and literature, they established specialized studios. Every project, from creation to distribution, was meticulously polished and perfected. The focus was on every last detail, all with the ultimate goal of creating masterpieces.

Consequently, the cultural works available on Hongsawaddy's internet were all exceptional pieces, painstakingly forged and polished by the entertainment subsidiaries of the three major groups.

The drastic improvement in Lai Xiaoni's impression of Hongsawaddy was largely due to the subtle influence of these cultural works.

It was precisely this style—meticulous research, tight logic, and realistic plots—combined with the region's rapid economic development, that allowed the three major groups' cultural industry to cultivate an increasingly positive public image.

At the very least, cultural products from Europe and America, as well as from East Japan and South Korea, failed to hold a strong appeal for the local younger generation.

The various shell companies and subsidiaries were fully committed to building up the cultural industry, and Homo Sapiens Company treated it as nothing less than a commercial war. The annual investment in this sector had now reached over two billion Jin yuan.

Of course, this investment wasn't merely an expense; it was already generating significant positive feedback and profits.

At least in Southeast Asia and East Asia, the overall image of Hongsawaddy's three major groups had improved, and their films, TV series, and anime were earning considerable box office revenue and advertising fees.

If they didn't make an all-out effort to capture this unique market, related companies from Europe and America, East Japan, and South Korea would undoubtedly swoop in and take over the local cultural scene.