Chapter 806: Resistance in Acquistion

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Min

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Three days later, the number of applicants exceeded ten million.

Immigration without a threshold was first welcomed by the poor people of Africa and the Middle East. Those who more or less had contact with the Internet and were eager for a better life in the outside world were particularly enthusiastic about signing up.

However, Jiang Chen failed their expectations.

For volunteers from underdeveloped areas, Celestial Trade adopted an extremely cautious attitude. Only a few applicants were accepted from Africa, and slightly more Middle East applicants were accepted for interviews.

This decision wasn’t because of racial discrimination but rather, because of considerations such as laws, living habits, religious practices, and even food culture, all of which might present hidden dangers to colonization. In order to reduce this risk, any applicants who rejected secularization didn’t receive an interview.

After the results of the interview came out, Liu Qingpeng couldn’t even believe he was accepted as someone with only a high school degree!

Happiness came too suddenly. On the same day, he excitedly took out several well-connected workers from the factory and went on a drinking binge. He resigned to the factory’s director the next day then he went to Xin’s Embassy with his identity card to receive a Coro Island work visa.

Dragging his suitcase at Coro Island Airport, he quickly saw the buses that were picking up volunteers.

There were people all over the world on the buses, but due to language barriers, he could only curiously look at them and didn’t communicate with them as much as he would have liked.

The buses boarded a ferry then the ferry stopped at Ange Island. The buses then transported them to the volunteer community next to the training center.

From now on, they would live there. They would receive four hours of on-site training every day, and four hours of VR training.

After six months, they would be separated into different jobs for specialized training according to their performance during training. A year later, their status would be changed from temporary workers. Although they would still be volunteers, they could be viewed as quasi-astronauts.

The construction of the space elevator would start simultaneously with the lunar colonization program. A year later, Celestial trade would select 200 of these volunteers as the first settlers to the moon. This would be the first step toward the astounding intergalactic settlement!

After the completion of the space elevator, a large number of astronauts would be needed at the space station.

The astronaut training center started construction at the same time as the space elevator program. On one hand, it was meant to provide staff for the space station. On the other hand, it was meant to carry out basic aerospace training for the citizens of Xin; they had to at least adapt to non-gravity environments!

“Up until now, 30,000 volunteers have arrived in Xin to receive training. Although cooperation with Future Tourism has begun, the entire space training center is still at a loss. According to estimates from the Finance Department, the deficit of the space training center this month is about 8 to 10 million.”

“We’ll lose 100 million a year?”

Jiang Chen’s expression didn’t change much after he digested Xia Shiyu’s words.

The aerospace project was a bottomless pit. He had long been prepared to lose money. Since he already committed more than 100 billion US Dollar, would he care about a mere 100 million?

“The budget of the training center remains unchanged, but let Wei Yun think about it a bit more and see if he can make better use of this space training center for tourism. Don’t aim for profitability; just don’t lose too much money.”

“I’ll tell him.” Xia Shiyu nodded.

“In addition, what happened to the negotiations with Australia’s SunRice?” Putting the astronaut training aside, Jiang Chen asked another question he was concerned about: the food supply to the future space elevator station and the moon’s colonial base.

“SunRice rejected our offer for the acquisition of the farm in Northern Australia, even though we offered a premium of 11%. According to the person responsible for negotiating with us at SunRice, this decision was made by the parent company Cargill.”

It was no secret that 80 percent of the world’s food market was controlled by the four big companies “A,B,C,D”. The companies were ADM in the UA, Bunge in the UA, Cargill in the UA, and Louis Dreyfus in France. It could be said that global food prices were basically determined by these four companies.

Interested people could easily see that three of them belonged to the UA. It was fair to state that the global food market was basically under the control of the UA. Although the UA had never announced that the grain market must be settled using USD, the rice in everyone’s bowls had never left the control of the UA.

During the 2004 soybean crisis, the Hua enterprises collectively collapsed, and they were taught a painful “trade lesson” who had joined the WTO for less than three years. Today, more than ten years later, the soybean industry in Hua hadn’t rebounded from the crisis.

It should be noted that before 2004, Hua was one of the major soybean exporters.

Now that it was no longer