The high-level leadership of the People's Party welcomed the changes in Japan. A country focused on the struggle for domestic productivity distribution generally would not choose a path of external expansion, unless that road was truly blocked. It would take at least several years to judge this. As for whether Japan would become more powerful after these years of reorganization, the People's Party leadership did not care. The People's Party had spent over twenty years focusing on technology and the development of productive forces; the current path had not only not narrowed, but had become wider and wider. If Japan found this road unsustainable within a few years, then it was destined to fail. Such a failed country was destined not to have too strong a national power.

Of course, a large part of the People's Party leadership's confidence came from Chairman Chen Ke's satisfactory evaluation of China's current technological development. Since even the leader of the People's Party could express satisfaction, the comrades firmly believed that China was on the right path.

Chen Ke was naturally satisfied. He believed that China could make a fortune during the Great Depression; this was something proved by the precedent of the Soviet Union. In fact, what they had gained was even more than what Chen Ke had wanted. China had gone through untold hardships to catch up with the Second Industrial Revolution. Before World War II, many breakthrough technologies were not without accumulation, but people of this era had not thought about how to combine these technologies to break through in new directions.

People of this era did not expect the future direction of technology, but Chen Ke had seen it with his own eyes. And one of the biggest difficulties in Chinese industry was the problem of precision measurement. To process high-precision parts, one must have higher-precision machine tools. Chen Ke was deeply impressed by one thing. He heard from his family that China had imported a batch of equipment from the United States and Germany for the railways. The precision requirements of these devices reached five decimal places, while China's measurement precision at that time was three decimal places. The Chinese factories had a huge headache at the time; this meant that China simply did not have the ability to determine the true dimensions of the parts it produced.

Splitting a millimeter into two is easy. Splitting a millimeter into ten is not too difficult. But splitting a millimeter into a thousand or ten thousand is absolutely a major problem in industrial technology. How to determine whether the precision is one ten-thousandth of a millimeter, or 0.5 ten-thousandths of a millimeter? Or an even more precise number? Without precise measuring instruments, none of this could be achieved. Therefore, one of the earliest industrial departments established by the People's Party was Weights and Measures.

Investment in measuring instruments would always seem insufficient. The People's Party industrial department spent nearly thirty years of effort on this, accumulating a lot of technology and attempting countless experiments, until the Great Depression, when they finally knocked open the doors of those second-rate European and American measuring instrument factories. When the People's Party took over these factories, they wanted everything, not even letting go of scraps of paper with writing on them.

The accumulation of hundreds of years of mechanical processing knowledge in Europe and America was really not a joke. Those tricks and lines of thought were truly incomparably ingenious. Even though the People's Party had been working hard to accumulate on its own, after really seeing the methods of established industrial powers, Chinese technical personnel also felt amazed.

And many design ideas from Europe and America that could not be realized due to technical limitations made the Chinese industrial department even more powerful—what Europe and America could not do did not mean the People's Party could not do it. Quartz clocks, electron tubes, transistors, lasers—these technologies combined with traditional precision measurement techniques played a huge role in China breaking through the bottlenecks of old precision measurement technologies.

At least by 1935, Chinese laboratories already had machine tools capable of achieving an accuracy of one-hundredth of a millimeter. With high-precision production capabilities, two-axis linkage machine tools and three-axis linkage machine tools were also being frantically developed. Once these devices could be completed, the machining accuracy of high-precision components would improve rapidly.

For example, the reaction kettles sold to Japan did not have high precision. In order to prevent leakage and other problems, they had to be made big, stupid, black, and coarse. Technically speaking, big, stupid, black, and coarse stuff had extremely high uncontrollability in expansion rates. Uncontrollable expansion rates under high temperature and high pressure would inevitably increase the possibility of interface leakage. To avoid this possibility, the production system had to be meticulous to an exceptionally abnormal level. After all, if hydrogen leaked in a high-temperature and high-pressure environment, something bad would happen.

Materials went up, processing accuracy went up. Seemingly simple two pipes screwed together, adding a hoop, would not leak. Processing accuracy was not only used on high-temperature and high-pressure equipment; large-scale production lines needed high-precision components even more. A production line often had hundreds of links. If each link had a little error, whether the production line could start in the end would be a problem. As for product quality, that didn't even need to be considered. Even in modern times, production line debugging is a terrible job. Not to mention the level of 1935. So once the production line started, it was to run for the longest possible time. This placed extremely high demands on materials. A main shaft running continuously for a few days or even more than ten days was really a high-tech profession.

To manufacture this simple thing required countless thoughts and countless experiments. Every experiment required costs. The money "burned" on experiments greatly exceeded what could be measured by cartloads. This is the accumulation of an industrial country; it requires an attitude of perseverance for decades.

So China simply did not care about Japan's technological development, because all the intelligence collected by intelligence personnel pointed to one thing: the Japanese industrial department simply had no intention of engaging in production lines. Historically, Japan's production lines only appeared after introducing a large amount of technology from the United States. That was a project finally decided upon by Japanese industrial bureaucrats with great determination. Present-day Japan was still dominated by family-style small businesses. Large-scale industrialization was just floating clouds on the horizon to them.

Large production lines are the key to determining whether homogeneous products can be mass-produced. Just like the bullet production line full of steampunk style in *Lord of War*, it looked very rough, but it could produce tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of bullets every day. If these bullets were placed in Japan, it would take ten times the manpower and dozens of times the time to finish production. This is the power of a true industrial country. If I can produce one bullet, I can produce one hundred million of the same bullets.