Great Northeast 1988

To raise surgery fees for his younger sister suffering from osteomyelitis, he secretly borrowed 20,000 yuan at usurious rates from the local tyrant "Black Bear" (equivalent to over a decade of wages for an ordinary worker at the time). While reselling a batch of canned goods, he was set up in a scam and lost both goods and money. His sister faced discontinuation of medication and amputation, and the tyrant was coming that very night to seize the house and chop off fingers. Chen Ping, using his advanced foresight of the price reform buying frenzy, did not flee or borrow money. Instead, he exploited information asymmetry at the train station dispatch to intercept a batch of allocated sugar and industrial alkali stranded at the freight yard through a "empty-handed" scheme. Within the 24 hours after the city department store was sold out, he seized the time gap and cashed out 38,000 yuan on the spot, tearing up the tyrant's loan shark IOU in his face. With two suitcases of Erguotou liquor, three thousand pairs of nylon stockings, and eighty cartons of Hongshuangxi cigarettes, he established contact with a Soviet border guard post on the frozen Heilongjiang River and exchanged for the first batch of Soviet military watches, fertilizer, and high-purity titanium metal. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: Great Northeast 1988 — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠