Reborn in 1999: Starting as a black marketeer

Recently, with more free time, Wang Feiyang has been spending more time online. If he has nothing to do in the evening, he will go to an internet cafe and spend two hours online.

Of course, he didn't go alone; Zhang Liang, Guo Juan, and Hu Xiaoyun also went along.

However, Wang Feiyang was searching for information online, Zhang Liang was engrossed in the recently popular Counter-Strike, and the two girls were watching movies and TV series with headphones on.

With internet cafes springing up like mushrooms after rain, internet fees have dropped significantly compared to the previous few months.

Under Wang Feiyang's guidance, the three of them also applied for their own QQ accounts.

At the beginning of the month, OICQ was officially renamed QQ, and the skinny penguin has "grown fat." It seems that Wang Feiyang's suggestion was quickly implemented by Mr. Ma and his team.

When they added Wang Feiyang as a friend, they were all envious of his lucky number [66666] and asked him where he got such a good number.

Of course, he couldn't tell them the truth, so Wang Feiyang could only laugh it off and say that he had been using QQ for a long time, when not many people used it and numbers weren't valuable. He had bought it from someone for fifty yuan.

This reason is quite convincing. After all, even at the end of the year, when the number of QQ users exceeds one million, good numbers are still worthless, and few people are willing to spend money to buy a virtual number. There isn't even the concept of a "premium number."

In a few years, accounts like [66666] will be valuable, and could even sell for hundreds of thousands!

By then, it will be very conspicuous for Wang Feiyang to use this account again, and he may have to disable the friend request function. At most, it will just make others envious, and they won't associate it with anything else.

Also, the fact that the number [10006] wasn't known to the three of them is really hard to explain.

After dinner that night, the four of them strolled over to an internet cafe, turned on their computers, and played their own games.

Wang Feiyang skillfully logged into QQ, first going to account [10006], where he had only five friends, who were Tencent's other five shareholders.

Mr. Ma left a message informing him of the company's recent major events, such as the name change, logo change, and that a letter had been sent to AOL to negotiate. In addition, the company has also begun to make efforts to contact major foreign venture capital firms in order to "sell" the company.

Of course, inspired by Wang Feiyang, Mr. Ma and his team were full of confidence in the company's future prospects. They no longer thought about selling the company, but instead wanted to attract venture capital and raise a large sum of money to accelerate the company's development!

Wang Feiyang's reply was also very simple: encourage Mr. Ma, make him believe that the fat penguin will lay golden eggs in the future, and when negotiating with VCs, he must be assertive and confident, and the company's valuation cannot be lowered...

I closed this QQ account and logged into the one with the number 【66666】. Coincidentally, there were only five friends on that account: Song Yi, Su Ying, Zhang Liang, Hu Xiaoyun, and Guo Juan.

As soon as he logged on, a gray friend's avatar started flashing "beep beep beep," it was Su Ying leaving him a message.

Upon opening it, I saw the message: "Feiyang, when does your training end this month?"

Since they became friends, Wang Feiyang has received messages from Su Ying every time he opens QQ online. They're not anything important; she just talks about her daily life at school or asks about Wang Feiyang's situation.

"It ends on the 20th. I'll go home to rest for a few days, pack my bags and stuff, and then leave at the end of the month," Wang Feiyang replied.

Su Ying wasn't online at the moment, so her profile picture was grayed out, and Wang Feiyang went to check the news.

About an hour later, QQ started beeping again. I glanced at it and saw that Su Ying had come online.

"That's only a few days left. This time you'll probably be gone for several years before you come back. What if you never come back and just settle down there? I've heard Russian girls are all quite pretty."

Wang Feiyang chuckled and replied, "That's unlikely. In a few years, the situation in China will be much better than there. I'm not stupid; why would I stay there?"

"Huh? Isn't Russia the second strongest country in the world? How could it possibly catch up domestically?"

It's not surprising that Su Ying would think this way. In the late 1990s, Russia had only disintegrated a few years earlier, and people's impression of it was still stuck in the era of the US-Soviet rivalry.

Domestically, development has only just begun, and although the growth rate is rapid, the foundation is still somewhat weak.

In 1998, China's GDP was less than one trillion US dollars, Japan's was four trillion, and the United States' was nine trillion!

Even the most optimistic person wouldn't dare imagine that China could surpass Japan, Britain, Germany, and France in ten years and quickly leave these countries far behind.

After all, back then everyone was still looking up to developed countries in Europe and America...

Actually, Su Ying didn't understand the situation in Russia. You should know that in 1998, Russia's GDP was less than 30 billion US dollars!

This was due to multiple blows, including the financial crisis, government debt default, the ruble's plunge, and low international oil prices. As a result, Russia's real GDP not only did not grow in 1998, but actually declined by 5.0%.

The reason why studying in Russia is so easy—as long as you're willing to pay, you can easily get into world-renowned universities like Moscow State University—is because they're practically broke!

With a sharp drop in government funding for universities, professors are struggling to pay their salaries. Unable to secure funding from the government, they have no choice but to find ways to generate their own revenue.

As a result, all schools with a reputation are desperately recruiting international students, as each student can bring in several thousand US dollars in tuition fees each year, which is a lifeline!

"China is a huge country, and its economic growth rate has been getting faster and faster in recent years. In a couple of years, it will join the WTO, which will accelerate its development. In a few more years, we might become the world's second largest economy after the United States," Wang Feiyang replied with a smile.

This was just a private conversation with Su Ying. If this were posted on some online forums, it would probably be met with a lot of criticism and rebuttal.

It's worth noting that back in 2005, someone on a well-known forum predicted that China's GDP would surpass Japan's by 2030. This prediction was met with ridicule from a group of economics professionals, some of whom even wrote lengthy articles to prove that China's GDP would never surpass Japan's in the next few decades!

As we all know, in just five years, by 2010, China's GDP had surpassed Japan's...

Su Ying was clearly not very interested in this topic, so she didn't continue the discussion. Instead, she took the opportunity to ask, "Since you're so optimistic about the development of the country, why do you want to go abroad? Wouldn't it be better to stay?"

Wang Feiyang said helplessly, "What's the point of staying? Fudan University doesn't want me. Am I supposed to go work in a factory tightening screws? Besides, although Russia's overall economic development isn't great, there are still plenty of opportunities. After all, the more chaotic a place is, the more opportunities there are to make money!"

This is not just something he made up. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, although countries like Russia, Russia, and Russia have been in dire straits, with their people struggling to make ends meet, a number of super-rich individuals have emerged. For example, Russia's "Seven Oligarchs" are world-renowned!