A very simple example: when a disaster strikes, people who own cars can reach a refuge much faster. This alone drastically increases the survival rate by an unknown margin. Therefore, among the less than one hundred thousand people in this small society, over a third are social elites like Niwen—engineers, senior technical personnel, scientists, government officials, and journalists. Considering the population of the Red Sea, such a survival rate was utterly abnormal compared to the ninety-plus percent of ordinary folks.
As for why even Lan Linger herself believed that the opposition would be in the majority, it was precisely due to the limitations of this mindset. The ordinary people at the bottom of society possessed no specialized skills; they were neither engineers nor scientists nor elites. Lives like Niwen's—where the whole family could have fried eggs every morning and buy a piece of meat to eat every day or two—were simply out of reach for the vast majority of people on the island. They could only go to work in factories or labor at construction sites, scraping by just enough to fill their stomachs. Moreover, the continuous reports in the three newspapers mostly interviewed middle-class and higher-tier individuals. Consequently, after the nationwide referendum, the outcome turned out to be so baffling.
Hao Qi had actually experienced something similar in his past life—for instance, Brexit as he knew it, or the United States presidential election. Whichever case it w…
Chapter 311