Daming Yuanfu

Gao Pragmatic has not paid attention to the situation in the harem for some time. After all, in his opinion, now that the dispute over the country has ended, the position of the crown prince has been determined, and the original turmoil surrounding this matter has passed. In the next period of time, as long as it is ensured that no one dares to make any life-threatening plot against the prince himself, then there is no need to pay too much attention.

Therefore, after he quietly arranged the defense of Kunning Palace some time ago, he almost stopped focusing on the harem. Naturally, he knew nothing about the subtle changes that had taken place in the harem.

At this moment, he has made a decision. Anyway, the impeachment storm will take some time to pass, so it is better to take this opportunity to stay behind closed doors and deal with the internal matters about Jinghua that have been accumulated some time ago. Speaking of which, there is nothing we can do about it. Ever since Liu Xin went south, there has been a backlog of these things, and it seems that things will be revealed if they are not sorted out carefully.

He first looked at various industry reports. The departments with better performance seemed to be oriented to the internal market, including Jinghua Bank, Jinghua Infrastructure, Jinghua Mining, Jinghua Machinery, Jinghua Textile and Jinghua Ordnance Industry, etc.; those that did not perform as well as expected It includes Jinghua Maritime Trading, Jinghua Port, Jinghua Trading Co., Ltd., Jinghua Shipping, Jinghua Textile, etc.

what is this? Strong domestic demand and insufficient external demand? If this is the case, then there is really no good way to solve this problem of insufficient external demand. However, how did the strong domestic demand come about? It stands to reason that the Ming Dynasty is still in a period of frequent disasters. Is this domestic demand just a false fire?

This kind of thing cannot be inferred out of thin air. Gao Pragmatic carefully compared various data, and then compared them one by one with the court data in his mind, and then basically determined: Domestic demand is real, because the reforms in the past twenty or thirty years have already A relatively obvious effect has emerged: a group of "urban middle class" has been cultivated.

As the Practical School has advocated for many years that "agriculture will strengthen the country, industry will strengthen the country, and commerce will enrich the country" and use this as a policy agenda to promote reforms, significant progress has now been made in all three aspects.

In terms of agriculture, Ming Dynasty now has sweet potatoes and corn as staple food supplements. Its promotion is particularly smooth in the northern provinces (because there are more disasters in the north and these high-yielding crops are more needed), and the southern provinces are also promoted to varying degrees. For example, Guangdong, Guangxi, Sichuan, and Huguang have a relatively strong influence on high pragmatism (Guangdong is greatly influenced by Beijing because it is close to the sea and has a strong business atmosphere. The other three places are all provinces with toasts and are naturally close to high pragmatism). This has greatly enhanced increased food production.

No matter how well people everywhere accept these new products, at least they can save lives when disasters occur frequently. Chinese people are the most practical people. Since these things can save lives, they are good things. As for the taste that you are not used to... How long has it been? Do you still care about the taste? No matter how weird the taste is, it's still better than Guanyin soil, right? Besides, the Chinese people have always been talented in the field of food. As long as it is not a disaster year, it is not difficult to find ways to improve the taste.

[Note: New World crops did not taste like they do today as soon as they arrived in Eurasia. They also had to be iterated countless times before they became what they are now. However, there are good opportunities to introduce high-pragmatism. In disaster years, no one cares about taste and appearance. As long as it can fill the stomach and not starve people to death, then it is a good thing. ]

In addition to sweet potatoes and corn, Liaodong is also carefully cultivating and iterating cold-resistant rice suitable for the local area. These cold-resistant rice species from Hokkaido have been iterated several times, and the yield has been much higher than at the beginning. Of course, don’t expect to compare with later generations of high-yielding Northeastern cold-tolerant rice. After all, no one understands genetics these days, including Gao Pragmatic and Liu Xin.

Today’s so-called “cultivation iteration” is actually mainly about seed selection. Roughly speaking, you plant a large batch first, then select those that grow best, and keep their fruits as seeds for the next batch, and so on. This is obviously a stupid method, but it works as long as it works. Even if it takes a long time to evolve, it is still better than the European method of sowing seeds and then watching God perform. At least there is hope.

Then there is the cultivation of cotton and sugar cane. In fact, in Gao Panggang's heart, only the Western Region was the holy land of cotton in his mind. However, it had not been recovered yet, so he had to promote it throughout the Ming Dynasty.

Regarding cotton, China’s cultivation and use actually have a long history. According to historical records, cotton was first introduced to China from West Asia, around the 2nd century BC or earlier.

Cotton, of course, is mainly used as a material for making clothing and other daily necessities. It has been so since ancient times. During the Han Dynasty, cotton was first planted in the Western Regions (Xinjiang). Later archaeologists discovered a cotton flower from the 2nd century BC in the ruins of Bachu County in Xinjiang, indicating that Xinjiang was already one of the important cotton producing areas in China at that time. one.

From the Song Dynasty to the Yuan Dynasty, cotton cultivation and utilization were gradually promoted across the country. The textile properties of cotton were recognized by people, and it became one of the important textile raw materials in China during the Song and Yuan Dynasties.

By the Ming Dynasty, cotton planting was further popularized and became a large industry nationwide. Especially in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the cotton textile industry became a pillar industry. But one thing to be clear here is that the cotton textile industry is concentrated in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, which does not mean that all cotton-producing areas are in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River.

The transportation capacity restrictions these days will cause a problem: industries that require bulk materials will often form industrial clusters in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, because only the Yangtze River waterway can provide huge, cheap, and stable transportation capacity.

This means that the Ming Dynasty is now the main cotton producing area, starting from the basin east of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River (navigation to the west is inconvenient) and all the way east to the sea.

The emergence of high pragmatism has not changed this trend, but has strengthened it. Because Jinghua created the Ming Dynasty version of the Jenny spinning machine based on Gao's pragmatic memory, almost all the important towns in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River have become important cities in the cotton textile industry, including Jingzhou, Yuezhou, Hanyang, Wuchang, Jiujiang, and Anqing , Chizhou, Nanjing, Zhenjiang, Suzhou, Songjiang, including almost the entire important towns along the Yangtze River.

As we all know, the cotton textile industry is a labor-intensive industry. Even if the Jenny spinning machine is more efficient than the old spinning machine, it still requires a lot of labor. This has led to a significant increase in urban migrant workers, who have become an important category of the “urban middle class” catalyzed by the reforms of the Pragmatic School.

Everyone knows that the cotton spinning industry is the most important industry in the initial stage of "industrialization", because the key reason why it is important is that it is a product for the public and its market prospect is broad enough. However, the biggest enemy of this industry is the small farmer economy-the vast majority of people do not have enough purchasing power.

In the original history, after the Opium War, the Qing Dynasty was forced to open its ports. As a result, a few years later, the British discovered that something was wrong, because apart from opium, their flagship product, industrial weaving, still had no market in China - the vast majority of Chinese people still Wear home-woven homespun cloth.

The highly pragmatic people know the solution to this problem, which is nothing more than to continue to increase the diversity of the urban population and transform more Chinese people from self-sufficient farmers and tenants into urban workers. More importantly, his reforms over the years have been aimed in this direction.

For example, another major item in agriculture: sugar cane. The sugar cane mentioned here is of course not for chewing, but for making sugar, which gave rise to the sugar industry and cultivated a group of sugar industry workers, as well as merchants and shop assistants who sold various sugars. Guangxi, a province with a net loss of more than 100,000 taels of silver from the imperial court every year, has been changing with each passing day since Gao Pragmatic took office.

Take Huang Zhiting's old territory of Simingfu Tusi and the surrounding Huang Tusi territory as an example. In the later Red Dynasty, this place was roughly Chongzuo City, Guangxi Province, the national sugar production center, known as the "Sugar Capital of China". The annual sugar output is 240 million tons (2022), accounting for one-third of Guangxi Province and one-fifth of China's entire country.

what does that mean? It means that this place is used to grow sugar cane and make sugar. That is absolutely true! Therefore, Gao pragmatically identified the development direction of sugar production and sugar production for Guangxi. After so many years of development, not only the Jinghua Group has been wildly expanding sugar production in Guangxi, but also many wealthy businessmen who have followed suit have actively invested, and have basically completed the super-large Guangxi sugar industry cluster of "one province supplying the whole country".

Putting aside sugarcane farmers, the sugar industry alone employs hundreds of thousands of people and produces an increasingly diverse range of sugar products. It’s not just white sugar that was “only for the rich” in the past. Now a variety of sugar products are popping up, including “fruit candies” wrapped in oil paper.

Although there are currently only three or four flavors of fruit candies, the trend has been formed and the output value has taken off. After all, the richness of non-staple food these days is far less than that of later generations. Candies are simply loved by everyone. They are not only popular in China, but are even exported. This has led to the great development of Guangxi's sugar industry, and because of the high premium, hundreds of thousands of industrial workers have been trained - these people are able to consume new industrial fabrics.

In addition to the sugar industry, the tussah industry in Liaodong, the hardwood industry in the southwestern provinces, etc. are also types of agriculture-related industries. I will not list them one by one.

In addition to these, there are also some industries with higher "purity" that are also thriving, such as Jinghua Ordnance Industry. Jinghua Ordnance Industry has many departments, the most important of which are of course the two types of products: muskets and artillery and their supporting ammunition.

With the Ming Dynasty's one-million-strong army undergoing mass re-equipment for nearly twenty years, and the training of three to four hundred thousand troops in southern Xinjiang within the same period of time, coupled with the fact that these two armies have been at war for many years, Jinghua's ordnance industry is simply Make a lot of money.

Later generations of the Ming Dynasty had a famous "American military-industrial complex". Although it is indeed not a good word to talk about in China, it must be admitted in any case that the current Jinghua military industry is almost the core of the "Ming Dynasty military-industrial complex" member.

The "complex" formed with Jinghua Military Industry is naturally the military industrial enterprises run by major aristocratic families. They branched off other product lines that Jinghua was not very involved in, such as armors, helmets, knives, horse armor, and even military tents and military iron kettles.

According to Jinghua Ordnance Industry's report and Gao Pragmatic's understanding of the Ministry of War's allocations, basically speaking, Jinghua Ordnance Industry accounts for approximately 43% of the total expenditure on military equipment procurement and maintenance every year in the Ming Dynasty, making it a dominant company. Correspondingly, Jinghua Ordnance Industry also has up to workers across the entire industry chain, which not only includes musket factories, artillery factories and ammunition factories, but also upstream companies - for example, an ammunition factory alone requires upstream Paper shell factory (paper shell fixed charge), saltpeter factory, sulfur factory, charcoal factory, etc.

Once Gao Pragmatic took a serious look at these reports, he quickly discovered a phenomenon: industrial concentration is taking place.

In the past, Ming Dynasty could produce some firearms products all over the country, but the products produced in most places were not very good, and the production costs were ridiculously high. This is not the case now. Various products have begun to show a trend of centralized production, and several industrial clusters have gradually formed.

For example, the Kaiping Industrial Zone not far from the capital is not only a leader in steel and coal production, but also a military-intensive area. Jinghua Ordnance Industry concentrated about 40% of the musket and artillery production capacity in the Ming Dynasty here. The reason is simple. It has two advantages: first, it has high-quality steel materials nearby; second, it has the advantage of nearby shipping.

However, Jinghua's ammunition factories are not located here, but in Xi'an, Datong and Wuchang. This is because the main producing areas of saltpeter, the most difficult strategic material, are located in the northwest and Sichuan. This choice was made after comprehensive consideration of logistics relations.

Of course, from a strategic perspective, the separate layout of firearms production bases and ammunition production bases also has considerations to prevent chaos. Part of the reason why Zhu Yijun believed that Gao Pragmatic had no objection was that Gao Pragmatic had explained the purpose of this arrangement to him.

After all, this approach is simply "high pragmatic defense and high pragmatic chaos" - if he puts it all in Kaiping, it means that he can arm hundreds of thousands of firearms troops at any time, with sufficient weapons and ammunition.

What, you said weapons and ammunition can be stored, but where do the people come from? Just kidding, hundreds of thousands of workers are his employees, aren't they just soldiers when they hand out bullets? It doesn't matter if the combat effectiveness is low, as long as you can fire a gun, no one except the Imperial Guard can react at the distance from Kaiping to the capital.

In short, with the advancement of reform, many new industrial clusters have been formed across the country, creating millions of industrial workers, allowing these new industries and industrial workers to combine to form a new "economic cycle." Although there is still a long way to go before "breaking the small-scale peasant economy", it can at least be said that the first step has been taken steadily.

Thinking of this, Gao Pragmatic suddenly felt something was wrong: Since domestic demand is strong, why did Jinghua Textile perform less than expected this year? Taking a closer look, Gao Pragmatic was a little stunned.

Jiangnan's local textile industry and Jinghua Textile started a trade war, or more directly, a price war.
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