Dragon Sea Empire

After the China United Company occupied Luzon, because Yin Feng had no experience in regime management, the construction of the grassroots regime was ultimately done by the veteran traditional bureaucrat Zeng Yue and a few of his students.

The few students brought by Zeng Yue were recruited when he was an official in Yazhou and when he was an official in Quanzhou. They were all the children of wealthy businessmen and military families. They were specially sent to him to discuss their future. Yin Feng summoned them After getting rid of these Confucian scholars, he told them publicly: Zhonghua Company does not need officials who can compose poems, but what it needs is practical talents.

Most of the students who were counting on getting ahead in the imperial examinations retreated and looked down on Yin Feng's so-called overseas achievements. Therefore, most of the students Zeng Yue brought to Luzon were the sons of merchants and descendants of the Zeng family. .

Yin Feng has always believed that: under the influence of traditional Chinese culture, the government will always be in a strong position; and a government cannot be completely confused with a profitable company. In this case, a government that is too strong will definitely violate the interests of ordinary people. Zeng Yue certainly does not I will agree with his opinion. In traditional culture, the state power is used for "herdsmen" - it is inappropriate to govern the people and take profits from the people, but the people being governed have only obligations and no rights at all.

In the end, Luzon established a management organization in accordance with the traditional county system and bureaucratic vertical management; the Luzon tutelary government is essentially an overseas colonial regime of the Chinese, and it is impossible to come up with any other political system.

After the land auction in Luzon, a total of more than a dozen powerful Fujian merchants and Cantonese merchants bought land in Luzon and established various agricultural manors and professional plantations. Official ranks are useless in Luzon. Any landlord who buys land in Luzon does not have the right to be tax-free. Regardless of the size of the land, he must pay land tax to the Luzon tutelary mansion, and also pay management tax-manors that do not pay management tax, The Chinese army will not send the Zhuang Ding team to station, and the security work of the manor will have to be taken care of by oneself.

Landlords have the right to handle the production of these agricultural manors and professional plantations by themselves, but as long as they obtain cash income through trade, they have to pay commercial taxes. The details of all tax items are clearly engraved on a wooden black On the lacquered notice board, hung in the bulletin hall outside the gate of the Luzon tutelary mansion, this form of government affairs disclosure is based on the traditional Chinese model:

In the Ming Dynasty, from the Yamen of the capital to the county government, and between the gate of the government office and the screen wall in front of the gate, there were two pavilion-style buildings that were symmetrical to each other in the east and the west as usual. One was called Shenming Pavilion and the other was called Jingshan Pavilion; The special facilities for the local government to educate the people were all initiated by Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang and continued until the late Qing Dynasty. In the Shenming Pavilion, there are wooden black-lacquered plaques called "banbang", which are provided by the local government and Grass-roots organizations regularly announce bad people and bad things in the region and how to punish them. The so-called "declaration" has several meanings such as solemn declaration, repeated enlightenment, and justification and appeal. Corresponding to the function of announcing bad people and bad deeds, Jeongseonjeong is a place to praise good people and good deeds. It also hangs several boards, which are actually honor rolls, but the background color is changed to red paint.

At the gate of the Luzon tutelary mansion, the announcement hall is on the right and the appeal hall is on the left.

Zeng Yue asked someone to engrave the tax details, and added a few more words, saying: Except for the tax items clearly listed, the government will never impose any exorbitant taxes. In the five years since the public land sale, there has never been arbitrarily increased taxes. However, the Chinese company governs the subordinates, regardless of whether they are high or low. This principle has always been adhered to by Yin Feng. Yue did the same, and the internal investigations of the company's security department and business intelligence department against corruption have never stopped; since these investigators are assigned in rotation to independently perform their duties and are directly responsible to Yin Feng, the internal investigations have always been carried out with Known for being ruthless.

During this period, the plan of merging indigenous villages and townships has been implemented, and new land on the island has been continuously vacated. One after another, people from the Lianghuai salt merchants, Shanxi merchants and other business gangs from the mainland came to Luzon to set up real estate. The reputation of the tutelary mansion as efficient and clean also spread among overseas businessmen.

When the news came out that the Spanish army was about to counterattack Luzon, there were more than 15 Chinese immigrants coming to Luzon one after another. There were still hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants coming to Manila from Fujian and Taiwan every month. Many inland farmers and vagrants went ashore.

At the beginning, in order to attract immigrants, Yin Feng established a system that all agricultural immigrants who wanted to cultivate land were allowed to cultivate for one year without compensation. Many domestic landless farmers rented the land owned by the Chinese company in Luzon to cultivate, but the Chinese company stated in the contract: As long as one-third of the harvest is paid every year as rent, the tenants are allowed to cultivate permanently for three consecutive years, and can be passed on to their own children and grandchildren, but they cannot be passed on to other farmers without the company's consent. After all, the tenant's land ownership belongs to the Chinese company. .

This basically endows the tenants with permanent tenancy rights, which is very attractive to countless landless peasants and vagrants in the Ming Dynasty. During the Ming Dynasty, permanent tenancy rights have already appeared in the Jiangnan area, but the court has never formalized them in legal form. It has been admitted, and the Chinese company has published this content as a law in clear words.

If the tenants who cultivate the company’s land serve as soldiers to fight, they can get another piece of land immediately; if any of them serve as soldiers and fight meritoriously, they can also get half of the land they cultivated without compensation. However, the Chinese company has the right to give priority to the military-owned land to produce products. Moreover, the company encourages these tenants and military-owned farms to centralize the land to the company's unified farms, and then rewards them with the system of share dividends.

Of course, the system that soldiers of the Chinese Army can get their own land after retiring or making great contributions is still valid.

Therefore, when the Spaniards were about to fight back, the tenants and military members of the company supported the Chinese Army with all their strength, and there was a long line of conscripts who came to the recruitment office of the town guard mansion every day. This was fighting for their own land and homeland, and people's emotions were high , eager to fight, and living in the local area for only a few years, these peasants from various provinces in mainland China have fully adapted to the rule of the Chinese United Corporation-Luzon Township Mansion. Influenced and grown in the cultural background of festivals and etiquette.

During these years of doing business overseas and founding Chinese companies, Yin Feng has gained a better understanding of traditional culture: traditional Chinese culture values ​​social order above all else, and if the people cannot obtain order from themselves, they will accept Who provides the order, as long as this order can bring a stable life, the common people will generally support this order, no matter who provides this order, in fact, many human beings living on this earth live like this .

In the face of the Spanish attack, those big manor owners and big landlords behaved differently from ordinary people. They were still worried about the strength of the Chinese company, and under consideration of gains and losses, some people came to the company and asked to return to the country. Or eager to sell and transfer to others.

At the same time, the war preparations were hindered by those big manor owners: for example, San Miguel in the north of the city had to build a fortress to defend the north wing of Manila, but the agent butler of the Shanxi businessman Qiao’s family who bought the land, Zhuangtou George However, he took the lead in opposing building fortresses on his own land, saying that it would affect his land production and Feng Shui.

Agents of many big landlords and manor owners instinctively objected to Chinese companies expropriating manpower from their manors to build fortifications. The rules and regulations published by Chinese companies clearly stated: Unless it is an emergency requisition in wartime, the company usually recruits laborers to work. Ten days of work and food and silver, and there is such a situation: those coolies can earn a tael of silver after working for ten days, which is much more than working for those landlords and manor owners. Many manor tenants, day laborers and even domestic servants left their bosses to work for the company.

Agents of big businessmen and landlords either bribed or used their own official ranks to oppress people, demanding that Chinese companies change their labor recruitment policies and implement the human law that the imperial court implemented in the interior: unpaid corvee.

"These guys thought our company was the same as those corrupt officials in the imperial court, and they actually bribed me," Yin Feng said helplessly to An Xiaosi, holding a stack of internal investigation reports from the Ministry of Security and the Ministry of Commerce and Intelligence. With a wry smile, he said, "Don't worry about these things. Zeng Shan will take over the internal affairs investigation department of the Luzon branch. Your main task now is to deal with the Spaniards."

Zeng Jingshan sat at Yin Feng's desk and read some reports, and said distressedly: "Ah Feng, this is not going to work. The construction of the four castles in the east, west, north and south cannot be completed on schedule."

"Do these rich merchants who bought land think we are fooling us? The Spaniards are here, so what good is there for them?" Yin Feng was very puzzled by the resistance of many landlords to the defense project.

He thought for a while and said, "How about this, let's call the heads and housekeepers of all the villages for a meeting..."

Yin Feng had the idea of ​​setting up a discussion bureau, so that all merchants and landlords who invested in Luzon's land would send representatives to participate in the evaluation of the governance of the Luzon Township Mansion. As a consulting and evaluation organization, Zeng Yue disagreed, thinking that Everything in Luzon is in the initial stage, and we can only highly concentrate power to implement some policies. Therefore, although the discussion bureau was established, it only played the role of various landlord associations and chambers of commerce, which is equivalent to a friendship club.

Now, Yin Feng convened the first formal review meeting of the Council in the spirit of giving it a try. In Yin Feng's heart, he believed that this was equivalent to a small-scale democratic experiment.