New Shun 1730

"My lord, there is something I still want to say. Whether it's reform or reform, even if it's just tinkering as the lord himself says, you have to be a little more relaxed."

"I support the reform, but I forgive you for not supporting the transfer of all the salt industry in Huainan to Huaibei."

"It is true that the salt households who originally used firewood to cook salt may not be disadvantaged if they change from boiled salt to sun-cooked salt. However, in addition to them, those who pack, bundle, carry salt, and transport, plus those who rely on Huainan salt merchants Cooks, gardeners, and gardeners who make a living, as well as scholars who live in literary societies, societies, and depend on salt merchants.”

"These are all living people. Moreover, the salt in Huainan is ten times that of Huaibei. Doesn't the Duke of the State consider their livelihood for these people?"

"In short, I support the replacement of boiled salt with sun-dried salt."

"But the official believes that the benefits of rain, heat, coal, beaches, etc. in Huaibei may not be greater than the livelihood of those in Huainan."

"In addition...the Duke should also consider the influence of Yangzhou Confucian scholars. They rely on the salt industry to survive. Without wealth, they cannot support them. Jiangnan Wenhua will be mostly abolished by the Duke."

"Opera, poetry, storytelling, novels, calligraphy, painting... To put it bluntly, these people are all raised in salt."

"And they are so intertwined with each other, including family members, in-laws, disciples and old officials, that it is really difficult to move. The Duke can abolish the contractors of the Great Salt Industry, but they will not object fiercely. But the Duke wants to rely on them for survival. If the foundation is destroyed, the matter will inevitably be shaken.”

"The Zhang family sells salt, and he is a guest of the Zhang family; the Wang family sells salt, and he is a guest of the Wang family. The Duke has deposed the Zhang family, and it's okay. But he can change his family and go to the Wang family."

"But the Duke directly abolished the 'selling salt' matter. Then we really have to consider the fierce public opinion."

Lin Min was very clear in her heart, which ones could be thrown away as "sacrifice" and which ones she dared not easily throw away as sacrifices.

Shioto can be sacrificed.

Scholars are not easy to sacrifice.

The difficulty of Huainan's problem is not to change cooking to drying.

The atmosphere in Huainan is similar to the feudal feudal system of the Warring States Period, except that at that time, land was enfeoffed, but now it is salt.

A large number of literati relied on salt merchants for their survival.

Literati had a high standard of living and culture naturally flourished. The salt merchants were also willing to spend money to make friends with these literati and celebrities, and they also gave them more help when they were short of money.

Clan, disciples, everywhere.

That is the soul of Jiangnan. And the soul also relies on the economic foundation. Without the money of salt merchants and big landowners, there would be no such prosperous culture. Literati have to serve them, otherwise they won’t have money to eat, drink or play.

Lin Min also understood that the salt policy reform in Huainan must be changed. But we can’t take such big steps.

Jiangsu is already in chaos. The reason why it has not become chaotic yet is because the imperial army is stationed nearby, and there are more than 20,000 elite field troops stationed in the Sunan camp.

Of course, it cannot be said that only scholars have vested interests.

After all, the reform involves too many directions. For example, those salt industry workers in Yangzhou who do packaging and transportation work have a distant relationship with the literati. But if Huainan Salt Industry is touched, they will definitely be dissatisfied. What about a scholar?

Therefore, Lin Min hopes to make a compromise and maintain Huainan's main industry, but just improve the method of producing salt.

After all, I still feel that letting Yangzhou and Huai'an, two prosperous places, completely decline is a horrifying thing.

After he expressed his opinion, Liu Yu just agreed and did not express any extreme views on this opinion.

He just said: "Master Lin, do you think Huainan can only rely on the salt industry to prosper? I think Huainan is really not suitable for the salt industry."

"The Huainan salt industry in the previous dynasty did not reform at all and still retained the method of boiling salt. This is really a good thing for this dynasty that deserves to be grateful to the previous dynasty."

"Since you agree with Xu Guangqi's view that the purpose of salt industry reform is to reclaim wasteland, why don't you think Huainan can be transformed?"

"Didn't Mr. Lin also go to the reclamation company to inspect? In the future, planting, picking, peeling, and rubbing cotton will all require people. Are we really afraid that they will have nothing to do?"

Hearing Liu Yu talk about the problem of the reclamation company, Lin Min could only sigh, not knowing how to characterize this matter.

Starting from spring, the reclamation company has begun to carry out small-scale land reclamation.

This reclamation also made Lin Min feel that it would be increasingly difficult to be the governor of Jiangsu Province in the future.

There is no problem with land reclamation, and on the whole he supports the enclosure of capital for land reclamation.

But the purpose of reclaiming wasteland was no longer something he could understand. Although the people from the reclamation company explained it to him, it was precisely because of this explanation that he lamented that it would be more and more difficult to be the governor of Jiangsu Province in the future.

The place where people from the Reclamation Company took the lead in reclaiming wasteland was near the sea in Nantong Prefecture. It is still a deserted place with few people living there.

Reclamation of wasteland is not that easy. In imagination, there seems to be so much open space and people are short of land. Wouldn’t it be an end if they just rush to open up wasteland?

However, in fact, reclaiming wasteland in a barren land is far beyond what ordinary people can afford today. And the transportation was not developed at this time.

If we can still live at home, who will leave their hometown to cultivate wasteland?

If you can't live at home, how can you survive the time it takes to cultivate the land and harvest the harvest? If he had enough food for a year, would he not be able to survive at home?

Lin Min naturally supported this kind of reclamation of wasteland as Jiangsu Jiedushi.

But the reclamation company said it would plant cotton in the future.

Because the Tianzhu cotton grown now has too short lint and average quality, and it is actually difficult for this material to become a raw material for mechanical textiles in the future.

Who told them? Of course it’s Liu Yu.

Therefore, the Academy of Sciences was able to show the impact of saline-alkali land on cotton growth and measure the promotion or inhibition of cotton growth within a reasonable salinity range. This was because Liu Yu had already begun to introduce Mexican food from the Americas. Cotton seeds have begun to be planted and cultivated.

Now, if Dashun wants to be a first-mover country, it is impossible to follow the existing path.

The historical path, at least in terms of cotton, was that Dashun would not work. If we do not promote Mexican cotton ourselves, then the modernization of cotton textiles in Dashun will not be completed.

Native cotton is not suitable for mechanized spinning. Even the most advanced mule machines of the early 19th century could not weave Asian cotton.

The current cotton textile industry in Songjiang Prefecture relies on the technology spread by Huang Daopo and the cotton cultivation promoted by Zhu Yuanzhang.

Now, if Dashun wants to move forward, it needs both a new "Huang Dao Po" and a new "Zhu Yuanzhang to promote cotton."

New Huang Daopo is the new mechanical textile technology.

The new Zhu Yuanzhang promoted Mexican cotton.

The original historical path was that the local national capital spinning industry relied on the cotton promoted by the British in India for its early development.

Now, since we want to be a first-mover country and complete this road ourselves, we have to consider changing cotton types ourselves.

Does Dashun have the grassroots control that it had in the early years of the Ming Dynasty? Apparently, not now.

Moreover, it is easy to go from 0 to 1, but it is difficult to turn all 1s into 2s. Historically, the reason why this local cotton improvement movement continued to fail in the early stages was an unexpected word - poverty.

As the new cotton seeds were promoted, small farmers planted cotton and extracted the oil from the cotton seeds.

Then in the second year, you can dig out some old cotton seeds and sprinkle them, or simply mix them. In three years at most, all the new cotton seeds will degrade.

As for the sterilization of cottonseed oil, the smoke of cottonseed oil, the unsuitability of cottonseed oil for practical use, etc., these are not minced meat. At that time, it was good to have oil to eat, so why did you care so much?

[Peasants freely receive seeds, mix up the good and bad, and allow natural hybridization. When harvesting flowers and ginning cotton, there is also a lot of mixing. The promotion of improved varieties takes less than a few years, but they are all mixed with inferiority]

This is the organizational capability of the small-scale peasant economy.

The final experience was cruel and proved the incompetence of governance.

[Only in places where there is no smoke for hundreds of miles, where the people are in dire straits, after a major disaster, and where soldiers and bandits have devastated the country, can it be possible to promote new cotton varieties]

Because the grassroots control ability is incompetent.

Therefore, the only option was to annex the land after the catastrophe, forcibly draw an isolation area of ​​hundreds of thousands of acres, and force cotton planting. In the end, it succeeded, stabilizing cotton seeds, and improving cotton seeds.

This experience is the same for Dashun.

Does Dashun’s grassroots organization have the ability to distribute cotton seeds to farmers and ensure recycling in the autumn?

cannot.

If Dashun's ability to organize and control the countryside reaches this level, building the Huaihe River into the sea will not require the efforts of the whole country and consume several years of national treasury savings. To have that kind of organizational power, this is obviously something that a province can do on its own. How can it get the strength of the whole country?

Does Dashun’s grassroots control have the ability to ensure that cotton harvesters do not mix old cotton together and seeds during ginning?

Of course not.

If there was such a degree of control over small traders, Dashun's commercial tax could have abolished the salt tax long ago. It is estimated that the commercial tax would have crushed the agricultural tax of 30 to 1 tax.

Can the level of poverty at the grassroots level in Dashun ensure that small farmers will not eat cottonseed oil?

This is even more impossible.

If Liu Yu is so wealthy, Liu Yu has nothing to do, but he has to go out and grab overseas markets? This consumption power and market will definitely overwhelm Europe and the Americas today. Let’s just start the internal circulation of light industrialization. When the whole country stopped eating crude cottonseed oil, the Soviet Union fucking collapsed.

Fortunately, the Ming Dynasty left a very great legacy to Dashun, which seemed to be the destiny of the country.

That is to say, the Ming Dynasty did not reform the salt-drying method in Huainan and retained the most primitive and backward small-household salt-cooking method.

This allowed Dashun to directly enclose land in Huainan and convert waste salt into land reclamation.

This is a natural open space [where there is no smoke for hundreds of miles and the people are in dire straits]. There is no need to wait for a major disaster before merging the land to ensure cotton seeds.

Similarly, the organizational and technical promotion capabilities of reclamation companies are much stronger than those of individual small farmers. The capital is also abundant, so there is no need to kill the goose to obtain the eggs, at least not to squeeze out all the cotton seeds that were easily cultivated in the early stage.

It should be said that until this matter is completed, that is, the replacement of Asian cotton with American cotton, coupled with mechanical spinning and weaving machines, Dashun will have all the prerequisite technologies for the light industrial revolution.

Steam engine... After having the boring machine, the steam engine is really the simplest in this series of front-end technologies.

And it should be the most inconspicuous one at the moment. This is a power. A waterwheel can drive the largest textile factory in the early 19th century.

Since we want to take the initiative to move forward and be a first-mover country, we have to make a lot of preparations. Both are indispensable.

Without the legacy of the salt boiling method left by the Ming Dynasty, it would be really difficult to promote long-staple cotton.

There is really no land suitable for growing cotton in the country. If it's too far away, it won't bring good luck; if it's too close, if the Ming Dynasty hadn't maintained the salt boiling method to control taxation, how could there be such a large open space for large-scale farms?

These are the reasons why Lin Min lamented that it would be more and more difficult to be the governor of Jiangsu in the future. He could understand all the truths that could be told to him, and he thought they all made sense.

However, which governor of Jiangsu could think of so many things spontaneously? He just felt that it was no wonder that he, the governor of Jiangsu, was just an empty shell, because he really didn't understand these industrial and commercial affairs. The development of the country's industrial and commercial affairs is not just about managing the struggle between employees and employers.