Competition between countries and nations can take countless forms, and war is nothing but a last resort.
The ultimate goal is to attack the opponent and consume others' strength, thereby creating a gap. To achieve this goal, all means can be used, and no use is used!
The backward Manchu Qing Dynasty never understood how important technology was, and they simply didn’t understand what productivity was?
When mankind entered the industrial revolution, improving productivity was a problem that all nations had to face, and it was an obstacle that no one could avoid.
To put it a bit exaggeratedly, the improvement of productivity can basically solve more than 90% of the conflicts in human society!
Poor Manchus always thought that the Industrial Revolution brought about by the Europeans consisted of foreign guns, cannons and armored battleships. They thought that what the foreign devils played with were just steel parts!
This is completely wrong. In fact, the improvement of productivity is not only the prosperity of industry and commerce, but also closely related to agriculture, which is most closely related to the Chinese people.
China is a farming nation, and the food problem is a big problem. Almost all changes in dynasties are related to the food crisis.
The population has grown, but there is only so much land, and food production has basically not changed much for thousands of years!
Although at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, due to the emergence of high-yield crops in the Americas such as corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, China experienced a small-scale population expansion.
But after all, we still rely on the sky for food, and the total population of more than 300 million has exhausted the potential of the land!
The wide gap between the rich and the poor and land annexation will indeed cause major social contradictions, but these contradictions will not trigger large-scale riots or peasant uprisings!
The real cause of the Taiping Rebellion was hunger, or because the people didn't have enough to eat!
Even the most beautiful places in the capital continue to suffer from food shortages, let alone those remote mountainous areas that no one cares about. Not to mention famine disasters, even in years with poor harvests, people will starve to death.
how to solve this problem? There are only two ways, and both of them are now in Xiao Letian's hands.
The first one is to add new cultivated land, which the Manchu Qing Dynasty can no longer do, because the future trend of the territory of the Qing Dynasty can only be reduced rather than expanded.
The newly added territories are all in the hands of the Chinese, and they were all won by Xiao Letian battle by battle!
Without the large granaries that warm Nanyang, there would be no way Chinese grain merchants could dump thousands of tons of rice!
In addition to adding new farmland, the second way is to improve agricultural production efficiency and increase agricultural productivity. What should be used to improve it? Of course it’s technology!
Nanyang is suitable for growing rice, but it also has its shortcomings. There is too much water in this place, and there are floods half the year! The local indigenous people's inability to develop agriculture is also related to floods.
In order to completely solve the flood problem, the Chinese reclamation areas built water conservancy projects and established smooth drainage systems on the one hand, but on the other hand they relied on advanced water pumps.
The technology of steam-powered water pumps commonly used in European coal mines is already very mature. The drawings were brought over for Chinese engineers to modify. This is a farming tool that Chinese farmers have never dared to think of for thousands of years.
After the heavy rain and typhoon, the farmland was seriously flooded. Is it necessary to rely on manpower to drain it? Still have to use mechanical power to pump water!
Farmland in the continuous drought is short of water and we still rely on water tankers? Start the water pump, and there will naturally be a steady stream of clean water!
Just the popularization of water pumps has turned many swamps and highlands that cannot produce food into fertile farmland!
Wherever there are Chinese settlements in Southeast Asia, there are spectacular scenes like this, with dozens of water pumps working day and night around the vast swamps.
Diligent farmers have built dams, drained a piece of land and leveled it. After planting seedlings, they can see the harvest that year!
Three crops of rice a year, how much food would be produced? Many people who could not survive in the country had no choice but to leave their hometowns. When they left, they were prepared to die. It was not clear what the Nanyang in their imaginations would look like.
But I never expected that Nanyang is actually a land of fish and rice that is harvested three times a year. Here as long as you are diligent, you don't have to worry about starvation.
The nickname "China's infrastructure madman" has existed since ancient times. The European colonists and Southeast Asian natives were all dumbfounded. They had never seen a nation that loves to work so much.
In many cases, thousands of people work together at the same time, and dozens of hectares of swamps are transformed into rice fields in just three days!
There are also jungles all over the mountains and plains. Small railways are being built deep into the mountains following the footsteps of logging camps. The sound of felling wood frightens all the animals in the rainforest to retreat.
There are twelve logging camps in Borneo alone with more than a thousand people. Hundreds of years of mahogany, rosewood, teak...all are transported by rails. When they arrive at the seaport, Chinese businessmen bring cash to grab the goods.
The land reclaimed by the logging camp will never be spared. Corn, sweet potatoes, etc. will be planted for two years first, and stones and tree stumps will be gradually cleared in the middle. After two or three years, a large area of farmland will appear again.
It is this kind of crazy expansion that gives Xiao Letian a trump card that is enough to dominate East Asia, and that is food!
At present, only a small part of the technology is used in agriculture. In the future, when the Chinese chemical industry rises, chemical fertilizers will definitely be the priority product.
Fertilizer is the most fundamental guarantee for agricultural production. Whoever controls this source industry will control the agricultural production of the future world.
The Manchu and Qing court had no idea how much food production the Chinese had at the moment, let alone their future agricultural potential!
But one thing is certain, the safety switch of Chinese people’s food security in the future lies in Xiao Letian’s hands!
Once the killer weapon of grain is activated, it will be a strategic nuclear weapon that the Qing Dynasty cannot resist life and death. Not to mention that several Dunhuang documents were ruined. If Guiziliu does not admit defeat in the capital, there will be a rice riot.
Of course he Yixin can care about the life and death of the people, but will your political opponents Yixin miss this good opportunity to attack you? Cixi has already rolled up her sleeves and taken the stage in person, and has put all the blame on you.
In order to protect his own rights, Yi Xin had to give in!
The next day, when Yi Xin heard that the Chinese had dumped a hundred tons of rice in the capital, he was so shocked that he didn't speak for a long time.
"It's become a trend, it's really a trend... It turns out that Xiao Letian was really trying to hide his capabilities and bide his time with us before!"
"In order to fight in Europe, he is playing a delaying tactic with us! He deceived us so miserably..."
The return of the head of state returned the strategic focus of the Chinese people from Europe to Asia. As a result, the return of the king naturally brought hundreds of millions of wind and thunder.
Xiao Letian's remote control command from Nanyang can cause a bloody storm in the Qing Dynasty!
All the forces had seen the terror of the head of state, and no one dared to take action on the Dunhuang Documents. Liu Jintang led the soldiers back to Guazhou with sullen eyebrows, and Zuo Zongtang also focused on commanding the war.
The Dunhuang side is completely left to King Shangtai and Zuo Zuo, and the rest of the people are out of sight!
The remaining Qingliu and Manchu nobles did not dare to cause trouble, and those who tried to get hold of some ancient books disappeared all of a sudden!
Although the British later requested to send another expedition team to Dunhuang for joint scientific research, it was beyond their reach!
