After receiving Wang Tu's invitation, Song Alin must pay attention to it regardless of whether he was willing to increase investment in Heyuan Prefecture.
Because the current Wang Tu is not the county magistrate of a remote small county with no roots, but the magistrate of a provincial prefecture. And many people who are familiar with officialdom know that behind Wang Tu there is also a Guangdong chief envoy. Cheng Yongfeng.
If nothing unexpected happens to such a person, a mere fifth-grade magistrate will definitely not be the end of his career, not even a magistrate. No one knows how far he can go in the future, but Song Alin knows that Wang Tu is now It was no longer something he could offend.
Not only should we not offend, but we should also deepen the relationship between the two parties if possible.
In fact...the businessmen who agreed to come over for inspection and the heads of government-run enterprises all basically had the same mentality.
You have to look again whether to invest or not. The investment environment is good and you can invest if it is profitable. If the environment does not allow it, then you will not invest.
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However, it is necessary to visit Heyuan Prefecture in person or to send heavyweight responsible persons to inspect.
The former is business and the latter is favor.
Even if we don’t get closer, we still can’t offend Wang Tu, a rising star in the officialdom. Who knows if he will become the head of a certain department in the governor’s office in a few years, let alone when he will transfer the government where his company is located. Become a co-prefect or even a magistrate.
After all, if the fifth-rank magistrate continues to be promoted, he will be promoted from the fourth-rank magistrate of each prefecture or the deputy director of each department of the governor's yamen. For rising stars in the officialdom with such huge connections, taking the deputy position is a transition. It won't be long before he can be transferred to a full-time job.
Song Alin and many investors who had the same intention as him once again set foot on the land of Heyuan Prefecture.
However, unlike others who chose to take the train directly to Heyuan, Song Alin chose to take a boat to Heyuan Prefecture.
He personally likes to travel by boat, and at the same time he also wants to see with his own eyes the changes in the Dongjiang Channel in recent years, mainly to see whether the navigation capabilities of the shallow beaches have been improved.
After all, if you want to invest in Heyuan Prefecture, you must consider the transportation of goods.
Although Heyuan Prefecture is connected to trains, the train freight is expensive... What Song Alin does is not a high-end business, just some ordinary food processing business. The gross profit is not high in the first place, so he must control every link. cost.
Therefore, cheaper water transportation is a must.
And water transportation relies on the conditions of waterways!
This is one of the reasons why Song Alin chose to take a boat to go north instead of taking the more convenient train directly...
Of course, more importantly, he personally prefers taking a boat to a train. After all, as a person who grew up by the river, he has a sense of intimacy and even a sense of security towards the river and the boat itself.
Because even if the boat sinks, he is not afraid, because he can just swim for a while, and crossing a few hundred meters across the river is nothing.
Different from the slow passenger and cargo steamer of Liuhe Shipping Company that I took last time, it was different that I had to walk upstream of the Dongjiang River for many days before arriving.
This time Song Alin took a fast passenger ship, which belonged to the Pearl River Shipping Company and was expected to arrive in Heyuan Prefecture City soon.
The Pearl River Shipping Company is also an old shipping company. Its predecessor was a part of the Navy's transport ships and retired personnel, plus sailors who surrendered but were unwilling to join the army or continue to roam the sea and surrendered to the pirates.
Founded and wholly owned by the Guangdong Governor's Yamen Industrial Department, it developed well in the early days of pure sailing. However, it did not have an absolute monopoly in the Pearl River Basin. At that time, there were many shipping companies in the Pearl River Basin. , and many companies with large transportation volumes often have their own fleets.
After entering the steam age, Liuhe Shipping Company relied on its prior investment to lock in the production capacity of part of the civilian ship-based steam engines of Guangzhou Machinery Company, monopolizing the production capacity of civilian ship-based steam engines for a long period of time, and took the lead in launching steam engine ship transportation nationwide. business.
Relying on this hand, Liuhe Shipping Company quickly grew into one of the top large-scale shipping companies in the Chu Empire, spreading business across the country, and occupied the leading position in the steamship transportation market in the Pearl River Basin.
Later, after more than a year of breakthroughs, the Pearl River Shipping Company obtained the production capacity of civilian shipboard steam engines, and reached a cooperation with Lee Shipyard to begin large-scale construction of steam engine passenger ships and put them into operation.
Taking advantage of their latecomer advantage and the more advanced performance of their steam engines, they designed, built and operated a number of fast river passenger ships.
Taking rapid passenger transport as the breakthrough point, it focuses on the mid-to-high-end passenger transport market.
At the same time, it launched a special offshore coal transport ship and reached cooperation with Guangzhou Iron and Steel Company and many coal sales companies in Guangdong to transport high-quality anthracite coal produced in Guangning for them.
Relying on these two hands, the Pearl River Shipping Company seized the tail end of the steam age and survived in the offshore shipping market in the Pearl River and Guangdong areas.
Song Alin was riding this kind of fast passenger ship, a fast steam passenger ship Zhujiang No. 26, which was put into operation by the Pearl River Shipping Company only last year.
The Zhujiang No. 26 steam passenger ship has a displacement of more than 150 tons. It is a standard shallow-water inland river passenger ship. It has a relatively wide hull, but the draft is very shallow, the superstructure is relatively tall, and it adopts more advanced technology. With advanced propeller propulsion, the pure steam engine can reach a speed of six knots.
This ship is actually not big, but it is just right for sailing on the Dongjiang River. After all, the lower reaches of the Dongjiang River are fine, but the navigation capacity of the middle and upper reaches is not strong. Even a shallow water steam passenger ship of more than 100 tons has to navigate many waterways. Be very careful. In addition, there are some shallow water beaches that are not navigable by shallow water inland ships of hundreds of tons during the dry season in autumn and winter.
Generally speaking, the waterways in the middle and upper reaches of the Dongjiang River are mainly operated by small boats of tens of tons. In addition, barges have also become popular in recent years.
That is to say, a high-horsepower tugboat with a shallow draft is used to tow a number of barges with a small tonnage and a shallow draft.
This can better solve the problem of poor navigation ability of shallow water channels.
Not only on some small rivers, there are also many barges on the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, the former north-south artery.
On the contrary, large inland waterways such as the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River do not need these gadgets, because the navigation capacity of the Yangtze River waterway is very good. The middle and lower reaches of the main channel from Hantianfu to Wusongkou can pass through ships with a draft of 4.5 meters.
As for the Yangtze River Basin, that is, the section from Jinling City to Wusongkou has even better conditions.
The excellent conditions of the Yangtze River waterway, coupled with the continuous progress of shipbuilding technology, iron-ribbed wooden hull ships have continued to reduce the cost of building large-tonnage ships, and steam engine technology continues to develop. The power of ship-based steam engines is increasing every year.
In order to compete, the three major steam engines invested heavily in research and development in the field of high-pressure steam engines, which continuously improved the performance of the steam engines.
In the 21st year of Chengshun, the maximum actual steam pressure of steam engines was only 0.25 MPa, but now some special steam engines can achieve 0.4 or even 0.45 MPa. The steam pressure The increase directly pushed up the increase in steam engine power.
At the same time, the three major steam engine manufacturers also have their own advantageous technologies, such as the multi-expansion steam engine of Tianjin Machinery Company, the new fire tube boiler of Guangzhou Machinery Company, etc.
The fierce competition between the three major steam engine companies led to the rapid development of high-pressure steam engines in the Chu Empire, and the rapid development of steam engines fed back to the train and ship industries.
The power of locomotives is getting bigger and bigger, and they can pull more and more goods at faster and faster speeds.
And ships can be built larger and faster.
Nowadays, there are many steamships with thousands of tons in operation on the Yangtze River waterway. Among them is the Shunjiang of Liuhe Shipping Company. On the ships of a large number of shipping companies, the company name and number are generally used as the ship name. Likewise, the fact that this river ship can be given a separate ship name means that this ship is different.
Its displacement reaches more than 1,200 tons. It uses a hybrid power of steam engine and sail. The steam engine is driven by a paddle wheel. The maximum speed reaches seven knots under pure steam engine power. It is a large inland river ship for both passenger and cargo. It travels between Han and Tianjin regularly. -Songjiang route.
When fully loaded, its maximum passenger capacity can reach 1,000.
Such superior performance also makes the cost of this ship reach 180,000 Chu Yuan. This is Chu Yuan under the gold standard, not 180,000 taels... If it is really priced according to the silver of more than ten years ago, according to the current price The ratio of gold to silver is close to three hundred thousand taels.
Such a large investment has also made this passenger ship the largest river ship currently operated by Liuhe Shipping Company, and it is also the largest civilian river ship currently owned by major shipping companies in the Dachu Empire.
Well, those military ships don't count... The fleet under the Guards only commissioned an offshore shallow-water battleship with a displacement of more than 2,000 tons last year... It's larger than the Shunjiang. Well, you heard it right, the same goes for the Guards. There is a fleet, and it is a serious battle fleet, with a lot of battleships attached, not the so-called transport fleet of the army.
Not only the navy, but also the Guards and the Air Force. The only hot air balloon flying team in the Chu Empire belongs to the Guards.
Whether the Shunjiang or other shipping companies, the medium and large river ships they build with hundreds of tons or even thousands of tons can basically only sail on the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River or other rivers with good navigation conditions.
But that’s not possible in Dongjiang!
The navigation capacity of the downstream channel of the Dongjiang River is good, and ships of several hundred tons can run there. However, the navigation capacity of the Dongjiang River section north of Guishan, Fucheng, Huizhou, has dropped sharply.
From here to Longchuan County in Heyuan Prefecture, there are many shallow rivers, large and small. Even if the local government has managed these shallow rivers, the scale is small and the results are not great...
After all, Heyuan Prefecture in the middle and upper reaches of the Dongjiang River is not an economically developed place. Investing huge sums of money in dredging the waterway would not be worth the gain.
In addition, small boats of dozens of tons are not impossible to move. If these small boats are combined with barges, they can actually initially meet the local transportation needs.
As for ships of more than 100 tons, they can only be seen during the current wet season in summer. During the dry season in winter, ships such as the Pearl River No. 27 want to pass through several shallow waters. The beach will be very troublesome... When necessary, it is even necessary to manually dig sand and dredge the river to move forward.
Song Alin took the Pearl River No. 27 Riverboat all the way north. It was smooth sailing along the way. He didn't encounter any water conditions, let alone any water bandits.
If there was something wrong, a few passengers on board were obviously not used to the bumps of this long-distance boat, so they vomited all the way.
And Song Alin is naturally not the one who gets seasick. He grew up by the river since he was a child. Over the years, he has been doing business all over the world, and he has basically taken boats. He has never known what seasickness is since he was a child...
After successfully arriving in Heyuan Prefecture City, Song Alin looked at this small city surrounded by water on three sides. For a moment, he had the illusion of traveling through time and space... as if he had returned to more than 20 years ago.
Not to mention that the entire city is small, and it is basically full of old buildings.
The state government of Heyuan Prefecture was the former county seat of Heyuan County. After the establishment of the state, the county seat became a state government.
The entire city is very small, surrounded by water on three sides, and only the south is land. This kind of terrain is very good in military terms, and it is a typical place that is easy to defend and difficult to attack.
But for industrial and commercial development, the limitations are relatively large. The surrounding plain area suitable for development is originally relatively small, and it is divided into three areas by the intersection of two rivers!
In this case, we can only develop one of the places, and as for the other two places, we can only give up temporarily!
As for simultaneous development around the cross-river mouth, the ideal is beautiful, but the reality is very basic... If you want to develop simultaneously across the river, you must first solve the traffic problems on both sides.
It is not easy to build a bridge across hundreds of meters of river these days, not to mention that the river needs to maintain navigability and a certain clear height of the bridge. The technology is very difficult and the investment is huge.
At present, let alone a broken place like Heyuan Prefecture, even a city as strong as Songjiang Prefecture is at a loss as to how to build a bridge on the Huangpu River without affecting the shipping on the Huangpu River. There is no talk about how to develop Huangpu without a bridge. The area on the east bank of the river.
At the same time, Jinling City, the capital of the Chu Empire, is just a general name. Its urban area includes three parts, namely Jiangning County in the western suburbs of Jiangnan, Shangyuan County in the eastern suburbs of Jiangnan, and Jiangpu County on the north bank of the Yangtze River.
To put it simply, the county seats of three counties make up the government of Yingtian Mansion, which is also the capital of the Chu Empire, Jinling City.
However, the core areas of Jinling City have always been in the Jiangning and Shangyuan areas on the south bank of the Yangtze River. As for the Jiangpu area in the north of the Yangtze River, the development is very limited, and there are not even many factories...
The main reason that limits its development is that cross-strait transportation is very troublesome and can only rely on ferries!
However, if you use a ferry, the transportation volume is small and the cost is high.
Therefore, for the development of urban areas, rivers actually have advantages and disadvantages. Rivers bring more convenient external transportation, but they also limit the development of external expansion of local urban areas.
In Song Alin's view, Heyuan Prefecture City is not suitable for the development of any industry. The transportation is not convenient and there are few resources in the surrounding area... Even the place only has a small, narrow and flat area around the river valley, with mountains on both sides...
In a place like this, it is destined that some traditional industrial industries will not be able to develop. Instead, some high-level and simple processing industries such as local specialties and cash crops will be developed.
Obviously, it was not just Song Alin who saw this. As the governor of the state, Wang Tu knew better that the Heyuan Prefecture under his rule seemed large, but in fact it was nothing. It didn’t even have a large population, and it was difficult to engage in labor-intensive and cheap industries. It cannot compete with densely populated areas.
However, relying on mountains to feed mountains and water to feed water, Wang Tu had visited various places in Heyuan Prefecture in detail before and found that the entire Heyuan Prefecture was not without any merits.
For example, if you go west along the Xinfeng River and then north along the Zhongxin River, you will come to a large basin, the Lighthouse Basin.
This area is a very rare flat area in the mountainous areas of northern Guangdong, which can promote large-scale food planting. This has been done before, and Wang Tu will also focus on agricultural development here in the following years. on the development of the Lighthouse Basin.
Food is always the most important priority for local development. Whether you grow food yourself, develop the industrial and commercial economy, or purchase food from other places, the local food supply must be sufficient.
Otherwise, there will be no development if the people don’t have enough to eat.
In other aspects, you still have to look for food in the mountains!
There are many mountains in Heyuan, and the environment and climate in many places are more suitable for growing tea. Wang Tu wants to start tea planting, and then set up supporting tea processing to create a one-stop tea industry chain.
At the same time, there are many local places suitable for growing some fruits, and you can rely on the fruits to make some canned fruits.
Coupled with the original economic crop planting and processing industries such as the yuba processing industry previously established in Heping, a comprehensive economic crop planting and processing industry chain will eventually be created.
His goal is to develop Heyuan Prefecture, a remote and remote country that people think has nothing to offer, into a state that can export agricultural products.
Through the cultivation and processing of agricultural products, it can not only increase the income of local farmers, but also provide more jobs and allow the government to obtain valuable tax revenue to improve infrastructure.
For example, Wang Tu has been keeping an eye on the dredging of the Dongjiang waterway for a long time. When he was the magistrate of Heping County, many local processed agricultural products and other products shipped to the Pearl River Delta for sale depended on the shipping of the Dongjiang River and its tributaries.
However, because the navigation capacity is so poor, the export of local products is strictly restricted.
Now that this problem has expanded to the entire Heyuan Prefecture, it has become more serious and prominent.
Although the Guangzhou-Heyuan section of the Guangdong-Jiangxi Railway has been opened, the railway line can continue to open north to Longchuan by the end of this year.
But rail transportation is expensive!
Unless there is no choice, bulk goods that do not have much time limit are generally shipped by ship, because the cost of rail transportation will be higher.
For ordinary goods, a slight increase in cost will have a huge impact.
In addition, although the railway has been opened, it will continue to extend northward to Ganzhou, and will eventually be connected to the Jiangxi section of the Guangdong-Jiangxi Railway in Jiangxi.
But not everywhere has a train station!
Railway stations along the railway are often dozens of kilometers or even further apart, which means that even if you want to transport goods by rail, you still need to transport the goods from the place of origin to the railway station.
This seemingly short land transportation distance is actually very troublesome. If you want to make these roads smooth, you need to invest a lot of money in widening and maintaining the roads.
The situation of land roads in various places in Heyuan is not optimistic, even the official roads are not in good condition.
Dredge the shipping conditions of the Dongjiang River and its several tributaries, especially the management of the shallow shoals; and at the same time improve and maintain some of the main official roads in the territory; this is the tone set by Wang Tu for infrastructure construction.
But this all requires money!
Although there will be financial support from the top...but you can't expect the top to pay for it all. There is no such precedent in the Dachu Empire.
When the local government needs financial support from superiors for infrastructure construction, you must first come up with part of it yourself, and then the superiors will consider subsidizing part of it for you.
Don't think that you won't be able to make a dime, just use the money from above to do it.
But today's Heyuan Prefecture is so poor that the state finance department cannot even pay the salaries of public officials at all levels. Wang Tu just went to Guangzhou half a month ago. Why did he go there?
He asked Cheng Yongfeng for money... and then came back with the money to pay part of the long-overdue salary!
Yes, only part of it has been paid. So far, the state finance department still owes more than 360,000 yuan in salary arrears to public officials at all levels.
If you ask carefully, you will find that the salary arrears started when the Chu Empire first came to this poor place to establish an office. The usual practice is to pay out part of the salary, and issue an IOU for the remaining part... and then reissue it after asking for subsidies from the superiors.
This is still a good year.
When funds are really tight, these IOUs are often owed for many years...or some local specialty and cheap goods are used as wages...
Naturally, many people have opinions on these items that are obviously junk at a glance and are even discounted at extremely high prices. But if you want this thing, don’t throw it away. The finances just don’t have the money anyway!
After so many years and months, the total amount of salary arrears has reached a huge amount of 360,000 Chu Yuan.
Three hundred and sixty thousand Chu Yuan is nothing to some big cities, even to some enterprises. For a shipping company to order a steam engine sailing ship of about two thousand tons, it costs more than three hundred thousand yuan. Chu Yuan.
But for the poor Heyuan Prefecture's finances, that is a huge sum of money.
The most terrible thing is that this is not only the only payment owed by Heyuan State's finances, but actually owes many other debts.
The former Heyuan magistrate had done a lot of infrastructure construction. The local people thought he was a good official, and his superiors also liked him very much, so he was transferred back to the governor's Yamen and became a deputy director.
But my ex did a lot of things, but he didn’t give me much money!
It's normal to build infrastructure. For the sake of political performance or their own ideals, most local officials will try to make it more beautiful. Wang Tu's predecessor created a so-called new administrative center and built the Zhizhou Yamen. It is very beautiful. It also built a so-called pedestrian street by the river. It is very beautiful to enrich people's daily life. It also built several official roads and flood control dams on several rivers.
We also built an irrigation and flood control system in the Lighthouse Basin.
A lot of things have been done and a lot of benefits have been brought to the people.
But the problem is that he basically didn’t pay the final payment for these projects.
Basically, they only give a down payment and let the contractor advance the construction funds. When the construction is completed and they ask for the balance, they find various reasons to default. Of course, in fact, they really have no money... They are just playing with nothing. Regarding the wolf thing, I had no plans to pay the balance.
This can be regarded as allowing some business leaders who are engaged in municipal projects and have high-ranking officials to see what the shamelessness of local officials is... In the past, they relied on some personal connections and bribes to undertake various government projects and made a lot of money. Very profitable.
But when I got to Heyuan Prefecture, it was good... I accepted the project casually, and the price seemed to be sufficient, but it was only a down payment, and the remaining balance was not available.
In the final calculation, not to mention making money, I even lost all my capital!
After asking relatives and friends to put pressure on officials, the former Zhizhou said politely after feeling the pressure: It's not that he doesn't want to give, it's because he really has no money... How about you use the Zhizhou Yamen building to pay off the debt?
In short, no matter what you say, you still have no money when you go back and forth... If you are really desperate and plan to ask them to pay off the debt at the Zhizhou Yamen Building, they will immediately turn against you and yell: If you have the ability, go and sue. The state is next door. Court!
By the way, the cement building of the Heyuan State Court has been in use for three years, but only 20% of the money for repairing the building has been paid, and the rest has not been paid... The contractors have been dragged into bankruptcy.
When he learned about these situations, Wang Tu was furious...
Damn, you are even more shameless than me!
And his ex has already done this, what should he do? He originally planned to do this!
So this is very confusing... He has also tried to advertise for repair work on a section of road before, but unfortunately, no contractor came to the door.
The former magistrate had ruined the reputation of the Heyuan Prefecture government!
