Dengzhou in September is the busiest season of the year.

Boatloads of grain arrived at Yantai Port along the northeast wind, and the big grain wholesalers sat in the teahouse and waited for it. The men and middlemen hired by them ran around, asking for instructions back and forth, and finally set a price acceptable to both buyers and sellers, and the grain changed hands and was transported to a warehouse not far away.

These are grains shipped from North Korea, which are inexpensive, with both wheat and rice, and are very popular with the people of Dengju. Of course, in order to protect local agriculture, the people of the East Coast have quotas for grain imports from North Korea, except for the years when the grain harvest is poor. If this quota is exceeded, import tariffs will become very high, and the price advantage of North Korean grain will be lost.

The grain carried by the ships that would enter the port was within the quota, and the price was only about 80% of the local grain, so the profit margin was high, which caused the grain wholesalers to rush to the market.

The difference from the scene here is that at the Yantai Railway Station, which is more than 100 meters away, the order of purchasing grain is much more orderly. These are all local grains transported along the Jiaoyan Railway, with huge output and good condition, so they are purchased by a large number of people with consumption power in Yantai and the surrounding areas.

The largest distribution center for local grain is at Taocun Railway Station. The major grain merchants in Dengzhou have set up points there, and selected shrewd and capable shopkeepers to be on duty for a long time to be responsible for the purchase of grain. Thanks to the blessing of Tianzun, although Denglai has not been able to talk about the wind and rain in recent years, but the weather can be regarded as helping, the grain output of the two provinces is stable, all kinds of vegetables and fruits are also booming in production and sales, the market is prosperous, and everyone is smiling.

The increase in food production has unsurprisingly brought about a flood of life. Denglai's population birth rate has been stable at a high level for many years, according to a researcher in the civil affairs department, it is "children all over the ground", almost every household has several children, Denglai's population is on the verge of breaking out after continuous small steps and fast forward, the natural population growth rate is catching up with the east coast of the mainland, maybe it can reach the level of 4%-5%, which is very amazing.

In order to ensure that the children can grow up normally and do not die in the middle of the journey (which was too normal in ancient times), the government of the Denglai Pioneer Team is also doing everything possible to improve the health situation in the two provinces. The peace agreement with the Qing gave them a favorable external environment, so they cut some military spending and began to build modern water and sewerage facilities in major cities to ensure that city dwellers were not harmed by polluted water bodies. At the same time, a more hygienic way of life was also taught to many urban and rural residents by the medical propaganda team, which led to the frequent cholera, dysentery and other diseases in the Qing, Shun, and Ming kingdoms in the eastern coast of the jurisdiction of the eastern coast, and the number of residents who died from these decreased a lot.

Take, for example, this noisy dock. All sorts of wastewater from the teahouse is dumped into a small culvert next to the road, instead of being spilled directly onto the pavement, as it was decades ago. The culverts are also cleaned regularly to ensure that they are not clogged up by all kinds of household waste, which in turn causes sewage to overflow onto the road.

Residents in Yantai, Jiaozhou and other places have basically become accustomed to such a way of life, and truly realize that these good living habits are indeed helpful to their own lives. As the leading big cities in Denglai, the residents of Yantai and Jiaozhou can be said to be no worse than the residents of many local cities in this regard. With a per capita monthly income of 4-5 yuan, they have passed the ignorant and backward stage in the early days, and have begun to fade more of the medieval color and enter a more modern ranks. In this regard, Yantai and Jiaozhou already have the characteristics of many local cities on the east coast, and if they build more hospitals, factories, schools, libraries and research institutions, and improve the infrastructure, then they will be no different from the local cities.

Of course, the government of the Denglai Pioneer Team has also been working in this direction for many years. In addition to the expenses that were forced to be spent on immigrants, the Denglai Pioneer Corps had cut military spending for three consecutive years, stopped hostile activities in Qingzhou and Liaodong, and the navy rarely went to the Yellow Sea and invested more money in construction. And this seems to be the main reason why the local people of Denglai are increasingly supporting this government - fiscal and tax revenues are taken from the people and for the people, and they should be so.

Therefore, some people once joked that the Qing and Shun countries have always imagined that when they step into Denglai and Ningshao in the future, the local people will help the old and the young, and kneel to welcome the king, but the reality will surprise them, and the people of Denglai will not only not greet them, but on the contrary, they will respond to the call of the pioneer team government and join the army to fight with it. If the Qing and Shun countries wanted to conquer these places, they had no other way but to win militarily, and even if they raised the banner of nationalism, it would have little effect, because the Denglai pioneer government won the banner of the former Song and Miao descendants, and it was also a Chinese lineage, so it was naturally immune to nationalist ideas.

At the other extreme of Denglai are Lianzhou, Wuzhou, Xunzhou and other places that have just been occupied by the people on the east coast. The East Coast government never ruled any of the areas, and the local common people knew little, if not anything, about the East Coast. The readers who have the right to speak understand more or less, but basically they are all negative things, and with their three views, they naturally can't have a good impression of the East Coast. Therefore, when the army on the east coast conquered these areas with lightning speed, the local gentry and scholars were actually very unwilling and tried to restore the old order. Even the toasts, who were not very well with the gentry, were not very interested in the East Coast, because the East Coasters had always been egalitarian and less interested in the slave-like dependence of life (although they also enslaved the blacks), and wherever they went, these toasters could no longer control a large number of people and means of production, because the East Coasters would definitely emancipate them and devote them to the production of the whole society, so this was an irreconcilable contradiction between the two sides.

The gentry were more disgusted with the East Coast people, and the Tusi was not interested in them, so it was normal for the East Coast people to not get the support of the local people in Lianzhou, Wuzhou and other places. Compared with them, although Dashun was also purging the Tusi forces, they had at least some support from the scholars, so the situation was much better than that of the people on the east coast, and they were more like fish in water locally.

Some of the upper strata of society in Denglai also learned a little bit about the situation in the south from the press. To be honest, they have mixed feelings about this, because it is not only about the possibility that they will have to pay for the troops (some of the new troops have already boarded the ship in Jiaozhou port and headed south), but more importantly, they are disappointed that the construction of the place that may be affected is very large.

You must know that the news that the local approval of Denglai, Ningshao and other places can introduce local technologies has long been flying all over the sky, and everyone has been gearing up and eager to try. At the same time, the success of the Jiaoyan Railway has also made everyone have great expectations for the Binh Vinh Railway, which is doing preliminary survey work, and ask around when it will be launched, so that they can prepare accordingly.

But what's going on now? It's going to be a war, how can this be! Lianzhou, Wuzhou, and Xunzhou are thousands of miles away, so what do we have to do with Denglai? Why use the tax revenue from Denglai to fight in these places? And let Denglai's disciples go to death, isn't it very good for these people to work locally? It's really not good, you can also let the subject country of North Korea help send troops!

It can be said that the views of the social elite in Denglei on this matter reflect the growing seriousness of their localized thinking. That is, after obtaining a certain social status and the right to speak, they no longer remain silent about things that harm their own interests, but make suggestions through various channels, although they are not necessarily adopted by their superiors.

Compared with them, the Ningshao area, which has always valued business, may not be so resistant. Some local merchants saw the occupation of Liem Ng as a rare opportunity to expand their commercial capital into the two provinces of Quang and northern Vietnam, so that they could grow freely beyond the small area of Ningbo. Although the gap between the rich and the poor is not as large as that of Ning Shao, Denglai, a place dominated by small yeoman farmers, is indeed inferior in terms of this kind of expansion ambition, which is also quite interesting to say.

Well, let's get down to business. All in all, the colonies in the Far East had different attitudes towards expansion in the Lianwu region, with Denglai generally opposed, Ningshao more neutral, Heishui supportive, and Manmeng feeling less likely. Of course, this is only for the middle and lower strata of society, but it is clear that power is not in the hands of these people, so the occupation and long-term occupation of the Lianwu region should become a fact. It is not known whether a new development team may be established after the approval of the local government, because the location here is too critical, and if it is in its hands, the future influence in the Liangguang region is not ordinarily large.

Of course, these things also reflect the unclear guiding ideology of the East Coast people in Chinese mainland. On the one hand, the locals feared that these feudal towns would grow larger and more difficult to control, and on the other hand, they hoped that they would maintain considerable influence and deterrence over the surrounding forces in order to maintain the interests of immigrants and businesses in the local area. The former demanded that the strength of the Far Eastern vassals should not be too strong, and the latter required them to have a certain strength, and this kind of refined guiding ideology led to the current situation, that is, the colonists knew that you did not have the idea of unifying China - of course, now the Qing and Shun countries can pull out hundreds of thousands of well-equipped troops, in fact, the people on the east coast do not have the strength to unify China - then it is better to live a small life behind closed doors, and stop fighting and dying in a place 108,000 miles away, which is simply a waste of life and money.

This idea cannot be said to be very common, but at least it exists objectively. It is up to the local executive councils to formulate a new Far East policy.