On January 25, 1677, the hottest season of the year, the La Plata Star train, carrying Qi Wangping, chairman of the Executive Committee of the East Coast Republic of China, and his entourage, slowly stopped at the railway station of Xia Yihe County.

The scale of the railway station in Xiayihe County is not small, to the north there is the Northwest Railway direct to Meiluo, Chengshan, Tieling and other places of the Northwest Railway, to the south is through a large area of grain planting areas (where large farms are popular) directly to the Mall, Jingjiang and other places of the Southwest Railway, to the east there is also the Xiamei Railway connected to the Qingmei Line.

The intersection of three railways is still unique in the country on the east coast, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is a railway hub. If we also consider that all parties gather here from all sides to bring together materials that are more important to the country, such as machinery and equipment, iron and steel products, fuel, agricultural products, gold, etc., the importance of this place is even more important.

In addition, the town of Lower Yi is also a river port. The Yi River, an artificial canal that has been allocated and dredged by the Transportation Affairs Office of the Ministry of Communications every year, flows through it, and has also played a huge role in the economic development of three or four counties in the basin. In this large-scale infrastructure construction operation in China, the guys from the Canal Office put forward a plan, that is, to widen and dredge the Yihe artificial canal all the way to the west, connect it to the Heihe River, and enter the Wujiang River from the downstream along the Heihe River, and run through the entire east bank prairie. Of course, this plan was not implemented after all, because the amount of work was huge, the cost was too high, and the water of the Heihe River was relatively shallow, which was not conducive to navigation, so it was abandoned. But in any case, at least in Zhongyihe County, Xiayihe County, Meilin County and other places, the role of this artificial canal is still very huge, and it is directly communicated to the heavy industrial area in the north through Milin Lake, Lianghu Canal and Yazi Lake to the east.

With such unique advantages, Xia Yihe County is naturally economically developed and has a large population. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, this county directly under the central government has a population of more than 70,000, and it is hard to believe that this is a county deep inland, because even Qingdao, the country's largest city, has a population of only 100,000.

Of the population of more than 70,000, agriculture absorbs more than 70 percent as usual, which is about the same as the proportion of the whole country, and the rest are almost concentrated in the wholesale industry, logistics industry and deep processing of agricultural products. Especially the latter, Yihe Agricultural Company, a well-known agricultural enterprise on the east bank (formed by the merger of the former Xu Ji Oil Mill and Xu's Farm, Xu Wenxuan is the largest shareholder, accounting for more than 60% of the shares) has a large area of soybean plantations here, as well as a large-scale oil mill, soybean product processing plant, and feed factory (with soybean cake as the main raw material), which is one of the economic engines of Xia Yihe County and Zhongyihe County, and its position is very important.

"The Yihe River Basin raises people, and the endless bean fields, wheat fields, and corn fields are refreshing to look at." Qi Wangping also rarely saw this kind of large-scale agricultural agglomeration, so he was full of interest, and only listened to him say to the people around him: "In several counties in the Yihe River Basin, there should still be a large area of wasteland that has not been developed, right?" ”

"It's fair to say that most of them are in an undeveloped state. The vast land of the eastern bank prairie has a mild climate and moderate precipitation, and except for the low Xiling Mountains, the whole territory is plain, which is the best agricultural area. Xia Yihe County is a typical example of this, how can more than 70,000 people fill such a large place in the county? Not to mention that a significant number of others are still engaged in other industries. According to what I saw when I was serving in the Far East, with the standard of living of the Qing and Ming people, it is not an exaggeration to say that our county can support two or three hundred thousand people, and it is not difficult at all. Now, hehe, it's a little sparsely populated, and young people can't keep it. "The answer was the magistrate of Xiayihe County, a former soldier who has passed the age of 50 and has worked in Xiayihe County for many years, from the director of the village militia all the way up, successively serving as the head of the township armed forces, the head of the township security regiment, the head of the county security regiment, the executive deputy county magistrate, and the county magistrate.

Qi Wangping has been training for so many years, and he is naturally aware of the slightest resentment of this county magistrate. Isn't it just that the central government artificially controls the distribution quota of public land in the counties in the old areas, and tilts it toward the border areas or undeveloped areas, forcing many young people who cannot inherit land to leave their hometowns and go to other places to fight for heaven and earth and pioneer production.

This kind of behavior not only made the people in the old area have a lot of dissatisfaction, but also made local officials complain a lot, such as the county magistrate in front of him. Because that is tantamount to pumping the blood of these old counties and slowing down their development. As a local parent official, I found that I couldn't raise enough labor when I started a large-scale project, and at this time, I would be out of the ghost if I didn't scold my mother! Therefore, when facing Qi Wangping, the old qualified county magistrate pretended to have the courage to say it.

Qi Wangping has heard a lot of these words on weekdays, and his ears have become calloused, so he naturally has no reaction when he listens to this, after all, he also deeply supports this in his heart. Otherwise, how many years will it take for those frontier areas on the east coast to be occupied? Moreover, how can the young second-generation national immigrants who have received a certain degree of education in the old areas assimilate those new Far Eastern immigrants and non-national laborers who have turned into regular workers? Therefore, this policy is bound to persist for a long time and will not waver for a hundred years!

"These places are some of the best agricultural regions in the country. I haven't been there yet, and I've heard that agricultural production is even bigger than here, and that every year wheat is produced almost filling the barns of the counties and townships, so that the price of grain has always lagged behind the increase in other commodities (precious metals have been flowing into the east coast for many years), and the farm contractors are not even very happy to expand the acreage because the profit margins are getting lower and lower. Qi Wangping selectively filtered the old county magistrate's complaints and shifted the topic elsewhere: "So agricultural mechanization is imperative!" In the southern cone area used a lot of large steam agricultural machinery, because of the large volume, heavy weight, not suitable for use in the east bank prairie (the east bank prairie land is relatively soft), so the Ministry of Agriculture and the Institute of Engineering and Technology cooperated to develop a small volume of 5 horses steam engine, after years of experiments and continuous improvement, has now developed a lot of interesting small machines on this basis, should inject new impetus into the agricultural development of our country. ”

What Qi Wangping mentioned is actually the current situation of agriculture on the east coast, mainly in the grain production industry, that is, except for a few years when the wind and rain are not smooth, most of the time the grain harvest is very gratifying, so the upward pressure on grain prices is greater. It is believed that if the government had not exempted tariffs on grain exports and some policy subsidies, the domestic grain production industry would have been even more depressed.

However, this situation has not been reversed well, because of the limitations of the world market and the domestic market, other industries such as industry and commerce cannot absorb too many people for a while, and most of the population still has to be employed in agriculture. Coupled with the need for immigrants (most of whom went to farm), it is not surprising that there have always been many people engaged in grain farming.

In the countries of the Old World, this kind of stable grain production that lasted for many years basically ushered in high population growth and commercial prosperity, which is generally called the "prosperous era" in ancient Chinese dynasties. At this time, the rapid growth of the population will offset some of the abundance of food, and at the same time, the raising of livestock and the production of wine will also consume a large amount of food. However, on the East Coast, the use of food consumption to obtain meat proved to be a very stupid thing, because the almost inexhaustible bison of the Pampa Plains provided more than three million people on the East Coast with meat that could not be eaten for a lifetime, thus greatly reducing the consumption of food.

In this way, it is not surprising that the East Coast has a surplus of grain every year. To put it bluntly, there are too many people who farm the land, and the fertility of the land is high, and there have been no major natural disasters for many years, let alone the threat of war, so the current situation has been created. The next step is to see how the government directs and appropriately reduces the proportion of agricultural workers - in the more than 40 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the proportion of agricultural workers has been reduced from the initial 80% to less than 70% now - so that more people can devote themselves to construction, navigation, overseas colonization and other industries, but this kind of thing is more complicated, and the people may not be happy, and it remains to be seen how to act.

On January 29, after finishing his inspection in Xiayihe County, Qi Wangping's special car started again, headed north into Meiluo County, and suspended at the Meiluo Town Railway Station. The station is currently being expanded, mainly because the Northern Railway, which is currently under construction, will meet the Northwest Railway in the future. At the same time, the mining and production of a super-large coal mine (10 billion tons) found at the junction of Hengtang County and Kaiyuan County has been put on the agenda, so the Merlot Railway Station must be expanded, otherwise it may not be able to undertake the sudden increase in transportation tasks in the future.

Qi Wangping had no intention of staying in this place for more, and the roaring Star de La Plata train left the Merlot railway station that afternoon, and then crossed the first railway bridge in China on the east coast, and drove into Tieling Town, the key inspection area of his trip to the Northwest Railway.

Cadres from the Tieling County Government, the Tieling Mining Bureau, the Tieling Special Steel and other units had been waiting at the Tieling Railway Station for several hours in advance. As early as when Qi Wangping's special train departed from Merlot Station, this side had already learned the news through the cable telegraph, and then made preparations in advance, which has to say that the cable telegraph network is really a multiplier of the country's productive forces, and no matter how much it is raised, its role cannot be exaggerated.

As soon as Qi Wangping got off the train, he came to the station's cafeteria and had a sumptuous dinner with the officials who came to report on their work. Next, he didn't move, and listened to everyone's reports directly in the restaurant, and the first person he named was the managers of the Tieling Coal and Steel Complex.

This so-called coal and steel consortium is composed of large state-owned enterprises such as Tieling Special Steel Plant, Western Steel Rolling Mill, Tieling Mining Bureau, Tieling Boiler Factory, and No. 1 Heavy Machinery Factory, and produces industrial products including carbon steel, alloy steel, iron bars, gold, rails, bridge parts, construction steel, tinned sheet (i.e., tinplate), steam engine components and various types of machinery and equipment. It is no wonder that Qi Wangping summoned the heads of these factories in the first step and listened to their reports.

"Ferromanganese products are now very mature and used in many industries. Manganese steel has now found the best ratio and has begun to enter the process of large-scale production, and it is believed that it will be more and more widely used in the future. At least, our current steam engine cylinder is greatly enhanced after using manganese steel as the material, correspondingly, under the same weight and volume, the steam engine can provide greater output power, which has a huge impact on all walks of life. "The director of Tieling Special Steel Plant was the first to speak, this guy is a second generation, initially worked in Changshan Iron Mine, and later entered the Tieling Mining Bureau, focusing on the production of gold mines, and achieved remarkable results, so he was later promoted to the director of Tieling Special Steel Plant.

Tieling Special Steel Plant is the only manufacturer on the east coast that produces various types of alloy steel. Unlike the huge Ping'an Iron and Steel Plant in the north, which mainly produces all kinds of cast iron, low-carbon steel, medium-carbon steel and high-carbon steel, the Tieling Plant mainly produces all kinds of alloy steel, which can be seen from the fact that they use crucible smelting to refine metals.

At present, the factory's fist product is naturally the manganese steel just mentioned, in addition to some lead, zinc, tin, copper and other metals smelting production, such as brass and bronze, tinned sheet (with the development of the canned food industry, the demand for this product is increasing day by day), lead pipe (for ships), tin pipe (for hoses) and so on.

In recent years, the plant has begun to work on nickel as a metal. The year before last, an engineer at the plant accidentally discovered that after adding manganese to nickel, nickel would become extremely tough and malleable, making it suitable for rolling processing. So, in the middle of last year, the Tieling Special Steel Works smelted a furnace of nickel-manganese alloy, then rolled a large sheet of thin plate, and finally transported it to the Shipu Mint to produce a bunch of coins, intended to replace the heavy and impractical copper coins in the East Coast.

Of course, nickel doesn't stop there. Now the technicians of Tieling Special Steel Plant have gradually set their sights on the body of nickel steel alloy. At the moment when manganese steel alloy has begun to become popular, what changes will be made in the addition of nickel in steel, which undoubtedly attracts the interest of many people, Tieling Special Steel Plant has also taken it as an important scientific research project, organized elite soldiers to conduct research, and I believe that it will definitely produce results in the near future.

"The largest output of our factory is ferromanganese, and the second largest is copper. I don't know why, but the demand for this metal has begun to increase exponentially in the past ten years, so we have built a special copper smelting workshop, and now we are able to stabilize industrial production. After reporting on the manganese steel, the director of the Tieling plant began to enter the second part, talking about the smelting and processing of copper, which has almost become the second largest source of profit for the plant.