The morning sun gradually rose from the distant horizon, casting a thousand rays of light on the flat eastern savannah. The grassland is as green as a beautiful carpet of sparkling rivers and lush man-made trees, but more often than not, every once in a while, neatly planned red-brick and blue-tiled buildings are the houses of the countryside on the east bank.

If you look down from the air, you'll see that in the middle of the endless wilderness, there is a winding railway stretching into the distance, and on the railroad is a running train. The train struggled forward at a speed of more than 30 kilometers per hour, bringing about 70 tons of various materials and passengers from one town to another loaded in the carriages, making the lives of the residents of the villages and towns along the line easier. It is like the arteries and blood vessels of the human body, which continuously deliver nutrients to all nodes of the whole country and support the operation of the entire system.

This is the Luomei Line, the busiest transportation artery in the East Coast Republic of China. On this railway line, which is only 150 kilometers long, there are seven large and small towns and three counties, and the total population along the line is close to 40,000, which can be regarded as the most elite area in the country.

With the development of the economy and the increasingly heavy transportation tasks, the frequency of a train on the Luomei line has begun to keep up, so the State Railway Administration has to purchase steam locomotives and wagons many times, train drivers and mechanics, and constantly modify the departure schedule and increase the number of trains, so that it can effectively undertake the transportation tasks that are several times better than in the past.

As we can see from the latest adjustment of the train schedule in late March, the current Luomei Line Railway runs three trains a day, which can transport more than 200 tons of supplies from Luocha Port to Meilin Port in one day. It effectively complements the lack of maritime power. If it is calculated according to the driving speed and cargo capacity. One train is worth more than three 72-ton inland river/offshore general-purpose steamboats. Pass guò these trains. The grains and industrial products in the Yazi Lake area in the north can be transported to the south very quickly to be loaded to the sea, and the livestock, soybeans, building materials, metal tools, and seafood in the south can also continue to go north, which effectively adjusts the commodity markets in various places and reduces the cost of material circulation.

According to the survey of the Bureau of Statistics, at present, the flow of goods and personnel between the seven towns and villages along the Luomei Line is very frequent, and the prices in various places tend to be the same, and a unified market is gradually taking shape. Some of the merchants who had been active between the three counties also lost their business because of the opening of the train, and they had to drive the big cars west. Go deep into the Ningjinbao and Danuma Township, which are relatively closed inland in the Yihe area, and sell the cheap goods in the coastal areas at relatively high prices to earn some hard-earned money.

Moreover, it was not only the opening of the train that prompted these merchants to look elsewhere for opportunities, but also the fact that as the Spanish army in Santa Fe, the last place of engagement in the La Plata region, gradually collapsed, a large number of militiamen or masters began to return home. The militiamen, in particular, received a large amount of cash from the spoils of war, and if the allowances and subsidies were added, the militiamen who had been away for a year received an average of more than 140 yuan each. That's already more than the principal of some small merchants.

When these people return home, even a very small percentage of them use the money to do business. It will also push the fierce competition of local business to a new peak. A large amount of hot money is surging in the private sector, and the price index has repeatedly reached new highs under the government's desperate control, except for a few basic consumer goods that are subject to price control. This made the bureaucrats of the Executive Committee and the Government Council begin to realize that the power of capital in the domestic people, except for the people, was being formed.

Only a very small part of this private capital has completed the primitive accumulation from agricultural production, that is, the so-called agricultural capital, which accounts for about 15%; In addition, the amount of capital that has been made by commercial trade far exceeds the income from agricultural accumulation, accounting for about one-third; And the rest is the capital that the government artificially "creates", that is, the huge amount of cash held by the returned soldiers.

Of course, among these returnees, the regular non-commissioned officers had the most money in their hands, and some of them had three or four hundred yuan, and the most had five or six hundred, and the per capita capital exceeded 420 yuan. And ordinary soldiers and militiamen, even if they don't have as much money as non-commissioned officers, have an average of about 200 yuan. These huge sums of capital, which may total up to 2 million yuan, have been accumulated in the private sector like a time bomb that could make a mess of the already fragile and narrow domestic market on the East Coast at any time.

The Ministry of Finance and the State Administration of Precious Metals, which had overissued a large number of banknotes during the war, were worried about this, and finally set the tone after the Executive Committee organized and convened a number of economic work conferences: 1. Liberalize the access of private capital in some industries, and allow private capital to invest and set up factories in these industries under the strict supervision of the state; 2. Establish a bond market, and allow more than 10 large state-owned enterprises to issue low-interest bonds in the first batch to supplement the lack of financing channels; 3. Allow the establishment of private highway and river transport joint-stock companies to guide domestic funds to invest in the transportation infrastructure industry, and the investment and interest can be collected by the establishment of toll checkpoints for 20 years; Fourth, guide domestic funds to invest in overseas territories to obtain excess returns, such as overseas fishing, overseas trade, overseas plantations, etc.

It has to be said that the execution of the East Coast government is still quite strong, especially when those who hold a lot of cash are obedient soldiers, and a considerable part of the funds are quickly diverted. Among them, the more conservative people invest in large-scale agricultural production under the guidance of the government, that is, to carry out large-scale land development in the undeveloped areas of the western part of the country, and the land that has been developed can be leased for 30 to 50 years, that is, the land clearers can lease their own land from the Ministry of Agriculture at a relatively low rent, and then carry out large-scale agricultural production.

At the end of the 30 to 50 year lease, the government may decide whether to renew the lease according to the circumstances, and if the lease is renewed, the previous tenant has the right of first refusal to renew the lease, and if the lease is not renewed, the land will be repossessed for other purposes. This policy circumvented the state's requirement that individuals should not own more than 30 mu of land, and at the same time created conditions for large-scale agricultural production.

Of course, at the present stage, there are still many difficulties in engaging in large-scale agricultural production. First of all, there is the problem of labor, in today's East Coast Republic, the government basically monopolizes labor resources, that is, the "property rights" of new immigrants every year belong to the government, and it is difficult for private individuals to intercept their long-cherished labor from this.

In such a situation, labor brokers who have been active on the East Coast for many years have come into the spotlight. These people had a lot of labor resources at hand, and at the same time they had a lot of means in the Old World, so the two sides almost hit it off: the labor brokers were responsible for "recruiting" young and middle-aged labor from the Old World, and then transferring their ownership to the agricultural pioneer capitalists on the East Coast in the form of labor contracts. This method would have required a lot of capital upfront, but once this cheap labor was available, it was possible to generate super-profits through the mechanization of large-scale farms (horse-drawn harvesters, steam ploughs, steam threshing and other machinery).

If the problem of labor is not very easy to solve, then the improvement of agricultural machinery leasing and maintenance, breeding stations, veterinary stations, agricultural technical consultants and other problems that are matched with mechanized farms will be much easier to solve. At present, in Xihu County and Zhenhai County in the north, there are four active agricultural machinery leasing enterprises, with more than 30 sets of various types of agricultural machinery (mainly horse-drawn harvesters and steam plows).

Agricultural machinery maintenance enterprises have also appeared a, the company is operated by a joint venture of a cross-public investment and two technicians who resigned from Dafeng Agricultural Machinery Factory, and with the in-depth development of national agricultural machinery to the countryside and the gradual rise of domestic agricultural machinery ownership, the scale of this enterprise is also expanding. It is believed that with the passage of time, when the domestic large-scale agricultural production activities are gradually on the right track, the agricultural machinery industry will enter a long-term multiplication upward channel.

In addition to opening up land and running farms, there are also some veterans who have a certain sense of adventure but are afraid to invest abroad, and choose to raise funds to build roads. The highway is mainly a gravel road between the towns and villages, which can pass through various types of trucks with a certain load capacity. These roads are expensive to build, but the returns that can be expected when they are completed are not low, making them ideal for prudent investors like them. At present, the government's policy on this area is to privately fund the construction of county roads and township roads, and after the completion of the construction, you can set up a card to collect taxes, and after the expiration of the 20-year tax collection period, it will be handed over to the Ministry of Communications for maintenance free of charge, and at the same time, the tax collection checkpoint will be revoked and changed to a free road, and the future maintenance costs will be borne by the state finance.

Instead of farmers trying to find a way to get people out of the Old World, these former veterans who wanted to build roads turned their minds to black Africans. Under the mediation of some of the old chiefs of the crossing group, they elected some representatives, and prepared to go to South Africa to meet the chiefs of the Eight Banners tribe, Krar and other nobles for a while, and then see if they could find a way to get some labor from them. For this reason, it is not a matter of needing to give them some weapons to plunder slaves, which is much cheaper than buying people from slave traders. Moreover, the plundered black slaves also signed formal labor contracts, that is, after 5-7 years of heavy work, they were given the banner of the Black Eight Banners tribe, which was equivalent to increasing the strength of these Eight Banners nobles in disguise, so why didn't they do it? (To be continued......)