The situation in northern China was in chaos throughout February. First of all, the yellow-clothed thieves made a big disturbance in Shandong, so that a large number of troops from the northern provinces of the Qing court were transferred here, which led the Qing army's actions in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Sichuan and other places to be very unsmooth, and the progress was extremely slow. At the end of February, the Qing army barely held Zhang Xianzhong in Sichuan, and destroyed his main force in a battle.

At present, the Qing army is still cleaning up the remnants of Zhang Xianzhong in Sichuan, and at the same time absorbing all the people including the Nanming armed forces, but at this time, the prestige of the Qing court is not as strong as in history, and the embarrassing situation of being repeatedly slapped by the yellow thieves and even the famous city of Yangzhou has been broken has made the Qing court lose a lot of points, coupled with the strong resistance brought by the forced shaving of hair and easy clothing, the armed forces in Sichuan who are willing to surrender to the Qing Dynasty have suddenly decreased a lot. By the way, the commander of the Qing army was Nikan, and Hauge was currently in solitary confinement - because of his clumsy appearance when he was a thief in yellow clothes opposite Shandong.

The Qing army was not going well in Sichuan, Shaanxi, and it was even more disgraceful in Shandong. Mo Dashuai completely annihilated the ace army in the seven general soldiers in the battle of Hug Qigu, and the main force of the former Mingshan Customs General Army, which was the most capable of fighting, more than 15,000 people, and Gao Di himself fled to Xuzhou with more than 1,000 wolf bèi. After defeating the Gaodi Division, the army on the east coast went to Ganyu and Haizhou counties to replenish and rest, and at the same time transferred a large amount of booty back to Yantai Port, which had begun to thaw.

The East Coast Army, which had finished resting and replenishing, then slowly marched westward under the leadership of the new commander-in-chief Mao Desheng, and after taking the old nest of Niu Chenghu, the general soldier of Yizhou, the East Coast Army stayed in place, and then Mao Desheng sent a number of messengers to Yantai. He was ready to persuade Shao Shude, the new leader of the pioneer team, to revoke the previous withdrawal order, and let himself take his troops to spend a few more months with the Qing army.

He understood that at present, Li Huajing in Caozhou rebelled, and more than 100,000 troops were joined by Dongping bandits, plus more than 100,000 people of the noisy Yuyuan army, as well as the commanders, leaders, and kings who flocked from all over the country, at this time, the Shandong Qing court could completely control zhì in its hands, I am afraid that there was only one Jinan Mansion and half of Dongchang Mansion. As for the three prefectures of Denglai Qing and Yanzhou, the ruling order of the Qing court in the local area had basically collapsed, and even the gentry forces (mainly landlords and merchants) who supported them were dealt many blows, and their strength was much less than before. And this obviously laid the foundation for Shao Shude to implement the so-called new policy in Dengzhou.

It is worth mentioning. At present, in Shao Shude's planning, Dengzhou and Heishui are completely two systems, that is, Dengzhou is handed over to the management of servant armies such as Chen Zhilong and Dong Xueli, such as Dong Xueli according to Dengzhou, Chen Zhilong according to Ninghai Prefecture, and Xie Qian occupies Weihaiwei; The Blackwater region (including Yantai, Jeju, Rishiri, Sakhalin, Tohoku and Hokkaido) is operated by itself. Well. In fact, Wei Boqiu is doing it.

Of course. As the nominal suzerain of these surrendered generals, Shao Shude believes that he also has the obligation to guide these Qiuba bandits who are extremely proficient in robbing money, food, and girls, but they are a mess in governing the country. For example, the so-called "rent reduction and interest reduction" campaign that he promoted with great fanfare in Dengzhou a while ago. Let the few remaining landlords in Denglai Prefecture reduce their rent, so that the peasants can recuperate. In fact, at this time, the landlords in Shandong had already begun to reduce their land rents due to the sparse population, and Shao Shude only further promoted this trend.

In addition, due to years of war, the contradiction between man and land in Dengzhou has become less prominent. In the Wanli period, the prosperous land with more than one million households (about 4 million people) is now estimated to have less than 600,000 people left, which is just over 10% of the heyday. Such a population is scattered on such a vast land of Dengzhou, and it is really diluted in the blink of an eye like sprinkling pepper noodles.

Compared with Dengzhou, the population of Laizhou is slightly inferior, but it is quite a lot. For example, in 1644, Zhang Haoqian besieged Jiaozhou with rebellious people, and there were more than 100,000 people, which shows that the population of Laizhou is also quite large. Moreover, the army on the east coast has never been good at killing ordinary people in Shandong, and its military discipline is much better than that of the Qing army, so although the population of Laizhou has not increased, it will not decrease significantly, and it is estimated that there are still four or five hundred thousand people at this time.

These two provinces have already exceeded a million people. Although it is much inferior to the nearly 70 million population of the entire Ming Dynasty at this time (less than 17 million Dingkou in 1645, converted to a population of about 60 or 70 million), it is simply incomparable to the poor 150,000 people on the east coast. In addition, since half a year ago, people on the east coast have been grabbing grain in the fields of Denglai Qingji Prefecture, and then attracting a large number of poor peasants to come to Dengzhou with their families, and now it is conservatively estimated that the population of Denglai Prefecture has exceeded 1.2 million, and its number is still increasing.

Shao Shude is different from his predecessor Mo Dashuai, who is afraid that the more people will eat up the fragile Blackwater economy, so the number of people collected each time is counted in advance. However, after Shao Shude took charge of Heishui, he began to let the servants who had taken refuge in him openly receive the people who had entered Dengzhou from Laizhou, Qingzhou and even Jinan Prefecture, and then distributed large tracts of wasteland to them and registered them. And in order to reassure them, he also issued a title deed issued by the Blackwater Pioneer Team to these poor people, which immediately attracted a lot of popular support.

After the distribution of the wasteland (mainly near the garrison of the servant army on the east coast, there are still large tracts of land abandoned in the field), the next step is a vigorous mass production movement. Although it is not yet time for spring planting, it is not so easy to reclaim the land that has been abandoned for a long time, and some water conservancy and irrigation facilities are in disrepair, which is just in time for the dry season in winter.

Shao Shude used to work on construction projects in the local area, but after arriving in Shandong, due to his unaccustomed water and soil and advanced age, his health was not as good as before, so he threw a lot of work to Wei Boqiu, who was urgently recalled from the position of front-line supervisor. Wei Boqiu actually had a lot of slander about Shao Shude's "Shandong New Deal", and he thought that it was pure nonsense to carry out construction in Dengzhou, because if it was not careful, it would become a war zone, and in the future, these farmlands might be destroyed by the warring parties.

Moreover, he did not agree with Shao Shude's equal division of landlords' land (a lot of wasteland was seized by landlords), forced rent and interest reductions, and a large amount of taxes on landlords and wealthy merchants, because this was very unfavorable to the United Front gentry, but all his opinions were choked back by Shao Shude's sentence "I am a member of the Communist Party", and he didn't come back to his senses for a long time: together with the Far East, a militarist madman Mo Dashuai, and now there is a communist Shao Shude, who is said to have never been in arrears when he was a construction contractor. I'm afraid it's really hard to say what the people of Shandong will face in the future, after all, this is the enemy of the gentry all over the world.

However, the local people still do not have a clear strategy for the Far East, the only thing they care about is the population, as long as the captain of each Blackwater Pioneer Team can send a large number of people to the local area with quality and quantity, then he is qualified and competent. If you can send some gold and silver to the country from time to time, it will be a great achievement. Therefore, Wei Boqiu didn't bother to take care of Shao Shude's policies in Shandong, anyway, Dengzhou was not a territory directly under the jurisdiction of the Heishui Pioneer Team, but an area indirectly managed by the Tongguò servant army, and he Wei Boqiu still managed Sakhalin Island, Hokkaido, and the Outer Northeast well, gradually turning these places into the basic territory of the East Coast Republic in the Far East, and at the same time reaping a lot of political and even economic benefits for himself by the way.

Under such circumstances, Shao Shude's Shandong New Deal has been quietly implemented for more than two months. In the past two months, Yantai, Dengzhou, Ninghai, and Weihaiwei have allocated more than one million mu of land (including reclaimed abandoned land), with an average of about 15 mu per adult male. Among them, the officers and soldiers of several servant armies were told that they had been assigned to the land, so their morale was greatly improved.

Of course, in the process of dividing the land, it was not all smooth sailing. Some landlords and gentry who were originally quite obedient to the people on the east coast saw that their fields were about to be "reformed", and they did not care about the disparity in power, and they led their domestic slaves to fight with arms. Due to the lack of cadres, most of the people who presided over the land-sharing operation this time were officers of the Standing Forces and various departments of the servant army, and they were all outsiders, so these landlords and gentry who resisted the armed resistance were naturally ruthlessly suppressed, which made this land-sharing operation seem to have a touch of tragedy.

Wei Boqiu is quite disdainful of this so-called land reform process. He felt that in less than ten years, if the people on the east coast had not failed in Shandong, the officers and soldiers of the servant army at all levels who had been assigned to the land would gradually evolve into large and small landlords, and the society would continue to return to the original order, and everyone would continue to live according to the original way of life.

However, he is not against the division of land, after all, the landlords who have been suppressed are not good birds. At the beginning, there were some small landlords or yeoman farmers in these patches of land, but these gentry took advantage of the chaos in the world to clean up these people who were inferior to them, and they had a lot of blood debts. Besides, a large number of servant troops will pour into Dengzhou next, you have to give people some benefits, otherwise who will continue to work hard for you! And land and women are obviously the best rewards, and they are also the things that can best win the hearts of the servants and officers.

It is believed that with the passage of time, when the people on the east coast have eliminated the weak and left the strong, and the rectification is completed, they may really be able to gain a foothold in Dengzhou by relying on the strange terrain (peninsula) of Shandong and the necessary forts and other defensive facilities. And once the people on the east coast succeed in stabilizing the situation in Dengzhou, then the Qing army has little hope of recapturing this place, unless they mobilize more than 200,000 troops to attack (the logistics line is long, and heavy troops need to be deployed for defense), but from the current situation in the country, it is not very likely. Therefore, the Shandong issue seems to be like a tumor on the body of the Qing court that is getting worse and stricter, and sooner or later the health of this body will be destroyed completely. (To be continued......)