China's native population has grown slowly, but it has risen from more than 500 million to 600 million, with a ten-year population growth rate of less than 12%, an average of less than 1.2% per year, lower than 3% in the United States, and 1.8% in the United Kingdom.

The population growth rate of Europe in the industrial age was staggering, otherwise it would not have been possible to catch up with China so quickly.

In 50 years, the growth rate of the Chinese population has underperformed most European countries, only doubling from 300 million in the last years of Qianlong. At the same time, the population of Britain grew by a terrible rate, with a growth rate of about 3.5% in the 10 years from 1741 to 1751, an increase of 7% from 1751 to 1761, an increase of 11% in the 10 years from 1780 to 1790, and a peak of 16% in the 19th and 20s. In the 10 years from 1811 to 1821 alone, Britain increased its population by 18 per cent, with an annual population growth rate of 1.8 per cent. This unprecedented rate of population growth has been dubbed the "demographic revolution" in the UK.

During the Industrial Revolution, the high growth rate maintained for a long time allowed Britain to grow from a small country of less than 4 million people to a large empire with a population of 30 million. Moreover, the urban population of Britain exceeded the rural population, and it was not only industrialized but also urbanized.

This definition of completion is different from that of China, which has already completed industrialization, but at present, industry has replaced agriculture as China's largest production unit by any measure. There is no clear calculation of the total amount, but the tax revenue provided by industry is already five times that of agricultural tax revenue, as high as 500 million yuan a year, and it continues to increase rapidly. However, the level of urbanization has grown slowly, and the urban population has hovered around one-third, and there has been no growth for many years. This made Zhou Lang, as emperor, quite worried, worried about whether he had fallen into the trap of agriculture, because the stubborn small-scale peasant economy had made it impossible for urbanization to continue to grow.

Stopping the growth of cities means that the ability of cities to attract labor is declining, and cities are unable to attract enough labor, let alone overseas immigrants. For the first time in 30 years, the number of overseas immigrants has fallen below one million, and the number of overseas immigrants in China has not even caught up with Europe.

As a ruler, this made Zhou Lang feel happy and worried. The good news is that the Chinese population has stopped exporting overseas, which means that the country can absorb enough labor, which means that the country is more attractive to Chinese people than overseas. The concern was that urbanization could stagnate, and it was difficult for him to judge the reasons for this stagnation.

On the surface, the reluctance of the rural population to go to the cities must be due to the fact that they can live well in the countryside, or at least not so far as to give up their comfortable rural life and work in the cities. With the development of transportation technology, overseas grain can be turned into ordinary commodities and imported into China, and the emergence of large-scale farm operations in China's border areas has made grain prices cheaper. As a result, local villages began to turn to the production of cash crops, such as silkworms, cotton and linen, and sugarcane fruits, and the planting area has far exceeded that of any other era in history.

There are no large rice fields in the south of the Yangtze River, and cotton is mainly planted in Shandong, while Guangdong has developed a preserved fruit industry. Sugarcane is widely cultivated in the south, and more than half of the country's provinces are unable to be self-sufficient in grain and need to be imported. The central provinces have developed the breeding industry, Henan, Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan four provinces generally raise pigs, Shaanxi and Gansu mainly raise sheep, the problem of food and clothing has long been solved, meat food is no longer a luxury, ordinary people at home, dare not say that there is meat to eat, but it is not uncommon to eat meat a month.

Due to the development of economical agriculture and animal husbandry in rural areas, the efficiency of rural industries has been greatly improved, a large number of labor forces have been attracted, and the attraction of working in cities has declined.

This has greatly influenced the development of urbanization, which is the future. The decline in the number of workers moving into the cities was accompanied by the stagnation of urban industrial development, and factory production began to saturate, although production efficiency was still growing, and more new technologies were adopted than by expanding the scale of production. Instead of building a new one, the old plant adopts new machines.

This made Zhou Lang worried. But he couldn't help it, he suspected it was technical. The industrial revolution driven by the steam engine may only do just that. The steam revolution made it easy for Britain to industrialize and urbanize, but in China it was only possible to get a third into the cities. Just like before the steam engine, China mastered all the industrial technologies before steam power such as water power in the Tang and Song dynasties, and the cities of the Song Dynasty were also very large, and there were many large cities, and the tax revenue of industry and commerce began to surpass agriculture, but the Song Dynasty still did not have an industrial revolution and did not complete urbanization. I am afraid that because of water conservancy technology, it is impossible for a country with a population of the Song Dynasty to complete industrialization and urbanization.

In the same way, steam-powered industrialization will not allow China, with a population of 600 million, to complete the industrial revolution and urbanization.

In addition to technical reasons, there are also administrative and cultural reasons.

Administratively, as the income of industry and commerce greatly exceeded that of agriculture, it began to feed back to agriculture, at least to the countryside. Through the reserve military service system and other means, a large number of rural families have received a fixed income from military salaries. As long as one son in the family is a reserve army, in fact, he does not need to go to the city to work to make a living. This may have affected the pressure on nearly 10 million people to move into cities.

In addition, a large number of transportation facilities have been built through financial means, and some rural areas are connected to the cities through canals and railways, although it is not possible to work in the cities and live in the rural areas, but a large number of peasants can maintain close ties with the rural areas, and they work intermittently or even continuously in the cities, but they return to the countryside during the New Year's holidays and do not want to settle in the cities. For them, the city is just a foreign land to make a living, not a place to live.

Culturally, it means that the peasants are reluctant to stay away from their homeland, far from the place where their ancestors' tombs are located. The phenomenon of migrant workers has been strengthened, and even if a large number of families are poor, at most they let the main labor force go to the city to work and earn money to subsidize the family, rather than all family members moving to the city to live. The appeal of urban life has not yet surpassed the sense of steadiness in the countryside.

Despite his apprehension, Zhou Lang found it really difficult for him to do anything to improve. Stopping the import of resources into the countryside means breaking with the existing military system, which is easy to set up, spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain, and the cost of giving up is too great; Moreover, the feedback of resources to the countryside is a compromise to maintain stability, and Zhou Lang would rather develop more slowly than the revolutionary risks that accompany rapid development.

Politically, it is impossible to stop giving feedback to the countryside, and culturally, it is even more difficult to change, and unless we carry out the situation of the Great Revolution of Culture, it will be difficult to cut off the traditional culture from the root. Changing customs through education is a century-old project.

Zhou Lang can only hope that the temporarily stagnant urbanization is the result of insufficient technological strength, and he knows that even if China's changes do not bring stimulation to the general trend of history, even if the Chinese have not contributed new technological strength to the world, there will soon be a second industrial revolution, and the application of electricity and internal combustion engines will still promote China's second city, hoping that urbanization will break through half by then.

After all, with electricity, city life really starts to become exciting, not at night in the city and in the countryside, you can only do bed exercise.

Through the data at the top, Zhou Lang knows that China has entered a special period of historical development, similar to the slow growth period after the completion of the industrial revolution in Western countries in later generations.

As a result, the overall efficiency of Chinese society has actually lost to the British. Although in the eastern industrial regions, China's large industries are more efficient than those of the United Kingdom, with larger and more intensive factories; But overall, it's not as good as the UK. Half of the UK's population is in cities, and even fewer are rural. More of China's population is in rural areas and less in urban areas. This means that China's industrial zones in the east are more efficient than those in the UK; However, the vast countryside is much lower than the commercial farm operations in the UK. In general, the UK is more like a model of small and medium-sized factories and medium-sized farms, while China is a large-scale industry plus small-scale agriculture, which on average is less efficient than that of the UK.

The manifestation of efficiency is that China's per capita is not comparable to Britain, and China's total amount is indeed much larger than Britain, more than ten times that of Britain, but the Chinese population is 20 times that of Britain, and the per capita income is actually only 60% of Britain.

Zhou Lang himself could not solve these problems, and although his body could still support him to continue to govern, he gradually let go of power. The main government affairs were handled by the crown prince, who first presided over the work of the military department and then began to govern as a superintendent of the state.

Zhou Lang stayed in the palace less and less, going back to the palace on Hainan Island in winter, and going to Chengde in summer to escape the heat. In spring and autumn, they generally enjoy leisure in the Taoist temples of famous mountains and rivers such as Wudang Mountain, drink tea, play boxing, read, and educate their children and grandchildren.

Zhou Lang began to enter a semi-retired state, and the attitude of the transfer of imperial power was very clear, for the domestic side, everyone saw the smooth handover, and felt steady, but for foreign countries, Western countries suddenly found that it became difficult to deal with the Chinese regime. The crown prince was far less tolerant of Western countries than the old emperors.

The old emperor was more receptive to the bargaining of Western countries and tolerated provocations and confrontation with the British, but the crown prince was more willing to adopt a confrontational situation.

After the end of the Russo-Austrian war, Western countries found that although the crown prince, like his predecessors in China, was not overly concerned about interests, he began to intensify confrontation in specific policies.

Some countries that have imposed high tariffs on Chinese products but have been able to freely enter the Chinese market are suddenly faced with such a dilemma: either to abandon the Chinese market and continue to maintain tariff barriers, or to liberalize tariff barriers in exchange for the Chinese market.

Among them, the mercantilist countries of Russia, Prussia, and Austria bear the brunt!