The last direction of this round of reform is military reform. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info

The original purpose of their last military reform was to establish a compulsory military service system, but the Ming Dynasty's population of 80 million at that time will inevitably exceed 100 million now, because Zhejiang, with a population of more than 10 million, and Yunnan, with a population of 4 or 5 million, will soon be incorporated into the territory of the Ming Dynasty.

100 million people, and after the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom wars, the old, weak, sick and disabled were naturally eliminated, and the 100 million people, mainly young people, under such a population structure and scale, to carry out compulsory military service, what a huge army must be formed.

Therefore, Zhu Jinglun always believes that the population size of the Ming Dynasty is not suitable for compulsory military service at all, but should mainly adopt the conscription system.

When the salaries of the army are not low, the enthusiasm of young people to serve in the army is very high, and there is no shortage of soldiers in the recruitment system.

Therefore, this military reform can even be said to be a reform, because it does not involve fundamental changes in the system, but only a quantitative expansion of the current military system.

The goal of the expansion is to expand the regular army to 300,000 and the reserve force to 700,000, and has been mobilized to form an army capable of 1 million.

Preparations for various reforms continued in the autumn, and various measures were finally introduced before the end of the year.

Obviously, these measures are not likely to have an immediate effect, but the economic performance of the Ming Dynasty has indeed begun to improve, and it is clear that this is the impact of the improvement of the world economy.

In the past five years, the growth of these two major export products has almost come to a standstill, with the export value of raw silk increasing by only 10 percent, while tea exports have only risen by 5 percent.

Due to the weakness of the silk tea trade, the import and export growth of the Ming Dynasty in recent years has also been very slow, only from 80 million taels to 100 million taels, and due to the surge in imported steel, the growth rate of imports is much higher than the growth of exports, last year's exports were only 62 million taels, and imports reached more than 74 million taels, which has not yet counted grain imports, otherwise the trade deficit has to be calculated with one billion taels.

The first reason for the decline of the Ming raw silk industry in the past two years is, of course, the economic crisis, the people affected by the economic crisis, mainly the urban middle class, whether it is China itself, or the Western market, the consumption of silk can not be the farmers in the countryside, but the middle class who know how to pursue the quality of life, it is precisely because of industrialization that the vast middle class in the West has long made raw silk a bulk trade product. Before the Industrial Revolution, China's raw silk exports were calculated at most 1,000 quintals, but now it is 100,000 quintals.

The second reason is that Ming merchants opened a large number of machine silk reeling factories in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, which greatly improved the quality of raw silk in the Jiangnan region, swept the Western market at the same time, in fact, also squeezed the export share of Ming raw silk. Therefore, in recent years, the raw silk industry has been struggling, and exports have not been able to expand.

But on the whole, it is beneficial to the capital accumulation of the Ming raw silk industry, because the monopoly on the production of raw silk in Jiangnan and machinery is far better than the profit of opening a silk reeling industry in the Ming Dynasty. Jiangnan silkworm cocoons have excellent quality and unique advantages created by the climate, which cannot be surpassed by competitors in the short term. However, Jiangnan raw silk is mainly a handmade product, and there is an uneven dead hole, so the price is very disadvantaged.

As a result, Westerners were able to reprocess the raw silk from Jiangnan and make a lot of profits. The French recorded that "ordinary white silk in Lyon is worth 47 francs per kilogram, while recoiling silk (i.e., a product that is processed and re-shaken by ordinary silk) is worth 63 francs".

Chen Chi, a literati of the Qing Dynasty Restoration, wrote in his 1896 book "The Policy of Continuing to Enrich the Country": "China's export of raw silk, each bag of 100 yuan, is only worth more than 300 gold, Shanghai Westerners set up a silk reeling factory, buy Chinese silkworm cocoons, with machine reeling, each package is worth more than 700 gold, the difference between high and low, China's lake silk export for two or three hundred years, each port of trade for 60 or 70 years, Shanghai Westerners set up a machine silk reeling factory also for one or 20 years...... That is, to collect more than 700 gold per package, there are still people in China who care? ”

Now Daming silk reeling capital has entered Jiangnan, in fact, it is to replace the later foreigners, especially the Japanese, who set up a silk reeling factory in Shanghai and began to grab excess profits.

At present, the silk reeling industry founded by Daming in Jiangsu and Zhejiang has accounted for half of the raw silk output in Jiangnan, but the profit level is more than twice that of soil silk, almost half of the profit.

And greatly promote the export of raw silk in the south of the Yangtze River, last year the export of raw silk reached 40,000 bales, the price reached 4501 bales, the profit was as high as 200 taels, half of which was occupied by Ming merchants, and they earned a profit of 4 million taels.

However, the export of Guangdong raw silk was squeezed only 60,000 bales, each package is exactly one load, and the price of Guangdong raw silk on the exchange has always been much lower than that of Jiangsu and Zhejiang raw silk, and the price of Jiangsu and Zhejiang raw silk last year was 450 taels, which was 780 taels higher than that of Guangdong raw silk.

That all started to change this year.

Before the low price of silk, so that the entire silk reeling industry has become difficult, but the most difficult is the handmade reeling, even after so many years of development, the raw silk industry in the eastern region is still half of the use of manual reeling, machine reeling silk is mainly concentrated in the three places of dense silkworm production in Nanfanshun, and in other sporadic distribution of silkworm breeding areas, manual production accounts for the vast majority. With the continued downturn in the market, especially in the past few years, the price of silk has been hovering below 400 taels. As a result, manual production came to a standstill, but it promoted the spread of machine production.

To this year, there have been seventy percent of the raw silk production using machine production, the newspaper described the machine reeling silk, the machine silk "moving and slippery, uniform and white", "but the cost of the steam engine is complicated, but the silk is soft and the value is high, its method is excellent, its benefits are especially huge", the price of factory silk in the market is about one-third higher than that of soil silk (handmade silk), in the early years following the opening of the Changlong silk reeling factory, "the period of heavy profits", it is simply a huge profit.

It is precisely because of the promotion of machine silk reeling that Daming raw silk has always occupied a considerable market share in the economic crisis, and has opened a brand in the West.

Since last year, the price of raw silk and the number of exports began to grow rapidly, at first because of the failure of the Italian silk harvest from 1876 to 1877, which caused the price of silk to soar, and the price of Jili Lake silk even doubled, as high as seven or eight hundred taels of silver, and at the same time, the export of raw silk of the Ming Dynasty also soared by one percent.

No one expected that this year's market continued to be optimistic, the first half of the year was the Hunan army into the Jiangnan region, resulting in the production of raw silk in Jiangnan was hit, raw silk squeezed and could not be shipped out, so that the export scale of Daming raw silk continued to expand, and the price finally rose to four hundred taels, the second half of the year is because of the recovery of the international economy, coupled with the continuous expansion of the capacity of the disaster relief railway, began to transport raw materials such as raw silk of Daming to the disaster area, so that the victims began to produce handmade silk.

These are good, so that the Ming silk reeling industry finally began to recover strongly, only in October, has completed the output of last year's whole year, the next autumn and winter, this is the peak season of Daming silk, it is possible to produce and sell two booms, and even this year is expected to export more than 80,000 quintals.

Under the stimulus of the good news, the capitalists who have accumulated capital over the years, especially the giants such as Rongji, who built factories in the Jiangnan area, have begun to build and expand new factories, and the economic crisis in the raw silk industry has been the first to survive.

In addition to the raw silk industry, as if the better, in the second half of this year, private investment began to surge, the technical barriers in the field of heavy industry are too high, so private capital is mainly concentrated in the field of light industry, not only the development of the silk reeling industry has grown again, in the paper industry, sugar industry, have set off a boom in the use of machine production.

But what Zhu Jinglun paid the most attention to was the sudden change in two industries, one was the soap industry.

The significance of this industry lies in the fact that it is the chemical industry, which is an absolute knowledge-intensive industry at this time, and the chemical industry is one of the main forces of the second industrial revolution.

However, like many other industries, the first to introduce the soap industry to Daming were Westerners.

China's local soap production, from the Tang Dynasty bath beans development, to the Song Dynasty has appeared square soap products, but after the technology has changed very little, the Ming Dynasty traditional soap, is still mainly the use of the Song Dynasty on the basic fixed formula, with honey locust grinding into powder, with pig pancreas grinding, add some sugar, and add different spices according to preferences, and finally with pork glued together, pressed into squares, because the production of this traditional soap, the main raw material is pig pancreas, so the common people call it pancreas.

The most fundamental difference between modern soap and traditional Chinese pancreas is that modern production has undergone a chemical reaction, and it can also be produced on a large scale, because compared with the raw materials of honey locust and pig pancreas, the raw material fat of the soap industry is easier to store and transport, so it can be processed and produced on a large scale, and the efficiency is greatly improved.

The first to introduce the soap industry, it is the famous Nobel, not that Nobel is tired of making gunpowder, and intends to open up a new production line, but because Daming is a country with weak basic industry, Nobel wants to produce explosives, one of the most important raw materials, glycerin, is a by-product of the soap industry, so Nobel built a soap factory to provide raw materials for his own factory, as for profits, Nobel really looks down on it, because the profits of what industry cannot be compared with gunpowder.

In fact, it was Nobel who encouraged some of his employees to invest in factories, and opened the first few soap factories, Nobel just wanted to get cheap raw materials, so he was happy to let some employees go out to start a business, and he even gave them back the first investment.

Nobel's gunpowder business has been lucrative in recent years, and as his gunpowder business grew, so did the soap industry.

The other industry is not a new industry, but the textile industry. But Zhu Jinglun also attaches great importance to it, and even attaches more importance to it, because the labor-intensive industry of the textile industry is probably the sharpest weapon of industrialization, because he can solve the employment problem to the greatest extent, so that more farmers can become the urban middle class, and this class will drive a huge domestic market.