Zhou Lang wanted to support France, but the French wanted to end their alliance with China.

The French ambassador personally submitted the notice of the end of the alliance to the Imperial Court, clearly telling China that because of the current situation of France, it was no longer able to maintain the alliance with China, so it had no choice but to suspend the alliance, and that the previous alliance treaty signed between China and the French Empire was null and void, but hoped to continue to maintain normal diplomatic relations between the French Republic and China.

After the news of France's betrayal of the alliance was announced, it did not arouse criticism from public opinion, because China was not able to support France in time in this Franco-Prussian War. Although the Franco-Prussian War was not part of the Sino-French alliance, and was not China's breach of the alliance, it was generally recognized that if China had given France some aid earlier, France would not have suffered such a miserable defeat.

Chinese literati love to discuss current affairs and politics, and the literati who think about the country and the world have written articles in newspapers criticizing the parliament.

The level of political commentators may not be high, but under their analysis, the basic international situation still gives the majority of readers a clearer understanding of the global competition between China and the United Kingdom, although everyone is proud to believe that China can defeat Britain independently even without allies, but it is better to have allies than no allies. The reason why China has not been able to defeat Britain is not because of its strength, but because it is too far away. Therefore, it is of great significance for China to co-opt an ally near the UK. However, the only Western ally, a major Western power that has maintained long-term friendly relations, has severed its alliance with China because of China's failure to help, which has to be said to be a loss.

In addition, the government's sluggishness to intervene in Japan's civil war has also led to public opinion criticism of the current system.

On the one hand, it was consciously promoted by the government, and on the other hand, it was fueled by literati groups who were similar to the ideology of the bureaucracy, making the parliamentary system the focus of public criticism.

There is a lot of evidence, especially for people's hearts, that the parliamentary system is a Western import, and from beginning to end, it has not been accepted by the literati community, believing that this is to imitate the Western Yi and change the Xia with Yi.

There has always been no unity within the parliament, and there has never been a single voice, but there has been infighting.

The gangs, chambers of commerce and trade unions, although not the largest in parliament, are the main force in parliament.

After the economic crisis, syndicated capital emerged in China.

The so-called syndicated capital is the capital that controls the workers' organization and runs the industry. This is true of trade unions, as well as of chambers of commerce and gangs. They are all mixed with each other, and they all infiltrate each other's fields, and the union members may not all work in the factories run by the union, especially outside Songjiang Prefecture, where the union capital is still basically blank. But the capitalization of gangs and chambers of commerce is very serious, and the chambers of commerce, needless to say, are a group of capitalists, of which the factory owners are an important force. The gangs, however, have a long tradition of operating docks, inns, and transportation. During the industrial age, they took the opportunity to infiltrate industry, building a number of textile mills, machine factories and even shipyards.

Originally, this kind of common group capital, the gang force was the first to be formed and the best developed. But when the unions began to own their own industries and the chambers of commerce began to have stronger control over workers' organizations, the gangs began to suffer on both fronts.

In times of economic crisis, trade unions began to rebound from the bottom. Because they got a number of bankrupt factories and quickly resumed production. As the president of the Songjiang trade union said, in production, it is not the emperor's turn to teach them. They have all kinds of talents, and production resumes quickly. After production resumes, there are products for sale, and there is always some profit. Their products are not bad and quickly squeeze into the market.

After they had some gains, they used them to do things they wanted to do before, but couldn't. They built welfare shops in factories to wholesale goods from the outside and sell them to their workers at the original price. They really treat their workers as brothers, and their leaders are not greedy or profit-seeking, but only the happiness of their employees. This allowed them to quickly attract a large number of workers who had not fared well during the economic crisis, and even those who had returned to work in the gang and chamber of commerce industries at the cost of lower wages.

The number of unions climbed rapidly and production continued to expand. Fortunately, the economic crisis has gradually passed, and their products have always found a market. So they are more attractive to the workers, they don't exploit the workers than the due-paying gangs, and they don't exploit the workers compared to the wage-pushing chambers. Most of the profits were distributed to the workers. And they treat everyone as brothers, no matter if they come first and come first, as long as they join the union, they have a benefit. This allowed the trade unions to thrive, quickly recovering to 100,000, 200,000, and 300,000 in the first year after the economic crisis.

The number of new members was partly from workers returning from the countryside, and most were laborers drawn from gangs and chambers of commerce. This is when the trouble comes, after the economic crisis, the market turns to growth, prices rise, sales rise, which means that profits rise, and at this time raising workers is no longer a burden, but a profitable thing. But a large number of poor workers switched from gangs and chambers of commerce to trade unions, and the chambers of commerce, fortunately, said that the gangs, accustomed to indiscriminate methods, began to hire people to threaten and beat these workers.

The trade unions immediately took action, suing the officials and protecting the protection of the workers, and the establishment of workers' security teams, and there were many armed clashes between the two sides. The government attaches great importance to this kind of thing, and after investigation and verification, the gang provoked the front, and immediately arrested a group of gang leaders, exiled those who were exiled, and those who were imprisoned.

If the government does not perform this kind of duty, it will be like in history, the workers will start to organize workers' pickets, the chambers of commerce will form merchant groups, and the gangs will be composed of some violent elements, because the people will not be protected by security, they will arm themselves.

Because of the government's intervention and the use of the law as a guide, anyone who uses force will die, and the result is that the gang suffered a heavy blow in this wave of conflicts for workers, and Zhou Lichun, the leader of the Little Knife Society, was arrested and exiled to Africa, and his daughter Zhou Xiuying continued to lead.

This brought the violent clashes over the struggle for workers to an abrupt end in the first place. The only way to attract workers is to raise wages and increase benefits.

In terms of raising wages, the chamber of commerce with strong capital strength has an absolute advantage, and in terms of increasing welfare, the trade union organizations that are heart-to-heart with the workers have a natural advantage. The gangs began to decline, their members were lost, they were in conflict with the unions, they were asking for dues, they were in conflict with the chambers of commerce.

The Chamber of Commerce needed workers, and in addition to open recruitment, it commissioned these gangs to recruit workers, and even worked with them in the past to get them to help manage the workers, because the threat and intimidation of the gangs used to be useful. Of course, there is some price to pay, each workers' gang will take a cut, when the market is bad, it will be drawn from the workers, and when the market is good, it will be paid by the enterprise, which is called a commission, but it is also a normal income. But now the business owners are organized, and they control a group of non-local workers through the Chamber of Commerce. When the economic conditions were good, they faced pressure to raise wages, but they found that some of the raised wages were taken away by the gangs, because some workers were forced to join the gangs.

In the past, the merchants would not have cared about these things, and the workers were sheep to them and the gangs, sheep that they could knock out their bones and suck the marrow. But now there's a union, it's a spoiler, and the workers are running to join the union, and the union will protect them. Entrepreneurs are faced with either watching the workers in their factories become union members or protecting them from the gangs.

The factory owners intervened through the Chamber of Commerce and negotiated with the gang forces to get them out of their factories or face lawsuits. The gang has a bad reputation, and it always loses lawsuits. In just a year or two, the gangs either turned to the right track, or disappeared, disbanded, or reverted to the old days of secret societies. Gangs, as a historical imprint, have completely disappeared from the increasingly regulated urban order.

Of course, those people in the gang are still there, and the gang organization is even there, but it has been transformed, and the larger the gang, the more actively they change their identity, because their leaders have entered the councils at all levels, and have become figures with heads and faces, and they are eager to clean up the black background, so they have become such and such a company, not such and such a gang, such and such a association.

Under the dual effect of internal and external factors, the speed at which traditional gangs withdrew from their public activities was faster than the encirclement and suppression of any dynasty, and the desire to enter the house in the hearts of the gang forces themselves was far greater than the suppression of any political force.

The new gangs abandoned the name of the gang, and they joined the Chamber of Commerce instead, joining various merchant guilds as factory owners and merchants.

Then the two sides in the political struggle of the city became the trade unions and the chambers of commerce. The difference in the fundamental interests of both parties makes them focus on different aspects of their business. Although the chambers of commerce also co-opt workers through organizations such as hometown associations, they are themselves profit-driven, and they have little direct incentive to improve the situation of workers. Although the trade unions also started to run industries, the purpose of their operations was to improve the condition of workers, and even to attract workers.

As a result, the trade unions have been infiltrating the chamber of commerce, and they have developed branches in the townspeople's associations. The Chamber of Commerce is desperately trying to squeeze them out, expelling workers who join the union. On the one hand, the trade unions placed these workers in their own industrial headquarters, and on the other hand, they organized and other means to confront the capitalist groups of the chamber of commerce.

The struggle in parliament is becoming increasingly fierce, and they all want to introduce policies that are beneficial to them. The trade unions want to enact a law that makes it illegal for capitalists to use labor at will, and the chamber of commerce wants to introduce a law that makes it illegal to work at will.

The bureaucracy, on the other hand, uses power to refrain from interfering in the struggle between the two parties, confined their struggle to the interior of Parliament, and at the same time strictly controls the violent conflict caused by the work. On the other hand, it co-opted the gentry class and firmly controlled the major policies.

The tripartite forces began to grasp the know-how of parliamentary struggle, and the parliamentary system slowly began to mature in an order where the rule of law did not collapse.

The bureaucracy was the most mature, with the most political experience, a scheming emperor who was even more sophisticated in balancing measures, and who succeeded in strengthening the freedom of the imperial and executive powers in the diplomatic and military spheres when all parties were fighting over interests.

Taking advantage of the general environment of public criticism of the inefficiency of the parliamentary system, the emergency regulations law was finally passed in the parliament, stipulating that in cases related to the national security of the country and its allies, the approval of the parliament is not required, and the cabinet only needs to agree, and the emperor can directly use military force.

But this could no longer save the Sino-French alliance, and the emperor's efforts were to hold a meeting with the French ambassador.