A few years ago, Daming experienced the first capitalist-style economic crisis in the history of the country, the economic crisis is not a good thing, it makes people feel painful and desperate, and the society is full of pessimism, which is also in Daming. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

However, the economic crisis in the Ming Dynasty was mainly concentrated in two major industries, raw silk and tea, because these two industries have been seriously overproduced. During the economic crisis, there was also a Western-style annexation phenomenon, especially tea, due to the decline in exports, large capitalist tea gardens began to turn to domestic sales, further squeezed small and medium-sized tea gardens in trouble, a large number of tea farmers went bankrupt, and many large tea gardens took the opportunity to merge small tea gardens. Tea production began to transform on a large scale.

The raw silk industry is another characteristic, because the Ming Dynasty silk industry has a special situation, that is, the silk reeling factory is mostly founded by the landlord squire, the squire Chen Qiyuan is born in the main way to promote the silk reeling industry is to encourage the gentry class to set up factories, as a result, a large number of silk reeling factories were founded in the countryside, the development of this industry is the same as tea, and did not bring the result of urbanization, but a kind of rural industrialization.

The advantage of rural industrialization is that more farmers can see the industrial mode of production, so that industry affects more people, everyone is familiar with it, adapt to industrialization, and they are not afraid, so after these two industries developed, the industrialization of other industries in the Ming Dynasty began to break out, because people no longer resisted.

However, in terms of efficiency, rural industrialization really cannot be compared with urban industry, most of the gentry enterprises are small, mainly processing local raw materials, small scale, small ability to resist risks, coupled with the stability and conservatism of the clan, resulting in a unique industrial phenomenon in China, that is, leasing factories.

The clans and landlords saw the factory as a living-interest industry, and more and more the landlord-gentry withdrew from production themselves, renting out the enterprise to the merchants.

As a result, the originally cultivated class of industrial gentry was deindustrialized on a large scale, and they finally did not transform into the same class as the German Junkers capital and the British new aristocracy or the Japanese samurai chaebol as Zhu Jinglun envisioned.

They know industry, they understand industry, they participate in industry, but they participate by renting out factories, just as they rent out land, and they become the rentier class of industry.

This situation has become very common, and new statistics show that 70% of factories in Guangdong are already rented. This meant that the vast majority of the gentry class had withdrawn from direct industrial production. The transformation of the gentry class into the industrial class failed.

Zhu Jinglun is worried about the social impact of the withdrawal of the gentry class, which is the backbone of traditional society, from industrialization. In fact, the gentry's withdrawal from industrialization brought about the short-term nature of industrial production, and the reason why the later industrial development of Germany and Japan was remarkable was mainly because the Junker landlords and samurai chaebols who dominated their industries pursued long-term profits, and family-style industries tended to pay more attention to continuity than to blindly pursue high profits.

Instead of tying his family to industry, the squire built a factory and leased it to merchants along with the land along with it. Businessmen have the habit of pursuing short-term profits, and the factories and land are rented, they are even less willing to make continuous investment, just as it is impossible to rent someone else's house for fine decoration, and it is impossible for businessmen to cherish the equipment of the factory, let alone replace it with new equipment with their own profits, they often squeeze out the factory in the short term, and then switch to the more profitable industry.

This phenomenon made Zhu Jinglun very depressed, but he no longer planned to introduce a policy, because the policy encouraged a large number of squires to set up factories, but in the end it returned to the hands of businessmen, who knows what distorted results will be brought about by policy intervention, since the power of capital has been formed, the culture of capital has appeared, and the industrial revolution has arrived, then let capital go to the market to play.

The economic crisis that began in 1883 finally ended in 1886, the year of the Ming war with France, and the world market began to recover.

Due to the war with France, the recovery of the Ming silk industry was slow, because France was the largest importer of raw silk in the Ming Dynasty, but the recovery of the international market and the improvement of consumption capacity still affected the capital of the Ming Dynasty, and the largest raw silk importer went to war with the Ming Dynasty, but the largest silk consumer Britain and the United States had a good relationship with the Ming Dynasty, and the silk weaving industry of the Ming Dynasty began to develop, so the silk reeling industry was exported to domestic sales, and a large number of raw silk was transferred to domestic processing and production, and then exported to Britain and the United States.

New raw silk production methods have also begun to appear, and there are more reeling factories similar to Hu Xueyan's investment, which greatly improves the uniformity of raw silk.

This reeling industry, like the weaving industry, is easier to concentrate because their raw material is not cocoons but raw silk, which is more convenient to transport, so it is concentrated in large quantities in cities. The Ming government centralized the management of the port and carried out unified planning, which not only greatly improved the infrastructure, but also planned the industrial zone in accordance with the latest Western ideas, attracted investment, and gave preferential policies, which greatly promoted industrialization.

After the reeling industry and the weaving industry began to concentrate on the city, as their raw material suppliers, the silk reeling factory also began to relocate, and the large silk reeling factory began to increase, they concentrated on investing in the construction of cocoon storage facilities, getting rid of the restrictions on the supply of silkworm cocoons, if this kind of facility is built by a small rural factory, it will not be able to recover the cost at all, but if it is concentrated in the city with convenient transportation, the scale of the enterprise with more than 800 people, it will be greatly profitable, and the scale benefit makes up for the additional cost of the cocoon storage facility. Moreover, the timeliness of silkworm production has been greatly reduced, and the cocoons in reserve allow the factory to have enough raw materials available even in winter.

Similar to the reeling industry and the weaving industry, other industries are also being developed in the city.

For example, the cotton textile industry has relied on cities from the very beginning.

The textile industry did not suffer from the impact of the war on the raw silk industry, because the Ming Dynasty is mainly an importer of cotton textiles, the significance of the cotton textile industry is to replace imports, during the economic crisis, the cotton textile industry was suppressed by the dumping of textiles from the United Kingdom, but after the end of the economic crisis, the potential of the cotton textile industry immediately burst out.

Unlike the investors in the silk reeling industry, which are mainly landlords and gentry, the investors in the cotton spinning industry are mainly compradors, who are more internationally unemployed, and most of them have entered foreign companies as apprentices, and climbed to the status of compradors step by step.

The most important thing is that they have capital, and ordinary foreign apprentices are very poor, but once they stand out and become big compradors, their income is quite rich, and some compradors' income can even compete with foreign companies.

When these people start to invest the capital they have accumulated in cooperation with foreigners and start investing in new industries, the power that will burst out cannot be underestimated. Moreover, they began to develop into giants, and many compradors went directly to visit large factories abroad, and were deeply inspired or tempted by the interests of the most advanced foreign factories to be introduced into the country in complete sets. In just a few years, Daming's cotton yarn industry has increased tenfold, but it is still an importing country, and there is still a lot of room for development.

These industrial enterprises provide rich tax revenues, and after Hurd's tax adjustment, the tax payment of industrial enterprises has reached more than 20 million taels, becoming a single tax second only to consumption tax, of course, the temporary concubinage tax is not included, which is the first major tax.

Compared with light industries such as silk reeling and textiles, the heavy industry of the Ming Dynasty is in a state of deformed development.

Unlike light industry, which endured two industrial crises, heavy industry, represented by the arsenal, was hardly hit by the economic crisis, because the wars, whether it was the war of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom or the war between the Ming Dynasty and France, happened to occur during the economic crisis.

The war brought great dividends to heavy industry, and during the war, instead of shrinking, heavy industry grabbed huge profits and expanded by a large margin.

As the largest machinery industry enterprise, the number of workers in the arsenal has reached 200,000, and it is still growing by 20,000 to 30,000 every year.

The expansion of the leading enterprise of the arsenal has made the machinery industry as a whole show a growth trend, but the entire industry is too concentrated, and small and medium-sized enterprises have been greatly suppressed and have never been able to develop, forming a monopoly giant such as the arsenal, and a large number of small workshops that can only repair equipment for a living coexist, and there is a serious lack of deformity in the middle of the medium-sized specialized factory.

This industrial form is obviously caused by an abnormal development trajectory and is not a benign industrial system.

In fact, the shipbuilding industry also has this phenomenon, stimulated by war, disaster relief, etc., suddenly skyrocketing, and then falling into a crisis of surplus. But in general, the shipbuilding industry is large and small, and has a complete ecosystem. Large factories include arsenal shipyards, shipyards of Tongwenxing, medium-sized ones such as Chen Liantai, private machinery enterprise capital, Fuzhou shipyards, joint venture shipyards of Jardine Matheson, and small ones have a large number of shipyards that rely on port contracting and maintenance of ship business, and the ecological system is relatively complete.

Another industry, which is more concentrated than the machinery industry, is the railway industry. Daming Railway Company, as a special effect railway company strongly supported by the government, is the only company that has a monopoly on the railway business. Since Tang Tingshu presided over the company, it has used the capital market to raise funds and expand on a large scale. The intensive construction of the Guangzhou-Shanghai railway, Guangzhou-Guilin, Guangzhou-Nanning railway, even during the economic crisis, did not stop the pace of expansion, because for a country with a serious lack of transportation facilities, the railway industry brought a hundredfold increase in transportation efficiency, can fully withstand the impact of the economic crisis on the decline in freight traffic.

The Guangzhou-Guilin railway has been completed. During the war, a large number of European and Indian goods entered the Ming Dynasty from the railway, and the Ming goods entered the Indian Ocean from the railway, making the benefits of the railway amazing. The annual profit is as high as more than two million taels of silver, and this is still in the case of sharing with the British Railway. The railway from Guangzhou to Shanghai has been built for eight years and will be opened to traffic this year.

The reason why the route of more than 1,200 kilometers from Guangzhou to Shanghai took eight years to build cannot be said that the economic crisis had no impact on the construction of the railway, but it also has a great deal to do with Tang Tingshu's business philosophy.

For example, the first section of construction was not from Kowloon to Fujian, but the section between Ningbo and Hangzhou, Shanghai and Hangzhou, and from Jiujiang to Wuhan.

However, in the mountainous section of the Fujian section, the mountainous section of northern Guangdong, the construction is very slow, because the investment cost here is large, the expected income is low, so it is not until the Shanghai-Hangzhou section, the Hangzhou-Ningbo section, the Jianghan section are opened to traffic, the construction of the section railway connecting Fuzhou, Xiamen and other ports began, after the construction of these port railways, the construction of the mountainous section of the road finally began.

This kind of business idea has minimized the cost of railway construction and maximized profits, but the construction speed has been greatly reduced.

After 1886, the economic crisis ended, and the construction of railways around the world increased again. Between 1885 and 1892, 190,000 kilometers of railway lines were built worldwide, twice as many as at the last peak. Among them, the United States has built 75,000 kilometers of railways, half of which is more than the last railway boom.

However, the speed of construction of the Daming Railway is not as fast as the speed during the disaster relief, and the total mileage built is only 3,000 kilometers, far below the world average speed, let alone compared with the United States.

Moreover, although Tang Tingshu was in charge of the railway company, and the operating performance of the railway company was quite good, he himself did not seem to value the shares of the railway company, and he invested a large amount of capital in other industries, relying on the railway company He developed a large number of minerals in Henan and Shanxi, and the relationship with Li Hongzhang and other Western-style ministers gave him a political backstage for his mining business, and at the same time gave these backstage a large number of shares and dividends.

He invested in the cotton yarn industry in Dongguan and has become the largest cotton yarn enterprise in the local area. Compared with the railway industry, which has a long fixed investment cycle and slow results, he obviously prefers light industry, which is a short-term flat and fast industry with small investment and quick results.

So he did not increase his shares in the railway company, but also through the issuance of new shares again and again to raise funds, reduce his shares, at present, Tang Tingshu's shares in the railway company, has dropped to half of the shares, but he is still the largest individual shareholder, is still the president of the railway company.

The stake in the railroad company may be a seeker for control rather than an expected gain. By taking control of the railways, he created an industrial group that operated around the railway business in the form of minerals and light textiles. In fact, Tang Tingshu has transformed from a big comprador to a corporate consortium by operating railways.

Moreover, Tang Tingshu's corporate consortium is still expanding new projects, and steelmaking and shipping are his next targets.