Section 518 The Canal of the American Company

Britain and the United States are also "quite sincere" in saying that they are willing to take a stake in the Panama Canal, each sharing one-third of the construction cost and one-third of the shares, and jointly managing the canal with China.

They also expressed their willingness to persuade Spain to recognize the Canal Zone as a neutral zone jointly administered by China, Britain and the United States, and to resolve the legal status of the canal, because after all, China cannot always control the canal in the name of the occupied zone, and China will always have to restore peaceful relations with Spain, and then the legal status of the canal will become an unsolved case.

China did not negotiate the canal issue with Britain and the United States at all, but only replied to them that the canal belonged to the investment and management of the American Company, and was the asset of the American Company, so let them discuss it with the American Company.

Since the North American company was divested, it has slipped from the first of the four major companies to the fourth company, and only Uruguay is left in the territory, and its market value has fallen to only one-tenth of that of the first company, the European company, and finally it took ten years to build the Panama Canal, and the market value has risen sharply, and it is impossible to hand over the canal, the most valuable asset of the company.

Britain said that since the strait can be jointly managed, then there is no reason why the canal cannot be jointly managed, and the canal also has vital interests for Britain and the United States. China went on to tell the British that the Panama Canal, like the Suez Canal, was an industry run by commercial companies, and that China protected the interests of its own companies from infringement, but did not consider the Panama Canal to be the same nature as the Ottoman Strait, one natural strait and the other public works, which could not be compared.

The merchant ships of the American Company continued to sail through the Panama Canal into the Gulf of Mexico, and the cheap cotton cloth imported from China no longer had to be transshipped by rail through Jinshan City, or through Mexican territory into the Gulf of Mexico, and suddenly swept through the central part of the Americas, completely monopolizing not only the Chinese market on the west bank of the Mississippi River, but also the southern market of the United States.

Ten years ago, China and North America already had 23 million people, and at that time there were 20 million people with the United States, and the gap between the two sides was not too big. Under the influence of the war, China's unemployed urban population began to migrate to North America, and the United States stopped attracting immigrants from Europe for several years.

The population of the United States has increased from 20 million to 25 million, and the Chinese population in the Americas has soared from 20 million to 40 million. And it's government-driven, planned immigration.

In the more than ten years since Huang Qiuxian was in power, he has adopted various methods, in addition to inheriting the policy of giving land for cattle cultivation during the crown prince's era, he has also begun to set up immigration bureaus in all counties in Chinese mainland, and cooperated with the local government to encourage immigrants to operate in the Americas. Under the impact of the industrial revolution, in addition to the bankrupt peasants moving to the cities, life in the central and western regions became even more difficult. Under this peer-to-peer immigration policy, a large number of people from Shaanxi, Henan, Hunan, Hubei, and especially Sichuan, with a large population, began to enter the territory of China and the Americas.

One of the characteristics of government-organized immigration is that the resettlement of immigrants is relatively balanced. By the time of the crown prince, the land on the Mississippi River and the west coast of the Americas had been basically allocated, and Huang Qiuwei began to emigrate to the newly occupied Central South Province south of the Arkansas River, to the newly occupied land in Canada, Great Northern Province, and even in the mountainous valleys of the Rocky Mountains. This is unlikely to happen if it is driven by the economy, and the migrants must have settled along the rivers and railways.

Land alone will not have such a big effect on the attraction of labor. During the Huang Qiu period, he began to shift from land development to mineral development and transportation facilities. A large number of mining companies have been formed, and the power of these companies is not to be underestimated, they do not have access to local labor, and they also recruit workers in the country, and they have more than the government's approach, but sometimes not so legally. These companies also attracted millions of workers, miners and railroad workers, many of whom stayed after seeing the high wages in the Americas.

Another measure Huang has taken is to encourage industrial and commercial immigration, and in addition to private immigrants organized by companies such as mining companies and railway companies, Huang has also stepped up support for China's large urban population. For small merchants, the government of the Americas provides them with a shop in the city free of charge, and after ten years of operation and legal taxation, they can get the title deed in perpetuity. It also provides certain preferential loans to help them open their businesses. Many failed merchants, poor apprentices who wanted to be their own owners, were attracted to this policy, although the number was small, but there were nearly a million people. The arrival of these people greatly prospered commerce in the Americas.

As the population increases, the per capita resources fall, and the wage level in the Americas is also declining, which is not good for attracting subsequent immigrants, but it is not necessarily harmful to the development of local industries. The excessively high level of wages is based on the large-scale and extensive exploitation of resources. The decline in wages is due to the balance between the supply and demand of labor, and the era of extreme shortage has passed. Corresponding new industries emerged, and the mulberry sericulture in California on the West Bank no longer exported raw silk, but began to produce silk on a large scale, and the high-end silk fabrics could not compete with the Jiangnan region of China, but the production of low-end plain silk increased greatly here. This, combined with the long distance, allowed them to begin to gain a foothold in the American silk market. Gradually, it began to replace the cheap silk of the region.

But silk itself is still a relatively expensive fabric, even the lowest-end silk is more expensive than the best cotton, of course, the luxury goods of Nanjing cloth are not among them. However, the low-end textile industry in the Americas has finally begun to appear, in the past, in the Americas to operate the cotton textile industry, in the absence of tariff barriers, basically there is only one way to go bankrupt, not only can not compete with the local textiles, but also can not compete with the British textiles, and even the United States textiles can not compete, in the American territories, especially in the middle and upper reaches of the Mississippi River, the cotton textiles in the northeast New England region of the United States enter the Chinese American market from the Great Lakes region, and the cost and price are lower than those of China's local textiles and British textiles.

Little Rock started with Nanjing cloth and gradually developed a large steam factory, the factory here is larger and more intensive than the British textile factory, otherwise the cost can not be advantageous, using the best machines, the largest production of cotton cloth, finally opened the cotton textile industrial revolution in North America.

Little Rock's textiles not only quickly swept the Mississippi River Valley, but were also sold back to the West Bank via railroad to compete with local cotton textiles, and British and American products have long been uncompetitive.

However, the opening of the Panama Canal originally made the textile owners of Little Rock very excited, but the sudden tense Sino-US situation put them in a predicament, because the Americans refused to enter the American ports of merchant ships passing through Panama, and the products of Little Rock, which was transit through New Orleans, immediately fell into trouble.