If there is any possibility, within thirty years, Zhu Jinglun does not want to provoke the British, because this is the Victorian era, this is the era of the British, and it is not a wise move for anyone, any country to challenge the British Empire in this era. Pen ~ fun ~ pavilion www.biquge.info

However, it was difficult for Zhu Jinglun to accept the evil of human nature in the coolie trade, especially the shame contained in it, which made it even more intolerable for him, a person with the inviolable sense of dignity of the old era of New China.

When it comes to coolie trade, what the younger generations of later generations think of may only be limited to the ultra-high mortality rate of the bilge of long-distance cruise ships, only limited to the bones of Chinese under the sleepers of American railroads, and even thanks to some beautified film and television dramas, the coolie trade in the eyes of many people is probably the mighty South Seas, a beautiful story of a self-made giant, and the legend of San Francisco's heroism Huang Feihong.

People who can put themselves in this era, ordinary people who have really fallen into the situation of coolies, they can't feel half of the romantic atmosphere in film and television dramas at all, they only feel fear, only despair.

In later generations, even in the country's propaganda, the South Seas had a positive color, describing this historical event as a spiritual symbol of the Chinese's struggle overseas, but the Chinese are the most homesick people, people leave their hometowns, but those who have some means, who wants to go to a strange place far from home.

The coolies were the most helpless of them, some of them sold their future, even their lives, with only a few pieces of ocean, and then they were stuffed into the filthy cabin like garbage, without even room to stretch their feet, all the way to the mines of the South Seas, working day and night, enduring whipping and heavy hard labor, most of them entered the mines, and never came out again.

In contrast, because the Chinese have been deeply cultivated for hundreds of years, even thousands of years, and they have come to this land longer than the Western colonizers, they still have some dependence, and some of them really have a chance to regain their freedom after the end of the hard labor period. The coolies who are trafficked to the Americas, especially Central and South America, have little way to live. They work in manure farms in Peru, where the filthy air prematurely erodes their health. Working on plantations in Cuba was often tortured and often whipped to death by coolies.

In this era, it seems that "Catholics are morally inferior", as described by the religious countries of Britain, the United States and Northwest Europe, the Catholic Portugal and Spain are full of sins in human history, the Indians of the Americas are almost as extinct as the Spaniards, and the Portuguese are not a good thing.

The first country to start the coolie trade in China was the small country of Portugal, who defrauded Macao from the Ming Dynasty and then used it as a base to start harming this simple country and its simple people.

In the records of the British, as early as the 14th year of the Ming Dynasty (1519), the Portuguese began to abduct children (many of whom were from famous families) to India to be sold as slaves...... Most of these Chinese slaves and domestic servants were abducted from the village by swindlers and sold to the Portuguese when they were young. …… The average price of abducted children is 12 taels to 16 taels of silver, and most of them are Cantonese.

The Ming court has repeatedly ordered the prohibition of human trafficking, and in the forty-second year of Wanli (1614), it was stipulated that "the purchase of human beings is prohibited." All new and old merchants are not allowed to buy the children of the Tang people, and if there is any reason to violate the sense of cowardice and lawlessness, they will be investigated according to their names and still punished for crimes. ”

In the Qing Dynasty, restrictions continued to be restricted, and in the fourteenth year of Qianlong in the Qing Dynasty (1749), the government ordered: "It is forbidden to sell children." Those who sell children in Australia Huayi shall be investigated separately according to the detailed regulations set in the ninth year of Qianlong. ”

But the Portuguese colonists turned a deaf ear to this. After the end of the 18th century, with the need to develop the American colonies, they intensified the development of coolie trade in Macao. In the fifteenth year of Jiaqing in the Qing Dynasty (1810), the Portuguese plundered hundreds of coolies from Macao and transported them to Brazil to grow tea, and all of them died soon after.

Even Portuguese missionary bishops in Macao were directly involved in the trafficking of the Chinese population, abducting Chinese women for training and then sending them to Goa for slavery by the colonizers, serving as slaves as women in India and other countries.

The Spanish did not do much evil in the early coolie trade, but it was not that they did not want to do evil, but they did not have the opportunity, they failed to gain a foothold in China, but they did not do much in the slave trade, and at the same time, the Spanish people slaughtered the most Chinese.

When the glorious era of these two small countries ended, they still did not stop harming the Chinese, and their colonial descendants, the lords of the estates in Central and South America, were the main force that enslaved the Chinese.

In contrast, the situation of the Chinese coolies in the British and American colonies was relatively better, at least not so gloomy. For example, although the Americans served Chinese laborers, there were few whipping overseers in South American plantations. But this is not an America built by Americans with high morals, exiles and scum, and there is no sense of morality. It's just that their economic model dictates that the Chinese workers on the West Coast of the United States are mainly hired laborers, and the Americans pay them wages and do not need to be whipped, and these hard-working Chinese workers can work honestly.

However, the American capitalists are absolutely not so merciful to the workers, especially the Chinese laborers, although they are better than the plantation owners, and will not whip or even torture them at every turn, but they adopt deceptive means, such as letting the Chinese workers do the most dangerous work that no white man is willing to do, including the work of planting the extremely dangerous nitroglycerin explosives, the work of detonating it, etc., so the mortality rate of Chinese laborers in the Americas is so high that it is depicted as the body of a Chinese laborer buried under every sleeper.

Zhu Jinglun has seen some people in later generations, even if they know what happened to the Chinese workers, they only lament twice, and they are not very painful, Zhu Jinglun does not think that they are ignoring history, Zhu Jinglun thinks, I am afraid that these people have not experienced the shame of the coolie trade at all.

As a historical phenomenon, the coolie trade has been around for a long time, but it is not for nothing that it suddenly broke out after the Opium Wars.

The general historical background is that from the 1830s, Western countries began to set off a mighty abolition movement, some social elites with human conscience, began to fiercely criticize this kind of trade that destroys human nature, and finally Britain abolished the slave trade in 1833, and sent warships to fight the slave trade all over the world.

Since Britain was the hegemon of the world, their actions had a driving effect, and with naval blows, countries slowly began to abolish slavery, and the former Spanish colonies of Gran Colombia (Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela) gradually emancipated slaves from 1821 and all of them in 1854. Chile abolished the slave trade in 1823, Mexico in 1829, France in 1848, Peru in 1851, and the Netherlands in 1863.

However, these colonies had already appeared to accumulate labor to exploit them, and the tepid Chinese coolie trade suddenly exploded as the opium war opened the country.

As long as this background is understood, all Chinese should be ashamed of this, because the coolie trade of Chinese laborers was in fact a substitute for slavery, and Chinese laborers turned out to be a substitute for African black slaves, a very symbolic historical scene fully shows this, in the large plantations of Spanish estate owners in South America, the emancipated black slaves took up the whip as overseers, and the object of their supervision was the Chinese coolies who were constantly trafficked from China.

According to some historical records, the black overseers also looked down on the Chinese workers very much, because they felt that the Chinese workers were inferior people by smoking opium, and yes, when the black people could pick up the whip and start whipping the Chinese, how could the Chinese prove that they were not inferior.

Zhu Jinglun is not a racist, he does not think that the Chinese are superior to any nation, including blacks, but he cannot agree that the Chinese are inferior to any nation, on the contrary, the Chinese should be one of the best races on the planet, not only their ancestors created a glorious ancient civilization, but also in the 21st century, Chinese by correcting historical mistakes, and began to create miracles, almost all economists believe that China will become the first country to surpass the United States economically since the 19th century.

But the glory of the ancestors is in the front, the success of the descendants is in the back, Zhu Jinglun is now living in the present, although he is full of confidence in the future, he can bear the current humiliation, but there is definitely a bottom line, he can endure the extraterritoriality insisted on by the British, he can accept the low tax rate under the oppression of the British, but he cannot accept the status quo that whites and even blacks do not treat the Chinese as people.

Therefore, even at this most inopportune time, if he wants to confront the British Empire at the peak of its glory, Zhu Jinglun has no choice, just like when he was poor and white, New China had to confront the United States imperialism, and later it had to confront Soviet Russia and the United States imperialism at the same time.

So when Zhu Jinglun returned from Beiqi and ended the military struggle with the Manchus, he began to seize the time to fight the coolie trade with all his might.

The first step was now carried out within the country, Zhu Jinglun directly signed an order declaring the coolie trade illegal, and then the police department was dispatched to immediately arrest a large number of coolie leaders who helped foreigners sell their compatriots.

At this time, arresting these people is definitely not impossible to follow, even if they break the law, although before Zhu Jinglun signed the new order, the Qing Dynasty law did not support their behavior, and even since the Ming Dynasty, their behavior is an illegal behavior, so there is absolutely a law to follow to arrest them, and it is the will of the people.

The common people really hate this kind of person!

But this kind of person is not easy to catch, because the people who dare to do this kind of business are often gang members with deep backgrounds, and they have the courage to confront the government.

But this grasp not only caught out the cancer at the bottom of the society, pulled out the radish and brought out the mud, but also involved a large number of government scandals, it turned out that the people who did this kind of immoral thing were not only the gang members composed of some outlaws, but also some officials who participated in it, and they were the umbrella of these lawbreakers.

As a result, an action to crack down on the coolie trade not only caused violent conflicts at the bottom of the society, but also armed clashes between gang members and the police and even the army almost every day, and even the officialdom was shaken for a while, and the scale of the shock was so large that Zhu Jinglun felt a little uneasy, and some high-ranking officials, even more upright officials like Chen Zhiting, wrote to Zhu Jinglun, hoping to temporarily stop the action to prevent the situation from expanding.

"Doesn't the law hold the people accountable?"

After seeing the attitude of a large group of senior officials, Zhu Jinglun couldn't help but sneer in his heart, he didn't believe that these officials were all involved, there might be one or two, but most of them should be innocent, they just wanted to calm things down.

But Zhu Jinglun really didn't want to settle the matter this time, the Chinese official has not been absolutely principled since ancient times, and in later generations, it even led to the fact that once the words of "principle" are said, it means that it can be flexible, and the word principle is used by Chinese officials in the context with the opposite meaning, I have to say that they are really too original, no wonder the people have always distrusted the official, and whatever is advocated by the official, the common people instinctively feel unreliable.

Zhu Jinglun has always been distressed that his government has no credibility, and he has a headache because the people do not trust the government, but this cannot be blamed on the people, if you want to blame the government for being too unprincipled, they are a public sector, but they cannot be selfless, so how can they have credibility?

They are not upright enough, but they can't blame their personal morality, but the long-standing practice of governance, China's officials and government have been a pragmatic and scheming government since ancient times, and their behavior is often the least harmful, not the most just, so if a person hurts the interests of a group of people, they are willing to sanction that person, but if a group of people harms the interests of a person, they are likely to settle the matter and let that person suffer, Because what damages a person is the least harmful to the government itself.

But for a long time, this kind of conspiracy method of doing things, so that the system and even the law formulated by the government itself, slowly lost its sense of majesty, since the rules can be broken at any time, can be broken by people, then who will abide by the rules, as long as everyone does not abide by it, you can boldly trample on it.

This is the case now, because the coolie trade involves too many people, so the government wants to be able to calm the people, so as not to cause harm to the government, so they can ignore the principles and ignore the law.

But Zhu Jinglun is really hard-hearted.

At the end of April, a full month after the crackdown, the biggest backlash occurred when people began to storm the Guangzhou government office, killing and wounding more than a dozen government officials, and trying to kidnap key prisoners in prison.

"Transfer the Wukeng Army back from Fujian!"

Zhu Jinglun decided to impose martial law. (To be continued.) )