The study of China's frontier society was not a matter of interest, nor was it because of the conversation with the Chinese consul that aroused his interest, and even if there was no conversation, he would still come to investigate, and he needed to study the military relations between China and Russia.

But with that conversation with the Chinese consul, he was better prepared and organized to observe Chinese society.

Due to the Tsar's refusal to sign, China not only did not release the Russian prisoners, but still occupies three important Russian cities: Kazan, Saratov, and Tsaritsyn.

The three cities were under military control, but Bismarck saw a flourishing business that connected the three cities by the Volga waterway, which was flanked by a large number of steamships, most of which were Chinese-run shipping companies. In these three cities, the number of Chinese is not large, only a few businessmen, and they have established chambers of commerce.

Through his connections, Bismarck found a local German merchant who had emigrated to a German family in the lower reaches of the Volga River in the time of Catherine the Great, who had a farm in the countryside and a shop in the city.

Through German merchants, Bismarck learned that the Chinese army was lax in its management. They do not directly intervene in various business activities, and their tax and other systems are copied from China, and the enforcement can be entrusted to the local chamber of commerce. Not only the Chinese chamber of commerce, but also the European chamber of commerce. The Chamber of Commerce is helping them collect their taxes. The Chamber of Commerce is also responsible for regulating commercial disputes and other issues, and as for the court, some military judges were dispatched, but they actually used the jury system to try cases, which Bismarck did not expect, I heard that the Chinese introduced the system from Britain.

The jury system in Germany was brought by Napoleon's army, but after Napoleon's defeat, the jury system was abolished in many places, and one of the revolutionaries' demands in this revolution was to restore the jury system.

Since the army did not intervene in the economic field, the merchants were the main force to maintain social order here, of course, the army was responsible for maintaining law and order, the chamber of commerce was responsible for regulating civil disputes, and the existence of the courts, there was order here, and there were railways and rivers, so commerce naturally developed.

Bismarck didn't care much about these either, because what he saw was mainly a Russian-style cultural phenomenon, and he was most concerned about the Chinese army, which looked no different from the European army, which was quite formal, and the training was guaranteed by various systems. Bismarck had done his homework, and he knew that China, like many other countries, had reorganized its own army in the French way after the Napoleonic Wars.

Since it is the French model, then the combat effectiveness should be guaranteed, as can be seen from their many victories against the Russian army. In recent years, there has always been an opinion in Europe that China's defeat of the Anglo-Russian coalition forces in Central Asia was due to their staggering numbers, not their strong combat effectiveness.

Bismarck watched the drills of the Chinese army for several days in a row, and he thought that it was all nonsense, the prejudice of European racists who would not admit defeat, and the British consciously contributed to the fire, in order to inspire the Europeans to have the courage to go to war with China. In Bismarck's view, only a stupid country like Russia would be fooled.

However, Bismarck had always been concerned about the mobilization capacity of the Chinese, and in order to get a close look at China's reserves, he wasted a lot of effort to get a chance to go up close and personal into China's rural areas.

His friends put him in touch with a bohemian troupe that travels back and forth in horse-drawn carriages to and from the Urals, performing in Russian settlements and now in Chinese villages.

In this way, he entered the Chinese countryside. He found that the Chinese countryside was very strict, I don't know if it was because of the border areas, the local fortress, people lived together, enclosed the village with earthen walls, and some villages even built walls with gravel or bricks, which they called earthen forts.

A dozen to hundreds of peasant households live in an earthen fort, and each house has a house number, on which is not written with a number, but with more detailed information, such as the name of the head of the household, how many men and women, and age. At first, Bismarck did not understand the role of this house number, but one evening he saw the chief of the village with a few people searching from house to house, calling out each household to count the number of people, and going into the house to look through it at will. Bismarck asked for the reason, in order to see if the people were hiding prisoners. Bismarck thought that somewhere the prisoner had run, and later he heard that it was just routine work. It is necessary to check every day, and after checking and registering, it is finally sent to the county.

Bismarck felt an eerie feeling of how much the Chinese emperor was afraid of the rebellion of his people, who were watching everyone in this way, and the people had no freedom at all. Later, when he shared these views with some diplomats who had worked in China, he learned that this had been the case before. However, it is not strict, it is just a formality, and only when the thieves swarm up, will this kind of management be strengthened, which is called the armor protection system in China. After the Great Zhou Emperor came to power, it became more and more normalized, and the emperor cultivated a large number of scholars, and the social management ability was greatly strengthened, so this normalized management could be carried out.

Bismarck wondered why the populace would not rebel when they were under such close surveillance, without freedom and privacy? The consul explained that the people did not care much about these freedoms and privacy, because the people who checked them were their acquaintances, and most of them were their elders, and the Chinese did not attach much importance to privacy, and everyone knew what happened to each family in a village.

And the official attitude has always been that this kind of armor protection is to prevent thieves, not to protect the people. In addition, the government's relief in times of famine is also distributed according to this kind of house number data, and the chief of the security department is not only responsible for supervising and managing the people, but also responsible for guiding and protecting them.

Bismarck stopped in a Chinese village for about ten days, and the gypsy teams allowed to perform there were checked every day, counting the number of people according to the license plates issued to them by the county government to see if they harbored fugitives or something. Bismarck found himself trapped, and they could not leave at will, otherwise they would get into big trouble.

To the east of the Volga, there are many such Chinese villages, and in the interspersed period, there are Russian villages. Bismarck began to think that this distribution of the Chinese was to monitor and control the Russians. Later, when he entered the Russian village community, he found that this was not the case at all. Because the Russian village community is also operating according to the armor protection system formulated by the Chinese, the Russians also have a Russian security chief, who is also responsible for checking the records every day.

What Bismarck looked forward to most was that he finally saw the training of rural soldiers, and these days he had already inquired about the content of the rural military service system. In the frontier regions, everyone was to be a soldier. The Chinese government attaches great importance to the frontiers, not only exempting all taxes in the villages, but also paying all soldiers who are not conscripted, and implementing a system in which all young and strong men must be used as reserves in the border areas, and in the interior they are drawn proportionally.

It can be said that the Chinese practice a policy of all soldiers in the border areas, and once a war breaks out, millions of people in the border areas can arm millions of troops. These reservists were trained for three months a year, and Bismarck observed that they were trained in the same way as the regular army, except for the lack of heavy weapons, and were trained according to regular infantry.

China has migrated millions of people to the Volga and the North Caucasus every year in recent years, and now in the Volga to Urals, the Chinese have the upper hand, they have a population of nearly three million here, and they can serve up to one million soldiers, while the rest of the population here is less than two million. Moreover, Bismarck suspected that under this system, the Russians would not be able to resist, and I was afraid that after the war, hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers would serve China and attack the Tsar's army with Chinese soldiers.

What he saw in the Russian village community was not a tense antagonism, these Russians, who were originally serfs, now live much better than in the past, they are also like Chinese immigrants, they do not need to pay taxes, there are young and strong families can still get three months of good military pay every year, and life is generally much better than their compatriots on the other side of the Volga River, which is supported by China's huge national power, Bismarck felt that the Chinese emperor was using the taxes of his own people to win over the Russians in these occupied areas.

If such a system were to be implemented in Prussia, I am afraid that various organizations would rise up against it.

Bismarck did not go to the Caucasus, and he believes that the situation there will be no different, and the Chinese have transplanted their own governance experience here.

Under this high-intensity management model, Bismarck believed that the Russians in the occupied territories were incapable of rebelling, and that they might not have any motives to rebel. It was as if Prussia had partitioned the western part of Poland and established a West Prussia, where Frederick the Great could collect more than a million thalers in taxes and raise more than 20,000 soldiers, and the local soldiers could only act with the Prussian army, and it was not until after the French Revolution that the local national problem began.

The ethnic problem in the Urals does not seem to be serious, and the national consciousness of the locals is weak. The ethnic composition here is also very complex, the Chinese now constitute the main group, the Russians are the second largest ethnic group, but there are also a large number of Tatars, and there are already a large number of Tatars living here, because before the Russians entered here, this was the territory of the Golden Horde and the Kazan Khanate, which was separated from the Golden Horde. Inhabited are Mongolian-speaking Mongols, Turkic-speaking Cheremis and Bashkirs, Finno-Ugric-speaking Moldovians, as well as Chuvash.

Earlier, it was the territory of the Bolgar principality, which was nomadic along the Volga, and the Mongol invasion led to the migration of the Bolgars along the Black Sea to the Danube Valley. About 300 years ago, the Russians destroyed the Kazan Khanate and began to migrate to the Urals, assimilating some of these ethnic groups.