Chapter 234 Death Infrastructure and Contract

In the cold and humid northern and southern frontiers of the empire, there is a contract called the death contract in later generations, and the party A who signed the contract is the primitive tribes and aborigines who joined the empire, and the content of the contract is to hire these laborers to engage in various local infrastructure construction and construction, and the treatment is definitely very attractive, and the casualties are also very high.

Due to the high quality and deadline requirements, these companies could not subcontract the work from the Imperial Government and the Colonial Government, so they had to follow the old path of crowd tactics. The price of labor in the empire itself was ten times higher than the price of hiring the indigenous people in each project, and with the additional expenses of transportation to and from the local engineering team, such as ferry tickets and food and lodging, it was possible to hire at least 30 local natives to hire one native worker.

In order to make money and expand the market, it has become a tradition to hire local laborers and natives, and almost all of the low-level coolies and low-skilled jobs are done by natives, and if you want to sign a contract, you have to find a guarantee or recommendation from citizens or freemen, and the salary you get a month is only enough to buy ten catties of salt or 5 catties of sugar (this is a very high income in the eyes of the natives, and salt and sugar can be exchanged for hundreds of times more grain and fruit or ten pieces of high-quality raw leather when you take back to the tribe). Most of the contractors are local citizens, and most of the foremen and technicians below are naturalized citizens and free people who have passed the examination, so the salary is much higher. After working for a year, you can learn some skills, and your income can be doubled, and in a few years, you will be able to become a superior person who is envied and hated by the same clan.

Although the empire did not openly discriminate against these primitive tribes and aliens who were incorporated into the territory, the threshold for employment opportunities was unavoidable, and it was not that skilled workers did not have the opportunity to touch those tools and equipment, let alone participate in the social division of labor and the market economy to share the fruits of civilization development and live a civilized life without worrying about food and clothing.

A tribal dispute in which a piece of flint and steel for a fire can cause a bloody case is really accepted by people who have been civilized, even if it is only for a day, so it is natural that a large number of aborigines who have seen the prosperity of the colonial port city will participate in the construction without hesitation.

When the Empire announced the protection of the indigenous peoples and the tribal possessions of the newly expanded Tripolar Realm, the scale of this mercenary was even higher. Every day, a large number of idle natives wait for employers to choose from the natural gathering points of the wage labor market, and the most popular ones are naturally Chinese translators. The elite of each aboriginal who learned Chinese earned at least 10 times that of their non-Chinese counterparts. A translator can arrange the work of at least 100 people, and some simple chores such as carrying, packing, digging, filling ponds, cutting trees, and carrying water do not need to learn Chinese.

As for the work carried out by various dangers or casualty rates, it is impossible for the Han people to do it with their lives, especially the work machines that need to be in close contact with dangerous accidents such as explosives, earth and rock burial, and overwork are almost all undertaken by the miners and the construction of high-rise buildings.

These projects, which require construction in harsh environments, are all favorites of death contracts. The primitive capitalists, who had just moved from an agrarian society to a capitalist society, would certainly not have signed labor insurance agreements or bought insurance for these aboriginal workers. A few years later, historians counted that the high-level highway of the Baltic Kingdom from Dali to the East Indies across the Hengduan Mountains was built at the cost of the lives of more than 7,000 wage workers of all ethnic groups along the route. It is of course extremely difficult to make a road between the tropical jungle and the snow-covered mountains full of swampy wetlands and snake poisons, and it is crucial that the diseases caused by the environment are the most fatal. The lack of oxygen and low temperature in the alpine mountains and the sultry and humidity in the valley alternately tortured the construction team, and even the local aborigines could not stand the frequent transportation up and down the mountain and the high-intensity construction work. During the construction period, no less than 200 sick people were carried down the mountain every month, and due to the backward medical conditions, at least a quarter of them were seriously ill and incurable.

In the north, the 1001 National Highway, the main artery of northern Xinjiang from Vladivostok in the east to the Green Mountains in the west, has the blood and tears of various ethnic minority laborers. The relationship between you and me is very normal, but due to the rush and lack of large-scale equipment, the crowd tactics of relying on shoulders to resist are indeed very casual. The complex, harsh and changeable construction environment is very difficult to allow southern Xinjiang, and although the system integration of sectional construction is very fast, it is also very expensive. The 20 million construction bonds issued by the public at the time of preparation could not even build half of the roads, and in order to save money, the crossing could only repeatedly lower the employment standards and labor insurance standards. Child laborers and women are moving stones in the desert with their bare hands, and a large number of lower concrete or building materials are used to build flatter feeder roads, etc.

It is difficult to survive in the harsh northwest environment, let alone build roads in no man's land? It is difficult to ensure daily drinking water, washing is even more delusional, and the complications such as heat stroke and dehydration caused by high temperatures and inflammation are innumerable, and at least 1,000 people have died. The high difficulty of winter construction also makes the labor exerting a lot of physical exertion in digging up the frozen soil, and many of them die of exhaustion and freeze to death (see how steel is made and the section of the railway is built inside).

Many primitive tribes in the Tunguska region also began to communicate with the ethnic minorities in the north on a large scale, and the territory of the empire extended directly from the former Mongolian plateau to the North Pole, so the wild people living in Lingbei Province north of the Mongolian plateau automatically became legal residents of the empire protected by the aboriginal law. Although these people are scarce in number, they have a huge range of activities, and they are the main ethnic group from the east to the North Chizhou and the Ural Mountains in the west. In order to absorb these indigenous peoples, the empire also formed the Northern Cavalry Division, which specialized in recruiting elite ethnic minorities from the Mongolian plateau and further north to serve as the vanguard of the Belt and Road Party and the spread of imperial influence.

There are also a large number of engineering arrangements for military training in summer and autumn. Many ethnic minority soldiers who had only learned the skills of herdsmen in the army became wealthy after retiring from the army, became mine bosses who learned to open mountains and prospect for mines, contracted foremen who learned to build bridges and pave roads, doctors who learned emergency medical treatment, traders and explorers who learned to scout and survive in the wilderness, and leaders of various tribes who learned to organize and dispatch. These steels, forged in the melting pot, served as the upstream and downstream networks on the periphery of the construction corps, enriched the strength of northern Xinjiang construction, and greatly reduced the casualties and expenses in the construction process, otherwise the budget of a small highway section across the Alxa Desert could be overspent by ten times, and the number of dead and injured workers would be several times.

In fact, the traversal is as clear in his heart as the mirror that the period of transition between the agrarian society and the industrial capital society is the bloody primitive accumulation of capital, and no matter how innovative and gold-fingered, the dead cannot be avoided. In order to reduce the negative impact and reduce the criticism of history, the traversal has done everything it can do, and has been working hard to do it.

It is impossible not to die without death, and the expenditure required to invest in zero casualties like the second phase of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway project is too huge, and the technical support alone can make the people tired to death, which is absolutely not in line with the actual strategic needs of the empire that has already unified Asia, so this kind of project and requirements do not exist, and it cannot enter the conference room of the Senate discussion meeting at all.

As the old saying goes, great wealth means great evil, from primitive society to information society, this is a core law that runs through primitive capital accumulation, the faster primitive capital accumulates, the greater its evil, without exception in thousands of years of history. Even in the information age, under the power of the Internet, the virtual economy can gather and create wealth out of thin air, but it is just a fraud and illusion that is difficult to detect.

Is there any developed country where primitive capital accumulation is not based on the misery of its people at home and abroad? Spain relied on the gold and silver exchanged for the bones of the Native Americans, Portugal relied on the wealth of the coastal colonial outlets to monopolize the spice trade, Britain relied on robbery as robbers to draw blood from India and Spain and sell opium to China, France relied on defrauding Indians and usury, Germany relied on sky-high tariffs and taxes to exploit its citizens internally, Russia relied on the emancipation of serfs to loot billions of gold rubles of primitive capital, Japan relied on organizing ** and foreign wars to obtain funds, and the United States was better. The wealth accumulated by selling resources and agricultural products, but the land that produced these things was snatched from the aborigines through the westward expansion movement without compensation. The accumulation of wealth in a few decades, which has not been possible in an agrarian society for thousands of years, cannot be entirely due to the power of industry, as Marx said, at least the start-up capital must be accumulated by robbery.

To tell the truth, the accumulation of funds through the crowd also relies on robbery, but not by violence, but by technology, systems and profits to circle money. Therefore, in the decades after the founding of the country, the speed and bloodiness of the primitive accumulation of capital were completely inversely proportional. The powers that traveled before the crowd were simply weak. As long as it is not their own people and highly productive educated citizens who die, and those illiterate natives are voluntarily employed, and a few more deaths can free up some land for immigrants, the pressure of public opinion is not even as good as the blood and tears of the Chinese pigs who built the railroad in the United States, and the probability of their descendants becoming the ruling class of a big country with the right to speak is certainly not comparable with that of overseas Chinese.

In the emerging cities of the empire with huge demand for infrastructure, the rapid environmental changes have brought a kind of intuitive vitality to the people, the living environment is getting better and better, there are more and more high-rise buildings, prices are getting cheaper and cheaper, incomes are getting higher and higher, and the happiness index of residents is soaring. At least half of this is built on the technological golden finger of the traversal, and the other half is built on the cheap plundering of resources and labor in overseas colonies. Large numbers of cannibals and extremely backward tribes of Guinea and the Paleolithic Age, inhabitants voluntarily left the forests where they had lived for generations to be exploited by the merchants of the empire, to become coolies and miners, or to be sentenced to hard labor after attacking the inhabitants of the empire themselves. Whether these aborigines actively or passively participated in the construction of the empire, their fate changed from then on, and their living standards were greatly improved, and their life spans were greatly extended.

In utilitarian terms, the aborigines who died in the construction are far less than those who died early because of the entry of the empire and the employment of people who changed the living environment to reduce disease and malnutrition, that is to say, this era is generally good, and it is still beneficial to these aborigines, compared with the aboriginal descendants of those backward areas in the era of Europe-led colonization, the situation of the aborigines in the era of the great colonization led by the Chinese Empire is not known how many times better. After all, the Han people are still different from the short-sighted bandits in Europe, and some necessary expenses and soft policies can still greatly reduce the cost of rule and the speed of colonization. (To be continued.) If you like this work, you are welcome to subscribe (this site), reward, your support is my biggest motivation. )