Chapter 248: The entry point of Xuanzhou's strategy

There was a content error in the previous chapter, and the Atlas Mountains were mistyped ,..

The Chinese Empire had very early contact with the black people of Xuanzhou, and the ancient Kunlun slaves were 'overseas workers' from Xuanzhou (Africa) in sub-Saharan Africa. These earliest foreign laborers became envoys of exchange and contact between China and this ancient continent. In fact, the traversal people have no desire to occupy and develop this land, this continent has always been a huge trouble, with a large population but barbaric and backward, the surname is rude and unsubmissive, and the accumulation rate of capital is almost zero. The abundance of resources is not a good reason, and it is better to occupy this place than to occupy the more cost-effective southern continent (Australia). Although it is vast and sparsely populated, it is at least easy to manage and develop.

There is hardly anything in sub-Saharan Africa that can attract pre-industrial countries. There are many endemic diseases, such as scarlet fever, sleeping sickness, malaria, jaundice, filariasis, parasitic flies, etc., the hot and humid rainforests are not suitable for settlement and urbanization, the arid grasslands are not suitable for the development of agriculture and water-intensive industries, and Africa's purchasing power can hardly be built on mining and nomadic economy. Therefore, until the information age, this ancient birthplace of mankind could not develop into an industrial society, except for South Africa, which barely squeezed into the developed countries by virtue of the prosperity of mining, other African countries gave people the impression of poverty and backwardness.

Many strongholds in the coastal areas of Xuanzhou have been planted with the flag of the Chinese Empire and become permanent settlements and ** land, and a large number of pioneers who are eager for land and wealth have gained a firm foothold with the help of the state, but it has always been difficult to penetrate into the interior. Except for the coastal areas, which are relatively easy to develop, the inland of this continent is simply an alien world, either barren rainforests (tropical highlands with no fertility at all) or swamps and water surfaces with snakes, insects, rats and ants. The arid grasslands do not rain in the first half of the year, flood in the first half of the year, and except for a few plateaus and river valleys, there are few places where agricultural bases can be established.

This is only a last resort when resources are scarce, and only when the price of resources is high enough to exceed the development costs of the area. The farce of the frenzy that set off the carving-up of this continent in the era of imperialism is a joke. Apart from the centuries-long slave trade, which provided Europe with a small amount of raw capital, the continent contributed very little to the world economy. Tens of thousands of tons of raw materials exported are not comparable to the value of an imported generator set.

In addition to being a relatively high-cost resource reserve and future export place, it is basically not attractive to attract investment. The expansion group under the leadership of the Crossing Masses only surrounded the continent first and occupied all the coastlines. The attitude towards this continent is to 'put development on hold and settle disputes'. Why the controversy? The Swahili city-states in the east and the black kingdoms in the west are all civilizational peoples, and they cannot be conquered and ruled by force like primitive tribes. With countless means, the Crossing Crowd easily broke the resistance of these 'states' from the stage of tribal alliance to the stage of feudal states, and smoothly established an indirect colonial system, pulling these regions into the ranks of 'semi-colonies'.

In the Congo region, for example, the local tribes have just joined together to form the prototype of the state, a multi-level tribal alliance state. The big tribe is the big city and the provincial capital, and the small tribe is the small city and village town, obeying the management of the big tribe, paying tribute and taxes in kind every year, and sending troops when there is an event. The largest tribe is the capital, and this loose tribal alliance is based on force and productivity, as long as a tribe has enough strong men and abundant products, sooner or later it can become a big power, or even a capital.

Although this kind of state is primitive, it is completely different from the tribes and their alliances, and it is a qualitative change produced by quantitative change, and it is a leap forward in civilization. Although there is no written language in the Congo, there is a systematic language, a system, an army, a prison, and various violent institutions and systems. This is a world of difference from primitive tribes that have no organizational ability. An organization with a basic framework is like the difference between a vertebrate and an invertebrate compared to a simple family, family, or tribe.

Whether it is for long-term peace and stability or for its own convenience, the Chinese Empire cannot kill all the natives here by force, and can only slowly conquer this place with soft power such as trade and cultural assimilation.

Although the ancient kingdom of Ghana was conquered by the Moroccan Murabit dynasty ten years before the crossing, the remnants of Ghana are also the most powerful power in West Africa. For the sake of gold and ivory, many brave explorers colluded with the merchants of the Kingdom of Ghana to destroy the salt industry and the most profitable export gold industry here, and became the emperor of this primitive country.

Those forces that have established trade relations and friendly exchanges with the Chinese who have established colonial bases are also the Kingdom of Benin, the Kingdom of Kanem, the declining Kingdom of Axum, the Kingdom of Hausa, etc., these areas are backward in productivity, and there are no good things to exchange with the empire, except for leather, golden sand, ivory, gems, wood and rare ores can be used to exchange consumer goods of the Chinese Empire, there are not many industrial products consumed here. Even the nails and saw blades used to build wooden houses are rarely afforded by the inhabitants here.

Pieces of land were taken by the traversers at a very low price, and the land that had been planned to be reserved for decades or even hundreds of years was thus included in the reserve land list of the Xuanzhou Group.

The way to open up these backward regions is simple, and if it is not as ugly as the Europeans traded glass balls and small mirrors for gold and slaves, but it is not as bad as scissors.

No ethnic group can do without the trade of necessities of life, and the self-sufficiency of necessities has always been the goal of all ethnic groups, in order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to develop the production of necessities of life, but some industries are difficult to develop, for the sake of strategy, the Chinese Empire can not let this continent appear a country with a complete industrial system. In order to achieve the most effective guidance and subtlety, finance and trade are the best weapons.

The art of capital lies in the fact that no sheep can discover the sheep after shearing the sheep. The goods are exchanged for domestic industrial goods and fast-moving consumer goods, but everything in these trade goods catalogues is a good thing that these countries actually need. Cheap iron farming tools for land reclamation, cement and molds for building bridges and roads, various simple equipment for processing wood and ore, kerosene lamps and matches for lighting, labor protection supplies such as rubber shoes that are convenient for people's life and production, cheap Chinese herbal medicine pills, insect repellent agents such as wind oil essence, a large number of steel knives (kitchen knives and mountain knives) with quality assurance, high-quality and inexpensive stationery and books.

These things are products that cannot be produced without large-scale industry, and they are also very practical and down-to-earth good things. As long as the goods that are used and cannot be separated from are easier to obtain the recognition of the people at the bottom and the market than those glass beads and small mirrors that cannot be used.

Both the buyer and the seller have a real need, and are well aware of the value and use of the goods, and they are all willing transactions, and there is no need to record in the history books that there is no guilt or guilt at all and a transaction that has nothing to do with fraudulent trade. As for the exchange of a kerosene lamp for a hundred crocodile skins, no one will pursue it.

The stakes of the scissors gap are known to everyone with a high school education, but no one can avoid it, and all countries and organizations involved in the national trade and global division of labor system have equal opportunities in this scissors gap. It depends on whether he chooses bitter first and then sweet or sweet and then bitter. Are there also developed countries that export raw materials? Of course, there is, but that is all after industrialization, as long as the country can tighten its belt, and the money saved from between its teeth is used for the appreciation of human capital and the construction of industrial hardware facilities, it will always become a developed country. Except for the United States, the most god-given land of agriculture, all developed countries with a population of more than 10 million have achieved primitive capital accumulation in the midst of hunger and cold. All developed countries have come out of the pattern of bitter first and then sweet, first high savings and then high consumption.

After all, the materials consumed by the intellectuals and technicians who have been trained out of production cannot be conjured out of thin air, and those infrastructures are all real things that are bought by labor. If you don't save money and accumulate wealth to pay for these things, the Buddha will not be able to help you get rich. Even if you lie on the gold mines, you can only live in the poor least developed countries. It is better to expect people who have not experienced hardship and economic education to get rich than to hope that money will fall from the sky when they win the lottery.

The plan to overcome the sins of the crowd is to be like a shepherd, to turn this ignorant and backward worthless land into an even more ignorant but valuable export of raw materials. Keep it in constant deflation and trade surplus, and make it a warehouse for cheap raw materials for the Empire. Even the biggest scissors difference can't withstand the avalanche-like trade of precious metals. A hundred high-quality knives are nothing more than stamped steel blades, which are exchanged for only 3 kilograms of gold. A thousand boxes of matches cost 10 kilograms of gold, and a shipload of 500 tons of salt costs 30 tusks or 100 pounds of gold. Although Africa, especially West Africa, has continuously mined gold for thousands of years, almost all of it has been lost in a few years, and it has been either exchanged for various consumer goods and imports of the Chinese Empire or exchanged for coins.

However, this impossible coin is not gold or silver, but a nickel-chromium stainless steel coin. The banks that exchanged a large amount of gold at the 'market price' became the largest gold mine in the Xuanzhou branch after the empire's branch in the Xuanzhou Trading Bank.

The only way to exchange high-end goods is to trade in such coins from banks, which are only accepted by the Imperial Trade Groups and the Exporters' Guild (an organization controlled by the crowd) that monopolize the export of high-end industrial goods (tobacco, alcohol, addictive fast-moving consumer goods, expensive clocks, branded luxury accessories, and women's goods). Once they get the coins, they can go to the bank and exchange them for gold or the equivalent of dragon dollars at a 10% discount at the 'market price'. The difference between the bank and the bank is dead. At that time, the natives became accustomed to this convenient coin, and after trading with physical gold, or there was no gold to be exchanged. Through the crowd will be able to indulge in the supply of this cheap coin, and thus the price and local wealth distribution system. The faster it develops, the better, and the more wealth you can earn when you travel through the crowd. When it was really impossible to continue to rule here, it was enough to abolish the purchasing power of nichrome coins, and declare that this currency could not be exchanged for dragon dollars and precious metals, and those who held these coins would suffer heavy losses or even bankruptcy.

The banks that poured these coins had a myriad of ways to pass on their losses to depositors and borrowers, such as exchanging most of their coins with local commercial banks for dragon dollars and precious metal coins before the coin's purchasing power collapsed, or buying them into assets and securities, and after the crash, selling some of the assets would allow them to recover several times the amount of the coins they had spent, and then returning the coins to the depositors according to the figures on the passbook. Even if you can lend out when you sign the loan agreement, you will have to borrow coins, and you must return them in dragon dollars and gold coins. If you want to be less obvious, the borrower can also transfer the loan at a discount to other investors who have assets or commodities that can maintain their value.

Anyway, well-informed people such as the Crossing Zhong and their partners will definitely make a profit and not lose money, and the Xuanzhou natives will definitely not be able to play with the foreign merchants from the Chinese Empire who set the rules and grasp the market.

The export of commodities and the export of capital are the main work of capitalism, but the highest level is to achieve lasting profits and win-win results. As a killer feature and long-term layout, Li Ji can only do it first and then say, and it is impossible to say whether to use Li Ji, who may no longer be alive, when the time comes.

As for industrialization? Then I have to say hehe. Blacks want to dominate industrialization, unless they dream. Even if they have a conscience not to let this place become a hell for the slave traders, do they still want to be a latecomer to catch up with and overtake the country? The international law dominated by the great powers, like the law of the jungle, is a bloody battlefield of the jungle. If you don't let you be considered the responsible savior of humanity if you are starved, starved, plagued, wars, and corpses everywhere every year, how can you ask for so much. So said to the students of the Department of Diplomacy of the School of Political Science who came out of traditional families that had been baptized by Confucianism. If these nerds who are full of the same society don't see the dark side of society, how can they rest assured that they will go abroad for training, and it will be troublesome if they are kidnapped by primitive tribes. (To be continued.) )