Sure enough, on September 11, Germany sent nearly 200 submarines to begin a frightening submarine war, which was mainly used to attack Allied merchant ships.

German submarine warfare began with limited submarine warfare, i.e., not attacking the merchant ships of neutral countries.

Because Germany is afraid of causing the defection of neutral countries, among the neutral countries, the United States is the most powerful, but now Germany has added another consideration, that is, China's East China autonomy axe.

After all, this is a 'country' with a population of 160 million, strictly speaking, it cannot be regarded as a country, but it is just a local surname in China, but obviously the East China Autonomous Axe has been pressed on the top of China's Central Political Axe, which can be seen in the world, and the East China Autonomous Political Axe can even mobilize the strength of more than 430 million people in China.

With so many people, how many troops can be mobilized?

After all, the army strength of the autonomous political axe in East China is relatively strong, and after the exchange of technology between the military industry and Germany, there has been a shocking development.

Moreover, the research and development capability of the East China Autonomous Political Axe is very strong, and new weapons are often come out, and once the East China Autonomous Political Axe falls to the Entente Powers, it will be more terrible for Germany than the United States to the Entente Countries.

At the very beginning of the submarine war, the German submarines achieved brilliant results, and the anti-submarine means of the Entente countries were basically equal to zero, such as depth charges and hydrophones, let alone sonars.

At first, the German submarines were more heroic, and before sinking the ship, they would let the crew on board the lifeboat first.

Of course, they would then run to the ships to plunder the booty, and then sink the ships, which was the precursor of the German submarines.

However, the British later developed a kind of submarine hunting ship, that is, disguised warships as merchant ships, and then lured German submarines to the surface, and then sank these German submarines.

Originally, more than 40 submarines were sunk by submarine hunters and more than 80 were damaged in the original World War I, and it was for this reason that German submarines did not give any warning before sinking merchant ships.

In the entire First World War, Britain sank two hundred German submarines, and the submarine hunter ship was the most efficient, because the other submarines were in the millions of shells, depth charges, and mines, and the British also mobilized more than 8,000 auxiliary vessels, and even pulled up many wires at sea.

Because Germany had obtained sufficiently advanced submarine technology in advance, submarine warfare was very ferocious from the beginning, which immediately caused great trouble to British commerce.

British merchant ships were unable to conduct commercial trade normally, which caused the prices of steel, coal, and textiles to rise around the world, and the market was suddenly empty.

The East China Autonomous Government has long sent personnel around the world to monitor the market situation in various places.

The textile, coal mining, and iron and steel industries in the seven autonomous provinces of East China have also begun to produce at full capacity in order to seize the local market.

At the same time, in terms of medicines, because Germany fell into the war, prices in the pharmaceutical industry also skyrocketed, and the dye industry was even more so.

In such a situation, countries are seizing the blank market.

Among them, the United States is the mainstay, and it is said that Ben has been a little slow to move because of the war.

However, neither the United States nor the United States can be as active and proactive as the autonomous political axe in East China.

In order to seize the steel market, Xia Jun purchased nearly 500 million points of mining equipment for East China Mining Company, which is enough equipment for East China Mining Company to triple its mining capacity.

The coal mining industry in Shanxi is also vigorously developed, and the current coal mining industry in Shanxi is not troubled by traffic, and the development can be described as extremely rapid.

This coal began to be exported to foreign markets, which was also a stopgap measure.

The East China Mining Company began to dig coal abroad, and Xia Jun spent another 200 million yuan to buy a resource distribution map in South America, and the East China Mining Company began to develop in South America.

Australia and South America are all areas with a lot of minerals.

Britain has a lot of assets in the world, many of which are in the mining sector, but the British have not yet reached the point of selling off overseas assets, so there is no need to think about it for the time being.

In contrast, the textile industry is booming.

Cheap cotton, cheap dyes, advanced processing equipment, mature clothing design, and cheap freight, etc., are the embodiment of the competitiveness of the textile industry in the seven provinces of East China.

As soon as the UK's market share was ceded, East China's textiles were directly squeezed in.

The development of the steel industry is also very rapid, Australia's iron ore mining volume has reached 3 million tons per month, and the annual mining volume is enough to 36 million tons, which can smelt 15 million tons of steel.

Such a terrifying iron ore production was naturally unable to be digested by steel mills in East China, which was mainly used to be transported to Germany for storage.

Now that the sea line of communication to Germany is blocked, and the East China Autonomous Government uses submarines to transport it, it is not cost-effective to transport iron ore to Germany now, and at this time it is mainly to smelt steel and then transport it to Germany.

As a result, the production capacity of East China Iron and Steel Company has also risen all the way, and there are many steel mills in the coastal areas, and Xia Jun has exchanged 300 million points for equipment for steel mills, increasing steel production capacity to 18 million tons.

The output of 18 million tons is still very small compared to the United States, and only a little more than Germany.

The United States already produces more than 31 million tons of steel and 31 million tons of pig iron, which is arguably twice that of Germany. Most of this steel is produced by U.S. Steel Corporations.

However, there is one factor that cannot be ignored, that is, British steel still occupies the international market, and the American steel is mainly used for domestic demand.

The domestic demand for steel in East China is also rising, but it will take time to accumulate such a huge amount, so most of the 18 million tons of output can be used for export.

Xia Jun has been extremely aggressive in seizing the vacant market for the British, and his main competitor is the United States.

In order to compete with the United States, Xia Jun did not hesitate to drop many points, after all, the opportunity must not be lost and will not come again, and if he misses this opportunity, it will be difficult to squeeze in in the future.

The steel equipment exchanged by Xia Jun is all from the forties, twenty years ahead of this era. Twenty years of leadership is enough to compete with all competitors in terms of price and quality.

What's more, when Xia Jun was operating in the steel industry, it was to strengthen the competitiveness of the whole link, and the mining first used extremely advanced equipment, which greatly reduced the mining cost, and the steelmaking also used advanced equipment, and the steelmaking cost was also greatly reduced.

As a result, the steel price of the East China Autonomous Political Axe is 30% lower than the steel price of the United States, but the current British steel export industry is suddenly paralyzed, the market is too blank, and the two sides do not need to compete at all to sell the steel, so there is not much difference between the steel prices of the two sides, but the East China Iron and Steel Company has earned more than 30% of the profits than the American Iron and Steel Company, which is an extremely terrifying gap.

In the transportation industry, the spring of the East China Ocean Shipping Company has arrived.

British merchant ships began to suffer continuous losses, which provided a lot of business for the East China Ocean Shipping Company, and with the increase in domestic export goods day by day, all the merchant ships built by the East China Ocean Shipping Company were full of tasks.

East China COSCO was too busy, which led to the development of its own shipbuilding industry.

At the same time, in order to compensate for the loss of tonnage of ships, Britain began to manufacture ships at full capacity, but the problem was that the speed at which they built was far from the speed of the loss, so they could only place orders from other countries.

The East China Shipbuilding Company also began to receive orders, but because it wanted to build warships, it could no longer receive many orders, and the speed of development was seriously lagging behind.

After receiving these orders, it means that the funds of East China Shipbuilding Company will be returned, and the profits of these orders are more than 100%.

That is, to build a ship, the profit and cost are at least 1:1, or even higher.

Wang Chengyi's previous worries were gone without a trace at this time, he never expected to encounter such a rare opportunity, and the chairman's vision was really not comparable to them.

Within a few days, Wang Chengyi received a new task from Xia Jun.

The main part of this task is to put the ship's parts in inland factories for production, and then transport them to the port for assembly.

Such a method can obviously greatly speed up the construction of ships, but this requires enough machinery manufacturing plants, it seems that the seven provinces of East China Autonomous Province have one East China Machinery Manufacturing Factory, and the scale of East China Machinery Manufacturing Factory is naturally nothing to say, but the task seems to be full.

Wang Chengyi made a phone call to inquire, and Feng Ru's answer confirmed Wang Chengyi's prediction that the machinery factory would not be able to spare capacity to the shipbuilding company in the near future.

However, Feng Ru revealed a message to Wang Chengyi, that is, a large number of private machinery factories will soon appear.

The chairman is clearly active.

Xia Jun was indeed active, and on September 13, he revealed to those industrialists in the industrialists' club that he had a large number of machinery manufacturing equipment in his hands, which immediately aroused great interest among these industrialists.

These industrialists do not have much capital at present, and their capital has long been invested in various industries, so most of them set up machinery manufacturing factories in the form of joint shares.

At present, most of the industries involved in these industrialists are light industry, and heavy industry is basically monopolized by the East China Group, which is not conducive to the development of diverse and flexible surnames.

Ten different bosses can run ten different results, it just depends on their own ability.

Xia Jun spent only 1.4 billion points in his hand, and at this time he didn't want to change any technology, but directly replaced the finished machine tool, and first increased the production capacity.

The opportunity of the First World War can be said to be unavoidable, and those technologies will be slowly developed later! Now the focus is on occupying the market, which is the king road to make China rich quickly.

Because the conditions for opening a machinery manufacturing plant are very favorable, those industrialists only need to build the factory, and the shares can account for 20%, so that many industrialists have taken out capital to build machinery manufacturing plants.

The application report increased day by day, Xia Jun successively spent nearly 500 million points to buy machine tools, feeling that such a purchase was not a long-term solution, so Yu purchased 500 million points of machine tool manufacturing equipment for the machine tool manufacturing factory.

Naturally, these factories are not put into operation in a day or two, and many factories have not even solved the problem of workers. However, the plants are expected to be operational by the end of next year.

(To be continued)