"Love the motherland, love the people, and support King Wu......

"Study hard and ...... every day"

In the Wu army barracks, a loud voice sounded, and every day after the soldiers got up early and went to bed at night, they had to recite the "Li Wei Chinese Quotations" and the "Wu Army Military Regulations Regulations" again.

Now, with hundreds of thousands of former Taiping Army soldiers joining the Wu Army, they naturally can't hide, so a new round of brainwashing has begun.

If you want to completely digest these hundreds of thousands of Taiping soldiers, it will take at least three months or even a few years.

Taking advantage of this time, Li Weiguo turned his energy to the economy and people's livelihood.

With Li Weiguo completely controlling the eight provinces in Jiangnan, in addition to Jiangnan Province and Zhejiang Province, the relative economic gap between the other six provinces is too large, especially Jiangxi Province, which is the poorest of the eight provinces in Jiangnan because of the war of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Not only is the economy the weakest, but the people's livelihood is also the worst, and Li Weiguo needs to spend a lot of financial and manpower to recover.

To this end, Li Weiguo ordered the Ministry of Finance of the Wu Dynasty to allocate 1 million yuan for the post-war reconstruction of Jiangxi Province, so as to appease the local people and enable them to break free from the poison of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom as soon as possible, return to the big family of the motherland, and repair the wounds of the war.

The new policies formulated by Li Weiguo also began to be implemented from Jiangnan Province and Zhejiang Province to the other six provinces, encouraging the development of industry and commerce, agriculture, and education.

In terms of tax burden, the eight provinces in the south of the Yangtze River have abolished a large number of taxes, the two largest of which are agricultural tax and centigold. The peasants were already poor, and they had to levy all kinds of taxes, which would aggravate the gap between the rich and the poor, so Li Weiguo directly abolished all agricultural taxes, and this decree instantly made more than 100 million peasants in the eight provinces south of the Yangtze River rejoice and inspire, and the degree of support for Li Weiguo reached an unprecedented level.

The other centith tax was a special tax set up by the Qing government to suppress the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and it was a heavy burden, almost overwhelming the gentry, merchants, and landlords, because the amount and percentage of the centigold were not clearly specified, and it was simply a forced donation and forced payment. Many wealthy families were bankrupt by this centigold, and the big fish were eaten into small fish, and the small fish were eaten into dried shrimp, and the shrimp family was finally ruined.

However, the system of centijin was never implemented in Jiangnan Province and Zhejiang Province under the rule of Li Weiguo, because Li Weiguo was not short of money to expand armaments, and used various excuses not to pay taxes to the imperial court, so that the people of Jiangnan Province and Zhejiang Province were not harmed by centijin, so that the people lived a stable and prosperous life.

But the common people in other places are suffering, and the Qing army is short of money to fight, so they can only exploit the common people on the gold. After eating, the big family in the east eats the west, until the big family is overwhelmed. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was even more lacking in virtue, and the sacred treasury system directly confiscated all the money of the common people.

Therefore, when the people of the other six provinces in the south of the Yangtze River learned that they no longer had to pay the centigold tax, they rushed to cheer and celebrate, thanking Li Weiguo for his great kindness.

The eight provinces in Jiangnan under the control of Li Weiguo abolished the centijin system, but the other provinces controlled by the Qing army still did not cancel the centijin, and even intensified it. In particular, Yi Xin's Eight Banner Army, Zeng Guofan's Chu Army (formerly Xiang Army), and Li Hongzhang's Yan Army (formerly Huai Army) were all expanding their armaments on a large scale, making the common people even more miserable.

Compared with the people in the northern provinces, the people in the southern provinces are obviously much happier. So they were even more grateful to Li Weiguo.

For a time, Li Weiguo's reputation was in full swing and he was deeply supported.

Li Weiguo owned eight provinces south of the Yangtze River, with a population of 98 million. Ninety-five per cent of them are farmers, who still rely on farming as their main means of livelihood. In addition to exempting the peasants from agricultural taxes and helping these peasants, Li Weiguo did not readjust the industrial structure of industry, agriculture, and commerce for the time being. Because the total strength of the Wu army at this time has reached one million, it has encountered a new problem, that is, the food problem.

Because of the war, food was scarce in all provinces, and a large number of peasants wandered around to escape the war, leaving the land barren and food drastically reduced.

Although Li Weiguo had abundant funds and could buy from overseas at a high price, the food supply of a million troops was also astronomical, and in the past, it was only necessary to build one or two large granaries, but now it is necessary to build dozens or even hundreds of large granaries to ensure the combat readiness requirements of the Wu army.

In this way, in order to solve the grain problem, Li Weiguo needs to restore agriculture in the provinces as soon as possible, and at the same time has to provide grain production on a large scale.

In this era, there were no high-yielding grain seeds such as hybrid rice, and the yield was very low in both paddy and dry fields, with less than one-tenth of the yield per mu in the 21st century.

Obviously, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom War reduced the population of the country by 200 million, the population of the Qing Empire in 1864 was only 210 million, although the population under the rule of Li Weiguo accounted for nearly half of the 98 million, but the division was very uneven, Jiangnan Province and Zhejiang Province because of the strong Wu army guarded, relatively stable, more than ten years in the south due to the war in large numbers of people moved in, now as high as 50 million, and Jiangxi Province, which was most affected by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom war, has a population of less than 5 million, a difference of ten times.

Li Weiguo originally wanted to relocate some of the people from Jiangnan Province and Zhejiang Province to supplement the population of Jiangxi Province, but in the end, he sent people to investigate the people's situation and found that the people were not willing at all, so he had to give up.

Unable to start with the population, Li Weiguo can find a way to increase the yield per mu of farmland.

Although Li Weiguo has assigned a group of agricultural scientists to carry out research and development of hybrid rice and other high-yield grains, it cannot be expected in the short term, and the only way to increase the yield per mu is chemical fertilizer.

Fortunately, Li Weiguo had the foresight to set up the Jiangwan Industrial Zone 10 years ago, and the first batch of factories included a fertilizer plant. At that time, the common people in Jiangnan Province were using farm fertilizer and could not afford to use chemical fertilizer, and Li Weiguo was also preparing to use the fertilizer factory to cover up the production target of the chemical factory.

The high cost at the beginning was because nitrate, an important principle in chemical fertilizers, needed to be imported from Chile, and there were no megaton large cargo ships in this era, the transportation cost was high, and the import tariffs were also high, resulting in the high cost of fertilizer produced by Jiangwan Fertilizer Factory, which was unaffordable for the people.

But now, ten years later, with the help of two academicians of the Academy of Sciences, Barnett and Huygens, and under the "divine guidance" of Li Weiguo, the equipment for using air to extract nitrogen has finally been successfully developed and put into operation, so that the Jiangwan fertilizer plant no longer needs to import expensive nitrate from Chile, and can directly use industrial nitrogen to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer, and even the nitric acid raw materials required by the gunpowder factory have also been solved, and the cost of these two huge uses has been rapidly reduced.

However, the common people are still not used to buying fertilizer for farming, although the price of fertilizer has fallen to the range that ordinary people can afford.

So Li Weiguo came up with a way to expand the production scale of the fertilizer plant. At first, the financial allocation was used to pay for the production of fertilizer, and it was distributed to farmers for free, and so on for several years, when farmers realized that chemical fertilizer could significantly increase food production, realized the importance of chemical fertilizer, and then sold fertilizer at the normal price, everything was fine.

If you are willing to give up, how can you get it if you are not willing to give up.

Under the temptation of the two policies of exempting agricultural taxes and giving free chemical fertilizers, the entire eight provinces south of the Yangtze River began a vigorous large-scale production movement, and the peasants' enthusiasm for farming increased rapidly. As a result, Li Weiguo's grain strategy pattern was completed.

While deploying the grain strategy, Li Weiguo naturally did not forget that industrial construction, especially the military industry, was also the key to winning the world.

In terms of industry, Li Weiguo has not changed the existing pattern, and is still taking Shanghai Jiangwan as the center of the industrial base, and the scale is gradually expanding outward, but it will not go out of Jiangnan Province, and it will not expand to other provinces for the time being.

Because Li Weiguo knows it very well. The provinces he controls are all in the south, and the mineral resources are poor, which is not suitable for building an industrial base, and an industrial base in Shanghai is already very good.

With the large-scale expansion of the Wu army and the incorporation of hundreds of thousands of Taiping troops. The increase in the number of troops meant large-scale spending on weapons and equipment, the production of guns and ammunition was several times larger than before, and the raw materials for the steel mills were previously mined from Shilu on Hainan Island and transported to Shanghai for processing, which was a long distance. Because there was no better quality iron ore in the south under Li Weiguo, it was not cost-effective to import from Europe and the United States.

In particular, Patriotic rifle cartridges use copper, because copper is malleable. Easy to process, easy to cut, the most suitable for lathe processing in the fifties, so it was selected by Li Weiguo to make rifle cartridges. However, due to the scarcity of copper ore in China, because the scale of the Shanghai army was not large, the required copper raw materials could be purchased from the market. However, with the transformation of the Shanghai army into the Wu army, the rifle ammunition required by the million army can be described as astronomical, and the consumption of training in peacetime, and even the outbreak of the war to exterminate the Qing Dynasty in the future, will require a larger amount of ammunition.

To this end, Li Weiguo signed an agreement with Britain to temporarily import copper ore from British India. However, from a strategic and military point of view, this is not a solution, and in the event of a war with the British in the future, the copper ore import channel will be blocked, which will affect the Wu army.

Now, with the fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the iron ore fields around Ma'anshan, which were previously occupied by the Taiping army, can now be mined, and will soon be transported down the Yangtze River to the Jiangwan Iron and Steel Plant in Shanghai for smelting, and the transportation cost is significantly lower than that of the previous sea from Hainan Island.

At the same time, there is also a large copper mine known to Li Weiguo in the Ma'anshan area, which has also been mined. In this way, not only the cost of steel smelting has dropped significantly, but even the demand for copper ore in the Wu Military Arsenal has also been solved.

Ma'anshan is the only large vein group south of the Yangtze River, rich in high-quality iron and copper, so Li Weiguo attached great importance to it, and quickly set up military camps in the Ma'anshan area, and sent troops to protect the mining site and shipping waterway.

However, where there are interests, it will definitely lead to war, and as Li Weiguo sent people to occupy the entire Ma'anshan mining area, it also attracted the peeps of the two surrounding forces.

Li Hongzhang, who was promoted to the throne of Yan, and Zeng Guofan, the king of Chu, are willing to see Li Weiguo become stronger, and they found that Wu Jun was buying copper at high prices in various places, so Zeng and Li secretly sent people to hoard and deliberately raise the price, on the one hand, to card Li Weiguo, and on the other hand, to make money.

However, with the leakage of the news that Ma'anshan is a super-large ore vein and rich in copper and iron, Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang couldn't sit still, on the one hand, they were unwilling to Li Weiguo to get the Ma'anshan large ore vein, and on the other hand, the large amount of copper ore and copper products they hoarded in their hands instantly depreciated, making them lose money.

Ma'anshan is not in Huguang, so although Zeng Guofan is envious and complaining, he has no way at all.

But Li Hongzhang is different, he looked at the map and found that Ma'anshan is under the jurisdiction of Anhui, which is his territory, even if it is a large mineral vein discovered by Li Weiguo, it will also score him Li Hongzhang's share.

Previously, in order to divide Li Hongzhang and Zeng Guofan, Li Weiguo recognized Anhui as Li Hongzhang's territory in order to expel Zeng Guofan first. In fact, Anhui belongs to the jurisdiction of Liangjiang and is the fief of King Wu of Li Weiguo, which should be fully recovered.

In this way, there is a scumbag barrel between Li Weiguo and Li Hongzhang that can explode at any time.

In the Wu Wangfu, Li Weiguo convened his staff to discuss Li Hongzhang's proposal to get a share of Ma'anshan's interests.

"There are iron ore and copper mines in the north, but Li Hongzhang came to meddle in Ma'anshan, which is a provocation to King Wu, and we should resolutely fight back!"

"Not bad! Li Hongzhang is now getting bigger and bigger, and he dares to bargain with King Wu, if it weren't for King Wu to protect him, now he is just a small governor of Anhui. ”

"The Ma'anshan vein is very important to us, with both copper and iron, which can meet the needs of the future development of the Jiangwan Industrial Zone, and cheap waterway transportation on the Yangtze River, so Li Hongzhang must not be allowed to interfere."

These people have a strong opposition attitude, but there are also people who support it, including Wu Yong,

Wu Yong could only smile and say: "I think that King Wu not only wants to let Li Hongzhang get a piece of the pie, but also takes the initiative to give half to Li Hongzhang." ”

Everyone was puzzled, and Li Weiguo was also confused, but he felt that Wu Yong still had something to do, so he said, "Go on!" ”

"Yes!" Wu Yong smiled slightly and said, "Everyone should know that the time to launch the battle to destroy the Qing Dynasty is not far away. At present, the reason why we have not yet made a difficult attack is because our new hundreds of thousands of Taiping troops need to be digested and absorbed, hundreds of thousands of Wu army recruits need to be trained, and equipment and ammunition need to be manufactured. ”

After a pause, Wu Yong continued: "It is estimated that it will take half a year to a year to complete these preparations, and during this period, I think we should keep a low profile and let our enemies relax their vigilance."

Fu Xuexian understood, and immediately smiled: "Could it be that giving half of the benefits to Li Hongzhang from Ma'anshan is to paralyze him?" ”

"Not bad!" Wu Yong nodded and said: "Last time, we deliberately gave the credit to Li Hongzhang to make him king, originally wanting to aggravate the rift between him and Zeng Guofan, but Yixin was cunning and saw our purpose, and also made Zeng Guofan king, so that the current relationship between the two of them has eased." For example, Li Hongzhang was preparing to establish the Tianjin Machinery Bureau in Tianjin, and Zeng Guofan moved the Anqing Ordnance Institute to Hankou to change it to the Hankou Manufacturing Bureau, and they wanted to compete with us in industry. Li Hongzhang has no shortage of iron ore and copper ore in the north, and he meddled in Ma'anshan because he didn't want King Wu to expand his strength and widen the gap. Therefore, we give Li Hongzhang half of the benefits, which is to show weakness, which will make Li Hongzhang even more arrogant. At the same time, Zeng Guofan was greedy, because Huguang did not have such a large ore vein, which would invisibly create the illusion that King Wu and Li Hongzhang were in the same group, which would increase the split between Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang. ”

Rong Hong said at this time: "The last time King Wu withdrew the Wu army of Zhili, it was actually a very good strategy, because without the Wu army in Zhili, Yixin's side would feel the urgent threat of Li Hongzhang's Huai army, and the contradiction was invisibly transferred to Li Hongzhang. It doesn't hurt to give Li Hongzhang half of the benefits this time, anyway, we have to prepare for military operations, and if we can paralyze Li Hongzhang, even if the hope is small, it is worth doing. ”

Soon, everyone agreed with Wu Yong's opinion.

Li Weiguo thought about it, so he nodded in agreement.

In this way, when Li Hongzhang learned about this, he was also surprised, he didn't expect Li Weiguo to make such a big concession, it was like the sun hit the west and came out, before the change, he must have doubted, but since the king of Fengyan, the minister of Beiyang, and the governor of Zhili, his character has become arrogant, especially not long ago, Li Weiguo actually withdrew all the Wu troops in Zhili and gave them to the Huai army, which made Li Hongzhang even more arrogant.

Therefore, Li Weiguo's concession this time made Li Hongzhang even more proud.

However, in Huguang on the other side, Zeng Guofan couldn't eat grapes and complained that the grapes were sour, and scolded Li Weiguo and Li Hongzhang for being embarrassed, completely disappointed in Li Hongzhang, and even the entire Chu army was even more dissatisfied with Li Hongzhang. (To be continued.) )