Due to the high speed of industrial production in China. China has leapt from a weak and backward traditional agricultural country to one of the world's major industrial powers, and compared with the most important industrial varieties in 1913, China's steel production, coal mining, oil exploitation, and power generation have all increased several times or even dozens of times. It is estimated that China's total industrial output has increased by 10 times, of which the production of means of production has increased by 15 times and the production of means of consumption has increased by 5 times. The output of some major products such as steel, iron and electricity has leapt to the forefront of the world. Such a high production development rate was unique in the world at that time.

The achievements made in China's industrial development are not only reflected in the speed of development, but also in the establishment of an industrial system with a fairly complete range of departments in a relatively short period of time, thus greatly strengthening the country's economic strength. China has built or greatly developed a series of heavy industrial sectors that are of great significance to the transformation of the entire national economy and national defense construction, such as shipbuilding, automobile and tractor manufacturing, machine tool manufacturing, and aircraft manufacturing. It was precisely these that laid the foundation for China's comprehensive victory in World War II, the largest war in human history.

The rise of China has also brought about major changes in the world political landscape, directly changing the historical trend of Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union.

After the signing of the Laparo Treaty between the Soviet Union and Germany, Germany soon became the Soviet Union's largest trading partner. The Soviet-German Laparo Treaty enabled Germany not only to benefit from trade with the Soviet Union, but also to its political significance. The progress of Soviet-German relations was the largest and only increase in power that Germany had achieved since the end of the First World War. The progress of such relations, in general, begins with economic cooperation, but the strength of Soviet-German cooperation lies in the fact that this economic interaction paves the way for future political and military cooperation.

At the beginning of 1923, in order to circumvent the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles and transfer the country's military industry to foreign development, General Seckert, the director of the German Military Service, formed a department in the Wehrmacht codenamed "R Group". Schleicher was in charge of the establishment of secret German assistance to the Soviet military industry, specifically in connection with Glasing, chairman of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade of the USSR. In September 1923, secret talks began between Soviet and German representatives in Schleicher's apartment, where the two sides agreed on the details of the implementation of German financial and technical assistance to the Soviet military industry. Of course, the Soviet side must also repay the German Wehrmacht for the "generous gift" from the German side, that is, to allow the German side to build arsenals and training bases necessary for the military industry on the territory of the Soviet Union.

Subsequently, Schleicher set up a number of "shell companies" (the most famous of which was GEFU) on behalf of the German side, which were responsible for the first financial assistance of 75 million marks to the Soviet military industry. In March 1924, the first German engineering experts came to the Soviet Union. A month later, the German aircraft company "Junkers" began to build a modern aircraft factory in the Fili area on the outskirts of Moscow; The Krupp Arms Company began construction of a heavy artillery production enterprise in the south of the Soviet Union. Subsequently, the German flight training school, tank testing college, chemical weapons production plant, and submarine construction base began to be built on the territory of the Soviet Union.

A large number of German engineers and technicians were sent to the Soviet Union to help Soviet engineers build a series of manufacturing plants for aircraft, tanks, large-caliber artillery, and chemicals. On the one hand, the Soviet Union has acquired extremely valuable advanced industrial technology and equipment, trained a large number of engineers in the military industry, and at the same time enabled the Soviet Union to learn the refined production management skills of German industry, thus greatly shortening the gap between the Soviet Union and industrialized countries in terms of technological level. On the other hand, these factories enabled Germany to test new technologies and inventions in practice, to produce a wide range of heavy equipment and military aircraft prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles, and to maintain the world-leading level of German technology. Germany, under the cover of the Soviet Union, evaded the inspection of German [***] industry by the British and French inspectors for compliance with the requirements of the Treaty of Versailles during the five-year military-industrial cooperation.

The five-year "honeymoon period" of Soviet-German military-industrial cooperation from 1923 to 1928 was also a critical period in the debate over the path to industrialization in the Soviet Union. It was with the help of German industry that the Soviet Union acquired the technology, equipment, experience and talent necessary for industrialization. The Soviet Union then only had to magnify the diffusion of these valuable industrial technologies dozens of times, and the wheels of industrialization would rumble and roll.

A few years after the implementation of the New Economic Policy in Soviet Russia, industrial and agricultural output had reached the level before the First World War in 1914. After that, the USSR began to implement the first five-year plan. And the economic crisis in the Western world, which began after the war, became a good opportunity for the rise of the Soviet Union. To this end, the Soviet government strengthened the management of foreign exchange and tariffs. During the NEP period, the Soviet Union once allowed limited private foreign exchange operations, but then implemented a system of strict control over foreign trade, foreign exchange, and customs duties under the state monopoly, and completely banned all activities of foreign exchange and stock exchanges. This temporary measure was intended to prevent the spread of the financial crisis to the Soviet Union, but after the end of the economic crisis, this policy was not relaxed, but was considered an important feature of a socialist-egalitarian economy. As a result, these positive measures to stabilize the economic order eventually turned into factors that hindered economic development.

During the NEP period, the Soviet government encouraged foreign investment in the Soviet Union in the form of concessions. Later, the Soviet government issued a decree abolishing the concession system. The Soviet Union's use of foreign capital gradually shifted from mainly absorbing foreign direct investment to mainly borrowing from abroad and importing technology for compensation. However, borrowing foreign debts requires interest payments, which can easily cause repayment pressure; The effect of paid technology introduction is often not as good as opening a joint venture and learning directly in the process of production and operation. As a result, the Soviet Union was isolated from the trend of expanding mutual investment by the developed countries, which hindered economic development.

Stalin, the strong-fisted leader of the Soviet Union, insisted that the Soviet Union was surrounded by "imperialist powers" and faced great dangers (especially China and Ben, which occupied large swathes of Soviet territory in Asia), and that the next world war was brewing. In order to cope with the threat from China, he demanded that the whole party and the people of the Soviet Union must strive to basically complete industrialization within 10 to 15 years, and for this reason they did not hesitate to endure a temporary hard life. In order to accelerate industrialization, the Soviet Union had to rely on the export of agricultural products and raw materials in exchange for foreign exchange to pay for imports of machinery and equipment. At that time, the prices of agricultural products and raw materials on the international market generally plummeted, but the Soviet Union expanded its exports, so it suffered huge economic losses. What is particularly frightening is that while the Soviet Union expanded its agricultural exports, domestic agricultural production was drastically reduced. However, with the progress of industrialization, the number of urban populations that need to be supported has increased significantly. In the so-called "collectivization of agriculture" movement, the supply of grain, meat and milk was so severe that it had to be supplied with vouchers. As a result, the standard of living of the Soviet population has not improved much, and in some areas it has even declined, as in the case of the Holodomor in Ukraine.

By the end of the first five-year plan of the Soviet Union, Soviet industrial output had reached a fairly high level, a pace that surprised Western observers. In fact, the rapid development of Soviet industry was inseparable from the centralized economic system of its time. This system has been effective in concentrating on the use of the state's limited manpower and material resources, changing the country's backward industrial outlook and the distribution of productive forces, and in uniformly allocating material resources to focus on certain urgently needed key state construction projects, such as the manufacture of weapons and equipment and the production of raw materials such as steel, coal, petroleum, and timber. However, there are serious drawbacks to this system: due to the one-sided emphasis on the development of heavy industry, the people's demand for ordinary consumer goods has been greatly suppressed; Excessive reliance on a highly centralized management system, the means of command by administrative orders, the neglect of the role of economic laws and people's initiative, coupled with the extensive mode of production, have made the role of this economic management system in hindering the development of production more and more obvious.

This deformed development of heavy industry in the USSR was determined by the economic development strategy implemented by the USSR. The primary goal of the leaders of the Soviet political axe was to catch up with and surpass the "advanced capitalist countries" in terms of economic development, that is, in terms of the speed of production and the quantity of products produced. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin once repeatedly emphasized: "We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries." We should cover this distance in 10 years. "In this target task, the growth of quantity, that is, the pursuit of the growth of the "gross output value" index, has always been in the dominant position. To a large extent, the growth of quantity depends on the extensive management mode of investing a large amount of manpower, material resources, and financial resources. The pursuit of "gross output" became almost the highest task of enterprise production, which inevitably led to the development of the Soviet economy along an extensive path.

The main means by which the Soviet Union realized this strategy was the priority and high-speed development of heavy industry. The Soviet leader explained: "Not the development of any kind of industry is called industrialization. The center of industrialization, the basis of industrialization, is the development of heavy industry (fuels, metals, etc.), in the final analysis, is the development of the production of means of production, the development of the country's machine manufacturing industry. "In order to raise funds for the development of heavy industry, it was obtained mainly by squeezing agriculture and suppressing consumption, thus forming an unbalanced and extremely deformed state of industrial development in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet government used its limited funds mainly for the development of heavy industry, which inevitably crowded out the development of light industry and agriculture. As a result, nearly a decade after the October Socialist Revolution, the main agricultural and livestock production in the Soviet Union had not even reached the level of the pre-revolutionary tsarist era.

In addition to the one-sided development of heavy industry, the problems brought about by the highly centralized management system also seriously constrained the development of the Soviet economy.

Since the Soviet Union did not allow the existence of the private economy, it also tried to exclude all forms of cooperatives, and even erased the distinction between state and collective ownership, and tried its best to promote the transformation of the collective economy into a state economy. This single form of ownership of the means of production has led to the formation of a highly centralized management system.

The main feature of the Soviet-style highly centralized management system is the management of the economy by administrative means, and the substitution of economic means by means of administrative orders, that is, the organization of economic activities mainly through the issuance of orders, resolutions, and administrative organizational means in relations with various economic units and enterprises. In essence, it rejects market adjustment means, and the room for using economic levers such as prices, costs, and profits is also very limited.

In the formulation of economic policy, political and ideological criteria prevail over economic considerations. Industry is superior to agriculture, and the production of means of production is superior to the production of means of consumption. The Soviet Union increased its industrial output by investing heavily in capital and labor, by way of extended development, by pursuing the quantity of products (i.e., the index of gross output value) rather than primarily by the quality of products, and by emphasizing more products at home and ignoring the links with the growing world market. As a result, the requirements for the development of the productive forces were ignored, the objective role of economic laws was ignored, and the development of the Soviet state was seriously constrained.

If China, which grew stronger, stimulated the Soviet Union and caused it to grow deformously, then the impact on the Soviet Union was no worse than that of the Soviet Union.

April 6, 1928, Tokyo Bay.

Standing on the bridge of the cruiser Isuzu of the Navy, Captain Isoroku Yamamoto stared closely at a large cruiser moored in the harbor with a five-color flag and a three-color herringbone flag, and took a deep breath of the sea breeze with the smell of oil smoke.

It was the Chinese Navy's large cruiser Yinhu, one of the new "Zodiac" class large cruisers, which was on a friendly visit to Tokyo Bay at this time.

In the eyes of many people, the friendly visit of the Chinese [***] ship is more of a demonstration of their strength to the company.

"This is a large cruiser built by the people of the United States for the China Navy." Kenji Sakui, the navy Daisaide beside Yamamoto Fifty-six, looked at this majestic large cruiser with a full load displacement of nearly 30,000 tons, and his voice spoke with a trace of indescribable depression.

"There are twelve of them, and not all of them were built by the United States." Yamamoto said calmly, "Four of them were built by shipyards in China. ”

"Oh? Is this true? Hearing Yamamoto Fifty-Roku's answer, Kenji Ide's eyes widened in surprise.

"When I was the military attache of the Navy stationed in the United States, I went to the Bethlehem Shipyard in the United States and the Shanghai Shipyard in China and saw these warships." Yamamoto fifty-six replied.

"That is to say, the restrictions imposed by the Washington Treaty on the China Navy are temporary, and once the treaty expires, with the shipbuilding capacity of China, it will still be able to build warships as powerful as the 'Republic' and 'Glorious' classes." Kenji Inide clenched his fists as he spoke.

"Now China, it has become more and more like a rice country." Yamamoto Fifty-six said with a sigh with mixed feelings.

As a rising star of the Navy, Yamamoto Isoroku studied at Harvard in Boston, USA, when he was promoted to Nakasa at the end of 1919. At the end of 1923, when he was promoted to the rank of Captain, he traveled to Europe on a business trip and attended the Naval Armament Readiness Conference in London. Because of his position, Yamamoto had the opportunity to travel and investigate in many countries. Such an experience enabled Yamamoto to to keep abreast of the world situation and the latest advances in the military science and technology of the world's navies. It can be said that Yamamoto's vision is very broad, for example, in terms of his view of the United States, Yamamoto Isoroku is fundamentally different from the view held by Kenri Sato, who has also been stationed in the United States for a long time. In Sato's view, how can an American, spoiled by a rich life, not even walk in a straight step, fight with the majestic Emperor [***] team? And Yamamoto Fifty-six doesn't see it that way.

The cultural impact of Yamamoto Isoroku on his first trip to the United States was too great, and Yamamoto Shaoza, who was not a feminist and loved female surnames, naturally focused on American female surnames in his letters to relatives and friends in China. Girls in the United States can receive a university education and be able to work independently, so that Yamamoto Shaosa, who almost does not know that there are other female surnames except for the women in Happy Street, is stunned, and the sugar in the United States is not rationed and teaches Yamamoto Shaosa what is the "difference in national strength", and later the car factory in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas also told Yamamoto Shaosa the true power of the United States.

In a memorandum to the Ministry of the Navy, Yamamoto pointed out: "Because of the relationship between China, there is a possibility of war with the United States, but it is impossible to support the war against the United States at the time of the War, so even if the Yamamoto can prepare the same armaments as the United States, it will not be possible to raise the war expenses for the war against the United States, and the only choice for the use of diplomatic means to avoid war with the United States is to use diplomatic means to avoid going to war with the United States." And now, after going to China, Yamamoto Isoroku has come to a similar conclusion about China.

It was hard for him to imagine that Chinese girls would go to college just like American girls, and that they would be able to read with the same self-improvement.

The oil fields of Central Siberia, the automobile factories in Manchuria and the huge shipyard on Yangshan Island also shocked Yamamoto Isoroku.

"It was supposed to be a war against China before the Washington Treaty expired." Kenji Iide said, "If the treaty expires and Shina has the opportunity to build more powerful warships, he will not be able to win." ”

Yamamoto Fifty-six listened to Kenji Ide's words and felt a little funny, although he did not show it on his face out of politeness.

Of course, he understood why Kenji Inide would say such things that sounded very unproductive to him.

Because of the failure of the "Battle of Busan" that year, the current Saimoto Navy's fear of the 12 50,000-ton giant ships of the Chinese Navy has surpassed the Meiji Navy's fear of "Dingyuan" and "Zhenyuan"!

What makes the whole country rejoice is that in order to show their loyalty to the "Washington Treaty" made by the "American masters," the Chinese have "abolished their martial arts."

(To be continued)