After the summer of 1897, from the beginning of June to the middle of July for more than a month, the southern provinces of Seris were pouring rain almost every day, and floods were reported one after another around the entire Anhui and northern Jiangsu, especially the Huai River in northern Jiangsu on July 11, and almost the entire Huainan suffered a disaster, among which the Taizhou Mansion was particularly seriously affected.

"Alas..."Chen Zeyu looked at the flood losses in various places, and his heart was worried.

Although a series of measures have been put in place, the huge loss of life and property in various places is still shocking. As a modern person who traveled through time and space, Chen Zeyu's hometown in his previous life was Jiangsu Province, which was the hardest hit area this time, and seeing that his hometown was severely flooded and the villagers suffered huge casualties, Chen Zeyu himself was of course not comfortable.

I remember that my family lived on the north bank of the tributary of the Huai River at that time, and once in 92 years, when the local river was flooded, the entire city where Chen Zeyu was located was instantly turned into a Ze country, fortunately, the underwater pipe network of his city at that time was good, and under the timely drainage, most of the residents, including Chen Zeyu, who was only a young child at that time, were spared.

Because of the successive floods in several provinces in the lower reaches of the Huai River, Chen Zeyu simply advanced the resettlement plan formulated by the government earlier.

Although Chen Zeyu's government of the Republic has been actively carrying out its own industrial planning, in terms of demographic structure alone, Seris is still an out-and-out agricultural country, especially in the mainland where the agricultural population is overwhelmingly dominant. In some provinces, such as Henan and Anhui, the contradiction between population and land has reached a point where it has to be resolved. Although Chen Zeyu's government of the Republic has been alleviating this contradiction through means such as tax reform and a series of rent and interest reductions since the day Seris was restored to the Central Plains, Chen Zeyu himself knows very well that this is just drinking to quench his thirst.

Even after Mr. Yuan Longping invented hybrid rice, the elite of the republic still had to implement a controversial population birth control policy. Compared with the young Europeans at that time, who could immigrate to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, all Chinese had to be crammed into a small territory. In the final analysis, this is just because the living space of the Chinese themselves is too narrow, and the peaceful rise is just a sad statement, and the nation with limited resource occupancy is doomed to have no way out.

In his thoughts, Chen Zeyu picked up a bill from the Ministry of Civil Affairs in his hand again and looked through it......

In addition to the Nanyang immigration policy that the government of the Republic has been advocating, the entire immigration plan will also include the newly formulated northbound immigration policy. Chen Zeyu deliberately marked a red circle in this bill and added a note below: "According to the government's immigration policy, all landless and landless farmers in the Central Plains and the south who voluntarily go to the northeast will receive 200 mu of free land per household for their cultivation. ”

Among them, Chen Zeyu also took special care of Jiangdong 64tun and other areas that nominally belong to Russia and are on the east bank of the Heilongjiang River. Although the Qing State had ceded more than 600,000 square kilometers of Outer Northeast territory to Tsarist Russia after the signing of the Treaty of Aihui in 1858, according to the provisions of the treaty, the Chinese still enjoyed the right of residence in the above areas, and because a large number of their own subjects did live in this area, the Russian side also agreed to the jurisdiction of the Qing State over some of these non-sovereign areas in the signing of the treaty.

For this loophole in the treaty, Chen Zeyu will naturally increase his exploitation. According to the plan, in the next five years, the Republic will emigrate 40 million people to the entire northeast region, and the Jiangdong region, which Chen Zeyu takes special care of, will "contract" nearly half of the population. Most of them will be modeled after the domestic production and construction corps, and will be organized into paramilitary armed resettlement groups.

According to the original history, before and after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, the Russian Far East garrison would launch several massacres in this land to completely reduce this hidden danger. But now that their opponents have been replaced by the more aggressive Seris, the results may not be as simple as they think.

Just when Chen Zeyu summoned a group of high-level leaders of the republic to "plot in the dark room", the Caribbean region of the Americas suddenly broke out in the flames of war.

On July 2, 1897, when Spain was dispatching troops in Latin America to suppress the guerrilla rebellion in Puerto Rico, the U.S. government, which was close to the Caribbean Sea, suddenly publicly declared its support for the independence demands of Cuba, Puerto Rico and other locals, and sent warships to deliver a large amount of arms and materials to the two places.

After being protested by the Spanish government, the Americans sent a fleet again and delivered supplies to the rebels twice on the 7th and 11th. Under these circumstances, the Spaniards finally formally presented an ultimatum to the US Government on the 24th, and asked the Spanish fleet dispatched from the mainland to take tough measures against the US arms smuggling ships, and the anger between the two sides became heavier and heavier.

At 9:14 a.m. on 25 July, the US Navy warship "Maine" was first sunk by the Spanish fleet outside the port of Havana in Cuba, and all but 42 of the 915 officers and men on board were killed. Spain also declared war on the United States that day!

Unlike the Spanish-American War, which was supposed to take place at the end of the century, Spain's impression of power in the eyes of the entire international world was greatly reduced after the impact of the previous Luzon independence events, and the United States also began to underestimate Spain's power and started the war a year earlier.

Because of the influence of Chen Zeyu's "Theory of Sea Power," which was published ahead of schedule, and especially after the launch of the "Dreadnought" battleship, the first all-heavy artillery of the Seris Navy last year, all the traditional naval powers in the world have successively launched their own naval expansion plans, and the Americans, who are in the center of the two oceans, are also not far behind. By the time the war began, the Americans had a powerful naval fleet consisting of 4 Maine-class battleships, 4 Olympia-class, 9 Baltimore-class armored cruisers, and a large number of unprotected cruisers and gunboats.

Among them, the Olipia-class cruisers are equipped with ten six-inch to eight-inch main ship guns with a displacement of more than 5,800 tons, while the Maine-class battleships are an astonishing more than 12,800 tons, equipped with a number of large and medium-caliber tower twin naval guns. In contrast, in addition to the three newer Teresa-class armored warships of more than 6,800 tons and one Cologne-class armored cruiser built by British Armstrong, the remaining dozens of combat ships are iron-ribbed wood-hulled unprotected cruisers that should have been eliminated a long time ago.

On the other hand, the more than 20,000 landing troops urgently dispatched by the United States to fight in Cuba since the beginning of the war have become a laughing stock in the military circles of all countries in the world. In particular, it is worth mentioning that although the Spanish Navy has four relatively new large-tonnage armored cruisers, the level of training and maintenance of the officers and men on board the ships is not enough to give full play to the true performance of these warships, and before the war between the two sides, some of the main guns on the Spanish warships have not even really fired.

The result of the naval battle between the two sides did not surprise Chen Zeyu, from the beginning of the war at the end of July to the beginning of August in just two weeks, after only a few naval encounters, the Spanish sea power was almost completely lost, four of the latest armored cruisers were sunk three times and one was damaged, except for one cruiser "Teresa" that escaped to Grenada by chance, the main force of the Spanish Navy, including dozens of unprotected cruisers, was completely wiped out after this battle. And the U.S. Navy paid no more than the insignificant price of minor damage to seven capital ships.

When Chen Zeyu received the results of the last naval battle of San Diego between the two navies, he also lamented in his heart that the Spanish navy's combat methods were too pedantic, and while knowing that its own naval strength was far from its opponent, it still engaged in a head-on decisive battle with the main fleet of the enemy's navy one after another. It has to be said that the Spanish commanders, while observing the knightly legacy, also lost the young lives of a large number of their own naval officers and men.

According to Chen Zeyu's original idea, although there is a huge difference between the strength of the Spanish navy and the United States in terms of capital ships, it can completely adopt the method of breaking diplomatic relations at sea and cruise to the waters off the US mainland in search of fighters while avoiding the Cuban battlefield. Using its four latest fast cruisers to attack the U.S. merchant fleet on the Atlantic Ocean in the uncertain seas, even if it was just two unprotected cruisers to bombard any port on the east coast, it was enough to cause a total panic among the American people.

Shaking his head, Chen Zeyu took over the information on the land battlefield and looked at it, unlike the one-sided situation of the maritime operations between the United States and the West, the Spanish colonial army on the land battlefield saved some face for their motherland.

Since the American landings in Cuba on July 27, the U.S. Army has lost more than 20,000 soldiers on the Caribbean islands, and the Spanish colonial forces have performed impressively in these battles.

Perhaps a few years earlier, having learned a lesson from the battlefields of East Asian Luzon, the Spanish government had successively replaced several groups of governors and garrison commanders in the colonies since 1895, and sent officials of the central government to conduct rigorous surveys and training the colonial garrisons in various places. For more than two months, from the end of July to mid-September, Spain's Caribbean garrison taught the American cowboys a lesson on the Cuban battlefield after systematically reducing the strength of the colonial forces in various places.

On 27 July, the Spanish and Cuban fronts were bombarded by the enemy's naval vessels, inflicting more than 1,000 casualties on the opponent in the US landing battle that day. The American troops, who had crossed the Florida Strait and landed off the coast of San Diego, actually fled back into the sea under the bombardment of the Spaniards' shore firefighting. On 9 August, Spanish forces systematically annihilated nearly 4,000 troops of the U.S. Second Army in the area east of Santiago. On 17 August, just as the two navies were fighting a decisive battle off the coast of Santiago, the Spanish colonial forces in Cuba suddenly struck a blow back to the pistol, and the Spanish troops, which were full of 100,000 men, instantly gathered and surrounded more than 20,000 people of the US Fifth Army in San Diego before the opponent could react. After a modest battle, most of the rest were captured by the Spanish army, except for a few American soldiers who escaped from the harbor by boat.

History changed again here, when the U.S. government launched the war against Spain at the right time to seize the opportunity of the great local uprising led by the Cuban Pratt. Now, when the United States launched the war a year ahead of schedule, there has been no major turmoil in Spain's colonies in the Caribbean, except for a small group of local guerrillas in Puerto Rico, and it has to be said that the situation of the Luzon independence war a few years ago has severely misled the high-ranking military and political personnel of the United States, making them ignore the original objective strength of the Spanish colonial army.

The war between the two sides progressed until the beginning of September, and although the American navy had completely seized sea supremacy over the Latin American Ocean, Cuba, a bright pearl on the Caribbean Sea, was still firmly in the hands of the Spaniards, except for Puerto Rico, which was voluntarily abandoned by the Spanish colonial forces.

In contrast to the historical war in which the Americans quickly seized Spain's colonies in the Pacific and Latin America, in this time and space, the original Luzon had long been pried away by Chen Zeyu, and other places except for the less important Puerto Rico, including the Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean, and Cuba in the Caribbean, were still under the control of Spain.

It can be said that the Americans have only won the "momentum" victory, but have failed to turn this advantage into real benefits. At the same time that the country's naval fleet was showing its might, the successive tragic white-knuckle battles on the land battlefield also frightened the courage of the American soldiers in an instant, of course, some people deliberately ignored the factor that the Spanish army was equipped with a large number of automatic weapons, which naturally included Chen Zeyu's earlier layout.

At the same time, the Americans had no choice but to organize a fleet to launch an almost cage-like naval blockade of Spain's Cuban colonies, hoping to weaken the long-term combat capability of the Spanish colonial army.