The speculation that lasted for more than half a month did not come to naught, with Xu Naizhao's recommendation, coupled with the heartfelt recommendation of the Minister of Military Aircraft, Yixun, it was finally Lin Zhe who became Su Songtai's soldier.

However, the appointment of Lin Zhe by the imperial court did not mean that Lin Zhe should directly serve as Su Songtai's military preparation road, but as the acting director, and now he is acting Su Songtaibing Beidao with the rank of three ranks, and concurrently acting Jianghaiguan Road, supervising the affairs of the Shanghai Trade Zone.

However, as Lin Zhe expected, it was impossible for the imperial court to let him take on too many affairs in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces at the same time, so the imperial court directly removed Lin Zhe's title of supervising the Huzhou Donation Bureau.

But fortunately, the imperial court did not remove his title of Zhejiang Province to co-organize the group training, but let him still retain the title of the minister of group training.

As the saying goes, there are gains and losses!

The loss of the title of supervising the Huzhou Donation Bureau made him quite unhappy, and now the Huzhou Donation Bureau has become quite large-scale, and the monthly tax has reached about 8,000 taels, and this batch of taxes is completely used for the military expenses of Yu Shengjun. In order to prevent the loss of his title of supervision, the tax of the Huzhou Donation Bureau was misappropriated by Zhejiang.

Lin Zhe personally wrote to Huang Zonghan, saying that Yu Shengjun was still stationed in Huzhou and still needed the taxes of the Huzhou Donation Bureau as military expenses, and recommended Bi Yutong under his command to Huang Zonghan as the new supervisor of the Huzhou Donation Bureau.

Huang Zonghan knew that although most of Yu Shengjun's main force had arrived in Shanghai, he still had 1,000 troops stationed in Huzhou, and the strategic security of northern Zhejiang still relied on this surplus of 1,000 victorious troops to a large extent, so he did not divert the taxes of the Huzhou Donation Bureau for other purposes, and wrote back to Lin Zhe saying that he must worry about the cost of the Huzhou garrison.

Sending away all those who congratulated him, Lin Zhe began to think about how he should deal with Su Songtai's affairs, but now he is also the ruling party, and there are millions of people in his jurisdiction, and there are many of these affairs.

To deal with government affairs, he must first have an office location, and he didn't want to go back to Su Songtaibing's Yamen in Shanghai County, so he planned to directly move Su Songtai's Bingbeidao Yamen to the Yamen of the Business Zone and merge his office.

As for other affairs, Lin Zhe found that he was not easy to start for a while, although Su Songtai's prefectures and counties had passed through the Little Knife Society, the operation of the government was not hindered, and now the government affairs of all prefectures and counties have old rules, and Lin Zhe is not easy to change too much.

Moreover, Su Songtai's prefectures and counties are traditional prefectures and counties, and they are different from the trade zone, if they rashly change the administrative organs, it is impossible to set up any patrol police, finance and other institutions like in the trade zone, if they do this, one of them will have to be detained for the crime of changing the official system without authorization, and when the time comes, they will have to take off a layer of skin.

For these civil affairs, Lin Zhe is not easy to meddle, and he has little interest in interfering, anyway, he became this Su Songtai soldier to make money, and the rest is not in charge for the time being.

However, it is not easy to make money, and there is a fixed amount of regular taxes, which need to be handed over to the household department and the governor's yamen, and it is difficult for the military preparation road yamen to intercept too much.

In terms of donations, the current donations in Jiangsu Province are the main source of military spending for the Jiangnan camp and the Jiangbei camp, not to mention that Su Songtai wants to interfere, even Xu Naizhao, the governor, does not have much right to speak, if he Lin Zhe wants to forcibly intervene, it is estimated that Xiang Rong and Qi Shan will be furious.

In this way, it is estimated that you can only rely on exacting taxes and miscellaneous taxes, as for how to get Lin Zhe with this exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous taxes, you have to find someone to discuss carefully, so as not to be careless, it will give those corrupt officials and corrupt officials in various prefectures and counties an excuse to extort the people, and when the time comes, ordinary people will not scold others, they will scold you Lin Zhe.

In addition to these taxes and miscellaneous taxes in Susongtai's prefectures and counties, there is actually a greater source of revenue, that is, Jianghaiguan!

Although Jianghaiguan gives a lot of silver taels to the Jiangnan camp and Jiangbei camp every month as military expenses, it is not all, for example, according to the previous oral agreement between Lin Zhe and Xu Naizhao, Jianghai Beiguan in Jianghaiguan pays 60,000 taels every month, and the rest is Yu Shengjun's military expenses.

Although the other checkpoints did not say it explicitly, if Lin Zhe could continue to pay the current amount of taxes, it would not be a big problem for the rest of the estimates to be intercepted

In this way, if the customs tax increases significantly in the future, it is estimated that the income will not be small, but you should be careful not to attract the attention of Xu Naizhao and Xiang Rong and others.

And if you want to make money from Jianghaiguan, you must first reform the entire Jianghai Customs as well as Jianghai Beiguan!

To this end, Lin Zhe directly asked the consuls of various countries to recruit talents, and would hire many foreigners to participate in the reform of the Jiangxi Customs in his personal name.

For a time, the foreigners hired in the name of Lin Zhe's personal consultants flooded the entire Jianghai Customs, from more than 10 people in the past to more than 40 people, and most of them held important positions, and most of the Chinese employees also began to hire from the people, dismissing the original corrupt officials who ate and waited for death, and embezzled and demanded money, so that the old gate of Jianghai Customs East Gate was also the same as Jianghai North Pass, the office efficiency was greatly increased, and the atmosphere was clear.

Although it is suspected of betraying the country to let foreigners intervene in the customs power, Lin Zhe doesn't care too much, although these foreign employees all hold important customs positions, they are actually not customs employees, but only his Lin Zhe's personal employees, and he can dismiss them all with one sentence.

Besides, as long as the customs tariff is increasing day by day, Lin Zhe doesn't care that future generations will scold him as a traitor.

The old East Gate in Jianghai Customs, the North Pass of Jianghai continued to carry out reforms, and Lin Zhe did not let go of the industrial and commercial development of the trade zone.

In order to encourage industry and commerce, especially those Chinese and foreign businessmen to set up factories and create China's industry, Lin Zhe specially led a large number of officials to participate in the opening ceremony of Lin's machine qì silk reeling factory in the trade zone.

The importance of Lin's machine qì silk reeling factory is not because it is the Lin family's industry, but because the factory is the first in Shanghai and the first modern factory in China to use steam as the power!

Its factory has a large number of large and small machines, and is scheduled to employ more than 300 workers, and its scale is far from being comparable to that of traditional workshop-style silk reeling factories.

"My lord, please see, the raw silk produced by these machines is not only cheaper than the handmade raw silk, but also the quality is of the highest quality, which is no worse than the silk produced in Western France!" Because Pan Lixuan, who was put into production by Lin's Silk Reeling Factory, was full of red light.

In front of Lin Zhe and a large group of officials in the business zone, he spat: "The procurement of Xinde and Jardine Matheson have come to see the samples, and they are very optimistic about the quality of our raw silk, and they are willing to bid more than 30% of the price of the silk!" ”

"The cost is reduced, the quality is high, the price is high, and the same amount of silkworm cocoons is born of silk, and the profit of the silk factory of this machine is more than forty percent of the silk produced by the silk reeling workshop we set up in Huzhou!"

"Good, good!" Lin Zhe did not skimp on his praise at all: "This machine qì silk reeling factory can be said to be a precedent for creating a dynasty in our country, and it is worth vigorously promoting, and then he turned his head to a ticket of business and trade zone officials behind him and said: "After you go back, your industrial and commercial department should guide more Huayang businessmen to invest in industry and set up this silk reeling factory!" ”

Encourage businessmen to invest in factories, this can only be done in the trade zone, due to the special political status of the trade zone, here is actually no different from foreign countries, the business zone yamen in order to increase tax to encourage industry and commerce is normal.

But if you don't talk about it in other parts of the country, if you don't talk about it in other places, just say that it's in the county town of Shanghai next door, it is impossible to do this.

Historically, from the bigwigs of the Qing court to the ordinary officials, they basically maintained a great rejection of foreigner-style factories and machines, and the rest of the country generally lacked the necessary normal business environment.

In the late Qing Dynasty, the reason why Shanghai's economy developed rapidly, and the number of factories accounted for more than half of the country, was because only Shanghai had relatively good political conditions in those years, so that businessmen could set up factories without worries.

Lin Zhe inspected the Lin's machine qì silk reeling factory with great fanfare, and the forty percent profit in Pan Lixuan's mouth also made many big businessmen, especially those raw silk merchants, very moved.

In these years, the people who were able to open a commercial house in Shanghai and do raw silk business with foreign companies were basically big silk merchants, and the Lin firm was just an ordinary member of these Chinese merchants.

Now they see that the Lin family has set up a machine qì silk reeling factory, which is not only low cost but also higher quality than soil silk, and all of them are active in their minds, and there are a few stable people who want to learn from Pan Lixuan, and some people are willing to cooperate with Lin's firm to set up a machine qì silk reeling factory.

As for those who are anxious, they have directly placed orders for major foreign banks, and are ready to buy land to build factories.

After seeing the report of the Industrial and Commercial Department that in just five days, six commercial banks had applied to the Industrial and Commercial Department to open a silk reeling factory, Lin Zhe finally put his mind at ease.

The industry in this business zone has finally made a start, and it is believed that relying on the raw silk industry, other industrial development in the business zone will also follow.

As long as the first batch of people taste the sweetness and know the benefits of running a factory, then there is no need to worry that no one will follow the trend, and as long as this trend rises, then the future will not only be a weaving factory, a spinning factory and other light industries.

The development of light industry will also drive the development of heavy industry, for example, the textile industry has so many machine equipment, if it is broken, it must be repaired, then there will inevitably be a machine factory that repairs machine equipment, and if it is repaired more, it will begin to try to build its own equipment, so that for a long time, each industrial chain will slowly rise, and finally evolve into a complete industrial system.

Of course, light industry can rely on policy and market guidance, but heavy industry sometimes needs forced support from government agencies.

And what can best represent heavy industry in these years is undoubtedly the defense industry!

In this era, a well-established arsenal covered almost all primitive heavy industries, from steel, coal, chemicals, finishing, wood, and so on.

If a large arsenal capable of producing guns, ammunition, and artillery can be established, it will be of great significance for the establishment of a complete industrial system.

Of course, Lin Zhe didn't dare to hope to build such a large-scale arsenal now, he just wanted to take one step at a time, starting from the modification of the rifle gun, and develop it in a down-to-earth manner.

And the first step of this start is the Linde Machinery Factory.