Song Biao came to Shanxi this time because the weasel gave the chicken a New Year's greeting, and he didn't have a good intention at all, saying that he wanted to personally thank the Jin merchants for their support to the Central Military Department, but in fact, he wanted to personally find out how deep the muddy water in Shanxi was.

The new governor he transferred to Shanxi is Wang Shuhan, this is the real imperial party, and it may not be very ruthless to start, but at the moment he is just trying to deal with the problem within the scope of appeasement, and then pave the way for a tougher iron-fisted governor.

After inspecting Shanxi for a whole month, and basically observing the problems in Shanxi at close range, Song Biao returned to Beijing and called Wang Shuhan over to admonish him, which allowed Wang Shuhan to take office and deal with some more urgent problems with gentle means as much as possible.

The difficulty of Shanxi's governance is difficult in the era when the Jin merchants were still alive in the Qing Dynasty, and they have not kept up with the rhythm at all, and have become an important obstacle to the development of Shanxi, these people can neither be as aggressive as Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Guangdong merchants, nor are they as decent as the Northeast and Huizhou merchants, and the road of officialdom has always been a shortcut to their fortunes, and they are not willing to forge ahead, nor are they allowed to come in to develop Shanxi.

Since the matter has reached such a place, Song Biao can only ruthlessly push down all the old Jin businessmen in front of him, and open a bright road to the future for the young talents of the new Jin businessmen.

Only by eradicating thorns can seedlings grow freely.

Of course, the Empire's immediate priority is to prepare for war against Soviet Russia and to fight to the death with the British Alliance to ensure the Empire's privileges in the Middle East.

The Germans' investment here made all countries realize that German New Guinea is rich in copper and gold resources, and the empire has also ingested about 600,000 tons of copper and nearly 30 tons of gold from here during the occupation in the past few years, and mined a part of the nickel ore, plus the cultivation of local coffee, cocoa, and coconut is an important supply to the empire's economy, and the empire has naturally refused to make any concessions. The British proposed that China and China split the two countries, but divided the main copper-gold mining areas into the capital.

The decline of France, the upheaval of Russia, and the external neutrality of the United States made the world after World War I temporarily completely dominated by the British, and even if China and France were united, the role they could play was limited.

In fact, he knew very well in his heart that Britain was now ostensibly committed to fulfilling the Sino-British Entente, and secretly frantically creating all kinds of problems for China, trying to force China to make new concessions on the basis of the Sino-British Entente, so as to ensure that Britain would maintain its position as the world hegemon and the initiative on issues such as Hong Kong, Tibetan Province, northern Burma, and the Middle East.

Song Biao had no better way than to endure for the time being, just as the republic would have done a century later in the face of all the rogue methods of the United States.

Compared with Britain, he hates a rogue country like Ben that desperately fights China with the help of external forces.

Song Biao also believed in China's potential, and one day, he would return it to this despicable and shameless British alliance.

If the empire wants to expand and develop, it can only be in this situation of internal and external troubles forever. In fact, the relationship between countries is always very complicated, especially between big countries, Britain has suppressed and supported China, and there is struggle and cooperation between China and Britain.

If China is really forced to be in a hurry, the empire can immediately reach a peace treaty with Soviet Russia, and leave the troubles of Soviet Russia to Europe to solve by itself, while the empire will steadily strengthen its garrison in the Middle East, with a million army troops stationed in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Papua New Guinea, and even a large-scale garrison in Tanzania, forcing South Africa, and then I don't know whether Britain will laugh or cry.

The struggle of great powers is a nasty and despicable art.

It was not until August 21, 1919 that the last day of the Paris Peace Conference ended its agenda, and the representatives of various countries signed the peace treaty, which, in addition to the Treaty of Versailles to Germany, also had corresponding peace treaties with Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman countries.

According to this series of peace treaties, China will receive a total of 2.2 billion pounds of war reparations from Austria, Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria, and about 3.2 billion German gold marks from Germany. Turkey was suzerainly controlled by the British Empire, China enjoyed suzerainty in Iraq, and Britain handed over the suzerainty of the Kingdom of Brunei to China.

In order to force Britain to recognize the previous war treaty, China did make major concessions, but these concessions enabled China to achieve several basic goals, that is, to maintain a certain status and interests in the Middle East and the Pacific, and at the same time to recover Hong Kong and Macao, and to demand that Britain recognize that Tibet Province belongs to China and recognize the Riau Islands as China's overseas territory.

Although Britain still plays with words and does not recognize Tibet as Chinese territory, and the conflict between the two sides in disputed areas such as northern and southern Tibet may intensify at any time, time is always more favorable to China for China.

Compared with Germany, which wants to compensate the Entente countries with 132 billion gold marks, China can only be said to be very lucky, and the former main partner country has now ended up in such a situation, and Premier Tang Shaoyi, who has visited Germany twice, is also quite emotional.

In mid-October 1919, the Russian Red Army completely defeated the White Army of Kolchak and General Madenidov entrenched in the Omsk region, and the Omsk White Army was forced to withdraw to the Novosibirsk region and completely hide under the wing of the Imperial Center Army, and the benefit of the empire was to obtain the Russian gold reserves as a protector.

Because of the Entente Mutual Insurance Treaty, Britain, France and Russia lost a relatively small total of gold reserves throughout the First World War, and Russia still has 1,170 tons of gold reserves at this stage, while owing the empire about 400 million pounds in debt.

After confirming that the gold reserves had arrived in Kyzyl, Song Biao met with General Madenidov, one of the envoys and leaders of the White Army, in the Xuanzheng Garden.

At this time, General Madenidov was no longer the Minister of War who was trusted by the Tsar in the past, because of the large-scale defeat at the front, in April 1917, General Madenidov was removed from the post of Minister of War, which unexpectedly made General Madenidov escape the February Revolution and the October Revolution in Soviet Russia, and has been waiting for the opportunity in his hometown of Orenburg, and later organized the White Army to capture Kazan with the Kolchak Department, and transported all the gold reserves of the Central Bank of Russia in Kazan back to Chelyabinsk, and then withdrew to Omsk, In the end, they withdrew to Kyzyl.

Because Jiang Yanxing was in charge of guarding the Novosibirsk region, he signed a confidentiality agreement with General Madenidov as a representative of the empire to keep these gold reserves on behalf of the White Army, but this agreement was known only to him, Madenidov, and Kolchak.

It was under such circumstances that General Madenidov personally arrived in Yanjing by train to Xuanzheng Garden to meet His Majesty the Emperor Hua.

Old friend, old boss.

Song Biao's mood was also very complicated, and he deliberately went out of Zhongnanhai to the railway station to meet General Madenidorff, and then returned to Zhonghai Inner Court in this gilded Chinese car used by the royal family.

On the way, Song Biao and General Madenidov had a brief chat, basically knowing that General Madenidov did not plan to return to Russia for the time being, and returned to Xuanzheng Garden, Song Biao invited General Madenidov to sit down in the imperial study, drink tea and chat, and at the same time asked Chen Qimei to come over, and asked Chen Qimei to rearrange Prince Gong's mansion in the name of the General Administration of the Inner Court, and specially entertained General Madenidov to live.

After Chen Qimei left, General Madenidov thanked Song Biao with gratitude: "Your Majesty, it is a great honor for me to be able to meet you in this life, but after Sheyenikiv and them all died in battle, I feel more and more sad, and I can't see the hope of rebuilding Russia, and the only hope at this time is to ask you and the Chinese Empire to send troops." ”

Song Biao bowed his head slightly in silence, but said: "General, you and I have been friends for many years, in fact, you also know in your heart that the empire has just finished a war, and there is the British Alliance dragging the empire behind, whether it is Hong Kong, or the Middle East and other issues, the British Alliance is biting to the death. The domestic military expenditure is already difficult to support, and the possibility of a decisive battle between us and Soviet Russia is too low, otherwise the empire will not just stay behind and refuse to send troops directly. Hey, military spending is a big problem, the insurance treaty is very heavy pressure on the empire, if you didn't send this batch of gold, temporarily offset the huge debt that Russia owes to our country up to 250 million pounds, the empire will now have to negotiate with Soviet Russia, and it is impossible to continue to help you hold on. ”

Of course, General Madenidov did not know that the Empire had another special expense that would support the Empire's war with Soviet Russia, but in fact, not only did he not know, but also the countries of the world.

If we only look at the general situation in the international community now, whether it is Britain and France, or China and the United States, in fact, they lack the economic foundation needed to continue a large-scale war, and they have no money, otherwise they would have joined forces to intervene in Soviet Russia a long time ago.

General Madenidov still barely held on to a glimmer of hope and asked, "Your Majesty, what are you thinking about it at present?" ”

Song Biao thought for a while and said, "My only promise now is to hold the Novosibirsk region, fight a decisive battle with Soviet Russia here, force Soviet Russia to recognize the establishment of a neutral autonomous state in the middle region, and retain you to continue to maintain the arms and power of the White Army." Of course, the regions east of Baikal, as well as the territories previously occupied by Russia, will definitely be returned. At this point, whether your White Army wins or the Soviet Russia wins, then we will not back down. In the past, we did not talk about these issues, that is because His Majesty the Tsar is here, the Romanov dynasty is in one day, considering the special relationship between China and Russia and the imperial family, we can all leave it aside for the time being, and now we will definitely talk about it. ”

General Madenidov replied: "We fully understand this, and with the present strength of the Empire, we will be very grateful to Your Majesty and the Empire if the Empire can guarantee that Soviet Russia will agree to the annexation of the Novosibirsk region to the highly autonomous Republic of Siberia." ”

Song Biao said: "If this can be the case, it must be the best, but it also depends on the outcome of our battle." According to my current observations, the level of the Red Army of Soviet Russia is actually very similar to the situation in the early days of the Northeast Army, that is, the more powerful the fighting, the richer the experience, the level of grassroots generals and middle and high-level generals are constantly improving, and the soldiers are also directly inherited from the First World War of Tsarist Russia, most of them are veterans, and the equipment is not bad, especially your White Army has sent a lot of good things before and after, and even tanks have been given to the Red Army. It's a bit of a mystery to me. The military is always full of too many unknowns, especially you can experience it best at this moment, so how can you let me guarantee it? ”

General Madenidov couldn't say anything about this either, but he knew that Song Biao didn't tell him the truth.

What level is Song Biao, is it not clear to Madenidorf? He and Kolchak and the other people's White Army have been delaying in front for nearly two years, and Song Biao's side must have been prepared for a long time, and he is unwilling to give him a clear answer at this time, to make it clear that the White Army has no use value.

Do you really think that Madneydorf and Kolchak gave away more than a thousand tons of gold for no reason?

At that time, the White Army thought that the Imperial Army on Jiang Yanxing's side did not know, and originally wanted to secretly transport the gold into the Tomsk region to be buried, but the Imperial Intelligence Department had been staring at this matter, and Jiang Yanxing and the people from the Central Military Intelligence Department and the Secret Bureau had already taken the lead to bring two integrated divisions to surround the Russian army, forcing the White Army to give up the gold, and only after bargaining did they sign a receipt issued by a private person.

The so-called receipt issued by Jiang Yanxing is nonsense, if the empire defaults on the debt, can the White Army send people to the empire to fight the lawsuit, how can it win?

Because of the influence of insurance treaties, the empire held a lot of British and French debts at this stage, but the country's central gold reserves are 2,175 tons, a large part of which is still private assets transferred from Europe to China for investment, and gold is directly exchanged for the middle yuan, so it is absolutely impossible for the empire to miss this batch of 1,170 tons of gold from Tsarist Russia.

One of the biggest benefits of the insurance treaty is to limit the crazy wave of gold from Europe to the United States, and limit the pace of the United States becoming the sole hegemon of the world, when the imperial gold reserves were maintained at 2,175 tons, the gold reserves of the United States actually did not exceed this number too much, and Britain was still the world's main gold reserve country, but the total amount fell to the scale of 4,000 tons.

At least on the question of gold reserves, the world's major powers were balanced with each other, with China, France, and the United States roughly equal, and Britain continuing to maintain twice as much as the other countries, until the empire secretly annexed this batch of gold reserves in Russia, and the pure gold standard system in the whole world was not immediately fatally hit by the First World War, and it was expected that the free circulation of gold would be restored in the next five years, provided that Britain and France gradually repaid their huge foreign debts.

General Madenidov was not a very clever military expert, but he must have been a very qualified politician, and he knew very well that the White Army was no longer of any use to the Chinese Empire, and that he remained in China, maintaining his special relationship with the Chinese Emperor and the Chinese Empire's top brass, and perhaps finding a new opportunity in the future, while it was completely pointless to remain in Russia.

In fact, he knew very well in his heart that what awaited the great Russian motherland was a tragic partition, just as cruel and ruthless as Russia had done to China, and the main culprit of all this was Soviet Russia, and other countries had just seized the opportunity.

Every country is greedy.

This is the only immutable truth in the world.

After meeting with General Madenidolph, Song Biao quietly left Yanjing and followed the same path taken by General Madenidov to Novosibirsk, where he continued to fulfill his duty as emperor at the forefront of the war - to lead the Chinese nation to victory over the eternal enemy once again.

The Imperial apparatus was exhausted, and finally this inevitable war was ushered in.

Novonikolaevsk is a city of plains, like Tolstoy's Vinnitsa, with sweeping plains with vast rye fields, low and stretching Salaire Ridge in the north, which supplies the city with a large amount of anthracite resources, the wide Ob River divides the city in two, and upstream, the Russians built hydroelectric power stations to provide cheap and abundant electricity for this emerging city in the East.

This is the Soviet-era city of Novosibirsk, and it is here that the Imperial CSKA Army is heavily armed, building a large number of fortifications on both sides of the upper Ob River, relying on the northern mountains and the remaining veins of the southern Altai Mountains to build a number of narrow defensive lines and a large number of fortresses.

When Song Biao's special train slowly drove into the west bank of the city, along both sides of the railway, two infantry divisions were following the tanks and trucks to march forward, and the troops from the cavalry division were also gathered nearby, scattered around the railway.

In the sky, from time to time, dozens of planes roared and flew by.

The First World War was a paradise for airplanes, and all sorts of technologies were born during this period, but the most wonderful thing for the empire was to invite Anthony, a genius designer of his time, from the Netherlands. Fokker and Northeast Aircraft Company have a special habit of signing contracts with engineers to jointly invest in new branches. After the new aircraft designed by Fokker was unveiled at the Russian Aircraft Exhibition, the Northeast Aircraft Company couldn't wait to talk to Anthony Brown. Fokker agreed on a cooperation plan, initially to jointly invest in a Fokker aircraft company in Germany, and later because the main orders came from Russia and China, the company soon moved to Shenyang Province in the northeast.

Since then, through military cooperation with France, the Imperial aircraft industry has continuously produced a variety of aircraft, mainly to Russia and the British and French forces, in 1917, when the largest number of aircraft exported, the empire exported 34,800 aircraft, accounting for 1/3 of the total aircraft production of the Entente countries that year.

However, at this time, in addition to the engine, propeller and machine gun, almost all the parts of the aircraft were made of wood, and the birch produced by the Empire was the best choice, which made it inevitable that the Empire would have a list of birch wood among the most exported military supplies during the war, and even the rifles produced by the French in the country used the birch butts of the Empire.

Compared to the large-scale export of aircraft, the Empire's air force did not have much success throughout the war, whether it was the Ottoman Empire or Austria-Hungary, the two main opponents of the Imperial Expeditionary Force did not have large-scale aircraft, so that the Empire's air force pilots could easily reconnoiter their opponents and carry out air raids in a small area.

All sorts of strange technologies were always born during this period, and the Empire and France collaborated to produce a four-engine SBAD.S303 biplane heavy bomber, which allowed the aircraft to carry 2.5 tons of bombs to bomb opponents at a range of 480 km.

The Reich's CSKA Divisions had been increased to 15 divisions over the past year, half of which were concentrated in Novosibirsk, and 22 regular infantry divisions and 104 new regiments drawn from the northern provinces were also drawn from this zone.

The Kuznetsk region, which was occupied by the empire with heavy troops, was Russia's largest open-pit coalfield, with more than hundreds of billions of tons of coal seams, and more than tens of billions of tons of coking coal with very low sulfur content, as well as a certain degree of iron ore resources, and was Russia's largest industrial town in the eastern region during the Tsarist period, producing more than 1.9 million tons of coal per year.

The empire, an optimistic country, had no idea of ceding this fertile land, and temporarily established the Siberian Reclamation Bureau there, where it was a large number of laborers from the northeast and Shanxi, and a new military industrial base was created, and the small steel mills of Russian merchants were expanded.

In the vast plains around Novosibirsk, which is equivalent to 1/2 of the three eastern provinces, the empire has cultivated more than 3 million hectares of land in a large-scale mechanized way, and also controls the taxes of about 1.7 million Russians in the local area to maintain the local military food supply, which is already a naked exposure of the empire's ambition to occupy it permanently.

The only trouble for the Reich now is that a large number of Russians are fleeing the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the total number of Russians in the area was only about 1.1 million when the Reich occupied the area last year, but now it has swelled by more than 600,000, not including the remnants of the White Army, which is about 200,000 or so.

It was not only foreign countries that were afraid of Soviet Russia, but also the Russians themselves, especially the middle and upper classes of Russia, who did everything they could to flee to the Far East, even if the empire occupied it.

From Omsk to Kuznetsk, from Tomsk to Abakan, these two plains have more than 210,000 square kilometers of fertile land, with minimum and maximum temperatures of around 20 degrees Celsius, and snowfall in winter and many rivers comparable to the Yangtze River are enough to ensure large-scale agricultural planting once a year.

After careful investigation and evaluation, the Empire had changed its original assumption and no longer intended to abandon this fertile land, and if all went well, the Empire would send more than 10 million northern people from the interior to the interior, develop it on a large scale, and prepare for a long century-long competition with Russia for this land.

Song Biao was also forced, and the empire was also forced.

The empire is so populated that the path of expansion can never be stopped.

Although in the depths of his conscience, Song Biao preferred to simply recover the empire's territories in the Far East and the Trans-Khing'an Mountains, and for a long time did not hold out any hope of permanently occupying Novosibirsk, the grim facts forced him and the empire to fight to the death for the survival of the nation.

Even if such a large-scale expansion would lead to the suppression of the international community, especially the vigilance and countermeasures of the British Empire, the Empire would have to take this step with difficulty.

In addition, Song Biao could not think of many ways to alleviate the population pressure in Henan, Hebei and Shanxi.

Mahatma Gandhi once said that if India followed the path of complete industrialization like the British, it would be a great disaster for India and the world, and this statement actually applies to China.

China needs to develop, but taking the path of a world factory is undoubtedly self-destructive.

In short, the cruel bottom line of national survival forced China and Russia to become the biggest rivals in history, what a tragic thing, but it could not be stopped, even if Song Biao, as the emperor, has always had some special romantic feelings for Russia, he could not reverse the fate of the two.

When his special train sailed into the city of Novonikolaevsk, his heart was also filled with a kind of melancholy sadness and helplessness, and at this moment he seemed to experience the entanglement and pain of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

(To be continued)