Before World War I, Britain and France held few gold reserves, the main gold reserves were in the commercial institutions of the two countries, and to this day, the gold reserves of the United States are mainly held by the Federal Reserve.

With the outbreak of the First World War, the classical gold standard could no longer be maintained, and countries such as Britain, France, Germany, and Italy passed legislation to transfer gold reserves to their central banks and implemented a gold exchange limit policy. Britain and France adopted the gold bar standard, which strictly restricted the exchange of gold and currency, and then continued to implement the gold exchange standard, transferring the gold reserves of the colonial countries to their own countries.

In 1920, with the turbulence of the international economic crisis, Britain, France, Italy and Germany all passed the temporary surname protection bill to suspend the exchange of gold, in order to prevent the loss of gold reserves, the three countries of China and the United States, which have relatively abundant gold reserves, also launched the same financial protection bill, and the international financial austerity crisis broke out irrepressibly.

In 1921, the total gold reserves of the Chinese Empire were 3,572 tons, worth 4.8 billion Chinese yuan, while the total amount of imperial broad money issued was 32 billion Chinese yuan, and the total amount in circulation was about 13.5 billion.

France's overall financial position is also good in theory, but whether France will be able to recover those reparations from Germany is really a question.

At this time, the empire was like the capital after the Sino-Japanese War, the total foreign debt and reparations were equivalent to 5.2 times the national fiscal revenue of the empire in 1921, and the whole empire felt very rich, as if it had endless money, and the empire's gold reserves also jumped to the second place in the world, second only to the United States.

Interestingly, the United States had become the world's largest exporter of capital, while the empire remained one of the world's largest importers of capital.

In 1921, about 28 percent of the Empire's national fiscal expenditure was spent on education, scientific research, and technology, accounting for the first place in the country's fiscal expenditure, 17.3 percent was used for resettlement, reclamation, soil and water protection, sand and flood control, agricultural support, and water conservancy and canal construction, 3 percent was used for special appropriations for the introduction of foreign talents, and 7.5 percent was used for the repurchase of cultivated land under the Land Restriction Act and special loans for peasants to increase their land holdings.

In 1921, the empire actually recovered 103 million pounds of foreign debts and indemnities, of which 1/3 was used to increase the holdings of gold, 1/3 was used for foreign study funding, and the remaining 1/3 was continued to be injected into the China International Trust and Investment Corporation for the central government's overseas investment.

Because the empire mainly relied on the low-cost army to maintain the seat of the great powers, compared with Britain, the United States, France, and Italy, the empire's expenditure on the navy and the burning of money were obviously insufficient, but the central political axe was very prosperous, and the magnitude of the fiscal surplus deeply stimulated the foreign powers in the deep debt crisis, and the empire also pumped oil in Baku like underground water, and was even more envious of the foreign powers.

The good financial surplus allowed the empire to launch an ambitious plan to double the total output value of agriculture in the third phase of the national plan, through the special credit support bill, to give preferential support loan policies to agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery throughout the country, to encourage farmers to purchase more advanced agricultural and animal husbandry machinery and equipment, to invest in the fruit economy and the purchase of large-tonnage fishing boats, it is expected to invest 2.5 billion yuan in five years for the national water conservancy construction, to the Novosibirsk Province, the Far Eastern Province, The development of industry and agriculture in Xijiang Province and the large-scale resettlement program are also urgent tasks for the new cabinet.

The Ouyang Geng cabinet adopted an economic policy that was completely different from that of Tang Shaoyi's cabinet, shifting the direction of support from the central and local governments to agriculture, in an attempt to expand the domestic demand market through the development of agriculture, so as to stimulate the growth of industry and commerce.

Song Biao was still very satisfied with such a policy, and with his understanding of Wang Yongjiang, the minister of agriculture, he also believed that there would be no problems with this big plan.

Therefore, although the scale of investment in the navy is a little lower, Song Biao does not have much worry, the empire's status in the world, its strength and the Sino-French alliance relationship can basically guarantee the security of the empire, as long as the time after World War I is accelerated development, a better tomorrow is always waiting for the empire, and it is with this mood that he is ready to accept the new US President Warren. Gambler. Harding's invitation to personally travel to the United States to attend the Washington Conference.

In late October 1921, Song Biao, escorted by a battleship and four cruisers of the Imperial Northern Fleet, traveled to the United States with Empress Shu Xuan on the battleship Aurora.

Different from the previous visits to the United States, Song Biao at this time was not only the emperor of the Chinese Empire, but also one of the most important leaders and giants of the Entente, and the cooperative relationship between China and the United States was also in the best stage in history.

The Americans are said to have taken Warren. President Harding's selection as one of the three most mediocre presidents in U.S. history may be a bit excessive. President Harding ended the wartime state of the United States and restored prosperity to the United States through a series of means, including raising tariffs and promoting free investment; Second, he reached the Washington Accords, ending the world's naval race, which has intensified over the past decade.

One thing is undeniable, and that's Warren. The depth of the collusion between President Harding and the American consortium is also unprecedented among American presidents, and the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of the Interior are both candidates for the Morgan consortium. Mellon is the most famous financial oligarchy, with the attorney general being the agent of Mobil Oil and the secretary of state being the chairman of the Bank of America, Mr. Connes. Vanderbilt.

In the harbor of San Francisco, the Emperor and Empress were personally greeted by Secretary of State John Conns. The Vanderbilts, who are clearly true old friends, are largely interconnected with their investments in both China and the United States.

Because they hadn't seen each other for several years, Song Biao seemed very happy when he saw Conns, and after the two got into the black GM Cadillac, they couldn't wait to discuss the situation in the world.

Rather than being a banker, Connes. Vanderbilt seemed more committed to the position of U.S. secretary of state, gushing endlessly about the international situation after the end of World War I, as well as the situation in Britain, France, the United States, and Germany.

At this time, Song Biao really didn't expect that the cooperation of that year would actually give birth to a very good US Secretary of State. Vanderbilt is the one who has known Wall Street and international finance the best of all U.S. secretaries of state.

The Cadillac will take Song to the Vanderbilt family's new mansion in San Francisco, a luxury estate in Oakland's Pidelmont Forest, which covers nearly 100 acres and fully demonstrates the Vanderbilt's special status since the revival of the West.

On the way to the Vanderbilt estate in Peddelmont Forest, Song Biao listened to Connes's thoughts on the German question.

The "Entente Insurance Treaty" planned by Song Biao largely limited the prosperity of the war in the United States and restricted the flow of gold into the United States, but the overall effect was not particularly obvious, and the United States still had the strength to challenge Britain's financial hegemony, and the Americans did so.

During the Paris peace talks, in order to maintain its own financial hegemony, Britain hoped that China and the United States would ban Britain's debts, and Britain would ban the debts of other countries.

At present, Britain and France pay as much as 70 million pounds sterling a year on their debts to China and the United States alone, and regardless of whether Germany can repay its debts to Britain and France, China and the United States will continue to repay the debts of Britain and France and other Allied countries.

In order to get rid of Britain's world financial hegemony, the United States has not been idle in the past two years, and China is the most important assistant of the United States, and the interests between China and the United States are by no means only to deal with the British Empire, but also to deal with the challenge of the British Navy.

Although the size of the US Navy is huge, all the center of gravity is in the Atlantic waters, and the fleet in the Pacific waters is not as large as the one in the Pacific Sea, and this requires the Chinese and US navies to maintain a high degree of cooperation and jointly contain the navy on the east and west coasts.

So for the past decade, the United States has maintained a large number of naval advisers in China and has provided all possible assistance to China's warship manufacturing industry.

China's navy has no clear threat to any of the great powers, so that China can not only maintain close naval cooperation with the United States and France, but also invite a large number of naval generals and technical engineers from Germany to work in China, and can even continue to maintain necessary cooperation with Britain, which is an important factor in the rapid development of the Chinese navy in these years.

At the Virginia Naval Academy, almost one-quarter of the cadets come from Chinese students, and there are Chinese students in the engineering schools of all famous universities in the United States, and in China's naval cadet schools and naval academies, the number of American instructors and instructors is also the largest, and the proportion even exceeds the number of domestic faculty members.

In the process of building the four Aurora-class battleships in the Empire, except for the assistance of the British Vickers Company in the early days, the rest of the foreign consultant team came from the United States, and when the Empire tried to completely localize the manufacture of the Qingzhou-class super-dreadnought, in addition to the technical engineering personnel from the German Krupp shipyard and the Vulcan window factory, there was also the strong assistance of American consultants, especially in the field of domestic steam turbines, which received unreserved technology transfer and support from the United States.

In the imperial era, China and France were natural allies, and so was China and the United States, and now China and the United States need to work closely together to jointly counter the British alliance's worldwide countermeasures against the two countries, so as to protect the common interests of both sides.

Just as the U.S. Navy was an intractable nightmare for Britain, the Reich's Army was also a nightmare that Britain could not face, and the strategic and mutually beneficial cooperation between China and the United States was also of positive economic significance, with the United States being both China's largest exporter and largest importer.

In order to encourage China to import petroleum, machinery, electrical equipment, ships, and chemical products from the United States, the United States has all along adopted special preferential policies for China's superior agricultural products, such as raw silk, tea, and hemp, and at the same time has cracked down on the economy in order to curb China's frenzied investment in the naval field.

Listening to Connes's free-flowing talk about the two countries' joint efforts to suppress the Anglo-Chinese alliance and the Washington Conference, his sympathy for Germany and France, and the necessity of replacing the British pound with the US dollar, Song Biao's mood at the moment was complicated; on the one hand, it was the general trend for China and the United States to jointly resist the British alliance, and on the other hand, he actually did not want to see the United States become a real new world hegemon.

So along the way, for Conns. Vanderbilt's heated speech, Song Biao barely reacted and expressed his position too much, and he was still hesitating, although he knew that this was the only reasonable choice.

It wasn't until the moment when I drove into the Vanderbilt Manor, visited the beautiful manor under the introduction of the Vanderbilt couple, and sat down with the couple to enjoy a peaceful afternoon tea time under an oak tree, that Song Biao suddenly expressed his stance on Connes's enthusiastic remarks: "I never believed that Germany would have a chance to repay all its debts, this is just a break from a twenty-year war, so it would be a very stupid thing to invest in Germany, but I don't know what the United States will do, in short, We will not further expand our investment in the United States. In fact, the whole of Europe is still very dangerous, whether it is Soviet Russia or Germany, this is a potential danger, and investing in China and the United States is still the best choice. ”

Connes was silent for a moment, and Song Biao replied: "I think so too, but the interests of the United States require that we must give Germany some reasonable help, but as far as I am concerned, investment in China and the United States is still the most important thing." In addition, the investment in the electrolytic aluminum industry is wonderful. ”

Song Biao laughed and agreed with satisfaction: "Yes, this is simply the most wonderful business in the past few years, who said it wasn't like this." ”

The electrolytic aluminum in the United States has been held by the Mellon consortium from the beginning, but in terms of patented technology, France's El also has the same status, but the French electrolytic aluminum industry has not been strong, so they bought this patent and carried out a larger investment research in the Northeast Electric Power Industry Research Institute, and applied for a patent in the United States with a new and improved technology, and the patent was jointly owned by Bethlehem and Far East.

Soon after, they took advantage of the Mellon consortium's oil crisis in Mexico to buy Alcoa, holding both patents, which made the Far East consortium and the Vanderbilt consortium in a monopoly position in the aluminum industry in the world, and have been continuously investing in the research of higher power and higher efficiency electrolytic aluminum industry technology, tirelessly maintaining Alcoa, and merging it with Far East Aluminum to form Pacific Aluminum.

The company is very profitable precisely because of the great development of the power industry and its status as the best alternative to copper conductors.

Overall, over the past 15 years, the Far East Consortium and the Vanderbilt Consortium have built a close relationship on both sides of the Pacific Ocean that has been enough to influence changes in the overall U.S.-China relationship, and the Bank of America, which is jointly controlled by the two consortiums and the California consortium, is now one of the largest banks in the Americas.

Money is a crazy thing.

With the profits initially obtained from Petroleos Mexicanos, the total assets owned by the Far Eastern consortium in the United States have exceeded $4 billion, which has increased 30 times in the past ten years, and has a very special commercial position in the nine fields of finance, metallurgy, electrical, machine tools, automobiles, aluminum, ships, aircraft, and petroleum.

Taking advantage of the wave of the second industrial revolution in the United States to seek profits, and constantly transferring technology and talents to support the development of the Far Eastern Consortium in China is the core operating principle of the Far Eastern Consortium.

It was in the promotion of the Far East Consortium and the Vanderbilt Consortium that the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act was mitigated to a certain extent by supporting the Republican Party to introduce a new immigration bill, and in the past ten years, a total of 137,000 Chinese in the United States and their families have been granted special approval, making these people American nationals, and most of them live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

With the help of the Vanderbilt consortium and local overseas Chinese leaders, the San Francisco Bay Company purchased more than 120,000 acres of land in South San Francisco, Telegraph Hill in San Francisco County, and Richmond, California, on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, to build a number of new urban areas, resettle Chinese immigrants from all over the United States, establish local schools and law firms, invest in textile, shipbuilding and chemical plants, and resettle workers.

In Richmond, the Chinese funded the establishment of a California Intermediate Court mainly for Chinese, and the empire established the California branch of Spring and Autumn College in Richmond through the cooperation of the American political axe, and the Vanderbilt family also gave huge financial support to the University of San Francisco, Stanford University and California Institute of Technology to help these two universities recruit more Chinese students.

It can be said that it is precisely because of the concentration of Chinese that the San Francisco Bay Area quickly recovered its prosperity after the San Francisco earthquake, and the Chinese built Richmond, California into the most beautiful new city in the United States, and is the most dynamic new industrial city in the western United States.

Although in a certain way, as some US congressmen and the [***] media have promoted, the dirty Chinese are invading the United States, but the strength behind the consortium is amazing, and both the Far East consortium and the Vanderbilt consortium have enough financial resources to support the pro-Chinese media, as well as to vigorously support the opponents of the [***] faction of congressmen.

By forcibly buying newspapers such as the Washington Post, the San Francisco Post, and the American News, hiring the most influential newspaper editors to join, organizing public relations agencies to design publicity and campaign strategies, and restraining and improving the Chinese community itself, the voice of the United States has been gradually suppressed.

Connes. The fact that a typical pro-China financial oligarchy like Vanderbilt can become the new US Secretary of State without controversy is enough to prove that within the United States, at least in the behind-the-scenes world of various conglomerates and party and government bosses, [***] is nonsense, and the most important thing is to unite the Chinese empire against the British alliance, and more importantly, the United States needs the huge and vast market of China.

After a day of rest in the Vanderbilt family's mansion, the couple visited San Francisco and Richmond, California, where they visited the California Intermediate Court, Spring and Autumn College, the California Institute of Technology, the University of San Francisco, which has the largest number of Chinese students, and the San Francisco Shipbuilding Company and Curtis Aircraft Company, which are controlled by the Far East consortium.

In 1918, the Far Eastern consortium had already sold off its holdings of military industry-related stocks at a high price, and even its famous Winchester Arms Company was sold to the Rockefeller family, but it still retained the San Francisco Shipyard and Curtis Aircraft Company, and continued to inject capital to make the San Francisco Shipyard the largest shipbuilding company on the West Coast of the United States, and the Curtis Aircraft Company became the largest aircraft manufacturing company in the United States.

The San Francisco shipyard built four battleships for the United States throughout World War I, and is currently building the Colora-class battleship USS West Virginia, the largest battleship in the United States at present, with a design displacement of 33,590 tons, second only to the British Nelson-class and Nagato-class battleships, all three of which had 16-inch guns.

Looking at the world's third largest super-dreadnought battleship being built by the Americans in this factory, Song Biao felt a lot of emotion in his heart, he really hoped that the empire would be able to build such a huge battleship one day, even if it would force Yuben to build a higher-specification battleship - that would not be bad, forcing Yuben to focus more resources on the manufacture of battleships.

After visiting the construction of this battleship, Song Biao was only able to visit the US Secretary of State Conns. Mr. Vanderbilt continued his journey to Washington, accompanied by Imperial Foreign Minister Liang Dunyan, Navy Minister Song Wenhui, Industry Minister Zheng Tingxiang, Education Minister Cai Yuanpei, and newly appointed Minister to the United States Gu Weijun.

The team sent by the empire to visit the United States this time is very large, except for the Chinese Emperor Ying Warren. In addition to President Harding's invitation to pay a state visit to the United States and participate in the Washington Conference, the Empire will also hold a new round of negotiations with the United States on the "Sino-US Strategic Mutually Beneficial Cooperation Agreement." Both sides have the intention, necessity and need to further strengthen this cooperation, and there are plans to elevate this agreement to the level of the "Sino-US Strategic Treaty of Mutual Benefit and Mutual Assistance" and deepen the cooperation between the two sides at a higher level.

The basis for this further deepening of cooperation lies in the fact that the United States has become the world's largest exporter of capital, and China's gross domestic product ranks second in the world, second only to the United States, without counting its colonies.

Similarly, with the shrinking of international capital in Britain, France and Germany and the weakening of their ability to invest abroad, China also needs new foreign investors to increase investment in China, because China is still in the initial stage of national construction and still needs a large amount of capital to engage in infrastructure and industrial construction.

Coupled with the natural need for confrontation against the British alliance, China and the United States must also further deepen their cooperation, but there are too many differences in such cooperation, especially on tariffs between the two sides. President Harding and the Republican Party can't wait to raise U.S. tariffs to ensure the prosperity of U.S. industry, while the empire is gradually accumulating cost advantages that cannot be ignored in basic light industries such as textiles, and continues to pour into the U.S. market, hoping that the United States will continue to maintain the existing tariff quota for the textile industry.

Similarly, although China's agriculture is developing rapidly, for the sake of its own interests, the United States also hopes that China will lower agricultural tariffs on the United States and expand the sales of American agricultural products to China, regardless of the fact that this will have a great impact on China's national economic foundation.

Every country is so vile and obscene that all the countries of the world are reduced to their own sales markets, without any industry, and at best not even agriculture, and for the United States, China is better off not even mining.

Politicians all over the world are inherently despicable and dirty, especially the politicians of capitalist countries, and this is why the world needs diplomatic work, because this is the essence of world diplomatic work, so weak countries have no real diplomacy to speak of.

The empire obviously has diplomacy, as well as the capital and conditions to make the United States back down.

The arrival of the Imperial Chinese delegation was undoubtedly the most dazzling military and political star of the Washington Conference, which not only demonstrated the full support of the Chinese Empire for the United States to convene the conference, but also demonstrated the closeness of the Pan-Pacific strategic cooperative relationship between China and the United States.

After and U.S. President Warren. After the official meeting of His Excellency President Harding, on November 8, 1921, Her Royal Highness Empress Shu Xuan delivered a speech entitled "Great Love" in the United States Congress on behalf of the Emperor and the Empire.

(To be continued)