An Italian scholar named Croce once said, "All history is contemporary." [Reading Network]"

Wang Shuhui's own understanding of this sentence is that different people interpret history according to their own different standards at that time.

For example, when non-scientific sociologists look at history, they see that the elite push history, and the talented people will make history.

For example, when researchers of scientific sociology look at history, they see that the masses of the people push history, and the class struggle creates history.

As a time-traveler, as a history lover and researcher who has traveled through two time and space, Wang Shuhui, a believer in scientific sociological theory, also has to admit that the history of the last years of the Ming Dynasty seems to be in a trance, just like the reality of contemporary history.

On the one hand, the economic crisis of the feudal agrarian society led to the crumbling of the feudal dynasty, and on the other hand, the periodic economic crisis of the capitalist system of modern industrial society led to a general decline in economic development.

On the one hand, people are in anger and despair because of natural disasters and land annexation, and on the other hand, people are beginning to be depressed and disappointed because of the environmental crisis and economic recession.

On the one hand, it completely abandoned the government of the Ming Dynasty and fell into the paranoia of its own interests and the crazy feudal landlord class. On the one hand, there are vested interest groups that have no reason or conscience at all, and only know how to protect their own interests and begin to expand and attack wildly.

In a sense, social science is just that. Because there is no way to falsify, Croce's view of history will always be vaguely proven at the level of reality.

Croce is a sociologist from a non-scientific sociological standpoint. Just as Wang Shuhui firmly believes that there is no pure economics without a position, only political economy with a position. Wang Shuhui also firmly believes that there is no pure historiography, only materialist historiography and idealistic historiography.

Under this guiding ideology, Wang Shuhui, who knew that the class contradictions had broken out in an all-round way, had a full understanding of the historical process of the Ming Dynasty's demise. He knew that the Ming Dynasty would be destroyed by the class contradictions that broke out. It's just that he doesn't know the details of how the class contradiction was used and who was used as the protagonist to destroy the Ming Dynasty.

At the present level of social productive forces, under the existing historical conditions, without the awakened leading organizations and without the education and guidance of the awakened revolutionaries, the working people's understanding of their own strength will not yet awaken.

In the era of feudal agriculture, the working people had a very vague understanding of the ruling class. The reason for their protests and participation in revolutionary actions was not even direct opposition to the feudal ruling class. For them, the fundamental reason why they are fighting, their participation in revolutionary action, is to solve the existential crisis that is just around the corner.

The peasant rebel forces did indeed coerce the peasants in the Central Plains. But as long as most farmers are not facing an existential crisis, they cannot really be coerced.

To take the simplest example, the peasants in Shanxi and Henan provinces in Shaanxi Province did not resist the fact that they were "sold" to the Ba'ath Party.

Because they participated in the rebellion, the reason why they were coerced was that they actively or passively wanted to solve the existential crisis in despair. Living under the rule of the Ba'ath Party, working as a tenant, a long-term worker, and working to earn money for the "big master" of the Ba'ath Party, compared with participating in the rebellion and becoming a peasant army, on the one hand, can solve the existential crisis more quickly and directly, and on the other hand, it can solve the existential crisis more quickly and thoroughly.

In the words of a former Henan peasant named Zhang Yaniu, who is now a soldier of the Central Plains Railway Production and Construction Corps of the Renaissance Party, "It is not that I do not want to be a tenant and work as a long-term laborer to make money to make ends meet, but I go to participate in the rebellion." It's that there are too many people like me in our place, and there are too few big landlords. I wanted to be a tenant and couldn't, but I really had no choice but to become a thief. ”

This was not only the thoughts of the peasants in the Central Plains who were rescued by the Baath Party, but also the soldiers of Li Zicheng and Lu Xiangsheng's corps who fought in the Zhending area.

The soldiers under Li Zicheng's command were to break into the army in order to be soldiers and eat food. The soldiers under Lu Xiangsheng became the Tianxiong Army, also to serve as soldiers and eat food. There is no clear ideological difference between the soldiers of the two sides. There is only one fundamental reason why they fight each other, that is, to survive in this troubled world and continue to be soldiers and eat food.

Survival, this is what is engraved in the genes of all living things.

At the southern gate of Zhending Mansion, the southern gate of the North Zhili, Li Zicheng and Lu Xiangsheng's corps, who fought on the vast North China Plain, began to discover a common problem as the war deepened. It seems that the weapons in everyone's hands are the same.

This is a problem that has been criticized by later generations of liberal non-scientific sociological historians in New China. Whether it is the weapons used by Li Zicheng's Breaking Army Corps or Lu Xiangsheng's Tianxiong Army Corps, they are all uniformly produced by the export departments of the Baath Party's munitions industrial enterprises.

Standardized industrially produced weapons have made both sides discover that the weapon parts obtained from the other side can be spliced together with their own broken weapons.

For example, the spearhead that a soldier of the Tianxiong Army gets from the corpse of an invading army can be very suitable for connecting with the shaft of his spear that has lost its spearhead. Two bolts that are united between two completely different parts of the weapon, are perfectly suitable.

For example, a soldier who broke into the army found a small bag of musket lead bullet from the corpse of a soldier of the Tianxiong Army, which could be perfectly loaded into his smoothbore flintlock pistol. You know, in terms of the common sense of this era, not to mention that the musket ammunition of the two sides of the war cannot be coordinated, even the musket ammunition of the own side is basically unable to cooperate.

In the era of handicrafts, product tolerances were in the centimeter range.

In fact, the Baath Party has been making high profits from the sale of weapons to both the Ming government army and the peasant rebels.

The peasant rebel army exchanged weapons and supplies with the Baath Party through the population and plundered gold and silver, and the Ming Dynasty government army exchanged weapons and supplies with the Baath Party through gold, silver, copper, and iron spots. It's just that one trading place is in the Central Plains region, and the other is in the Ludong region. The person in charge of a transaction is Li Yan, who is favored by the Ba'ath Party, and the person in charge of a transaction is Sun Yuanhua, who is also favored by the Ba'ath Party.

It is not uncommon for the Baath Party to support Wang Shuhui and to have different opinions on the arms trade between the two sides.

For example, Meng Li, chairman of the Central Committee of the Ba'ath Party, asked Wang Shuhui whether such a transfer of weapons and materials to the two reactionary armed forces would aggravate their harm to the masses.

Wang Shuhui only made a simple rhetorical question to Meng Li's question, "Could it be that if the Baath Party does not send weapons to these reactionaries, the harm caused by these reactionaries to the masses will be weakened?" ”

Meng Li fell silent after listening to Wang Shuhui's words. Because he clearly knew that whether or not the Baath Party sent weapons to both sides, the peasant rebels would coerce the masses to become cannon fodder. Regardless of whether the Baath Party sends weapons to both sides, the Ming Dynasty, whose economy has collapsed, will further extort and extort from the masses.

On the contrary, it is the arms trade between the Baath Party and both sides that can enable the people who have been coerced to be rescued by the Baath Party through trade. Moreover, the gold and silver obtained from the Ming Dynasty government can also be used in the construction of the country under the leadership of the Baath Party government.

The global trade crisis of the Age of Discovery was struck by the shrinking of silver mining in the Americas by Spanish and other colonizers. The impact of such a primitive economic crisis on China is quite profound.

The most direct impact was that China's foreign trade began to enter a state of full-scale recession at the end of the Ming Dynasty because of the shrinkage of silver imports.

The reduction in the money supply has made deflation in the Jiangnan region of China more and more serious. As the only industrialized organization in the world, the Baath Party was also greatly affected by deflation. It's just that compared with the ordinary Jiangnan business groups, the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River business groups led and supported by the Ba'ath Party are relatively more proactive in the face of this kind of deflation.

Because of the low cost of production, the business groups in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River led by the Baath Party immediately lowered the prices of their export products after discovering the signs of deflation. Cotton, silk, white sugar, iron and steel products, tea, new porcelain, bone china, these export products that have been fully industrialized and mechanized by the merchant groups in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River, have been comprehensively reduced in price.

This practice of the business groups in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River led by the Baath Party not only failed to alleviate the economic crisis caused by deflation, but further accelerated the economic crisis caused by deflation.

The Jiangnan Commercial Group, which had no way to compete with the business groups in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River led by the Ba'ath Party, began to go bankrupt in the dumping at lower prices.

In the Jiangnan region, which has become a comprehensive market economy after Zhang Juzheng's reforms, it is simply unable to effectively respond to the economic crisis caused by this artificial competition. A large number of merchants and workshops, especially those who sold and produced products such as cotton cloth, silk, tea, porcelain, sugar and ironware, went bankrupt on a large scale.

What makes them even more unable to cope with it is that because of the comprehensive marketization of the economy in the Jiangnan area, it is very difficult for these Jiangnan businessmen and workshop owners, who are both big landlords and big businessmen, to give up sales and production and return to their old profession as landlords.

Because in order to provide cheap means of production for their own industrial enterprises, the farmland in the Jiangnan area has long been no longer planted with food crops with rising prices in this time and space. As early as more than a decade ago, the farmland in the Jiangnan region was already full of tea, mulberry, cotton and other cash crops.

Under the sudden economic crisis, more extreme things happened in the Jiangnan region hundreds of years in advance. According to the report of the Ba'ath Party's intelligence personnel in the Jiangnan area, the smoke billowing from the cotton fields in Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian, and other places in Nanzhili was very spectacular.

At the subsequent emergency work conference of the Central Committee of the Baath Party, Wang Shuhui clearly told the members of the Central Committee who had read the materials and were digesting this unbelievable situation:

"There is no such thing as overproduction, only the illusion of relative overproduction."

"Most of the nearly 134 million Chinese people lack clothing, but the capitalists and businessmen in the Jiangnan area have artificially eliminated these relatively surplus materials during the economic crisis. It's a crime."

"As a Baath Party committed to feeding all the people, we must put an end to this crime"

In this way, in the second half of 1630, the Baath Party began to play a kind of "savior" image in the Gangnam region.

It was loaded with a large number of standard gold, silver, copper, and steel coins produced by the Baath Central Bank Mint, and was loaded with more than a dozen 3,000-ton gunboats of the Baath Party's Yangtze River Fleet. These gold, silver, copper, and steel coins, whose value exceeded the actual value of the currency, were carried by steam-powered ships and unloaded in the Gangnam area, which were then loaded with bankrupt workers and peasants and large quantities of cotton and raw silk in the Gangnam area, and returned to the Ba'ath Party's sphere of influence to become raw materials for the production of Ba'ath factories.

At the same time, the Baath Party, which had already opened routes between Korea and Japan and Nanyang, relied on its ocean-going fleet to sell silk and cotton cloth produced from cotton and raw silk in the Jiangnan region directly to Korea, Japan, and even weapons along with tea, new porcelain, bone china, sugar and iron ware, and even weapons purchased and produced by the Baath Party at low prices in the Jiangnan region.

Even after the Baath Party's ocean-going fleet, which uses a hybrid of steam and sail, has easily defeated the part-time and full-time pirates or the navy of various countries in the East China Sea, the Pacific Ocean, the South China Sea, and the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean, the products of the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River under the leadership of the Baath Party to the Ottoman Empire, which is at its peak in the Middle East.

In the three or four years from 1627 to 1630, the Baath Party grew by leaps and bounds in its economic territory, although it was slow in its actual territorial expansion.

Although there is no absolute threshold for the coinage technology of this era, under the mechanical level and metallurgical technology of the Baath Party beyond the times, the various coins produced by the Mint of the Central Bank of the Baath Party on a large scale have made it difficult for the handicraft workshops of this era to imitate and have extremely high anti-counterfeiting, on the other hand, there are no countries and forces on the earth that have the ability to convert gold, silver, copper and iron into gold, silver, copper and steel coins on this scale.

Chen Feng, director of the Central Administrative Council of the Ba'ath Party, was puzzled by Wang Shuhui's spending money to buy high-quality modern long-staple cotton produced by the Baath Party's own high-yield and high-quality Baath Party's cotton farms, and consulted Wang Shuhui on the question of whether doing so would cause the Ba'ath Party's economy to suffer.

At that time, Wang Shuhui held a silver coin that had just been produced and printed with a profile portrait of Zhu Yuanzhang, which was specially released for the Jiangnan region, and said to Chen Feng:

"These things, in fact, don't have any value."

Waving his hand, pointing to the chimneys of the Fuxing Party's Wuchang Industrial Zone on the Yangtze River in the distance outside the window, Wang Shuhui continued to say to Chen Feng:

"Those things are the ones that have real value."

Although Baath members have been educated in basic political economy, it is rare in this era to have a full understanding of the general equivalent nature of money.

Chen Feng and the economic cadres in the Fuxing Party may have been able to understand this under Wang Shuhui's education. However, the big landlords and big merchants in the Jiangnan area were completely unaware of this.

Having received a large amount of Baath currency, they did not know that they had been economically kidnapped by the Baath Party. On the contrary, they all sincerely think that Fuxing Trading Company is really a good trading company, and Wang Shuhui, the county lord and guest of honor, is really a good person. These spokesmen of the big landowners and big businessmen in the Jiangnan region in the imperial court all expressed their overall favor towards Wang Shuhui.

After all, Wang Shuhui's actions can be said to have saved the lives of these bureaucrats who were in high positions in the Ming Dynasty.

At the suggestion of Wang Shuhui, the Jiangnan bureaucracy, which was facing the crisis of national extinction in Beijing, actually passed the order very quickly, Yao Zongwen, who had already died in the labor camp of the Baath Party, the secretary of the military department, the governor of Sichuan, Shaanxi, Huguang, and the military affairs of the four provinces of Henan, and Zhang Hong, the governor of Denglai, and the secretary of the military department and the governor of Shandong.

In fact, these bureaucrats who were entrenched in the upper echelons of the Ming Dynasty also clearly felt that this Beijing crisis was different from any previous crisis.

It is precisely for this reason that the civil bureaucrats who have a deep understanding of "the right not to expire and invalidate" have begun to become completely unscrupulous.

After all, for them, Shaanxi and Henan, which had already "fallen", did not have any troops for Yao Zongwen, the so-called governor of the four provinces, to deploy. Huguang, like Liaodong, did not listen to the orders of the imperial court at all. Sichuan is located in the west, and he has to guard against Tusi rebellion, Qin Liangyu is "reluctantly" coping.

So it seems that Yao Zongwen, who succeeded Yang Sichang's prominent position, is actually a bare-bones commander.

As for Zhang Hong, they also completely ignored this original "eunuch party". After all, the position he took over as the governor of Shandong actually did not have any soldiers under him. Because the Shandong soldiers were all taken by Sun Yuanhua to King Qin, the capital division.

Spring River Plumbing Duck Prophet. These ruling classes of the Ming Dynasty, vested interests in this time and space, are now thinking not about the rules and systems of the imperial court, but about how to protect their own interests in the possible upcoming change of dynasty.

According to a report by the Baath Party's intelligence department, there seem to be many people in the camp of Gao Yingxiang's army, who are already stationed in the Daimyo's mansion, who speak Jiangnan accents and provide Gao Yingxiang with information on the Beijing Division.

These people seem to be the henchmen and housekeepers of those officials and noble families in Beijing. It is said that the families of Zhang Jinyan, the new secretary of the Ministry of War, and Wei Zaode, a cabinet university scholar, are among them.

Wang Shuhui, who received specific information, also had to admit that although history has changed, the actions of historical figures do not seem to have changed much.

There are only individuals who betray the class, there is no class that betrays the class. It seems that all vested interests have the same face.

Being the leading party in the change of dynasty is really the fate of these people