PS: The second update is here! Ask for a subscription, ask for a monthly pass! It's late in the month, and book friends have monthly passes, right? Cast it for the fish! Thank you for the monthly pass of aces25 and Chaofei Xibi!

With the signing of peace treaties between Chile and Argentina and Brazil, the South American War officially came to an end, and peace returned to the land. However, this peace is clearly only a fragile peace. There will be another battle between Chile and Brazil. However, the war between the two countries, in terms of scale and significance, will not have much impact on the situation in the whole world.

Although Chile won the war, they also incurred huge debts as a result. From the beginning of the war of arms expansion a few years ago, to the huge military expenditure consumed in the war, all of which came from loans obtained from China, and by the end of the war, this amount had increased to 500 million Chinese yuan. While China has provided Chile with low-interest loans and allowed Chile to use minerals and agricultural products to repay, the Chilean government will need to tighten its belts for at least the next five years.

However, even so, Chile has gained a lot from this battle. The territories acquired from Argentina and Brazil have more than quadrupled the size of Chile. At the same time, various resources are more abundant, especially in agricultural products, which will not become a constraint on Chile's development. The only thing that is lacking is probably that Chile has a small population. After the end of the war, the Chilean government enacted a series of measures to promote population growth. However, even then, it will be decades before Chile becomes a populous country!

After peace was restored in South America, the whole world seemed to be restored to peace once again. It's just that in this peace, the shadow of war has hung over the whole world. Europe, the center of the whole world. The antagonism between the two major military blocs, led by Britain and Germany, became more and more severe, and the people of all European countries were very frightened, fearing that when they woke up the next morning, war would have already broken out. All countries are doing their best to prepare for war, and large quantities of weapons and ammunition are being produced and sent to strategic reserve warehouses. The slipways of the major shipyards are also full of battleships, battle cruisers, heavy cruisers, light cruisers and destroyers under construction, and the construction of merchant ships has been reduced to a low point, and most of the resources of various countries are used to prepare for war. As a result, the economies of various countries have experienced recessions at different levels. It is foreseeable that when all countries can no longer support this frantic arms build-up war, that is when war breaks out.

The East of the world, all under the rule of ancient and huge China, on the contrary. The people here have not been affected much. The people are still living according to normal laws. Although, many people of insight saw that a large-scale war was about to break out, and they asked the empire to speed up preparations for war. However, the imperial government did not devote all its national strength to the preparation for war, as was the case with the European and American countries. Compared to the European and American powers, the empire was strong. However, the background is not as good as that of Europe and the United States, when the European and American countries are expanding their armaments at the expense of economic development, the formal empire has a great opportunity to accelerate economic development and industrialization. In order to obtain sufficient resources for the development of armaments, Germany transferred many valuable technologies to China. To know. If these technologies were in peacetime, China would not have been able to acquire them at any cost. It is not that China is not unprepared militarily, but it is not as strong as that of the European and American powers. China's current position determines that China does not need to invest all its national strength at the beginning of the war.

After the outbreak of war. China mainly faces enemies from two directions, one is the United States in the East. The other is Russia in the West. In the face of the United States, a strong Chinese navy can protect China's security, and it is impossible for the United States to threaten China's soil until the Chinese navy is defeated. And does the US Navy have the strength to defeat the Chinese Navy? From the current point of view, this possibility is not based on zài. Although the United States is building battleships on a large scale, the use of British design and technology makes their battleships far inferior in performance to China. Even if they have a numerical advantage, it is difficult for them to translate into an advantage on the battlefield. The Battle of the Mediterranean Sea has proven that numerical superiority does not have much effect when the difference in the performance of the warships of the two sides is too great. Not to mention, the killer weapon of aircraft carriers that China is still secretly building, once the aircraft carrier is dispatched, it is enough to easily send all the battleships built by the United States to the bottom of the sea. As for Russia, there is nothing to worry about at all. Ten years ago, Russia suffered heavy losses in the war, and although it had been recuperating for ten years, Russia had slowly recovered. But if you want to defeat China, it will not be ordinary. Moreover, once the war began, Britain and France would face strong pressure from Germany, and would certainly ask Russia to place its main attack in the west. At that time, China only needs to retain a small number of troops on the Western Front, which will be enough to defend against Russian pressure. Wait until China defeats the United States with all its might, and then move westward. It is impossible for the Russian roots to withstand the Chinese attack.

The year 1908 passed without danger, and people prayed that there would be no war next year. However, in 1909, the situation in the world was once again much more tense. And the crisis of war mainly comes from the fierce confrontation between China and the United States!

In June 1909, the U.S. government announced that the Panama Canal was about to open to navigation after six years of hard work. This is a year later than expected in the United States, mainly because the project is too difficult. However, in order to speed up the construction of this canal, under the condition of rushing to work day and night, this canal was finally able to be navigable. The price paid is that more than 50,000 laborers died on the construction site for various reasons, almost twice as many as in history. Of course, these dead laborers were mainly Panamanians, as well as the population of Central American countries. Many of these dead laborers in history were Chinese. But now, with the rise of the empire, the Chinese will no longer be trafficked to the Americas and Australia to do hard labor as they did in history!

The Panama Canal is one of the two most strategically important man-made waterways in the world, the other being the Suez Canal. Ships sailing between the east and west coasts of the United States had to make a detour through Cape Horn in South America, which could be shortened by about 15,000 kilometers (8,000 nautical miles) using the Panama Canal. Voyages of up to 6,500 kilometres (3,500 nautical miles) can also be saved from one coast on one side of North America to South American ports on the other. Ships sailing between Europe and East Asia or Australia can also reduce their range by 3,700 km (2,000 nautical miles) via the canal. The Panama Canal has a total length of 813 kilometers, a water depth of 13 meters ~ 15 meters, and a river width of 152 meters to 304 meters. The water level of the entire canal is 26 meters higher than the two oceans, and there are 6 locks. It usually takes 9 hours for ships to navigate the Guò Canal, which can navigate 76,000-ton ships. For the United States, the biggest role is military use, forced by the treaty signed after the defeat of the second Sino-US Pacific naval war, the United States can not deploy more than 10,000 tons of warships on the west coast, which makes the west coast of the United States completely under the threat of China. After the Panama Canal is completed, the huge fleet deployed by the United States on the east coast can rush to the west coast to fight within half a month, which can effectively protect the national security of the United States!

The Panama Canal is located at 9° north latitude, where the North American Continental Divide plummets to one of its lowest points. The canal does not cross the isthmus from east to west, as most people think. Rather, on the Atlantic side, the entrance to Cologne leads south to the Guò Gatun sluice to the widest point of Lake Gaton; Then make a sharp turn to the east and follow a roughly southeasterly shipping lane to Panama Bay on the Pacific side. It is located near Balboa, and terminates southeast of the Pitt Pavilion www.biquge.info near Cologne, about 40 kilometers away.

Ships travelling from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean via the Guò Canal first via the 11-kilometre-long inlet channel in the Gulf of Limon to reach the Gatun Locks. There are three consecutive locks in Gatun that raise boats 26 meters into Gatun Lake. The Gatun Lake system is formed by the Gatun Dam on the Chagres River, the water of the lake originates from Lake Alajuela, with an area of 425 square kilometers and a water depth of 14~26 meters, and is about 37 kilometers long to Gamboa. The Gaillard Canal, which cuts through the continental watershed, began at Gamboa. The artificial canal has an average depth of about 13 meters and extends about 13 kilometers to the Pedro Miguel sluice. The Pedro Miguel Locks lower the boat 9 meters into Lake Miraflores, which is 16 meters above sea level. Boats lead to a waterway about 2 km long in Guò, which is lowered to sea level by a two-stage lock at Miraflores. The last section of the canal is an excavated inlet channel, about 11 kilometers long, through which ships enter the Pacific Ocean. The bottom width of the canal is at least 150 meters; In Lake Gatun, the width of the channel varies from 150 to 300 meters, while in the Miraflores section of the channel is 225 meters.

The Chinese side also knows that the opening of the Panama Canal will pose a huge threat to China, and has also taken many measures to deal with it. After defeating Britain and France in the war a few years earlier, China acquired Guadeloupe, located in the Lesser Antilles, from France, extending its influence into the Caribbean. At the same time, China's lease of the Tumaco naval base in Colombia and the Santa Cruz Island naval base from Ecuador have given China the ability to blockade the Panama Canal in the shortest possible time in wartime. At present, the main forces of the Pacific Fleet of the Chinese Navy have been transferred from Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands to Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island. The Tumaco naval base is mainly deployed with light cruisers and destroyers to facilitate reconnaissance in the vicinity of the Panama Canal, and once the capital ship of the US Navy is found to be through the Panama Canal, it will be reported to the Pacific Fleet Command immediately!