In the past, when the capital was Beijing, the people in Jiangnan, bureaucrats, and scholars always felt that they were very aggrieved.

Even many people maliciously believe that the reason why the Jiangnan area was heavily taxed by the imperial court was because when the Ming Dynasty opened the country, the people of Jiangnan did not express their support for Emperor Taizu early, but supported Emperor Taizu's nemesis. Many people think that it seems to be the reason why it is difficult to explain, so the Ming Dynasty has always imposed heavy taxes on the Jiangnan region.

Rich people always feel that they don't have enough money and should have more money. People who live a good life always think that their life is not good enough, and they should live a better life.

Those who have money, those who have power, those who live a good life, will never show any mercy to those who have no money, those who have no power, and those who live a hard life. In their opinion, those people who have no power, no money, and can't live a good life are simply because they are stupid, they are stupid, and they deserve it.

They feel that only the superior people like themselves take it for granted that they are high up and enjoy the glory and wealth, and they deserve it whether the others are dead or alive.

This kind of psychology is a relatively common psychology for people in the Jiangnan area. Not to mention the endless bureaucrats in the landlord class in the Jiangnan area, even the people in the Jiangnan area also think that they were born with a good destiny and were born in the treasure land of Jiangnan. They feel that because of their own lives, because of the wealth and prosperity of the Jiangnan region, the government will have to tax them more, which is a very unfair thing.

For the people in the Jiangnan area, they have always believed that if they do not need to be responsible for the financial problems of the entire Ming Dynasty, they can live a very good life.

This kind of thinking is not just the thoughts of the people in the Jiangnan area. In other words, the common people in the Jiangnan area have such ideas, which are directly related to the propaganda and propaganda of the landlord bureaucracy in the Jiangnan area and the Shidafu clique in the Jiangnan area.

In other words, as a regional ruling group that has mastered the form of consciousness, the big landlords, big businessmen, and big bureaucrats in the Jiangnan region themselves see the problem in this way.

But then again, all ideas and assumptions, if not verified by practice, are nonsense. The truth that comes up out of the air with the head and the truth that is said out of the air with the mouth is never the true truth and the last word.

Even in an era when the market economy was developed such as the last years of the Ming Dynasty, most of the "elites" still had a rather superficial and simplistic view of the economy.

For example, most of the landlords and bureaucrats of the Ming Dynasty still had a view of wealth in terms of real money.

After earning the silver, melting it into silver balls and bricks, and hiding it in the secret room of the cellar, they thought that they had gained and stored wealth. The more than 80 million taels of silver obtained by the Fuxing Army when it raided the Jinshang Group in Shanxi is the most direct proof, and the more than 60 million taels of silver obtained by the Fuxing Army when it raided the two Huai salt merchants in Yangzhou is also proof.

However, even the most grassroots party members and cadres of the Ba'ath Party know that whether it is silver, gold, or renminbi, these things are not wealth, these things are just currency. Money, on the other hand, is only the general equivalent of commodity exchange. Currency itself has no value. Whether it is silver, gold or renminbi, if these currencies cannot buy real things, these things that cannot be eaten or worn are meaningless.

In order to prove this point, New China melted 100 million taels of silver into 5,000 huge silver nuggets weighing one ton each, and piled up these 5,000 tons of silver nuggets on the square in front of the Central People's Bank of the New Beijing Special Economic Zone so that the people of the whole country could visit them casually.

Gold and silver, these rare metals, are meaningless to the Baath Party, except that they are needed for parts on some machine lathes.

Although the more than 80 million people in New China do not necessarily have such insight, they also know that in New China, there is no renminbi for gold and silver. Because you can buy anything in the world with yuan, but you can't do this with gold and silver.

You can buy things with RMB, and RMB is valuable. If you can't buy anything with gold and silver, gold and silver are worthless. You don't need advanced theories, you can build such awareness just through practical experience.

The 80 million people in New China have been able to understand this through two or three years of practical experience. However, the people of the south, who nominally belonged to the area ruled by the Southern Ming, did not have such an understanding. Not only did the people of the Southern Ming Dynasty not have such an understanding, but the ruling class in the Southern Ming court, from Emperor Chongzhen to the bureaucratic landlords, also did not recognize this problem.

Since Zhang Juzheng, the southern region, which has been fully marketized in the economy, has long established a stereotype. For the entire South, as long as you have gold and silver in hand, then you can buy anything.

In a sense, this perception is not entirely wrong. When the Ming Dynasty ruled the whole of China, the Jiangnan region could indeed buy grain from the Huguang region, livestock from the northwest region, fur from the northeast, tea from the southwest, and seafood from the southeast through the gold and silver in their hands.

But there is an inevitable premise for this matter, that is, the whole of China must be under a system, and all materials can circulate freely.

When the Baath Party took control of northern China, Sichuan in the southwest, and threatened the Hunan and Jiangxi regions, the Jiangnan region, which had long since ceased to produce grain and specialized in the cultivation of cash crops, really had nothing but silk and cotton cloth in its hands and gold and silver obtained through overseas trade with the South and Western regions.

The Hanjiang Plain, which was originally the commercial grain base of the Ming Dynasty, has now become a gathering place for state-owned farms in New China, just like the Northeast Plain, the North China Plain, the Hetao Plain, the Hanzhong Plain, and the Chengdu Plain. Since the founding of the Ba'ath Party in 1620, with the expansion of the Ba'ath Party's sphere of influence, there is less and less food in the market in the Jiangnan area because of the solid and stable grain policy.

There is less grain, but the landlords and bureaucrats in the Jiangnan area will not be short of food rations. The lack of food can only cause the people in the Jiangnan area to have no food or drink, and fall into an existential crisis. Therefore, since 1625, the people's rebellion and military rebellion in the entire Jiangnan region have not stopped.

Over the next five years, silk and cotton production in the entire Jiangnan region was shattered as the Baath Party's light industrial products began to be dumped in the Gangnam region. At the same time, due to the continuous rise in grain prices, a large number of cotton fields and mulberry fields were artificially burned and converted into rice fields in the entire Jiangnan region.

Five years later, when Emperor Chongzhen fled to the Jiangnan region, before Emperor Chongzhen straightened out the Southern Ming regime in Nanjing, the Baath Party began to carry out large-scale grain dumping in the Jiangnan region.

On the one hand, the Baath Party's own grain production is huge and the output is astonishing, and on the other hand, the Baath Party can easily obtain a large amount of cheap grain from Annam, Siam and other Southeast Asian countries with industrial products by virtue of its developed sea transportation.

Therefore, from the time Emperor Chongzhen fled to Nanjing, it took less than half a month for the Baath Party to dump grain, and the price of grain in the entire southern region fell from the price of 17 taels of silver for one stone of rice to 1 tael of silver for one stone of rice.

By the time Emperor Chongzhen fled south to Hangzhou again, the price of rice had been at the highest level in the southern region of Nanjing, and the price of rice had fallen to seven coins of silver and one stone.

The so-called vested interest groups can actually be viewed in this way. One of the most important characteristics of this group of "elites" who have mastered economic and political privileges is that no matter how the external environment changes, no matter whether the country is stable or turbulent, no matter what these "elites" do or how they do it, they can continue to obtain benefits anyway.

From a macro point of view, the collapse of mulberry cotton five years ago was indeed caused by the dumping of industrial products by the Baath Party. However, the Baath Party controlled the northern and Huguang regions, and they did not have so many sales outlets in the Jiangnan area for them to dump industrial products.

The reason why the Ba'ath Party's dumping of industrial products was successful was simple. That is, long ago, when the Baath Party was just emerging, a new class had already emerged in the entire Jiangnan region, and this class was the comprador class.

The economic influence of the Baath Party in the Gangnam region was realized through the comprador class.

Without these compradors who were born in the Jiangnan area of the big landlords and big bureaucratic class, there would have been no way for the Baath Party to dump industrial products in the Jiangnan region without the use of force. Therefore, although the collapse of Sangmian five years ago completely bankrupted a large number of small and medium-sized landlords, those big landlords and big bureaucrats who existed as compradors took the opportunity to annex more land and further strengthen themselves.

This is the real reason why after Emperor Chongzhen fled from Beijing to Nanjing, he had nothing to do with the scholars and doctors in Nanjing, and his situation was even worse than when he was in Beijing, and he was almost in a state of being hollowed out.

And five years later, when the Baath Party carried out a second economic blow to the Jiangnan region through new compradors in Jiangxi, Hunan, Fujian, and other places, it had already turned into super-landlords and old compradors who owned hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile land, and like the opponents they had defeated, they had also fallen into the sad situation of total bankruptcy.

The two economic blows not only brought about the replacement of the compradors in the Nanming area, but also made the Nanming regime, which was constantly in internal strife, more and more chaotic.

In addition to achieving full penetration into the economy of the southern region, the two economic blows also caused the bankruptcy of tens of millions of handicraftsmen and peasants throughout the southern region.

Taking advantage of this trend, between 1632 and 1634 the Baath Party further expanded its influence in the south.

Through the occupation of Hunan and Guangxi, the Baath Party achieved the east-west isolation of the whole of South China.

It was precisely because of the tens of millions of bankrupt craftsmen and farmers that the Baath Party was able to open up a large number of tropical farms in the South China Sea and start producing rubber and palm oil on a large scale.

In fact, by about 1636, Southern China had been divided into four spheres of influence, driven by the Baathist's large-scale economic and small-scale military efforts.

Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian, and Guangdong, in the easternmost regions, still belong to the sphere of influence of the Chongzhen government, which is still engaged in chaotic internal strife and party strife.

However, in this declining Nanming court, in addition to the Donglin Party clique, which has deep roots, there is also the Gan Party clique that exists as a comprador class, the Min Party clique that relies on the Zheng pirate clique, and the Cantonese clique that mainly consists of landlords and merchants in Guangdong.

To a certain extent, although Emperor Chongzhen very wisely escaped all the way from the big quagmire in Nanjing to Hangzhou and did things very decisively, he did not completely escape the fate of becoming a puppet of the Jiangnan Shidafu group. Although the current Emperor Chongzhen is still able to carry out some limited struggles with the strong support of Sun Chengzong and Yuan Chonghuan, it is becoming an increasingly obvious possibility to completely turn into a mud puppet.

Hunan and Guangxi, as Baath Party's spheres of influence, are generally in a stable state at present.

In addition to the nearly 10 million bankrupt handicraftsmen and peasants from the southern region who have been shunted to the northern region, there are also nearly 10 million bankrupt handicraftsmen and peasants in the south who are receiving training and education from the Baath Party, which has become relatively well-manned, together with the masses of the people in Hunan and Guangxi.

A railway connecting the north and south is being built in Hunan and Guangxi.

Except for some "light" military operations against some mountainous areas in Hunan and Guangxi, the entire Hunan and Guangxi regions are currently in a relatively stable stage of infrastructure construction. A large number of farms and factories are being built. The relative surplus population was also diverted by the Baath Party to the Baath Party's state-run tropical farms in the South China Sea region.

In addition to Hunan and Guangxi, which are controlled by the Nanming government and the Ba'ath Party, there are two main forces in the current Yunnan-Guizhou region.

One of these forces was the group of Gao Yingxiang, Li Zicheng, and Zhang Xianzhong, who had been driven by the Baath Party from northern Shaanxi all the way to the Yunnan-Guizhou region.

With more than 3,000 fully armed backbones of the army, and with the intentional support of the Baath Party, the strong Gao Yingxiang Group has gathered nearly 100,000 "heroes" from all walks of life in the Yunnan-Guizhou region.

In addition to Gao Yingxiang's Chuang Jun Group, another force in the Yunnan-Guizhou region is the Qianguo Gongmu Qiyuan Group that still carries the banner of the Ming Dynasty on the surface, but in fact has colluded with the Tusi in the Yunnan-Guizhou region to form a fully independent Qianguo Gongmu Qiyuan Group.

Mu Qiyuan, who had already died in the original history, lived well in this time and space. After the Baath Party seized the Hunan region, Mu Qiyuan, who had a very high prestige in the Yunnan-Guizhou Tusi and had always had "great ambitions", immediately led his troops to launch a military attack on the Fuxing Army.

However, Mu Qiyuan is also relatively unlucky, and the person who presided over the main military operations of the Fuxing Army in Hunan was Ma Xianglin, who had already frightened Yungui Tusi more than ten years ago. Leading the four mountain brigades that were still in the experimental stage, Ma Xianglin easily defeated the combined forces of the Mu family and the Yungui Tusi, who were known as the 150,000 army.

More than 50,000 Yungui Tusi soldiers surrendered directly on the battlefield in this completely one-sided battle. After all, many of them still have vivid memories of the stone pillar musketeers who were rampant in the Yunnan-Guizhou region more than ten years ago.

The Qianguo Gong Group, which had retracted back to Yunnan and Guizhou, had not yet licked its wounds, and Gao Yingxiang's Chuang Jun Group had invaded the Kunming area. If it weren't for Gao Yingxiang's Chuang Jun Group not fully adapting to the climate in the Yunnan-Guizhou region, if the Tusi in the Yunnan-Guizhou region supported Mu Qiyuan wholeheartedly, it would be a question of whether the Qianguo Gong Group could continue to exist.

In this way, in southern China around 1636, because the Baath Party was still focused on local construction, the three forces of Gao Yingxiang's Chuang Jun Group, Mu Qiyuan's Qianguo Gong Group, and Zhu Youzhen's Nanming Government were able to exist temporarily.

However, even though the Baath Party and these three forces are in a hostile state, whether it is Nanming, Gao Yingxiang, and Mu Qiyuan, they all maintain close business ties with the Baath Party.