When Li Hongzhang disguised himself as a merchant and came to Shanghai on a foreigner's river steamer, the new decree of the imperial court was quickly issued.

The new decree of the imperial court is to issue an edict clearly, which means that when the edict is issued to the parties, it will be widely disseminated in advance, so that everyone in the world knows the meaning of the content of the edict.

In the edict of Mingfa, the text is very complicated, and the content is very simple, mainly under the pretext that Li Yongji had made meritorious contributions to the expulsion of the bandits some time ago, so he wanted to promote and reward the cadres of the Jingwu Army.

In the edict, Li Yongji was officially promoted to the governor of Liangjiang, which was expected, but the next reward for several other people in the Jingwu Army was somewhat unexpected.

For example, Wang Sanwu was promoted to the governor of Shandong, in charge of Shandong's military affairs, and ordered to immediately lead the army to suppress the bandits.

Another example is that Zhou Da was promoted to the governor of Anhui and commanded Anhui's military affairs.

Another example is Zhang Wei, who was promoted to the governor of Zhejiang and the governor of Zhejiang, commanding the military and government of Zhejiang.

In addition, others such as Jiang Feng, Jiang Hai, Zhang Feng and others were also given positions such as general staff officers, which can be said to have really promoted the commanders at all levels of the Jingwu Army.

In addition to these substantive contents, the holy decree also clearly mentioned the interception of Caoyin, but said that the matter was ineffective protection of the Jingwu army, and did not say that it was intercepted, and then because of the ineffective protection, Li Yongji was painlessly applied, took away his yellow coat, and asked him to quickly escort Caoyin into Beijing.

Li Hongzhang is also an old oilman in the officialdom, and he can see at a glance that this is the strategy of the imperial court's rise and fall, division and disintegration.

For this trick, Li Hongzhang felt that the court used it quite well, and it belonged to a serious yang scheme, if it was replaced by him, I am afraid that it would be difficult to do. Because in his opinion, it is human nature to pursue power, and Li Yongji, who was rewarded by the imperial court, is said to be only thirteen or fourteen years old. Can you still control the group of proud soldiers under your hands? In this way, I am afraid that the elite army will be torn apart.

In fact, although Li Hongzhang was a lobbyist sent by Zeng Guofan to Li Yongji's side, he actually shouldered the purpose of observing reality and reality. After all, the rise of the elite army is too fast, although it doesn't appear out of thin air, but the speed of the rise is really staggering.

Thinking that their Hunan army, when it was just pulled out, it was a series of defeats, and it relied on tenacity to get to where it is today, but the elite army is good. As soon as they appeared, they fought such a wonderful battle, the First World War crippled Li Xiucheng's victorious army, and the Second World War scared the entire bandits, so that the world was shocked by their combat effectiveness.

Although Li Hongzhang had not yet opened Huaiyong at this time, he had also handled military affairs before, and he deeply knew how difficult it was to raise a capable army, so he didn't think that a child who was only thirteen years old could really become the head of this group of proud soldiers, in his opinion. This Li Yongji is more of a puppet that everyone pushed to the forefront, if he can't get it right, he is still a ghost made by foreigners.

This puppet theory is very marketable within the Hunan army. Not only did he think so, but even Zeng Guofan had such doubts, and because of this, for a long time. The Hunan army did not have any contact with this army.

But this time, the Jingwu Army actually beat the foreigners, which made them a little unclear. Moreover, the Jingwu Army came out with troops from all directions this time, and the troops were mobilized more than 60,000, and they fought cleanly, showing their powerful strength to the world, which not only made the imperial court beat the drum in their hearts, but also made the Hunan army no longer able to face up to this force.

Because of this, Zeng Guofan sent Li Hongzhang, whom he valued very much, to check the truth and reality, as for the matter of persuasion, it was actually just incidental, or an excuse.

Now, the imperial court has taken the first step, and the situation has become complicated again, which makes Li Hongzhang have to suspend his contact with Li Yongji, and decide to slow down for a while and take a look.

In fact, Li Hongzhang was too worried, although the imperial court's strategy of division and disintegration was very difficult in the eyes of others, but for the Jingwu Army and Li Yongji, it was insignificant at all.

As early as when the Jingwu army received the content of this Ming edict, Wang Sanwu, Zhang Wei, Zhou Da and other parties hurriedly called Li Yongji to show their loyalty, and all said that they would not accept these puppet officials of the Qing court, and other officers above the platoon level also wrote to Li Yongji, most of them asked Li Yongji to rebel immediately, so as to oppose the imperial court, lest the Qing dog use this kind of indiscriminate tricks to disgust people.

It can be seen from this that the Jingwu army also saw clearly this kind of favor or explanation of the Qing court's promotion and secret descent, and they did not care about the official position of the Qing court at all.

The reason why it is clear that there is opposition from top to bottom, but when encountering such a thing, they only came to ask for Li Yongji's orders, it shows that this contingent has completely obeyed Li Yongji's command from top to bottom, has no bad habits of doing its own thing, and is already a modern army that is truly well-disciplined and absolutely obedient to the orders of its superiors.

can have this effect, of course, this is inseparable from Li Yongji's long-term strategy.

After all, the Jingwu Army is different from other armies, it can be said that Li Yongji pulled it up a little bit from scratch, and from this point of view, all the current backbone officers of the Jingwu Army can claim to be Li Yongji's protégé.

And because Li Yongji has a golden finger, there has been no shortage of material from the beginning, whether it is treatment or weapons, they are not available elsewhere.

If the great material wealth is only more attractive and people are willing to work, then the brainwashing policy of educating the army since then, as well as the slightly unreasonable behavior of protecting the short, have completely turned the elite army into a monster that is free from the world.

Thinking that the families of the soldiers of the Jingwu Army took revenge and exterminated the Wang family as the starting point, the Jingwu Army gradually embarked on a deformed road. At first, others thought that this was a group similar to Shuibo Liangshan, but with the expansion of this short-term protection, as all the relatives of the Jingwu Army were able to enjoy the benefits of this short-term protection, such as being exempted from paying a qiē tax, etc., this was somewhat out of the concept of doing things for the sky.

As long as one person in the family joins the Jingwu Army, even if it is a handyman in the Jingwu Army, it will become a tax-free thing for the whole family, and then the whole family will be honored.

People have a sense of superiority, and at the beginning, everyone's living standards were the same, but because someone in other people's families became elite soldiers, others didn't have to pay any taxes, and the government and the gentry didn't dare to oppress them, but they still had to pay taxes as usual. Can this mood be the same?

In other words, Li Yongji did not deliberately break a certain group, he just built his small collective into another privileged class in this era, and the growth of one after the other was like a snowball, attracting more and more people to join.

If it were someone else, this kind of behavior of not collecting taxes and returning benefits would not last long at all, but Li Yongji is different. Because he has a golden finger, he can trade back and forth between the two worlds, and he can take advantage of the time difference to obtain super high profits. Therefore, it is by relying on this ultra-high profit that he can continue to play this policy of buying people's hearts.

If you want to compare, this is a bit like the later Venezuelan Chávez, who used the profits of oil to buy people's hearts and won super high approval ratings. With this popular support, he became a great dictator of a generation.

The difference is that the people of the Qing Dynasty were oppressed strictly, and Li Yongji wanted to buy people's hearts. In fact, his expenditure is mainly the military expenditure of the Jingwu Army, and the benefits of those relatives are mostly the effect of the military deterrence of the Jingwu Army. It did not cause a substantial economic burden on the elite army, but on the contrary, it also had a promoting effect.

That is, a collective like the Jingwu Army. If it weren't for the guns in his hands, if it weren't for the fact that there were Taiping troops inside, foreigners outside, and the court was weak, he would have changed to a prosperous dynasty, and his deviant behavior would have been counterattacked by the government a long time ago, and he would never be allowed to develop normally so far.

However, today's Jingwu Army has gotten rid of the initial weakness and has grown to the power to encroach on the world, so that it will become anti-guest-oriented, the original secular power has become weak, and the Jingwu Army, a deviant non-mainstream, has become a strong one, which can be said to be the subject and the guest are out of place.

You must know that so far, although the salaries of Jingwu officers and soldiers do not seem to be as high as those of the Eight Banners Army, they are the highest in the Qing Dynasty when they are counted. At the same time, the casualties of the Jingwu Army are also the lowest in the Qing Dynasty, and the casualty rate of soldiers in the Jingwu Army is even lower than that of small workers and farmers, because the Jingwu Army not only has better food, but also provides medical services!

For example, if you have a headache, brain fever or something, or have diarrhea and diarrhea or something, if you are not a soldier in the Jingwu Army, or an ordinary person, you can only resist yourself, or eat some home remedies to find some comfort, if you are rich, it is okay, the standard of living is high, and the probability of disease resistance can be increased, but the poor have a low standard of living, and eating is a problem.

In other words, in the Qing Dynasty, the mortality rate of ordinary people was quite high, and the real cause of these people's deaths, war accounted for only a small part, hunger, poverty and the resulting diseases were the main causes, and among the diseases that caused death, the highest number of deaths was not cancer, but ordinary colds and fevers, and ordinary malnutrition!

However, once you become an elite soldier, not to mention the high salary, not to mention food, clothing, housing and transportation, just the medical benefits that can be cured and can also provide special drugs, and can benefit this medical welfare to your family, so that almost more than half of the people in the elite army have been favored.

At this time, the people of the Qing Dynasty were relatively simple, although they had gained a lot of knowledge, but they still regarded this kind of medical welfare that Li Yongji took for granted as a kind of gratitude, and with this kind of gratitude, loyalty was fully guaranteed, not to mention that Li Yongji not only gave them material satisfaction, but also gave them a more lofty spiritual goal, that is, to fight for the rise of China!

At this time, the Jingwu Army's policy of educating and educating the military has played an effective role, and all kinds of new knowledge began to fill the brains of the Jingwu Army, and once people come into contact with these new knowledge, their vision has become broader, and then look back at the group of people around them who are still ignorant, and they can no longer be friends with them.

This situation is like letting a college student who has seen the world become friends with a closed cowherd baby in the mountains, and it is okay to say two sentences at first, but after a long time, there will inevitably be a lack of common topics.

In the same way, most of the people of the Qing Dynasty at this time, even if they were scholars, only knew how to read the Four Books and the Five Classics, and they even knew very little about their own history, let alone foreign history. The general history of China on Chinese history in the Jingwu Army, as well as the general history of the world about foreign history, are all must-read publications like textbooks, and they are all vernacular.

Not to mention, knowledge changes fate, at least these people in the elite army, especially those who were recruited by Li Yongji in the first batch, after such a long period of study, their ideological realm has long been sublimated to another realm, they all have the idea of changing China with the sense of ownership, and they also have the most basic nationalism and nationalism, and of course regard Li Yongji as a great sage sent by God to save China.

In the words of later generations, for the officers and soldiers of the elite army, Li Yongji is a sacred idol that cannot be desecrated in their hearts, except for Li Yongji, they don't recognize anyone! Li Yongji is the sun in their hearts, and Li Yongji is the irreplaceable emperor in their hearts! Almost ninety percent of the elite officers and soldiers are Li Yongji's brain-dead fans.

How could such a group, which was independent of the world and brainwashed as a whole, be impressed by the official position of the Qing court?

In fact, this strategy of the Qing court was not only useless to the Jingwu army, but also counterproductive, making the Jingwu army more disgusted and more united, especially those radicals in the Jingwu army, and it was clearly pointed out that this order of the Qing court was instigating harmony within the Jingwu army and encouraging the officers and soldiers of the Jingwu to defect against the great leader Li Yongji.

The members of these radical factions often had a rough life and were more oppressed, and they often caused tears in the audience to cry at the grievance meetings when the recruits entered the camp, and they could easily blame the Qing court for all the hardships they had suffered before, and they were also the people who considered themselves the most loyal to Li Yongji, and even regarded this loyalty to Li Yongji as a kind of glory higher than Yiqiē.

For these radicals, the Qing court's encouragement of rebellion was a desecration of Li Yongji's authority and the dignity of the Jingwu Army, so these radicals constantly set off various self-examination and self-correction actions in the army, spontaneously brought up red armbands, and arrested and interrogated a person in the Jingwu Army who identified with the Qing court.

In order to force themselves and others to take a stand and find out the enemy elements who had penetrated into the interior, they even began to cut their braids, and regarded those who refused to cut their braids as lackeys who still identified with the Qing court and reactionaries who had penetrated into the elite army, and they had to be immediately arrested and severely interrogated.

There is no doubt that this kind of behavior has created a lot of unjust, false and wrongful cases, but fortunately, Li Yongji made a voice to correct it in time, but it was too late, even if the red armbands no longer blatantly forced others to cut their braids, but those who still had braids would also be pointed at by others and subjected to cold violence by others, so in the end, all the elite officers and soldiers cut their braids.

The braids are all cut, it seems that the next step is to add a yellow robe, in fact, these red armbands have also put forward anti-Qing remarks more than once, but this time, Li Yongji is treated strictly, and there is no room for a trace of disobedience.

This time, in order to prevent these radicals from messing up his established plans, Li Yongji deliberately used his authority to hold an army-wide radio speech, using the sharp weapon of radio to clearly spread his voice and will to the ears of every elite army, and to nip in the bud the evil consequences caused by such radical actions.

In the end, it was Li Yongji who broke his lips and made a long two-hour speech on the radio to the whole army, explaining in detail from all sides why the rebellion could not be rebelled at present, and urging everyone to endure it a little longer, to be patient with haste, to guard against arrogance and rashness, and to subordinate the part to the overall situation, and this dispelled the restlessness in the army.

That's right, Li Yongji also put forward the word "no haste, be patient", but it is exactly the same as the word that Yi Guifei persuaded Emperor Xianfeng.

After calming the restlessness of the army's heart, Li Yongji had the time to communicate with Wang Sanwu and others, and it was relatively easy to communicate with them, as long as he explained his ideas to them, they would follow them without a trace of doubt.

In such a situation, the Jingwu Army calmly accepted the reward from the imperial court, and then, what should be done, there was no change in the slightest, the only change was that the officers and soldiers of the Jingwu Army cut off their braids. (To be continued......)