“…… In the last eight months, the number of Genoese merchant ships arriving in Seville has increased by 50 per cent, while the number of Venetian merchant ships arriving in Lisbon has increased by 20 per cent. The two allies of the Iberian Peninsula linked the trading powers of the Eastern and Western Mediterraneans, respectively. ”

“…… Genoese and Venetian merchants had a monopoly on maritime trade in most of the Mediterranean, and the latter had a more subtle commercial relationship with Ottoman merchants than we can imagine, and their bankers were even guests of the Spanish and French royal families. I believe that the establishment of the 'Atlantic-Mediterranean-Levant Trade Route' is very important for us, and for us, it is a good opportunity to expand the country's influence and change the weakness of Atlantic trade caused by the war in Europe." ”

“…… From Genoa to Florence, from Sicily to Venice, the Mediterranean route covers tens of millions of people, and roughly estimates that the annual Mediterranean trade volume exceeds 10 million US dollars. The large coastal cities of the route have long lacked the supply of high-quality paper, soap, lamp oil, cotton, wool and leather; Alum from Italy, copper from Austria and Hungary, grain from North Africa, gold and silver from the Ottoman Empire...... These are all points of engagement where we can get ample benefits. ”

“…… Finally, I would like to pay tribute to the distinguished Speakers of the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as to the Cabinet of Ministers, Premier Guan and Minister Shi. Thank you for taking the time to review my report. ”

……

When I put down the pen, the sky was already full of stars. Loosening his tie, Sanyu rubbed his wrist and carried the teacup on the table, only to find that the tea had already cooled.

"Yu'er, it's only been a few days since I've been back, so I'm going to stay up all night and bother, I'm going to go to the Wang family for a banquet tomorrow, so let's rest early, don't get tired and lose your breath. This time to recuperate at home, you should think carefully about the marriage event. If you disobey your father again, you will have to be reprimanded. ”

The door to the study opened, and Sanyu's mother, Lu Shi, walked in with a maid, who was still holding a bowl of hot chicken soup. Looking at his son's slightly reddened eyes, Lu Shi looked concerned.

As one of Chang Kun's several wives, Lu Shi gave birth to the first son of the Chang family 23 years ago, and he completely turned over. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the marriage law of "not blaming the past" for immigrants with their old marriage history made the Chang family live a stable and stable life. Relying on the wholesale marriage of a bunch of daughters, the Lu family and other wives and concubines can also raise their heads at home. Chang Kun is even more mixed.

Sanyu, the eldest son who was born on the way to immigration, was given the greatest expectations by the Chang family. Sanyu received a very strict tutor from the Chang family since he was a child, and Chang Kun actively promoted the family's integration into the Chinese high society, and after graduating from high school, Sanyu was admitted to an Ivy League university majoring in international relations.

As a result of his university major, he was fluent in Latin, Portuguese and Spanish, and excelled in his studies, so he naturally joined the Cabinet Foreign Office after graduation. First as a clerk in the Public Affairs Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and then two years later as a commercial assistant at the Consulate of the Chinese and American Foreign Affairs in Seville, Spain, he was very promising.

Although the marriage attempt between the Chang family and Zhou Ruo, the daughter of the seventh aunt of the Yan Mansion, was finally ruined under the secret opposition of Yan Xianping. But as she continued to be promoted in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sanyu gradually became one of Manchester City's sought-after young talents. It is said that Wang Gui, general manager of the Caribbean branch of the Oriental Union Group, has already intended to marry his second daughter, who has just graduated from college, to Sanyu.

This time, Sanyu ended his one-year tenure at the Seville consulate and returned home on leave to await a new work arrangement. During the vacation period. Sanyu began to take stock of his work in Europe, and even began to write a report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Assembly Office to set out his new perspective on the current state of European trade.

"Mom, I'll go to tomorrow's banquet. But I don't know anything about the daughter of the Wang family, so don't expect me to promise anything on the spot. Sanyu drank the chicken soup that her mother had served herself, and was still checking for typos in her debriefing report. I was a little absent-minded about my mother's words.

The soup with a hint of chicken is accompanied by slices of ginseng and ginseng whiskers, a high-end tonic from the Far East that sells for a lot in Manchester City. Thinking of her mother cooking for herself in the middle of the night, Sanyu felt a little guilty.

"Hey, your mother is old, and your father is not in good health these days, and he still looks at the east all day and sighs, nagging about leaving his hometown for decades, thinking about whether there is still a chance to return to his roots...... As the saying goes, there are three unfilial pieties, and no queen is great, and now my father and mother don't think about you flying Huang Tengda, so I look forward to hugging my grandson as soon as possible, and I have a heart ......"

As he spoke, Lu's eyes suddenly turned red, and he withdrew from the study with the maid, leaving Sanyu smiling bitterly in the study.

……

Genoa and Venice, two traditional Mediterranean trading powers, have long been natural allies of the two old colonial empires of the Iberian Peninsula.

When Dias and da Gama set out on their voyage to Africa, Lisbon was crowded with sponsors from Genoa waiting for news; Most of the precious metals obtained by Spain in the New World were handed over to Genoese merchants to operate. It can even be said that without the strong support of Genoese merchants, the discovery of the New World may have been delayed for an unknown number of years.

After the eastern Mediterranean was squeezed by Venice and the Ottoman Empire and lost its trade advantages, Genoa's trade center of gravity began to shift greatly to the western Mediterranean. As early as the 16th century, Genoese merchants were involved in the Mediterranean trade in the hundreds to tens of millions of florins.

Like Genoa, Venice, which had repeatedly entered the competition in the western Mediterranean, was greatly ostracized and even involved in war, and Venice had to put its commercial destiny on the eastern Mediterranean. Under the guiding ideology of putting commercial interests above one qiē, Venice put aside its religious rivalries early on, and thus formed a relationship with the Ottoman Empire as friend and foe.

From the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire was gradually accepted by major European countries and became a pole of international geopolitics in the Mediterranean and even in Europe. Before and after the Thirty Years' War, the Islamic Empire, which had been at odds with Europe, repeatedly allied with France, Venice and other countries against the Habsburgs in Europe.

In this process, Venice played a vital role in the connection between trade and diplomacy, and its trade area spread from the entire eastern Mediterranean to the Black Sea, especially from Central Asia, and it was the strongest competitor of Portugal and the Netherlands in the European spice market. Many goods from Central and Eastern Europe and Southern Europe were also sold exclusively to Levant (Middle East) by Venetian merchants, thus amassing an astonishing fortune.

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the Venetian mint minted millions of new gold coins every year. However, it still cannot meet the needs of commercial trade. The Venetian bankers are second only to the Netherlands in terms of monetary and financial development, and their business scope has even penetrated into the Nordic region.

In the face of such a Mediterranean region, which gave birth to European commercial civilization and huge economic interests, it is impossible to say that Huamei has no ideas.

The opening of new trade routes mentioned in the report of the Chang family has been a very representative, but by no means the only one with ideas for Mediterranean trade, in recent years.

As early as three years ago, during the negotiations of the "Peace of the Sea Township" between Huamei and Spain and Portugal, Huamei mentioned the hope of opening up trade with Italy. However, at that time, the western Mediterranean and western Italy were basically part of the trade monopoly of the Republic of Genoa under Spanish control, and the close relationship between Genoese merchants and bankers and the Spanish royal family continued for nearly two hundred years, so Huamei did not show too strong willingness to enter at that time.

At present, in the Mediterranean trade circle, Huamei can only be regarded as the outermost at best. Through the connection of the Portuguese and French royal monopolies, the luxury goods can also enter the Mediterranean and North African markets to a greater or lesser extent. At the same time, it is also one of the largest buyers of Mediterranean olive oil.

Through the transit trade of Mediterranean merchants, bestsellers such as Chinese and American arms have appeared in small quantities in the Ottoman army. However, whether it is trade dominance or commodity profits, the profits obtained by Chinese and American merchants are far less than those of the royal monopoly agents of the above three countries.

Spain's dependence on trade with China and the United States has risen to an unprecedented height after the Thirty Years' War, and Portugal has long become a bridgehead and binding body for the interests of China and Europe. Therefore, at present, in order to make up for the loss of trade with Europe caused by the Thirty Years' War, the conditions for Huamei to directly open trade routes to Genoa and Venice have become ripe.

But there are far more political, diplomatic, and economic factors to consider. After all, once it penetrates into the Mediterranean route, it has to attract the attention of some traditional merchants and banking families in Genoa and Venice, and once it is not operated well, it will cause unnecessary trade conflicts, which will affect the relationship between these two large trading families second only to the Netherlands.

The most critical thing is. With the exception of the Portuguese colony of Tangier in the Strait of Gibraltar in North Africa, Huamei did not have an effective commercial foothold on the Mediterranean route. And so far, Portugal has not relaxed the right to open the port of Tangier for free trade, after all, the Portuguese crown has an inseparable share of trade in North Africa and the Mediterranean.

……

May 29, 1645. Monday.

At the regular session of Congress that week, the Senate and the House of Representatives formally passed the five-year "National Transportation Construction Investment Subsidy Budget" and the "Labor Law" amendments.

The "National Transportation Construction Investment Subsidy Budget" stipulates that starting from next year. The state will increase investment in the construction of land infrastructure and transportation. The main contents include speeding up the construction progress of the "United City-Porter City Railway" in Songzhou, and starting the construction of the "Qingcheng-Wood City Railway" in Haizhou ahead of schedule.

The former will further enhance the economic ties between the inland and even the northern part of Songzhou, with a huge amount of work and at least tens of thousands of direct jobs. In the past, merchant ships that needed to detour Haizhou Cod Point to Qingcheng only needed to dock at Wood City (later Providence) to unload their cargo, and then they could reach Qingcheng City by Guò railway in a few hours, and vice versa, thus saving a lot of merchant shipping capacity and time.

In 1644, for the first time, the number of births in China surpassed the number of immigrants, reaching more than 41,000, and the total population exceeded 900,000 in the spring of 1645. The population growth rate has exceeded the fiscal growth rate, and the investment in urban infrastructure, health, education, and maternal and child security in China and the United States has been in a quagmire in recent years.

The monetary and financial development in China and the United States has been relatively fast, with the domestic currency circulation reaching 250 million US dollars, and the proportion of accounting currencies such as "central bank reserve certificates" has reached 40%, which is close to the proportion of domestic accounting currency in England at the end of the 17th century, which has greatly promoted financial development. However, the national central budget for fiscal 1645 had reached an unprecedented $66 million, and it finally struggled to enter the door of deficit finance, but the needs of all sides were still unable to be met.

If you want to get rich, you must first build roads, expand the country's basic transportation construction, create employment demand, and stimulate production and consumption. However, the five-year budget will cost an additional $1.5 million a year, and the Senate has no choice but to approve that the budget funds will continue to be raised from various commercial banks through the issuance of treasury bonds.

The emergence of the amendment to the Labor Law can be regarded as a disguised adjustment strategy made by the cabinet of Guan Ruzhong to solve the national financial gap and improve the livelihood of the domestic wage earners without increasing the tax rate.

The main content of the amendment is to raise the local minimum wage, which has remained unchanged for more than a decade, from US$16 to US$18. Because it focuses on more than a dozen large conglomerates with thousands of domestic workers, the amendment has been hotly debated for nine months.

According to the Social Statistics Map of the Statistics Bureau under the Ministry of Civil Affairs, there are currently about 250,000 state-owned or private enterprises employed in the country, excluding overseas governorates, of which 60 percent or about 150,000 still receive a minimum salary of US$16 per month. Although the average national wage is 3 to 5 times higher than that of Europe and 10 times that of the Ming Dynasty, the cost of living in Huamei is also the highest in the world.

If the minimum monthly wage for these people can be raised to $18, it will mean that local enterprises, large and small, will increase their wage expenses by at least $3.6 million a year, and will enable a large number of national households to gain more spending power and improve their quality of life.

According to conservative estimates, without changing any corporate or consumption tax rates, the social consumption effect brought about by the increase in the minimum wage of only US$2 can increase the country's central fiscal revenue by US$1 million per year.

Guan Ruzhong's small abacus is crackling, but many people, including large state-owned groups, are unhappy, and Guan Ruzhong has been going door-to-door almost every weekend in the past few months to reason.

The two bills passed by the regular session of the National Assembly today are propositions for the cabinet to spend money and make money with all its might, and according to common sense, they should also be all kinds of prevarication or diversion of topics. But the actual situation was unexpected, it coincided with the Duanyang Festival, almost all the members of Congress were a little absent-minded, and the votes on the two bills went smoothly, except for the final vote by show of hands, they all went home early after the meeting, as if the previous entanglements and quarrels had disappeared.

……

In the huge hall of Congress, only Senator Su Zining was left sitting, and in addition, there were a few staff members who cleaned the venue.

Flipping through the internal reference documents in front of him again, Su Zining couldn't help but smile bitterly and shook his head, and he also knew the reason why this congress was too "serious and united". Unlike the previous internal texts of the Congress, which were full of all kinds of big and small matters, this latest internal reference document is only about the situation in the Ming Dynasty, a few hundred words, and the words are heavy.

The deterioration of the Yangtze River defense line, which caused military infighting, Zuo Liangyu died of a violent illness in Jiujiang, and nearly 200,000 troops stopped advancing.

The main force of the Manchu Qing East Route Army, which recruited hundreds of thousands of Jiangbei Ming troops, was in Yangzhou, and Shi Kefa, the governor of Jiangbei, was repeatedly defeated and trapped in defending the city, and Huang Degong failed to rescue Yangzhou and was forced to return to defend the Guazhou ferry, but the whole army was desperate and had no heart to fight.

On the south bank of the Yangtze River, Zheng Hongkui, the general soldier of Zhenjiang under the command of Zheng Zhilong, and Zheng Zhihu, the general soldier of Jiangyin, not only did not move, but also showed signs of retreat; Zheng Cai, the general soldier of Taizhou, and Zheng Zhibao, the deputy general of Nantong, crossed the river and escaped before Yangzhou was besieged.

Although there are many discrepancies between time and details and real history, the general trend is still the same, the military deployment on both sides of the Yangtze River has completely collapsed, and the Southern Ming court is overwhelmed. (To be continued......)