Chapter 472: Industrial Transformation

Different countries have different circumstances and different ways to recover their economies. The victorious countries could quickly recover their economies by exploiting the vast colonies they had just acquired and relying on reparations, while the defeated countries would not only have difficulty recovering their economies, but would also have to bear huge reparations, making it very difficult to develop their economies.

After repeated arguments, the Saar Empire first announced that it would abandon the gold standard and change to a floating exchange rate, and at the same time, the government printed money to devalue the currency, stimulate economic growth with controllable inflation, and at the same time reduce the pressure on reparations, and indirectly avoid reparations.

After the Saar Empire announced the abandonment of the gold standard, the Nantes Empire and Russia also abandoned the gold standard one after another, and began to depreciate the currency.

In order to allow Russia to confront the Chinese Empire, the Boston Empire had just provided Russia with a large loan to help it restore its economy, but after Russia gave up the gold standard, it came to a very unkind malicious devaluation, so that the banks that provided loans to Russia in the Boston Empire did not even have the capital, so angry that the Boston Empire's Prime Minister Wiedman scolded Ulyanov for being unkind.

It has seen several defeated countries improve the competitiveness of domestic products and accelerate economic recovery through currency devaluation. Other countries are also looking at it, and with an example ahead, countries have abandoned the gold standard and used inflation to increase the competitiveness of their products, and the trade war has begun to intensify.

Due to Fang Xiaoyu's insistence on encouraging fertility policies over the years, and the traditional idea of having more children and more blessings among the Chinese people, the population of the Chinese Empire has been growing very rapidly, and the current population of the Chinese has exceeded 800 million, plus the population of the entire ASEAN Association of the allies is close to 1.2 billion, more than half of the world's 2 billion people.

With such a large domestic consumer group, the various products produced by the Chinese Empire are not at all worried about not being able to sell, as long as the tariffs are high enough, even if the Chinese dollar does not depreciate, it is still very competitive. As for exports, the Chinese Empire has a large number of unique products, and it is not at all afraid of high tariffs from the other side.

The biggest problem facing the Chinese Empire now is how to convert the wartime economy back to a peacetime free economy, so that the economy can smoothly transition and achieve a soft landing, the most important of which is the Chinese consortium. Because the Chinese consortium supplied more than ninety percent of the military supplies of the Chinese army, and also provided a large number of weapons and equipment to foreign countries, the scale of the military industry had expanded too much during the war, and Fang Xiaoyu started in many ways.

Fang Xiaoyu's first step in economic regulation was to convert military enterprises to civilian products, and the chariot factory began to produce agricultural products such as tractors, combine harvesters, rice transplanters, threshers, and electric mills for agricultural production, and the aircraft factory also began to produce some cheap biplanes for special tasks such as pesticide spraying, geological exploration, and firefighting in the mountains and forests.

This not only solved the problem of overproductivity in the chariot factories, but also accelerated the realization of agricultural modernization within ASEAN, freeing up a large number of working people to transfer to industrial production.

The shipyard produces civilian ships, in order to improve the carrying speed, Fang Xiaoyu specially developed a container transportation system, and specially manufactured ships for container transportation, instead of the previous sprinkling cargo ships, which greatly improved the efficiency of unloading, for which all trade ports in the entire ASEAN have started port reconstruction projects to adapt to the transshipment and loading and unloading of containers.

In addition to those special aircraft, the aircraft factory also began to produce the Qingzhou 100 passenger aircraft, which is based on the newly developed Behemoth 1 transport aircraft and modified and developed, installed with four 600-horsepower engines, a maximum speed of 360 kilometers per hour, a practical ceiling of 8,000 and 50 meters, can load up to 4.8 tons of cargo, as a passenger aircraft practical can carry three crew members, carry 50 passengers, and have a range of 4,600 kilometers.

The China Consortium set up China Airlines and began to build civil airports and open air routes in China. Seeing that the Zhonghua Consortium opened an airline, the Wang family and the Xia family immediately followed up, and soon the Wang family's Xuan and the consortium established Northwest Airlines, and the Xia family's Zhongxia consortium established Eastern Airlines.

Major consortia purchased a large number of Qingzhou-100 passenger aircraft from the China Consortium and hired retired air force pilots to drive passenger planes, the imperial aviation industry has developed rapidly, seeing that it is profitable to manufacture aircraft, some private enterprises have also begun to set foot in this field, and they have begun to establish their own aircraft research laboratories.

The three airlines soon began to lay out foreign routes, flying planes to the territory of other countries. China Airlines even opened a transoceanic route to the Empire of St. Maarten via a number of islands in the Eastern Ocean, making communication within the entire ASEAN much easier.

After the military vehicle manufacturing factory began to transform into manufacturing civilian trucks and cars, there was a buying boom in the wealthy Chinese Empire, and various types of cars began to increase on the domestic roads, and civilian trucks began to replace the railway line to share part of the transportation task, especially in those areas that could not be reached by the railway. The military industry began to gradually reduce its scale, focusing its investment on scientific research, and the contraction of the military industry will inevitably reduce the amount of steel used.

In order to maintain the use of steel, Fang Xiaoyu immediately set out to build railways in the newly occupied areas to strengthen his control over these areas, especially the coastal railway line that crossed the entire occupied area of the Chinese Empire in the southern subcontinent. In addition, Fang Xiaoyu had already carried out a double-track project for the Far Eastern Railway built by the original Cossack Empire, and this time he built a new railway directly in the north of this railway.

Due to the shortage of funds in those years, the Cossack Empire only built a single-track railway when building the Far Eastern Railway, which greatly restricted the carrying capacity of this railway artery, and this problem was undoubtedly exposed during the world war, because the railway transportation efficiency was too low, resulting in a large number of weapons sold by the Chinese Empire to the Cossack Empire at that time in the station, and the front army suffered a large number of casualties due to the lack of weapons.

At that time, in view of this, in order to strengthen the control of the Central Continent and provide strong logistical support for the attacking Cossack Imperial army, Fang Xiaoyu carried out a double-track project for this railway at that time, which was quickly completed with the help of many prisoners of war laborers, and this railway line has now become a sharp weapon to support the Cossack Empire's war against Russia.

In order to make the traffic more convenient, Fang Xiaoyu decided to lay a double track directly for the new railway in the north, that is, so that the train can go in both directions, which will greatly improve the carrying capacity of this railway.

If there is a chance in the future, Fang Xiaoyu also plans to build Far Eastern Railway Line 3 in the more northern area, or a number of longitudinal railways to the north through the Far Eastern Railway, so as to strengthen the control of this continent and continuously transport countless resources from the cold wilderness of the north.

The reason why Fang Xiaoyu attaches so much importance to this continent is that the eastern part of the Far East has always been under his control, the economic development here is very early, with the rich mineral resources in the Far East, it has become an indispensable heavy industry base of the Chinese Empire, and its output has reached almost one-third of the entire country, and now the resource-rich Berian Plain is under his control, as long as the traffic is smooth, it can give this industrial zone a chance to expand again.

In addition, at the other end of the Beria region, near the Ural Mountains, in the Tyumen region, only 300 kilometers from the national border, there is a huge oil field hidden underground, which is comparable in scale to the Aberdeen Peninsula oil field that Fang Xiaoyu began to secretly exploit during the war, but it is slightly more difficult to exploit. Although Fang Xiaoyu does not plan to exploit the oil in this area, he still needs to strengthen his control over this area, and no one will have too much for such an important industrial resource.

In addition to the Far East Railway and the Southern Subcontinent Coastal Railway, two new large railways running from north to south through the former Lanfang Empire region, and three railway arteries from the eastern ocean coast to the Central Continent have all started construction, in addition to the railway line extending from the Batan region to the west, turning south through the Sinai Canal, directly connected to the coastal railway line of the Southern subcontinent, and the radiation area is as far as the southernmost port of Cape Town, such an ultra-long railway also began to be built.

The railway was built by Fang Xiaoyu specifically to strengthen his control over the southern subcontinent Krai, and he also demanded that all the areas passing through the Sinai Canal be used as an underground railway, and that the rails pass under the river through a culvert to avoid obstructing the normal operation of the canal. With such a huge railway construction plan, coupled with various construction plans for the newly occupied area, Fang Xiaoyu finally did not have to worry about the use of steel.

The Chinese Empire's steel production was already equivalent to 80% of the Boston Empire's, but with the end of the war, the demand for steel declined, and the Boston Empire's steel industry had shrunk. Fang Xiaoyu's big railroad construction plan completely undertook the demand for excess steel, and after the country began to overhaul the railway, the steel industry had enough time to adjust and optimize the combination of its own industries, of course, in this way, the Boston Empire, which did not get so much land, could not learn, even if they wanted to build not enough places.

The country's industrial capacity was fully increased during the war, and the post-war impact on exports was significant, not only in terms of steel surplus, but also in other areas, and with the severe decline in the purchasing power of the countries of the Western Continent, all export commodities were affected.

In order to reverse this situation, Fang Xiaoyu decided to renovate the houses of the whole country in the name of preventing infectious diseases, improving the national health level, and changing living habits, relying on the situation of state financial appropriations and donations from foundations, and relocated those people who still lived in adobe houses, and built spacious tiled houses or buildings for them.