The strength of the Central Plains Field Army was damaged, but Hu Weidong was personally promoted again, and because Zhang Hao, the former political commissar of the 15th Group Army and also the secretary of the Central Plains Bureau, was transferred to the Central Committee to take charge of various preparations after the founding of the People's Republic of China (Note 1), he no longer held the post of secretary of the Central Plains Bureau. After Zhang Hao left office, the Red Party Central Committee originally intended for Hu Weidong to take over Zhang Hao's post of secretary of the Central Plains Bureau, but considering that he was too young, the word "acting" was temporarily added, and at the same time he was appointed as the political commissar of the Central Plains Field Army instead of the commander, and the commander was promoted by Su Yu, the former deputy commander-in-chief of the 15th Group Army.

Because the Red Party has always been the "Party Command Gun", therefore, although the position of commander is gone, Hu Weidong, whose status in the party has been greatly improved, is definitely promoted, and his power has not shrunk in the slightest, after all, in the Red Party system, even if he is a political commissar, he has to participate in and even lead the military command, such as Taizu back then.

Therefore, Hu Weidong naturally has no dissatisfaction with this, but he really can't do the work of the political commissar! However, the Central Committee used the examples of Mr. Peng, Mr. Lin and others to tell Hu Weidong that political commissar is not as difficult as he imagined, especially at the level of the field army, as a political commissar, he only needs to grasp the general direction, and the specific work can be handed over to his subordinates!

Only then did Hu Weidong agree to serve as the political commissar of the Central Plains Field Army, but at the same time, he proposed that Mao Zetan, the current political commissar of the new 38th Division and his partner when he first started the army, be promoted to deputy political commissar of the Central Plains Field Army, and actually be in charge of the political work of the field army.

At the same time as the formation of the five major field armies, the original major border areas have also been renamed the liberated areas, and the Red Party's army has also officially changed its name to the "People's Liberation Army", it is obvious that with the further strengthening of the Red Party's armed Liliang, now even if it is a two-front operation, there will not be much of a problem, as long as Lao Jiang can't hold his breath and act first, the day of the Red Party to liberate the whole of China will come. Even if Lao Jiang is calm. After killing the devil, he couldn't run away, not to mention that the Chongqing government's financial situation is becoming increasingly embarrassed due to the increasing proportion of overseas donations flowing to the Red Party. However, out of fear of the Red Party's armament, they did not dare to cut off a single army at all, and it was strange that they could raise two or three times the number of huge troops with less than one-third of the military expenditure of those years

Although the post of secretary of the Central Plains Bureau is only an acting for the time being. However, Hu Weidong can now be called a man of his word in the Central Plains Liberated Area, which undoubtedly makes him more able to give full play to the foresight and sagacity of the traverser and his own outstanding talents. For now, however, his mind is focused on the newly occupied Shanghai. Among them, Hu Weidong attaches the most importance to Shanghai's shipbuilding industry, which is ahead of the rest of the country

Hu Weidong was overjoyed by the occupation of Qingdao, which had a 10,000-ton dock, while Shanghai's Jiangnan Shipyard had a larger 20,000-ton dock, and after the American equipment and technicians introduced by Zhongfu International were stationed, the Jiangnan Shipyard could not only build civilian ships with a displacement of 10,000 tons or even larger displacements, but also large warships of tens of thousands of tons.

According to Hu Weidong's prediction before the war, it will be difficult for Shanghai to recover. Therefore, he chose Qingdao as China's number one shipbuilding and shipbuilding base in the future, and spent a lot of money to start building 3 10,000-ton and 2 70,000-ton modern docks in Qingdao (during the Republic of China, China only lacked high-level designers in engineering construction, as long as it can be introduced from abroad, it is not difficult to build some large projects, compared with factories). The level of sophistication of the construction work is far from good). However, the construction of the dock is time-consuming and laborious, even if it is a relatively small 10,000-ton dock, with the most advanced management methods, the workers and masters have also taken out the spirit of living 20 years less and worked hard, and it will take at least more than half a year to complete, coupled with the continuous attacks of Japanese aircraft, it should be thankful that it can be completed within nine months. As for the larger docks, it will take much longer, and it may not be possible to build it well in two or three years

So at that time, Hu Weidong did not expect China to develop the domestic shipbuilding industry before the victory in World War II, after all, there was a dock, which could not be built quickly, and no matter how to introduce jishu, equipment and talents from abroad, it was still too late. But I didn't expect Shanghai's recovery to come so early, which really made Hu Weidong ecstatic, and Shanghai's shipyard is not only Jiangnan Shipyard, in terms of overall scale, by the former Shanghai's largest shipyard Yesong Shipyard and many other enterprises have merged and formed the British Union Shipyard is the largest shipbuilding enterprise in Shanghai.

British Associated Shipyard Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as British Associated Shipyard) is the largest shipbuilding leading enterprise in China formed by the merger of some foreign and Chinese-funded enterprises with a predominantly British background in order to reduce internal friction, covering an area of 300,000 square meters after the merger, with nearly 1,000 employees and 4 large docks (Yangshupu No. 1 and No. 2 docks, Dongjiadu dock and Hefeng dock). With such a haode foundation, as long as it is injected with its relatively scarce middle and high-level Jishu talents and some advanced processing equipment (such as welding machines), after three or five months, it can build four civilian ships with a displacement of 10,000 tons or warships within 8,000 tons at the same time, which is undoubtedly much stronger than the Qingdao shipyard that currently has only one 10,000-ton dock, but the problem is that this shipyard is an asset of foreigners

Note 1: This matter also has something to do with Hu Weidong, who considered that the victory in the later stage of the Liberation War in history came too quickly, so that the preparations for the founding of the People's Republic of China were seriously insufficient, and the introduction of many policies and regulations was not carefully considered, which had a lot of negative effects. Take the promotion of simplified Chinese characters as an example, at that time, because of the need for universal education, the time was very urgent, so that many simplification schemes were obviously inappropriate, the font was simplified, but because the rules of Chinese characters were not strictly followed, many simplified characters were directly selected just with the same pronunciation, which not only caused a certain impact and damage to cultural traditions, but also received simplified Chinese character education after more literacy because there is no rule to follow, and the difficulty of in-depth learning is greater than that of traditional Chinese characters. As a result, simplified characters only helped more for early elementary literacy, and for people with a secondary school education or above, more time was spent on literacy than traditional Chinese characters (the current simplified characters have been revised many times, and the situation has been much better, but because they are only tinkering on the original basis, the problem is still not completely solved). This also caused a certain obstacle to the industrialization process of New China.

Therefore, as early as 1938, Hu Weidong had already written to the Central Committee, hoping to take precautions and start preparations in advance. The Central Committee adopted Hu Weidong's suggestion, and transferred Zhang Hao, who was already a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, to the Central Committee to take full charge of this matter. (To be continued.) )