Soon, Zhu Youzhen entered the boundary of Nanjing, and it was undoubtedly more stable and comfortable to ride a steam locomotive than a horse-drawn carriage.

There is also his own royal bed in Zhu Youzhen's special train, and it does not affect his sleeping soundly.

When Zhu Youzhen woke up, he saw the railroad tracks under the red wall spreading into the city gate, and he couldn't help but feel very comfortable for a while.

This is the first time he has returned to Nanjing City after more than ten years, but Nanjing City at this time is different from Nanjing City when he left.

There were undoubtedly more citizens of the city, with endless residential areas inside and outside the city, chimneys and factories lined with blast furnaces in the distance, the streets were more crowded than before, and the sky of the city seemed to be a little gray.

What makes Zhu Youzhen have to admit is that with the development of Daming industry, the city's pollution and ecological problems have also begun to become more acute problems.

However, industrial development will inevitably be accompanied by industrial pollution, which is an unavoidable problem, especially in an era when industrial technology is not sophisticated enough.

Fortunately, the current Ming Dynasty has not yet invented plastics, and industrial pollution is still waste gas and waste residue pollution, as well as a small amount of heavy metal pollution.

But now Zhu Youzhen has moved many of the empire's polluting non-precision technology processing companies to the Batavia and Lelang regions.

Even pollutants produced domestically were transported by specialized transport companies to the colonies controlled by the Ming Dynasty.

However, the project of transferring industrial areas has just begun, so it is still inevitable that there will still be environmental pollution in Nanjing, but Zhu Youzhen believes that it will improve a lot in a few years.

Now the hottest thing in the empire is the steel mills.

Zhu Youzhen did not restrict the participation of private capital in all walks of life, and the construction and operation of the Rao is railway were all with the participation of private capital; except for a few companies such as Huangzhuang, Zhu Youzhen's royal capital only invested in companies in all walks of life, did not hold a controlling stake, and did not establish an internal bureaucracy within the company.

And steel is also an industry that all businessmen can participate in, because the basis of industrial development is the steel industry, whether it is railway construction or weapon manufacturing, transportation construction or even housing construction and bridge construction, etc., steel is still inseparable, so the demand for steel is still high, and there are more and more companies involved in the manufacture of steel.

Iron and steel companies are many, competitiveness is also strong, in the past, only the Iron and Steel Smelting Bureau affiliated to the Ming Ordnance was responsible for the research and development of iron and steel technology, and now there are no less than 100 institutions involved in the research and development of iron and steel technology, in order to compete for orders for railway construction and steel materials such as guns, iron and steel companies are painstaking.

Zhu Youzhen did not let officials manage the construction of railways and the manufacture of weapons, but also let private capital participate, whoever wants to build a section of the railway will invest in repairing and be responsible for the operation, and whoever wants to develop and produce firearms can ask the imperial court for approval to produce and develop firearms, but only the Ministry of War is responsible for procurement, and the sale of foreign products must also be approved by the imperial court.

Therefore, the degree to which the commodity economy of the Ming Dynasty is controlled by bureaucratic capital is relatively small, and the competition in the entire market is still relatively benign, and the railway companies that want to invest in a certain section of the railway to adopt their steel can only obtain cooperation opportunities through technology and price advantages, but they cannot obtain cooperation opportunities through the relationship between people in the officialdom.

Of course, at present, the empire is still the largest royal capital controlled by Zhu Youzhen, and even the wealth is still transparent, people can know how much property their emperor has, but no one disputes this, because they all know that the property of the current son is not obtained through the sale of official positions, nor through the possession of the imperial grain and national taxes, but only through investment.

This is the same as all the people in the empire, it is legally owned property, and the Ming Dynasty has clearly stipulated that the government has the obligation to protect private property.

It is precisely because Zhu Youzhen did not let the royal capital and bureaucratic capital monopolize all industries, so that the input cost of the Ming court is still not very high, and the number of officials is still the same as before, and there is no way to knock the bones on the people through commercial intervention.

There may be officials who invest on their own, but that is only to participate in the commodity economy as a merchant, and like Zhu Youzhen, the emperor, he cannot use the army to forcibly intervene because of a commercial failure of his royal capital.

Even if he could do so, he would be countered by a huge capital group, which he did not guarantee without the participation of the military of the Generalissimo's system, and even more so by other officials, whose investment in or even the companies they created themselves to participate in the competition for goods would be boycotted by the merchant group or chamber of commerce if they used public power to forcibly intervene.

However, more often than not, the officials have been controlled by the capital group, and the only thing the current Ming officials can do is to obey the command of the capital group and exercise their administrative power, even the cabinet chief assistant is more to protect the interests of the capital group, and Zhu Youzhen, the emperor, is the largest capitalist.

The Daming Ordnance Institute no longer exists, Zhu Youzhen split the Daming Ordnance Institute as early as five years ago, with the success of the imperial industrial construction, there is no need for the government to lead the industrial construction, so Zhu Youzhen handed it all over to the market, but most of the sales of the original Ordnance Institute are still controlled by the government, after all, they are weapons of mass destruction.

Among the representatives, the Iron and Steel Smelting Bureau of the Daming Ordnance Institute has now become a private enterprise with Song Yingxing as the largest shareholder, Zhu Youzhen's royal capital also holds shares, and other employees of the Iron and Steel Smelting Bureau also hold shares.

The Iron and Steel Smelting Bureau is still the largest steel plant in Daming, but it failed in the latest tender for the Songjiang-Nanjing section of the railway, and lost to the Daming Qingfeng Iron and Steel Plant, which was founded by a few graduates of the Daming Industrial School.

Zhu Youzhen naturally will not ask why he failed, as long as the Iron and Steel Smelting Bureau loses money, he will not hesitate to withdraw his capital and invest it in Qingfeng Iron and Steel.

Although Song Yingxing had been a cabinet minister, he was still an academic leader, and he could not force the railway companies that invested in the Songjiang-Nanjing section to choose their steel.

The reason for its failure is that Song Yingxing is old, and the improvement of the steel production process has not been able to keep up with the speed of young people.

Daming has implemented the patent system and intellectual property protection law, and Qingfeng Iron and Steel has applied for a patent, which not only uses new steel technology to take away the market of the Iron and Steel Smelting Bureau, but also makes a lot of money, after all, other steel companies, including the Iron and Steel Smelting Bureau, have to update the latest technology if they want to keep the market, and they have to buy his patents.

The Iron and Steel Smelting Bureau will naturally not stop there, relying on its own strong financial resources to dig up the R&D personnel of Qingfeng Iron and Steel with a lot of money.

Zhu Youzhen saw these in the newspaper, he admired this kind of healthy competition, and he was also happy about it, after all, Daming can now take the initiative to improve his industrial technology without his interference.

(End of chapter)