For its part, the military, although it did not have a good opinion of the landlord class in the former Ming rule, still hoped to focus more on military operations for foreign expansion rather than on bloody repression within the rule. With a buffer period of a few months, the civil affairs and other departments will have more time to use other methods to coordinate and deal with conflicts of interest in land relations, and the people will have a better understanding of Haihan's land policy, so that they will not directly enter into a state of confrontation.

Another thing that pleased the military was that the Executive Committee approved the proposal submitted by the military to build a new military port along the northern coastline of Qiongbei.

After occupying the northern Qiongbei area, the defense area of the Haihan Navy was also expanded, and the Qiongzhou Strait will become a new key defense area of the Navy, and there is currently no special military supply port on the coastline of Qiongbei, and the fleet performing tasks in the Qiongzhou Strait can only temporarily requisition the naval battalion outside the city. However, the tonnage of the ships of the sailors is generally small, and the berths docked are not suitable for the large ships of the Haihan fleet, and the main ships like the "Majestic Class" have no way to enter the berth of the water village, so they can only stop in the Nandu River, relying on small boats and gangplanks to build a road to land on the river. In order for the Haihan fleet to maintain a cruising density in the Qiongzhou Strait for a long time, it must have a suitable special port in the local area.

There is no shortage of areas suitable for the construction of ports near the capital city of Qiongzhou, in fact, it has been the main distribution center of maritime trade on Qiongzhou Island since ancient times. During the Northern Song Dynasty, at the mouth of the Nandu River, the earliest port Baishajin was formed, also known as Shenying Port. In the Ming Wanli's "Qiongzhou Mansion Chronicles", it is recorded that "the old name is Baishajin, and the Song Marshal Wang Guangzu has opened it, but it has not been established." Chun You Wushen suddenly hurricane made, since the rush into the port, people think that God should be, hence the name. ”

As an important supply station of the medieval Maritime Silk Road, Baishajin became the main port and cargo distribution center for Qiongzhou Island's foreign trade at that time, and it was also a coastal defense fortress for the naval forces of successive dynasties.

However, with the prosperity of the Baishajin trade, the waterway here began to become shallower due to sediment accumulation, and large ships could not enter the channel, so they often had to anchor outside Baishakou and wait until the tide was high before entering the wharf. By the end of the Song Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, the trading center gradually moved to the vicinity of Haitian, where the hydrological conditions were better.

This place is the Haidian of later generations, in the five years of Song Kaibao, that is, in 972 A.D., it is called "Haikou Pu" because of the location of its Nandu River estuary, and the historical records record that "moved to Tianjin and built Pu, and crossed the sea from Pu to call 'Haikou Port'." The place name Haikou is also named after this.

However, the place that the navy is looking at is not on the side of the mouth of the Nandu River, and considering the particularity of military use, the military does not want the warships to be combined with the civilian ship wharf, at least to a certain extent like the port of Shengli. After repeatedly inspecting the coastal terrain near the capital city of Qiongzhou, the military selected the location of the military port in the area of Xiuying Port in later generations. The coastal conditions and hydrological conditions are more suitable for the construction of large ports, and there are no hidden dangers such as sediment siltation channels that are common at the mouth of large rivers.

Of course, the cost of building a dedicated military port is not a small amount, and the arrangement of construction technicians is also a problem that cannot be ignored. If it were not for the necessity of setting up a military port in northern Qiongbei, it is estimated that the executive committee actually had the intention to push this large infrastructure project to the next year - the Shilu project and several ports in Annam are still in the construction stage, and it will be extremely stressful for the Ministry of Construction to open any large-scale construction sites now.

For the Executive Committee, these troubles in the aftermath are actually sweet troubles, after all, the vast territory of northern Qiongbei has finally been included in the control of Haihan, and the Haihan regime has a territory that belongs to it in the true sense, and it is worth paying some price for it.

The good news that came next was not only about pacifying Qiongbei. On November 5, the Changhua Engineering Headquarters sent a telegram back to the base camp that the land passage from Changhua to Shilu has been fully completed, and the track laying progress has been completed seventy percent, and it is expected that the whole line will be opened to traffic in January next year. At that time, the ore produced by the Shiroku Iron Mine will be transported from the deep mountains and old forests to the sea through the railway track of more than 30 kilometers long in Guò.

In fact, the completion of the track is only one-third of the overall project, and at both ends of the rail line, Changhua and Shilu will build a coal-iron composite industrial base and a large-scale open-pit iron mine respectively. The amount of work in these two places is also quite huge, and it will not be much easier than building this track.

The port has also rapidly expanded from a small fish port a year ago to a medium-sized cargo terminal that can dock more than 10 400-ton cargo ships at the same time, and its main task is to receive large quantities of coal from Heitu Port and transport future locally smelted steel from here.

However, as the local administrator, Qiao Zhiya really didn't have much excitement. He had just received a report from the Ministry of Civil Affairs and Justice on the casualty statistics of the Changhua Huarok project since the start of construction. During the past 15 months of construction, the number of deaths and 440 injuries among local RTL service members was 827. However, only the injuries that directly affect the ability to work are counted, and the vast majority of the injured are disabled, and ordinary minor injuries are not recorded in this statistics at all. However, the rate of loss of hard labor was quite acceptable, and it did not exceed the warning line set by the Executive Committee, and there were no incidents of a similar nature in the hard labor camps.

In addition to this cheap labour, 28 of the locally hired labourers were killed and nine injured. Seventeen naturalized citizens died in the line of duty, and eleven were disabled due to injuries. And this casualty rate is also the highest number of casualties in a single project in the history of Haihan Engineering so far.

The only thing that is thankful is that the traversers from the various departments who have been sent here one after another to carry out their missions have not had any incidents, and everyone has left the place unharmed after completing their work. Although some people fell ill on the construction site halfway, fortunately, the treatment was timely and did not cause major problems.

But Qiao Zhiya also knew that he didn't have much time to be compassionate, so he signed his personal opinion on it, then took out his seal, stamped it on the last page of the report, and handed it to the attendant next to him. The attendant put the text into a brown paper envelope and carefully stamped it with a wax seal. The report will be sent to the Executive Committee tomorrow with a scheduled flight to Shengli Harbor, and at the latest three or four days later, the Executive Committee's executive meeting should discuss the proposal to send additional personnel from the forced labor camps to serve in the Changhua area.

As for the number of personnel losses in the report, Qiao Zhiya estimates that no one will pay too much attention to it. After all, this time to attack Qiongbei, the "pirates" and militia groups have made a lot of profits, and they have taken in a lot of people. Although it is inconvenient for the population captured by the "pirates" to appear on Qiongzhou Island again, these prisoners of war who were sent to Heitu Port to dig coal can completely exchange the local hard labor and send them to Qiongzhou Island to serve their labor. On Qiongzhou Island, or Hainan Island, as the Executive Committee has conventionally called, the number of prisoners included in the camp is still about 6,000, which is a large army of cheap labor.

However, the vast majority of them will be sent to work in the Shilu Iron Mine in the interior of Qiongxi for some time to come, and no one will be able to pack up as to how many of them will leave the place in good hands. All the Executive Committee cares about is when the iron ore mine will be put into production, and how many prisoners' lives will be consumed in the process, which is not a matter that will be considered first. Compared to the value of hundreds or thousands of tons of steel, this cheap labor is indeed a consumable that no one cares about.

After proposing the slave trade to the Portuguese, savvy Portuguese merchants began transporting slaves to the Haihan-controlled district. However, most of them were natives they captured on the islands of Southeast Asia, and only a very small number were African black slaves that the Haihan people hoped to obtain.

These Southeast Asian natives are not only small in stature, limited in size, but also extremely lazy, after all, in the environment they live in, even if they do not grow food, they have an inexhaustible variety of wild fruits to eat, as long as they are willing to open their mouths, they will not starve to death. And such an environment has also created their lazy habits, even if the Haihan people sacrificed various punishment methods, but these Southeast Asian natives who are lazy by nature have not received too good results.

Of course, Qiao Zhiya, a high-ranking Haihan official, would not be worried about the laziness of these slaves, but the foreman of the forced labor camp who directly managed these foreign slaves, and if the engineering tasks assigned to them could not be completed on time, then the foreman would also suffer corresponding punishments - such as reducing the food supply, canceling all kinds of special treatment, and even cutting off the position of foreman and becoming a slave of the subordinates again.

"stand up!" With a crisp whip, several skinny slaves with dark complexions got up from the ground with frightened faces and desperately pulled a flatbed cart full of logs. However, probably due to lack of strength, although several people were also trying, the car still did not move.

"Feed the pigs more than you!" the foreman scolded mercilessly, his whip dancing in the air, making the nearby slaves tremble.

The scolding foreman brought two more slaves from the side to join in, and finally pushed the heavy cart. The foreman walked to the side of the road, lifted the bamboo tube containing the spring water, and poured it down a few times, only to feel that the irritability in his heart had finally disappeared a little.

But before he could recover his strength, someone shouted: "Li Maozai!"

"Here!" the foreman replied, throwing down the bamboo tube and running quickly towards the place where the voice came from: "I'm here!"

This foreman named Li Maozai is the traitor who attracted the bandit leader Liao Dabi to attack Li Jiazhuang in Guangdong. He narrowly escaped outside Lijiazhuang, but was still captured by the Haihan militia, and after being sent to Sanya, he was naturally thrown into a hard labor camp as a coolie. However, this guy is also tenacious, and he actually survived in the hard labor camp for more than a year, and then because of the structural arrangement of "bringing the old with the new" in the camp, he was promoted to the head of a cell, and after half a year, because of his good appearance, he was promoted to foreman, and then he was sent to Changhua to join the road construction army.

Of course, this foreman is not the other foreman, and Li Maozai's work is not the same as that of a naturalized migrant foreman. Not only does he have to supervise the progress of the labor, but he also has to bear the corresponding responsibilities. If the team under his command fails to complete the task on the same day, then he will not only be reprimanded by his superiors, but also more likely to be treated with a corresponding reduction in salary.

Li Maozai has now lived in a dormitory for eight people, enjoying a regular and fixed supply of meals, and the treatment is far better than those slaves who are squeezed into a thatched hut with thirty or forty people, with a bowl of gruel at each meal, and will be fined for deducting food if they can't finish their work. He didn't want to go back to the way he had been in the first year of hard labor, so he did his best to supervise the hard labor despite the heavy daily tasks.

However, the recent batch of slaves sent made him very dissatisfied, these island monkeys are all too lazy to be amazing, if the whip does not hit their bodies, they just won't move, let alone the Han people, even if they are more than the Annam people who are separated by a sea, their labor ability is far from the same. Moreover, these monkey slaves are extremely poor, often two or three people can withstand the work of a Han person, and their brains are quite bad, and the simple operation process has to be taught for a long time to learn. After bringing these people, Li Maozai has not been able to complete his work tasks on time for 7 days this month. That means he'll have to pay a hard price for it next month — he won't be able to enjoy a steady supply of food for at least seven days.

For this matter, Li Maozai also looked for cadres from the hard labor camp, but the cadres from naturalized people did not have a good solution to this. So Li Maozai had to find a solution on his own, such as using more severe corporal punishment to force these monkey slaves to work, squeezing every ounce of strength out of them.

After doing so, it did improve labor efficiency, but the cost was also obvious, and seven people died in half a month under Li Maozai's hard labor. Although these people were not killed by him, and some of them may even be due to diseases caused by water and soil adaptation after crossing the sea from the near equatorial region, or physical overdraft caused by excessive labor intensity, when the cadres counted the casualties of hard labor, there was no doubt that this account should be counted on his head Li Maozai.

At this time, the cadre who called Li Maozai over for questioning was also asking about this matter: "I heard that two of your subordinates died last night, what is the situation?"

Li Maozai complained bitterly: "This ...... It's not my fault!"