I want to be emperor

This was not Andre's first train ride. A few years ago, businessmen from Chu State built the first railway in England for coal transportation.

Many coal mines invested and developed by Chu businessmen are not just at the seaside or riverside, but rather some distance away. In order to transport coal, these mining companies usually build a small railway to facilitate the transportation of coal.

It’s just that the empire has not yet relaxed export controls on train-related equipment. Therefore, the earliest mining railways in these vassal countries generally used horses to pull carriages... It may sound strange, but this is the fact. In fact, The earliest railways in the Dachu Empire also used horse-drawn carriages. It was not until the development of high-pressure steam engines and trains that trains were used.

Railways are older than trains, and many years earlier!

From another perspective, it is also possible to use horse-drawn carriages for railway transportation. Although the transportation efficiency is not as good as that of real trains, it is far better than horse-drawn carriages traveling on ordinary roads.

Therefore, when the early empire did not liberalize the export of train-related equipment, mining companies investing in mineral development in overseas vassal countries all used small railways and horse-drawn carriages to transport goods.

In order to stimulate the economy of the vassal states and increase the supply of various raw materials, the Great Chu Empire relaxed export controls on railway transportation and allowed mining companies wholly owned by Chu people to purchase and use trains. At the same time, it approved the Great Chu Empire. After the Imperial Railway Corporation built standard commercial railways in each vassal country, it started a wave of train use in each vassal country.

The first commercial railway in the Kingdom of England, the 'Doron Railway', is a commercial railway from Dover, an overseas territory directly under the jurisdiction of the Dachu Empire, to London, the capital of the Kingdom of England. It is operated by European Railways, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Dachu Empire Railway Corporation. The British Railway Company, a subsidiary of the company, invested and built it.

However, this is not only not the first railway in the UK, it is not even the first commercial railway in the UK... Previously, the railways in the UK were narrow-gauge mining railways, and the gauge was generally seventy centimeters or more. One meter, which is very different from the standard commercial railway's 1.5 meter gauge.

Of course, because it is in a vassal country, many things are not governed by imperial laws. Therefore, these mining area railways built by mining area companies will generally carry out commercial operations...

Therefore, some indigenous people in the British area have actually experienced what it feels like to take a train very early on.

However, it was only after the British Railways Company built the Duolon Railway in the British area that more indigenous people and goods were able to enjoy the convenience of railway transportation.

However, the riding experience of the trains in the vassal country, even the standard commercial railways invested and constructed by the Railway Corporation, is far inferior to that of the empire's mainland railways.

The first is the locomotives and carriages... In order to control costs for locomotives and carriages used overseas, railway companies often directly transport some old locomotives and carriages that have been replaced locally and continue to use them.

On the whole, the railway systems in overseas vassal states are one generation behind those in domestic areas.

So after Andre arrived in the Chu Empire, the experience of taking the train was much better than taking the railway in England. Not only was it faster, but the train was also smoother.

This also made people sigh once again about the power of the Chu Empire!

Along the way, when he set off from Dover, he frequently felt the power of the Chu Empire!

This kind of power is not only military power, but also comprehensive economic and cultural crushing.

The most common example is that when he arrived in Songjiang, he and the ambassadors from other vassal countries briefly visited Songjiang City under the arrangement of the personnel of the Domain Affairs Department of the Ministry of Ethnic Education. On the way, they saw a large number of ordinary people from the Chu Kingdom!

Then he discovered a very shocking fact, that is, the people of Chu are really tall!

When he was in China in the past, although he also knew that the Chu people were taller, Andre was also a marquis in the Kingdom of England. On a daily basis, he came into contact with some Chu officials, soldiers, and businessmen because of his official duties. He always felt that these people In the Dachu Empire, he should be at the upper-middle level, and being tall is normal.

But when he arrived at Songjiang City, he saw that all the ordinary Chu people on the street were tall and tall, and he was completely shocked.

Some of the Chu people on the street could tell at a glance that they were ordinary people, but none of them were short, especially the young people who were almost all very tall.

He silently compared the average young people in his country and found that the average height difference between the two was probably at least ten centimeters.

And Andre is not an ignorant person. He is also one of the few people in the Kingdom of England who is familiar with Chu. He is also quite proficient in Chu studies and has basic common sense... He knows deeply that he wants the entire group to understand Chu. To grow so tall, how high does the food supply level need to be?

That was a level of food supply that the Kingdom of England could not even imagine!

According to statistics from the Ministry of Health of the Da Chu Empire, the average height of the younger generation in the Da Chu Empire is growing very rapidly. In the 45th year of Chengshun, the average height of 18-year-old young men had reached 1.68 meters. We are still talking about average data, which means that there are actually a lot of people who are over 1.68 meters tall, and there are many people who are over 1.7 meters tall.

Nowadays, the minimum height standard for new recruits in the Da Chu Empire has been raised to 1.65 meters...

It can be seen that the living standards of today's younger generation have been greatly improved compared to their parents' generation.

For comparison... the young people in England are probably only about 1.6 meters tall!

There is a misunderstanding in history. Napoleon is said to be short... But don't think that he is relatively short in contemporary France. He is about 1.678 meters tall.

This height was not considered short for France and even the entire European region at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century... After all, the average height in Europe during that period was just like this. Even the Dutch, who had the fastest growth in height, were only around 10 years old. It only started to surge in the late ninth century, and the industry was actually like that in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Therefore, strictly speaking, compared to other contemporary Europeans, Napoleon was not short... he was even taller than most ordinary Europeans.

Just because of some derogatory remarks, deliberately calling him short, and in addition, Westerners also referred to this setting when filming movies and TV series. The actor of Napoleon is only about 1.7 meters, but there are a lot of actors found. All of them are the average height of the 21st century, which is often more than 1.8 meters, which highlights that Napoleon is very short...

Now in the seventeenth century, the average height of Europeans is shorter... Height requires nutritional support, and nutrition comes from food, which means that food supply needs to be sufficient and at a price that ordinary people can afford.

And not all countries can do this!

What is needed behind this is strong national defense and economic strength!

Just having financial strength is not enough to have granaries all over the floor, because if you hoard food, your neighbors may hoard guns...

As for the Great Chu Empire, it goes without saying that its strength in all aspects allowed it to provide its subjects with a massive and abundant food supply, and in the past few years it had exceeded the huge annual per capita consumption of 400 kilograms of food.

What is this level?

It's about the level of the United States in the late nineteenth century... Don't think that it was very backward at this point in the late nineteenth century.

You have to know that the geographical term is the United States. With its unique climate and arable land area, plus a population of tens of millions at the time, it could grow more food than could be eaten all... At that time, the United States was the world's largest food producer. As an exporting country, countless ships are exported to Europe every year loaded with grain. At the same time, grain is also the most important export commodity of the United States.

And what about the Chu Empire?

Although the population is larger, according to the estimates of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, within the forty-seven years of Chengshun, the population is estimated to exceed 700 million people... But the problem is that the Da Chu Empire has enough territory.

Not to mention the United States, which is blessed by nature, even the entire America is in the hands of the empire, and it is still a directly administered territory, which is the same concept as the mainland.

In addition to the entire North and South America, the Chu Empire also occupied Nanyang, which was also an important source of food/economic crops. Then there is Eastern Europe, which was newly occupied and developed on a large scale... The war in Eastern Europe conducted by the Da Chu Empire was simply and purely for the purpose of occupying Eastern Europe and then carrying out large-scale agricultural mechanization development.

In addition to these large-scale free grain-producing areas, the Chu Empire also planted and imported grain on a large scale in various administrative territories and vassal states.

In India, Africa, and Europe, there are countless plantations opened by the Chu people... No matter how these plantations are operated, they supply countless grains and various economic crops to the Chu Empire every year.

It can even be said that the Chu Empire used hundreds of millions of indigenous laborers all over the world to supply itself with food.

In this way, the huge consumption of a population of 700 million can be satisfied and the per capita food consumption has reached 400 kilograms, which is an extremely high level of food consumption for contemporary times.

Against the backdrop of this era, the new generation of young people from the Chu country can’t be any shorter if they want to be...

What's more, what makes the senior officials of the Da Chu Empire no longer worry about it, and what is even somewhat worrying is that the period of rapid population growth in the Da Chu Empire has stopped.

Many families no longer have four or five children as they did twenty or thirty years ago. In fact, in the early 1930s, the birth rate of the Great Chu Empire was already declining rapidly. In the past ten years, the average Chu Empire The number of children in a family is generally two or three, and there are also many with one child.

According to estimates from the Imperial Ministry of Civil Affairs, the empire's population growth rate will enter a slow growth rate in the future. Although the total population continues to rise, this part of the population growth is not due to more newly born people, but to This is because average life expectancy continues to increase, and people are living longer, which in turn leads to an increase in the population.

But even so, it may take a long, long time to reach the one billion population mark, and there may even be negative population growth before reaching the one billion population mark in a few decades.

This is an inevitable result of the continuous changes in people's ideas as the development of industrial and commercial economy, the popularization of education: People don't like to have babies anymore!

Throughout human history, especially the history of industrial countries in the past hundred years, this is true for all countries, without exception!

That’s why capitalists in later developed countries in Europe and the United States will generally introduce immigrant labor... If they don’t introduce immigrants, their own people will not have children, there will be no one to do the work, and the economy will be ruined.

It's just that this kind of thing cannot be done in the East Asian cultural circle... So you can also see that in developed countries in Europe and the United States, the overall population situation is relatively optimistic because they have introduced a large number of immigrants.

But Japan and South Korea are different. They do not introduce or even exclude immigrants. As a result, extremely exaggerated population growth rates and population structures have emerged.

As for the Dachu Empire, today's Dachu Empire has just passed the rapid growth of population and entered the stage of moderate growth. There is no so-called population problem... and the moderate population growth can not only maintain good economic growth. speed, without excessive consumption of various resources, thereby increasing the per capita resource supply level.

The current population structure of the Dachu Empire will be in a relatively good state for at least the next twenty or thirty years.

And even if we take a step back, even if the demographic structure of the empire changes, and the population declines or even affects the economy, the problem is actually not big...

Because the Great Chu Empire is different from all other countries in later generations, that is, the Great Chu Empire has no competitors on earth!

There is no need to consider such things as import and export trade, international economic competition, and global resource competition.

The entire earth belongs to the Chu Empire!

It really doesn't work. There are still hundreds of millions. In the future, there will definitely be more indigenous people working hard to support the Chu people!

As long as the army of the Great Chu Empire remains so strong and there is no large-scale chaotic civil war within it, it can continue to suppress the industrial, economic, and national defense armies of the vassal states.

Based on Luo Zhixue's knowledge, it should not be a big problem for his empire to maintain global suppression for more than a hundred years.

As for the longer future, such as two hundred years from now?

To be honest, he doesn't know!

After all, anything can happen in the future. Who knows, one day a certain indigenous country will secretly produce a lot of advanced guns, and then fight with the Chu army, and then the army of the Chu Empire will become decadent again. , or perhaps they were unwilling to fight due to economic problems, which eventually led to these indigenous countries becoming truly independent from Chu.

This is not impossible, it is even very possible.

Especially after entering the modern technological level of later generations, even superpowers cannot do whatever they want... The famous Imperial Tomb State is a living example!

Even if you are a superpower and others refuse to accept it and will continue to do it to you, you cannot hope to truly rule unless you kill all the locals.

And if you kill everyone, who are you exploiting? You can't just want a piece of bad land with nothing... What are you doing by spending countless military expenditures on fighting a war like this?

Just like the Chu people in India, Africa and Europe now... they didn't do anything to avoid people in important places like they did in America and Southeast Asia in the past.

The main reason why they wanted land but not people was that the ideas of the empire's top leaders at that time were relatively old, including Luo Zhixue's, who were still narrow-minded and only thought about opening up the territory and expanding the territory to provide more territory for the survival of the Chu people... Later I found out that this was not necessary.

Because they discovered that people in Chu gradually stopped having children, and it was expected that the population would not explode in the future. Coupled with the continued development of industry and commerce, and people's growing demand for improvement in living standards, the empire's foreign expansion policy made a U-turn.

From wanting land and not wanting people, to wanting land and wanting people.

In simple and straightforward terms, it is a shift from plundering resources to plundering labor value!

The major change in the foreign expansion policy further increased the amount of various resources that the Chu Empire obtained from the outside, which ultimately led to the annual per capita grain consumption of the Chu Empire exceeding 400 kilograms!

This food level was eventually reflected in the Chu Empire. The most intuitive and obvious change was that the average height of the younger generation in the Chu Empire increased significantly, reaching the level of 1.68 meters in one fell swoop, and is expected to exceed 1.68 meters in the next few years. The level of Mi Qi.

This is why Andre could see countless tall Chu people on the streets of Songjiang... Of course, after seeing these, he could only sigh that the Chu Empire was so developed and people lived so well.

But he couldn't understand the deeper things, such as why the Chu people could grow so tall and what was the essence behind it.

Just like many people in later generations envy the high-welfare life in developed countries in Europe and the United States, they will only envy it, and at most they will say a few sarcastic words...

But few people know that the high welfare life of people in these developed countries is based on the exploitation of other developing countries...

In fact, what the developed countries in Europe and the United States did in later generations was not fundamentally different from what the Chu Empire was doing now, and even the methods were not much different.

They all use military, technological, economic and other advantages to exploit backward countries in all aspects!

To put it nicely, it’s international trade; to put it worst, it’s robbery!

After all, the so-called international competition is actually the competition for survival resources...

The resources on the earth are limited, and even the value of labor is limited. If you take more, others will have to take less.

But the earth is only so big, but there are many countries!

Even the middle and high-level elites in the current Great Chu Empire have this argument, which is to continue to suppress the vassal states, formulate strict technology export restriction standards, and use various means to deeply control the economic systems of the vassal states. Many speeches There is basically a saying in this article: there is no room for two tigers in one mountain!

The earth is only so big and cannot support two empires!

If those indigenous vassal states honestly followed the plan set by the Chu State, they could still share the leftovers with the Chu people and barely survive.

But if you want to get more, and strive to develop national defense, industry, etc., you want to struggle.

Then what is waiting is not the businessmen of Chu State, but the army of Chu State!