I want to be emperor

Chapter 640 Is a Crisis and an Opportunity

The extremely abnormal climate that started last year has caused severe drought in Jiangxi and some surrounding areas, which has also brought some shadows to the Great Chu Empire, which is undergoing rapid industrial development.

But it's just shadows.

The Great Chu Empire was not any feudal dynasty in the pre-Ming Dynasty or in ancient times. Its productivity was extremely low, and even if the rulers wanted to rescue disasters, they did not have enough ability to face natural disasters.

But the Great Chu Empire is different. The Great Chu Empire is an empire that has entered the first industrial revolution. The application of a large number of mechanical equipment has greatly improved the productivity of the Great Chu Empire.

Although the Great Chu Empire has not been able to solve the problem of hybrid rice, nor has it been able to solve the problem of chemical fertilizers, the increase in productivity has still brought great help to agriculture.

For example, more and better farm tools. As an important tool in agricultural production, farm tools play a very important role in food production.

Good and sufficient agricultural tools allow farmers to cultivate more land at the same time, even if the unit yield cannot be increased, they can also increase the total grain output by planting more land.

In addition, the sufficient national power of the Great Chu Empire also allowed the Great Chu Empire to possess various water conservancy facilities, roads and other transportation facilities that were incomparable to the feudal dynasties in ancient times.

Especially water conservancy facilities are everywhere.

Although the water conservancy facilities of the Great Chu Empire cannot be compared with those of later generations, or even far behind, they are several times stronger than the traditional feudal dynasties.

As far as this drought is concerned, if it were placed in the pre-Ming Dynasty, even in the prosperity of the early Ming Dynasty, if there was no civil strife, the court would provide relief as much as possible, and there would probably be a large-scale famine, which would cause countless people to starve to death.

Because of the productivity of the Ming Dynasty, it was impossible to prevent large-scale grain production, and at the same time, it was impossible to transport a large amount of grain from other places to the disaster area in a convenient way.

But the Great Chu Empire can!

The large number of water conservancy facilities built before have not played a role. On the contrary, the large number of water conservancy facilities built in the past few years have played a great role. Otherwise, many places this year would not have reduced production, but had no harvest.

Relying on powerful water conservancy facilities, many areas that are only affected by ordinary drought can still rely on reservoirs, diversion canals and other methods to ensure the most basic crops are irrigated.

In some areas with severe drought, the production of some crops can also be ensured through water conservancy facilities. Large-scale production reductions are inevitable, but it is not impossible to say that all local crops will fail.

And in this season, even if it is possible to keep part of the food, it is very rare, so that there is no need to use food from other places on a large scale.

Even if the transportation of the Great Chu Empire is more convenient, the cost of large-scale transportation of grain is still very high.

The basis for the transportation of grain also benefited from the water conservancy facilities of the Great Chu Empire all over the country.

The Great Chu Empire is very large. Although central Jiangxi suffered severe drought, there are many places with good weather, especially in the main grain-producing areas of Jiangnan and Huguang. Although the overall rainfall is less, thanks to the local Good water conservancy facilities are basically not affected by drought.

Although the agricultural production of the Great Chu Empire did not yet have the conditions to fully resist large-scale and severe extreme weather, it did not have any problems with some ordinary floods or droughts.

If the grain output of these major grain-producing areas is not affected, they will be able to supply a large amount to the outside world.

According to the proposed plan, the Great Chu Empire Grain Corporation will draw a large amount of grain from its stocks, and then transport it by water to Jiangxi and other severely affected places to ensure a stable local food supply.

As long as enough food is transported in the past and there is food locally, then the next thing will be solved easily.

The Great Chu Empire has a complete set of relief plans, and it is the perfect experience summed up after more than ten years of experience.

Various relief-for-work projects will be carried out in the disaster area or nearby areas like a cluster, to recruit local people to work for income, and then use the income to purchase food transported by food companies from other places to feed the whole family.

Although it is harder, it will never be hungry.

At the same time, Luo Zhixue decreed to exempt the unified agricultural tax in many areas that were severely affected by the disaster, and at the same time, implement limited agricultural tax reduction measures for areas affected by certain disasters.

To reduce the burden of the people affected by the disaster as much as possible, we can't let them reduce or even cut off their grain production, and ask them to collect a unified agricultural tax, isn't it?

This will quickly plunge the affected farmers into bankruptcy.

The government of the Great Chu Empire is trying to prevent these disaster-stricken farmers from going bankrupt as much as possible, and help them survive this difficult year for the coming year.

In addition to various conventional relief measures, the government organized a group of large government-run or private enterprises from other places to go to the disaster-stricken area to recruit workers.

The local food is not enough, and the fields cannot be harvested. When the cost of transporting food from outside is too high, the high level of the empire also hopes to transfer some of the local surplus population to industrial cities.

There are fewer local people here, and the food pressure is naturally less.

For this kind of thing, the sparsely populated enterprises in Liaodong and other places are the most enthusiastic, especially those mining enterprises, smelting enterprises and machinery enterprises in Liaodong Province. Because the population of Liaodong and other northeast regions is generally insufficient, they are always Under the circumstances of difficulty in recruiting workers, in order to solve the problem of employment difficulties, they often go to the customs to recruit workers in areas with a lot of people and few people or disaster-stricken areas under the organization of the government.

Although the cost of recruitment is relatively high, it is relatively easy to recruit, and many people can be recruited once recruited.

In addition to corporate recruitment, the Immigration Department is also involved. They organize people to recruit a large number of immigrants in the disaster area, whether they are domestic settlement immigrants, or overseas immigrants. Whether you go to a remote area in the country or an overseas territory, the Immigration Department All are welcome.

For these immigrants from disaster areas, the immigration policy is more favorable than ordinary immigrants.

With a multi-pronged approach, although the large-scale drought this time is severe, Luo Zhixue believes that it is still generally controllable.

For the people in the disaster-stricken areas, whether they are working for relief, going out to work, or simply emigrating, suffering is inevitable, but at least they can survive.

For those ancient dynasties in the past, this kind of thing is unthinkable... It is impossible to care whether the monarch is good or bad, regardless of whether the dynasty is clear or not.

Because even if they want to provide disaster relief, they can't do it because of the limitation of productivity.

And this is also the most direct and also the greatest benefit that the first industrial revolution brought to the Great Chu Empire, to be precise, to the ordinary people of the Great Chu Empire.

Even if they are still at the bottom of society, it will be easier for them to survive because of the overall increase in productivity.

This is like the ancient people who were exhausted all day and couldn't get enough to eat, but people in developed countries and a few developing countries in later generations scolded this and that every day, and were dissatisfied with various things, but it was not easy to starve to death... …Even if you have no hands or feet, being alone will have a fairly complete social welfare and will not let you starve to death easily!
why?
Because after a substantial increase in productivity, for the entire society, the cost of feeding a person has become very low, or even negligible.

Under such circumstances, even if most of the wealth will be occupied by a very small number of people, the exposed star can still support countless people.

The ancient people, their dissatisfaction mainly came from their dissatisfaction with survival, they wanted to live.

The dissatisfaction of future generations is not dissatisfaction with survival, but dissatisfaction with the quality of life. They want to live a better life.

The differences in needs and dissatisfaction between ancient people and modern people are due to changes in productivity.

When you are full, you will think about living in a big house, allowing your children to receive better education, etc.

People don't think about these things when they have nothing to eat...

The productivity of the Great Chu Empire is still thousands of miles away from later generations, but it is much stronger than the ancient times.

Therefore, the social status quo of the Great Chu Empire appeared: the people are generally still working hard to get enough to eat, and often they are still not full, and quite a few people at the bottom are still in a state of malnutrition for a long time... But it will not appear on a large scale famine.

Compared vertically with the ancient and later generations, the Great Chu Empire is more than the top and the bottom is more than the bottom!

But if you want to compare it horizontally with other countries at the same time, the Great Chu Empire can beat them!

Looking at the world, no country can ensure that the people still have food and there will be no large-scale famine when millions of people are affected by disasters.

Not only was there no famine, but looking further, they took advantage of this opportunity to forcibly upgrade the infrastructure in the affected areas!

A large number of work-for-relief projects were carried out in the disaster-stricken areas. The people in the disaster-stricken areas received temporary wages to support their families. The government spent money but also saved military expenses for dispatching troops to suppress them. At the same time, a large number of work-for-relief projects The projects are mainly water conservancy and transportation projects, which means that the level of subsequent contemporary infrastructure will continue to improve.

This will greatly improve the ability to fight against natural disasters in the future.

The Great Chu Empire’s method of building water conservancy facilities against natural disasters is actually very simple. If one reservoir is not enough, then build two, and if two are not enough, build three!

If one diversion canal is not enough, two are dug.

If one well is not enough, two wells will be drilled.

If the water trucks are not enough, more water trucks will be built. Even if they are not needed now, they can be used as disaster relief supplies in stock and will be used in the coming year.

In short, it is trying to improve the resistance to natural disasters.

The only disadvantage of this method is that it costs too much money... But these costs are nothing to the Great Chu Empire. After all, this is a huge empire with a central fiscal revenue of more than 1 million.

This is more than just the central fiscal revenue, and the local fiscal revenue has not yet been counted.

In this severe drought, in addition to the direct allocation of 500 million Chu Yuan from the central government, some places that were not affected by the disaster and have relatively rich finances also coordinated and donated a lot of funds and materials to the disaster area.

For example, Yingtianfu, the capital city, donated 55 Chu Yuan. In addition, Jiangnan, a wealthy province, donated 100 million Chu Yuan in one go.

There are also more or less donations from other places.

In the end, the total amount of financial donations from various regions reached more than 500 million Chu Yuan, which was more than the direct appropriation from the central government.

The disaster relief funds totaling tens of millions of Chu Yuan will be used for drought relief in parts of Jiangxi, northern Guangdong, Fujian, and parts of southern Chu, and part of it will be used for flood fighting in Jiangbei.

That's right, when many areas south of the Yangtze River were suffering from drought, the Huaihe River and the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River were experiencing heavy rains...which led to flooding in many places.

There is drought on one side and flood on the other, making Luo Zhixue speechless after seeing it!

Because of the Yellow River taking the Huai River into the sea, Anlu, Jiangbei, Henan and other places will experience local floods almost every year. Even if the Great Chu Empire took pains to build the Hongze Lake Embankment, it would not help.

The Hongze Lake embankment can only ensure that the Jiangbei area, to be precise, does not experience large-scale flooding in the downstream area... But there is still so much water in the flood season...

During the flood season every year, when the Yellow River and the middle and upper reaches of the Huaihe River get a lot of rain, this water will eventually flow to the lower reaches of the Huaihe River, and the flow of the Huaihe River to the sea is limited, so there will be a lot of floods that will not come out, and eventually silt up and even flood.

The Great Chu Empire builds various promotions every year without interruption, but although the large-scale floods have disappeared, the small-scale floods continue every year.

Up to now, every summer flood season, Luo Zhixue saw the flood disaster report sent by the Huanghuai area, unless it was a serious flood, otherwise he could not change his face.

Without him, I have seen too much, and I have long been numb.

This year's drought and floods came together, and the pressure on the relief of the Great Chu Empire was relatively high. The disaster relief funds directly allocated by the central and local governments to the disaster-stricken areas have reached tens of millions. .

Some of the disaster relief funds from these allocations are used for drought and flood relief, and some are used for post-disaster reconstruction.

In fact, these two methods are basically implemented through work-for-relief in the end.

The main cost of drought and flood relief is to build dams, diversion canals, reservoirs or flood storage areas, etc. These projects are basically carried out in the form of work-for-relief. People fight disasters while earning wages to support their families.

Reconstruction after a disaster is much the same.

As many disaster relief and reconstruction policies were issued one after another, and the funds were also in place one after another, Luo Zhixue felt a lot more at ease. Even if there would be problems of one kind or another in the future, there were generally no major problems.

This also freed Luo Zhixue to focus on other things, such as the industrial mass production of steam engines that started last year.

Since the Royal Institute of Technology produced a practical steam engine last year, under the instructions of Luo Zhixue, the top management of the Great Chu Empire quickly launched a series of steam engine support and promotion policies.

The three mechanical companies that have obtained the complete patent of the steam engine and are responsible for industrial mass production are also showing their special skills.

And after more than half a year of hard work, it has also produced results.

The fastest among them is Dangtu Machinery Company!

Dangtu Machinery Company is located in Dangtu Industrial Zone, which is the most important heavy industry industrial zone in the empire.

The most important thing is that Jinling City is on the edge, and as the capital of the Great Chu Empire, Jinling City is also the place where higher education is concentrated.

The Royal Institute of Technology, Guozijian University, Jinling University of Technology, Yingtian University, and Jinling Higher Normal College are all located in Jinling City.

You must know that there are not many universities in the Great Chu Empire at present, there are only more than 20 four-year universities in total, but Jinling City has as many as five universities in one city.

This is not counting the four military academies in Jinling City, namely the Army Officer Academy for training junior Army officers, the Army University for training senior Army generals, and the Naval University for training senior Navy generals.

Finally, the National University of Defense Technology, which was split from the ordnance department of the Army and Naval Academy, was merged. This is a high-level military academy specializing in defense technology education and research. Like the Army University and the Naval University, both belong to military affairs. The court is directly under the jurisdiction, um, to put it bluntly, it belongs to the emperor.

As for the Naval Academy, because of the particularity of the navy, it chose to run the school in the Wusong Naval Base along the coast to facilitate the students to conduct navigation training.

There are so many colleges and universities gathered in Jinling City, not to mention other aspects, there are quite a few science and engineering graduates every year.

The employment direction of these science and engineering graduates, except for politics and the army, the rest will basically enter the major government-run enterprises.

As for the enterprises in the Dangtu Industrial Zone, because they are close to Jinling City and there is no industrial zone in Jinling City, they can absorb a lot of outstanding talents to join them.

Of course, some other powerful companies will simply design research institutions in Jinling City and recruit talents on the spot, but even so, the companies on Dangtu still have a lot of advantages.

Dangtu Machinery Company is one of them. They have recruited many excellent R&D talents, and the company's top management also attaches great importance to the steam engine project, so the progress of industrial mass production is very fast.

While conducting various experiments and researches, they are building factories, ordering various types of mechanical equipment, or simply designing and manufacturing some mechanical equipment that is not readily available in the market.

A large sum of money was spent, and many people worked hard. They finally built a steam engine production line in July of Chengshun's 17th year, and then manufactured the first set of steam engines.

It is not the kind of laboratory product that is produced by engineers in the laboratory, but is produced by skilled workers using mechanical equipment under the leadership of engineers using a production line.

This is much more meaningful than a prototype made by a senior engineer purely by hand.

As far as laboratory products are concerned, many laboratory technologies can actually be done when they are at home. The most typical one is the Steam Engine Research Institute of the Royal Institute of Technology. They were able to knock out an original steam engine for you by hand more than ten years ago, but there is no The method is practical.

Dangtu Machinery Co., Ltd. has actually manufactured three prototypes in the laboratory for various tests in the past six months.

But the reason why laboratory products are laboratory products is because they cannot be mass-produced... The cost of relying on laboratory production alone is very high. To be honest, a prototype for testing is worth mentioning. Tens of thousands of Chu Yuan.

The price of tens of thousands of Chu yuan is too nonsense. Many small and medium-sized coal mines don’t have that much annual output value. You ask them to sell a steam engine worth tens of thousands of yuan to pump water... They would rather throw away the mine with serious water seepage .

The significance of industrial mass production is not how good the performance is, but to reduce the cost!
Even, the prototypes made by Dangtu Machinery Company are not as good as the few prototypes they made in the laboratory before in terms of performance.

The reason for the lack of performance is that these are compromises made to reduce costs.

In July, after the first steam pump was produced, Dangtu Machinery Co., Ltd. delivered the goods for free, and directly sent it to the mine of Chizhou Coal Mine Company for installation, and provided free installation, commissioning and even short-term maintenance.

In fact, this is not all free. Dangtu Machinery Company also wants to collect various data through the actual use of these steam pumps, and provide practical application data for subsequent improvements.

After the first steam pump was installed, and then started to pump water from the mine continuously, there was a lot of applause immediately.

This 'Dangtu [-]-type steam engine' produced by Dangtu Machinery Company is not the first steam engine in the Great Chu Empire, and it is not even the first steam engine with water pumping in coal mines, but it is the first industrial mass-produced and A practical steam engine.

Its actual value is very large!

Its successful manufacture and application means that the Great Chu Empire has the ability to mass-produce industrial steam engines and put them into use.

For the Great Chu Empire, this is far more meaningful than some steam engines produced in laboratories.

When the first Dangtu [-] steam engine was successfully put into use, the other four steam engines purchased by Chizhou Coal Mine Company last year were also transported to the mine one after another, and then installed and used.

In fact, there were many technical problems during the period. The prototype was fine during the test, but after the actual application, the steam engine often had various failures.

However, Dangtu Machinery Company had anticipated this problem long ago, and directly stationed a team of engineers in Chizhou Coal Mine Company, and even brought a complete set of small mechanical equipment and a large number of spare parts to solve various problems on the spot.

Solving the problem is still secondary, and the focus is still to collect various materials.

As long as these problems in actual use are exposed, Dangtu Machinery Co., Ltd. can make various targeted improvements and then upgrade the products.

And the Chizhou Coal Mine Company did not suffer a loss. Although there were many problems, they also reached an agreement with Dangtu Machinery Company before.

We are the first to eat crabs, but you have to provide warranty service, and when the improved product comes out, they ask for a trade-in to get a huge discount.

In this way, the cooperation between the two parties is relatively pleasant. A large amount of data generated by the practical application of steam engines, especially various fault data, is continuously transmitted back to the headquarters of Dangtu Machinery Company.

Then the engineers of Dangtu Machinery Co., Ltd. gradually solved the exposed problems, or changed materials, or improved the processing technology, etc., to prepare for the follow-up truly reliable and stable steam engine mass production models.

And they believe it won't take long!
The large-scale technical framework problems have been solved, and now there seem to be many problems exposed, but they are all small problems. It may seem troublesome to solve, but in fact it will not take long.

They estimate that by the end of the year, they will be able to complete the corresponding improvements, and then start mass production of steam engines and fully push them to the market.

(End of this chapter)