1627 Rise of the South China Sea

Chapter 523 Cheap Labor

As far as the military is concerned, although they don't have a good impression of the landlord class in the former Ming Dynasty's ruling area, they still hope to focus more on military operations for external expansion rather than bloody suppression within the rule.With a buffer period of a few more months, civil affairs and other departments have more time to use other methods to coordinate and deal with conflicts of interest in land relations. And directly into the opposite state.

Another thing that makes the military happy is that the executive committee approved the proposal submitted by the military to build a new military port on the Qiongbei coastline.

After occupying the Qiongbei area, the defense area of ​​the Haihan Navy has also expanded accordingly. The Qiongzhou Strait will become a new key defense area for the navy. However, there is currently no special military supply port on the Qiongbei coastline. Those who perform tasks in the Qiongzhou Strait The fleet could only temporarily requisition the naval camp outside Fucheng.However, the tonnage of the navy's ships is generally small, and the berths are not suitable for the large ships of the Haihan Fleet. The main large ships like the "Majestic Class" have no way to sail into the berths of the Shuizhai, so they can only park in the Nandu River. Rely on boats and springboards to build a road leading to land on the river.However, if the Haihan Fleet wants to maintain a cruise density in the Qiongzhou Strait for a long time, it must have a suitable dedicated port in the local area.

There is no lack of areas suitable for building ports near Qiongzhou Fucheng. In fact, this has been the main distribution center for maritime trade on Qiongzhou Island since ancient times.During the Northern Song Dynasty, at the mouth of the Nandu River, Baishajin, the earliest port, was formed, also known as Shenying Port.It is recorded in "Qiongzhou Fu Zhi" in Wanli of the Ming Dynasty that "the old name is Baishajin, which was opened by Song Yuanshuai Wang Guangzu, but it was not completed. Chunyou Wushen suddenly created a hurricane, and it rushed into Hong Kong. People think that God responded, so it was named."

As an important supply station on the maritime Silk Road in the Middle Ages, 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 where successive dynasties stationed naval forces.

However, with the prosperity of Baishajin trade, the waterway here began to gradually become shallow due to sedimentation, and large ships could not enter the waterway, and often had to berth outside Baishakou and wait until the tide was high before entering the dock.At the end of the Song Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, the trade center gradually moved to the vicinity of the sea field with better hydrological conditions.

This place is Haidian in later generations. In the fifth year of Kaibao in the Song Dynasty, that is, in 972 AD, it was called "Haikou Pu" because of its location at the mouth of the Nandu River. Hong Kong'." The place name Haikou was also named after this time.

However, the place the navy is looking for is not at the estuary of the Nandu River. Considering the particularity of military use, the military does not want warships and civilian ship docks to be together, at least they have to be separated like Shengli Port.After repeatedly inspecting the coastal terrain near Qiongzhou Fucheng, the military selected the location of the military port as the Xiuying Port area of ​​later generations.The coastal conditions and hydrological conditions here are more suitable for the construction of large ports, and there are no hidden dangers such as the sedimentation channels that are common at the mouth of large rivers.

Of course, the cost of building a dedicated military port is not small, and the arrangement of construction technicians is also a problem that cannot be ignored.If it were not for the consideration of the necessity of setting up a military port in Qiongbei, it is estimated that the executive committee actually intends to push this large infrastructure project to next year. The Shilu project and several ports in Annan are still in the construction stage. Opening any large-scale construction site now will put great pressure on the Ministry of Construction.

For the executive committee, these troublesome aftermaths are actually sweet troubles. After all, the vast area of ​​Qiongbei has finally been brought under the control of Haihan, and the Haihan regime has its own in the true sense. A piece of territory, it is worth paying some price for it.

The good news that followed was not limited to the pacification of Qiongbei. On November 11, the Changhua Engineering Headquarters sent a telegram back to the base camp, stating that the overland passage from Changhua to Shilu has been completed, and 5% of the track laying progress has been completed. It is expected that the entire line will be open to traffic in January next year.At that time, the ore produced by Shilu Iron Mine will be transported from deep mountains and old forests to the seaside through more than 30 kilometers of railway tracks.

And this project does not end with the completion of the track line. In fact, the completion of the track line is only one-third of the overall project. At both ends of the track line, Changhua and Shilu have to build coal mines respectively. Iron compound industrial base and large open-pit iron mine.The amount of work in these two places is also quite huge, and it will not be much easier than repairing this track.

The scale of Changhua Port has also rapidly expanded from a small fish port a year ago to a medium-sized cargo terminal that can berth more than ten 400-ton cargo ships at the same time, and its main task is to receive a large number of ships from Heitu Port. Coal is burned, and the steel that will be smelted locally in the future is shipped out from here.

However, as the chief administrator of the local area, Qiao Zhiya really didn't have much excitement.He has just received the report submitted by the civil affairs and judicial departments, which is the statistics of casualties since the Changhua Shilu project started.During the construction period of the past 820 months, the death toll of the local labor camp service personnel was 440, and [-] were injured.The injuries here only count injuries that directly affect the ability to work, and most of the wounded are disabled. As for general minor injuries, they are not included in this statistics at all.However, the loss rate of the hard labor was not bad, and it did not exceed the warning line set by the executive committee, and there were no incidents of a similar nature to riots in the hard labor camp.

In addition to these cheap labor, 28 people were killed and nine were injured among the locally employed laborers.Among the Guihuamin, 17 died in the line of duty, and 11 became disabled due to injuries.And this casualty rate also set a record for the highest number of casualties in a single project in the history of Haihan Project so far.

The only good thing is that the traversers from various departments who were sent here to carry out tasks one after another did not have any accidents. Everyone left here safely after finishing their work.Although some people fell ill on the construction site halfway, fortunately, the treatment was timely and did not cause serious problems.

But Qiao Zhiya also knew that he didn't have much time to be merciful, so he signed his personal opinion on it, then took out his own seal, stamped the last page of the report, and handed it to the attendant next to him.The attendant put the document in a manila envelope and carefully sealed it with wax.This report will be sent to the Executive Committee tomorrow with the scheduled flight to Shengli Port. In three or four days at the latest, the Executive Committee executive meeting should discuss the proposal to send more labor camp personnel to Changhua area for hard labor. .

As for the personnel loss data in the report, Qiao Zhiya estimated that no one would pay too much attention to it.After all, the "pirates" and militias made a lot of money in the raid on Qiongbei this time, and they took a lot of people into custody.Although it is not convenient for the people taken away by the "pirates" to reappear on Qiongzhou Island, 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 for hard labor.On Qiongzhou Island, or Hainan Island as it is commonly known in the internal documents of the Executive Committee, the number of prisoners currently included in the labor camp establishment is still about 6000, which can be regarded as 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 Jonesey for a period of time to come. As for how many of them can leave that place well, no one will know. Guaranteed.The Executive Committee only cares about the time it takes for the iron mine to go into production, and how many prisoners' lives will be consumed in the process, which is not one of the primary considerations.Compared with the value of hundreds of thousands of tons of steel, these cheap labor are indeed consumables that no one cares about.

After proposing slave trafficking to the Portuguese, shrewd Portuguese merchants have begun to transport slaves to the area controlled by Haihan.However, most of them were natives captured on the islands in Southeast Asia, and only a few were African slaves that the Haihan people hoped to obtain.

These Southeast Asian natives are not only small in stature, limited in physical strength, but also extremely lazy. After all, in their living environment, even if they do not grow food, there are inexhaustible varieties 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 also created their lazy living habits. Even though the Haihan people resorted to various punishment methods, they did not receive very good results for these lazy Southeast Asian natives.

Of course, high-ranking Haihan officials of Qiao Zhiya’s position will not worry about the laziness of these slaves. What worries them is the foreman of the hard labor camp who directly manages these foreign slaves. If the engineering tasks assigned to them cannot be completed on time, the foreman will also suffer correspondingly. punishments—for example, reducing food supply, canceling various special treatment, and even cutting off the position of foreman in the worst case, and becoming a slave again.

"Fuck me, stand up!" With a clear whip, several skinny, dark-skinned slaves climbed up from the ground with horror on their faces, desperately pulling a flat cart full of logs.However, probably due to lack of strength, even though several people were working hard, the car still did not move at all.

"Hardly! Feeding the pigs is more useful than feeding you!" the foreman yelled and cursed mercilessly, and the whip in his hand kept dancing in the air, making the nearby slaves tremble with fear.

The cursing foreman brought in two more slaves from the side, and finally pushed the heavy cart.The foreman walked to the side of the road, picked up the bamboo tube containing the spring water and poured it down a few times, only then did he feel that the anger in his heart finally subsided a little.

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

"I'm here!" The foreman responded, throwing down the bamboo tube and running quickly to the place where the sound came from: "I'm here!"

This foreman named Li Maozai was the traitor who lured the bandit leader Liao Dabi to attack Lijiazhuang in Guangdong.He managed to escape with his life outside Lijiazhuang, but was still captured by the Haihan militia. After being sent to Sanya, he was naturally thrown into a hard labor camp as a coolie.However, this guy is considered tough, and he survived in the hard labor camp for more than a year, and then because of the camp's "old to bring new" structure, he was promoted to be the leader of a certain cell, and another half a year later Because of his good performance, he was promoted to be a foreman, and then sent to Changhua to join the road construction army.

Of course, this foreman is not that foreman, and Li Maozai's work is not the same as that of a naturalized migrant foreman.He not only has to supervise the construction progress of the laborers, but also has to assume corresponding responsibilities.If the team he commands fails to complete the task that day, then what awaits him is not only a reprimand from his boss, but also a corresponding reduction in treatment.

Li Maozai has now lived in a dormitory for eight people at any rate, and enjoys fixed and fixed meals. The treatment is far better than those three or forty people who squeeze into a hut, and each meal is only a bowl of gruel. Slaves who will be fined for food are much better off.He didn't want to go back to the life he had when he entered the hard labor camp in the first year, so even though there were heavy labor tasks every day, he would try his best to supervise the completion of these hard labor.

However, the batch of slaves sent recently made him very dissatisfied. These island monkeys are all too lazy to startle, and they won’t move unless the whip hits them. People, labor capacity is also very different.Moreover, these monkey slaves have extremely poor physical strength, and often two or three people can do the work of a Han Chinese, and their brains are also quite poor, and it takes a long time to learn the simple operation process.After bringing this group of people, Li Maozai has not been able to complete his work tasks on time for 7 days this month.That means he'll be paying dearly for the next month - losing his steady supply of food for at least seven days.

For this matter, Li Maozai also approached the cadres of the hard labor camp, but the cadres who were born as naturalized people did not have any good solutions for this.So Li Maozai could only find a solution by himself - such as using more severe corporal punishment to force these monkey slaves to work, draining every trace of strength from them.

After doing this, the labor efficiency was indeed improved, but the cost was also obvious. Seven people died in the hard labor under Li Maozai's hands within half a month.Although these people were not beaten to death by him, some of them may even be caused by diseases caused by acclimatization after crossing the sea near the equator, or physical exhaustion caused by excessive labor intensity, etc., but the cadres When counting the number of hard labor casualties, there is no doubt that Li Maozai will be blamed for this.

At this time, the cadre who called Li Maozai over to question him was also asking about this matter: "I heard that two of your subordinates died last night. What's the situation?"

Li Maozai complained incessantly, "This...it's really not my fault!"

(End of this chapter)