Bringing the Railway to Daming

Chapter 228: What Happened in Later Times Is Strange! Why Didn’t Egypt Have a Population Dividend? [Subscription Request]

Liu Kuandao said, "In fact, since the Han Dynasty, rulers of every dynasty in China have been exploring ways to resolve the contradiction between people and land, and they have all used the same method, which is to suppress landlords and powerful people and curb annexation."

"For example, although the Later Han and Zhao Song dynasties did the worst in suppressing annexation, and were even regarded by later generations as not suppressing annexation at all, there were still emperors and a small number of officials who consciously suppressed powerful people."

"Your Majesty has been suppressing landlords and powerful people since you started your rebellion. Later, you split up clans through immigration, which can be regarded as following the methods of past dynasties to curb annexation."

Zhu Yuanzhang nodded after hearing this.

Although he did not have such a clear idea before in solving the contradiction between people and land, he was indeed consciously using various means to disintegrate the power of the powerful, large landlords and large clans.

In fact, not to mention that such groups will spontaneously annex land and cause conflicts between people and land in the country in one or two hundred years, even at present, the power of the gentry and powerful clans is too great, which will also affect his rule over the world.

Therefore, not only has he suppressed this type of group in the past, he will also suppress them even more severely in the future!
Liu Kuan continued, "After I arrived in the Ming Dynasty, I provided Your Majesty with two ideas to alleviate the contradiction between people and land."

"First, the great voyages of discovery and overseas expansion—the more territory a country has, the higher its population capacity will be, and civil unrest caused by too many people and too little land will erupt later."

"Of course, due to the limitations of transportation and communication conditions, the territory that a court can effectively govern is often limited. The bigger the better."

"Last Mid-Autumn Festival, I saw that Your Majesty was not overly greedy for overseas territories. He only designated Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the northern part of Nanyang as the future overseas territories of the Ming Dynasty. I knew that Your Majesty understood this."

Zhu Yuanzhang was particularly sensitive to Liu Kuan's flattery. Hearing his praise, he couldn't help but laugh and said, "If I don't understand this little bit, wouldn't it be a waste of more than a decade as emperor?"

Liu Kuan also smiled and continued, "But whether it's suppressing the powerful and curbing annexation, or expanding overseas territories and increasing the country's population carrying capacity, it can only alleviate the contradiction between population and land, but cannot truly solve this problem."

"If a country wants to stop being plagued by the contradiction between population and land, it must move beyond being an agricultural nation. Just like Bangladesh at the end of the video, although it is trapped in the internal conflict of population and extreme agriculture, it is also working hard to develop industry and technology."

"Therefore, as long as the Ming Dynasty persists in developing science and technology and industry, and transforms itself from an agricultural power into an industrial power, or even a scientific and technological power, then in two or three hundred years, with sufficiently advanced technology and a sufficiently powerful industry, it will be able to escape the contradiction between population and land."

Expanding overseas territories and developing science and technology and industry are also what Zhu Yuanzhang is doing.

Therefore, Liu Kuan was right when he said earlier that Zhu Yuanzhang was trying to permanently resolve the contradiction between people and land in the Ming Dynasty.

After Liu Kuan finished speaking, everyone was in deep thought.

After a few breaths, Prince Zhou Zhu Su could not help but say, "My third brother-in-law said that as long as the Ming Dynasty becomes an industrial and technological power, the contradiction between people and land will no longer exist. I can understand this a little bit."

"After all, from many previous videos, we can see that the main source of national finance for so-called industrial and technological powers is no longer agriculture, but industry, commerce, and technology."

"But even technology and industry will eventually reach a bottleneck, and yet the population continues to increase exponentially, as the video suggests. Won't it eventually reach the limit of what a technologically and industrially advanced nation can handle?"

After hearing what Zhu Su said, Zhu Biao, Zhu Biao and others couldn't help but think: Isn't that right? As long as there are bottlenecks in science and technology and industry, there must be a limit to the population they can support, right?
Liu Kuan was also surprised that Zhu Su could think of this.

But then he smiled at Old Zhu and said, "Your Majesty, do you remember what I said when I first came to Ming Dynasty?"

Liu Kuan talked about so many things during his time traveling that Old Zhu didn't know what he was talking about, so he asked, "What is it?"

At this moment, Empress Ma, who had been listening in, suddenly spoke up, "What Kuan'er said is that people in later generations all marry late, or even don't want to get married and have children?"

"That's exactly what happened." Liu Kuan nodded. "In later generations, not only in China, but in most developed countries, people marry late and have a low desire to have children."

"Although the reasons for this are diverse and the situations in different countries are slightly different, it does reflect a general rule: as countries develop, their fertility rates tend to decline."

"Like Japan and South Korea in later generations, their populations are decreasing instead of increasing. Perhaps they will disappear naturally in a few years."

"Therefore, a truly technologically and industrially advanced country may first encounter the problem of declining fertility before its population reaches its carrying capacity."

"If the fertility rate falls below a certain level, the country's population will gradually decrease year by year. Far from a crisis of overpopulation, the country will instead be trapped in a crisis of declining population year by year."

Zhu Di, Zhu Su and others, who heard about this for the first time, could not help but look at each other in surprise.

They never imagined that in later generations there would be countries where people would marry late or even be unwilling to marry and have children - if it was a poor country where people couldn't eat enough or wear warm clothes, they could understand it, but if this happened in a developed country in later generations, they would find it difficult to understand.

"People in developed countries in the future should have enough food to eat and warm clothes to wear, right? Why are they unwilling to pass on their family line?" Zhu Su couldn't help but ask this after he came to his senses.

Liu Kuan smiled bitterly and said, "This question is too complicated, and it's difficult for me to answer it."

Hearing this, Zhu Su could only sigh, "What happens in later times is truly bizarre."

Zhu Yuanzhang was a very practical person. It was still too early for the Ming Dynasty to develop to the level of later generations where people lived so well that they were unwilling to have children.

Moreover, the Ming Dynasty had a lot of problems to solve, and he had no time to think about how to solve the problems of future generations. He immediately ordered Liu Kuan to play the next video.

"Population exceeds 100 million! Why doesn't Egypt have a demographic dividend, only a demographic burden?" — [World Watch]

Seeing this title, Zhu Tan and a few other people who focused on different things thought: Finally, it’s not that video from the [Earth Knowledge Bureau].

Most adults, such as Lao Zhu and Zhu Biao, thought: This is another video about population issues, but I don’t know how much knowledge it can gain.

The video begins with a pyramid against the setting sun, accompanied by a man's slow explanation. "As the saying goes, the poor have their own problems, and the rich have their own problems. And for any country, whether rich or poor, there's one common problem: population disease."

"Rich nations worry about their small populations, while poor nations worry about their large populations. Each has its own troubles... Today we will examine how Egypt's 'population problem' has dragged it into an abyss of no return."

The video shows a map of North Africa, the Mediterranean, and West Asia, with the territory of later Egypt marked in red.

Seeing that Egypt was located right between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, and between the African continent and the Eurasian continent, people with some military knowledge, such as Zhu Yuanzhang, Zhu Biao, and Zhu Di, immediately realized Egypt's important military position in the three continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe.

"In February 2020, Egypt became the third country in Africa and the 2th in the world to have a population of over 3 million."

"However, 95% of Egypt's territory is desert, and the habitable Nile Valley and Nile Delta only cover 3.5 square kilometers, which is smaller than my country's Hainan Island."

"But this narrow area is home to 99% of Egypt's population, and Egypt's population is still increasing at a rate of two to three million per year..."

The video tells the story of the overpopulation problem faced by Egypt in later generations. It then begins with the changes in Egypt's population in modern times, leading to a water conservancy project that is closely related to Egypt's population explosion.

Aswan Dam on the Nile River!

"Egypt is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Indian Ocean to the east, possessing excellent conditions for becoming a maritime power. However, from ancient times to the present, Egypt has always been a land power..."

The video further describes Egypt's geography, showing that Egypt was trapped in the Nile Valley and Delta for thousands of years.

In addition, its geographical location has extremely important military value. Historically, it has been occupied and ruled by Arabs and Europeans. Therefore, until its independence in the 20th century, its population never exceeded 10 million.

After independence, Egypt built the Aswan Dam on the Nile River with the assistance of the Sudanese, which improved the planting conditions in the Nile Valley. The cultivated land area once expanded to 53 hectares, which can be said to have changed Egypt's national destiny.

Coupled with the support of technology and industry, more food can be produced, so the population began to surge. In less than a hundred years, it quickly soared to 1 million!

Egypt has since fallen into the abyss of population explosion!
"Egypt could have avoided the 'population disease' if it had adhered to the principle of food self-sufficiency, which requires the state to control population growth and avoid suffering from the 'overpopulation' disease."

"But Egypt didn't do that. It easily handed over its food supply to other countries..."

Old Zhu, Zhu Biao, Zhu Di and others listened more attentively.

Because through the video, they saw how future superpowers and American and European capital destroyed a country's future through food trade.

In the video, Egypt later joined the Western camp and, during the process of population explosion, listened to the persuasion of Western capital and purchased food from the United States and European capitalist countries to solve the food problem of the rapidly growing population.

As a result, Egypt not only neglected population control, but also spent most of its precious foreign exchange on importing food rather than developing industry, resulting in slow national industrial development.

By the new century, Egypt's population crisis had completely broken out - the population was too large, but the industrial capacity was insufficient, and therefore the ability to generate foreign exchange had also become insufficient. Even though it owned the Suez Canal, it still had to use most of the foreign exchange it earned each year to import food.

It has become extremely difficult to free up foreign exchange to develop industry.

Because Egypt has a large agricultural population and the idea of ​​having more children is still dominant, the country's population continues to increase rapidly every year. Even though Egypt has formulated a national policy on birth control, it will still take decades for the population to stop growing.

If Egypt cannot survive these difficult decades, it will be torn to pieces by the population explosion!
"As an aside, the Bald Eagle's food self-sufficiency rate has never been lower than 120%, while Egypt's current food self-sufficiency rate is less than 20%."

"After humanity enters post-industrial society, for developing countries, when basic material conditions are met but industrial development fails to keep pace, the result is that the agricultural society mentality of 'more births means more labor' will be carried over into modern society..."

"Egypt's population problems may seem self-inflicted, but they actually reflect the dilemma faced by most developing countries: stagnant economic development, population growth, unemployment, poverty, resource depletion, and so on."

"To solve this problem, we must work hard to develop industry before it breaks out, take over industrial transfers from developed countries, and improve the education level of our people..."

"To achieve this, not only does it require a huge amount of money, but it also takes at least a generation of time."

"This world is cruel. The window of opportunity it offers each country for development may be as short as 20 to 30 years. Once you miss it, you will be unable to raise your head for at least a hundred years."

"Thankfully, our country seized the last window of opportunity and is now vying for the next one..."

After watching the video, Lao Zhu, Zhu Biao and others were speechless for a long time.

Because through this video, they deeply felt the cruelty of national competition in future generations.

Although there are no war scenes with swords, guns and smoke in the video, it is actually more bizarre, sinister, cold and ruthless than a real war.

After coming to his senses, Zhu Yuanzhang couldn't help but look at Liu Kuan and asked, "If I'm not mistaken, then China in the future can also be considered a developing country as mentioned in the video, right?"

"Did the Xin Dynasty also encounter a similar trap as Egypt? How did it overcome it? And how did it seize that 20-30 year window of opportunity to rise?"

Liu Kuan sighed and said, "Your Majesty, the questions you asked involve quite a lot. Could you allow me to explain them in detail?"

Old Zhu nodded, "We're not in a hurry, just tell me."

　First update.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)