Master Yuan, start!

A wooden platform about ten feet long had been erected on the dock at some point. Several scholars stood on the platform and gave impassioned speeches to the gathered people in a very high-pitched manner.

Amidst the howling cold wind, the voice of the speaker rose and fell, but the people below did not mind at all, and cheers were heard from time to time.

Yuan Xiangcheng looked around and saw that there was more than one wooden platform on the dock, and more than one person was giving a speech. Although the accents of these people were not southern, this did not become an obstacle for the audience.

“Fellow countrymen, wake up and unite.

We Han people have been oppressed by the Manchu Tartars for nearly 300 years, and China has been bullied by foreigners for nearly half a century. Now we finally have a Yuan Shikai who can win a battle, but we are being called back by them like Yue Fei, and they want the Fengbo Pavilion and the white silk as a gift!

We cannot agree to this no matter what!"

There were two people on the wooden platform. After one of them finished speaking, the other scholar wearing glasses immediately shouted.

"Exactly! The Manchus finally produced Emperor Guangxu, who advocated for reform, but he was assassinated by the Manchus themselves.

In my opinion, the Manchus are constantly fighting among themselves, and their fate has run out. The throne of the Son of Heaven should belong to us Han people!"

It is obvious that both of them supported Yuan Shikai's anti-Manchu struggle and independence.

The two men shouted a few more times to the onlookers, and then the scholar with glasses opened the package on his back and threw thin booklets into the air, which immediately attracted a scramble.

Yuan Xiangcheng came forward, picked up a book and flipped through it.

The best way to get started

Three Days in Jiangyin

The Three Massacres of Jiading

Of the dozen or so pages above, only a small portion contained simple and straightforward words, describing the massacre that broke out in the south of the Si River when the Qing Dynasty first entered the country.

Most of the rest are patterns similar to those of villains, but the content of the pictures is very bloody.

As the sun set, the city wall was in ruins. The large flag with the Chinese character "Ming" was broken off and stuck upside down in the ground, but the large flag with the Chinese character "Qing" stood on the top of the city wall.

Heads with tied hair floated on the blood-red river, while the Qing soldiers with bald heads and rat-tail braids swung their swords at the remaining civilians with a grim smile.

A scene of doomsday massacre comes to life on the paper.

"Ming Ye, did you also find this person?" Yuan Xiangcheng pointed at the passionate scholar with glasses on the stage and asked.

"Or... maybe." Ming Ye scratched his head, obviously not finishing his words.

"What do you mean by maybe?"

Yuan Xiangcheng stared at the picture in front of him intently. The more he looked at it, the more he felt that the little man was exquisitely painted.

It is not just a simple picture, it also contains a plot, and the image is captured very accurately.

When I saw the heads floating in the river, I felt that the people of the Ming Dynasty in the painting died miserably. After seeing the hideous faces of the Qing soldiers, I felt a surge of anger towards the Qing Dynasty.

The power of pictures is sometimes greater than words.

This painting perfectly displays the brutality and ugliness of the Qing Dynasty. Compared with simple text leaflets, it is much more inflammatory in terms of public opinion propaganda.

Such talents are good candidates for propaganda, and the Red Confucian Society needs them very much!

So Yuan Xiangcheng asked again: "Don't you know whether this person is from the Red Confucian Society?"

"Chief Instructor, I was the one who sent out the booklet about the Qing army's massacre in Jiangnan." Ming Ye quickly explained in a low voice, "But I don't know who drew this little figure."

"Go and invite this man over. I want to ask him some questions." Yuan Xiangcheng pointed at the scholar with glasses who was distributing brochures and said.

"Yes!"

After receiving the order, Ming Ye hurriedly brought his men forward and brought the man over regardless of his consent.

"What are you doing? Are you going to report me to the police?

I tell you, the Qing Dynasty is about to fall. As Han Chinese, stop working for the Tartars! "

The scholar with glasses was brought before Yuan Xiangcheng, shouting.

"Yuan, Lord Yuan?" Unexpectedly, after seeing Yuan Xiangcheng's face clearly, he recognized him immediately.

"Oh, you have seen me?" Yuan Xiangcheng asked in surprise.

"I've seen it, I've seen it!" the bespectacled scholar said excitedly, "I saw it at the French Consulate. I even drew a picture of Master Yuan and Master Liu Kun-yi!"

After he said that, Yuan Xiangcheng really became interested.

"I don't know what to call it?"

"My surname is Qi, my given name is Huang, and my courtesy name is Pingsheng," the bespectacled scholar said, "but you can just call me Bai Shi."

Qi Baishi?

Yuan Shikai did not expect to meet another celebrity. This time when he went out, he wanted to see how the public opinion in the literati circle viewed the game between the Qing Dynasty and him.

However, looking at the young man wearing glasses in front of him, he once again began to think about winning him over.

Chapter 282: Jianghuai Decline and Agriculture

When a vigorous ideological storm was set off in the city, Yuan Shikai also instructed the peasant association under the Red Confucian Society to begin to expand blatantly in the rural areas of the Jianghuai area.

Yuan Xiangcheng intended to use this "division of clan land" to clean up the forces in the Jianghuai area and lay a good social foundation for the future management of the Yellow River.

The Jianghuai area was indeed an area where China's feudal forces were extremely stubborn, but at this time, the large landlords in Jianghuai were also extremely weak.

Historically, the populations of Anhui and Jiangsu in 1850 were over 3700 million and over 4400 million respectively.

Henan, Shandong and other places that were later known as provinces with large populations had only 2400 million and 3300 million people at that time.

That is to say, before the war, the population of Jiangsu and Anhui provinces was larger than the population of Henan, Hebei and Shandong provinces combined.

Cows and sheep live near water and grass, and so do humans.

Economic development often affects population size. Looking beyond the surface to the essence, the huge populations of Jiangsu and Anhui provinces just confirm the phenomenon of economic center shifting southwards, which has been mentioned in history books, and it continued in the Qing Dynasty.

If it develops normally, by the 21st century, the Jianghuai area will probably become the area with the most densely populated registered population in China, rather than the Central Plains area.

But history has no ifs.

After the Taiping Rebellion, the Hunan-Huaihe Rebellion, and the resurgence of the Nian Army, the population of Anhui and Jiangsu provinces once dropped to more than 1800 million and more than 3000 million respectively.

In Huaibei alone, it is no exaggeration to say that the population was reduced by half. Not only ordinary people, but also many landlords and wealthy families died.

This time and space is also superimposed with the war between the National Defense Army and the Hunan Army. It can be foreseen that the population size of Jiangsu and Anhui provinces will definitely be lower than their history.

In contrast, the population of provinces such as Henan and Shandong, which were not affected by large-scale wars, not only did not decline, but continued to increase.

Therefore, after the Taiping Rebellion, the strong binding relationship between population and economy began to gradually disintegrate.

Due to frequent wars and the lack of management of the Yellow River, it frequently burst its banks, and the originally prosperous Jianghuai area did not gather a large population.

The economic center of gravity is still moving south, but the population center of gravity remains in the north.

Politics and economy are inseparable, and the economic center is in the south and north of the Yangtze River, which means that political activities are frequent in this area.

Unfortunately, political activities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were often accompanied by war.

The Jiangnan region seemed to be cursed. The more developed its economy was, the more wars it suffered, and the more people died in the wars.

The several major battles that broke out between the revolutionary army and the Beiyang army between Nanjing and Jianghuai in the early years of the Republic of China are clear evidence of this.

It can be said that it was the wars in the late Qing Dynasty and even during the Republic of China that laid the foundation for the large population in Henan and Shandong in later generations.

Once people are gone, they are gone. Under natural conditions, it is extremely difficult to replace the lost population.

The fact that Shandong and Henan provinces became provinces with large registered populations in later generations is a bit like the saying "When there is no tiger in the mountain, the monkey becomes king".

This mismatch between population and economy continued until the later opening up.

After the chief architect decided to implement an open policy, the Jiangnan area quickly found its own position, took advantage of its geographical location to develop its economy, and the population began to gradually gather from the inland to the coast.

The economic center of gravity moved southward after being interrupted for nearly 100 years due to various reasons such as war and system, and then started to move again.

There is a dense network of waterways between the Yangtze River and the Huai River, and it is adjacent to the Yangtze River estuary, which can fully serve as Shanghai's vast hinterland.

What Yuan Xiangcheng had to do was to speed up this process, reshape the order in Jianghuai, and let each social element go to the position where it should be.

After the war subsided, under the deliberate instigation of Yuan Shikai, farmers from all over Anhui reported to the government with a variety of land deeds.

The Red Confucian Society currently does not have enough manpower to work in the Farmers' Association. Even if the hundreds of graduates from the Northeast Civil Affairs School are counted as supplementary personnel every year, there is only one person per town on average.

Therefore, the "division of clan land" can only be carried out around the military towns where the National Defense Forces are stationed.

The first is to use the old practice of nationalizing unowned wasteland, designating all land that could not produce deeds as public land, recruiting landless farmers, and cultivating the land under the unified organization of the farmers' association.

These public fields are also a disguised form of "clan fields". Some are distributed to the stationed national defense forces, and some are retained directly under the farmers' association.

As for the land that has an owner, the approach is different.

Farmers with land took out land deeds from unknown sources and claimed that a certain piece of land was theirs.

The landlord who received the news hurried over and said that the farmer was talking nonsense and that the land was clearly his. He then produced another land deed stamped by the Qing court.

The local farmers' association staff had received instructions long ago and had no need to distinguish the authenticity of the claims from either side. They simply declared the land to be disputed and designated it as clan land.

Even if there is no tradition of clan land in the local area, the farmers' association members will create a clan land and then include all the land with unclear land deeds into it, and treat it as jointly owned by both parties.

The farmers naturally applauded and welcomed this.

And all of this stems from the evil land rent exploitation.

The Jianghuai region has a long history of agriculture, so there are many ways to collect land rent.

The common land rental items alone are divided into two types: cash rental and goods rental.

The so-called money rent is to pay currency or silver as land rent, while the goods rent is to pay grain, cloth, etc.

Among these, cargo lease is divided into fixed lease and event lease.

The fixed rent refers to the grain that must be paid every year, regardless of famine; the movable rent is that in a famine year, farmers can plead with the landlord for a reduction or exemption.

In addition, there is "deposit rent", which means that if farmers want to cultivate land, they have to pay a deposit to the landlord. After the deposit rent system appeared, the amount continued to rise, and in the late Qing Dynasty it could even reach 3-5 times the annual rent.

In other words, a small amount of land rent is divided into at least four types.

Under the exploitation of various land rents, the landlords would take away 100-6 or even more of the farmers' 70 harvests each year, with the land rent as high as 6-70%.

The clan land divided by the farmers' association truly achieved shared ownership and shared cultivation of the land.

The rent paid by clan land is lower, and the "four zero rent reduction" policy that has been implemented for many years outside the customs is strictly implemented.

Even if the ownership of some land is clear, some farmers are jealous of the low rent and forge a land deed from somewhere, forcibly turning the land that originally belonged to the landlord into clan land for everyone to share the benefits.