The cute president smiled and said, "That's right. Don't hold back if you have something to say. However, the reason I explain my current reason is pale. I will do my homework before I finally start."

Princess Katrina Kaif nodded with bright eyes and said, "I will always believe in Your Majesty. What steps should we take before we start?"

"One, diplomacy, gain support, and purchase strategic materials, and two, the domestic power is fully mobilized, which is more important than the external environment." The cute president said to Princess Katrina Kaif meaningfully.

After the cute president moved into St James' Palace, the next day, he invited many ambassadors and envoys from various countries in London to meet at St James' Palace.

Originally, the British invited the Emperor of China to live in St. James' Palace, just to show the world that the Emperor of China was assassinated in the UK, which had absolutely nothing to do with the British government. At most, it was their omission in protection measures.

However, the Emperor Hua's invitation to diplomatic ambassadors from various countries for the talks has changed, because the more Emperor Hua has contacted with people, the more truths it will be revealed in his conversations. Moreover, the Emperor Hua's invitation is mostly countries that have established certain diplomatic relations with China. From the perspective of sympathy, after returning, he will also promote the truth that Emperor Hua was assassinated by British and French radicals, as well as the acquiescent attitude of the British and French governments in the middle, and even the role of threading needles.

Among them, the minister that Emperor Hua urgently needed was the Duke of Maxim Kanunikov, the foreign minister of Tsarist Russia. The Emperor Hua needed to know the most accurately and clearly the question of Tsarist Russia's current attitude towards China, whether there is a possibility of delaying Tsarist Russia's hatred or even ease Tsarist Russia's hatred.

In fact, in order to seize Siberia and Central Asia, the Emperor of China had to attack Tsarist Russia. If Tsarist Russia was placed a little further away from China, the Emperor of China would never be the first to attack such a country. In fact, it was because of the balance between Tsarist Russia, Germany, Britain and France, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire that the internal friction on the European continent would be too serious, causing the European continent to never have a country that can win the world.

If it weren't for Europe's long-term balance of power, in fact, whether it was the European powers or the European sub-strong countries, at least ten countries had the ability to win the world. For more than two centuries, they were wasted by their internal friction.

If history had the possibility of fantasy, Emperor Hua hoped that if the First Opium War could take place in the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century, China would have long become the world leader. Because the culture and thoughts of the Qing Dynasty were not worthy of representing China on the world stage. In the decadent late Ming Dynasty, those literati and officials would open their eyes to the world early after being catalyzed by the world powers.

If it was during peacetime, whether it was the Ming Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty, or any Chinese dynasty in history, the Emperor Hua believed that there was no soil for capitalism, because the feudal political system was too strong, which was the most awesome thing about Confucianism.

Whether it is Ming or Qing, it is impossible to develop into a capitalist country.

As for the decline of modern China, the key lies not in capitalism, but in the industrial revolution.

The main characteristic of capitalism is that private ownership is that it owns capital and can freely control these capitals. For the purpose of capital proliferation, free labor is hired to produce, and the capital owners are responsible for production. Economic activities are carried out in the market based on supply and demand relationships and the purpose of pursuing maximum profits.

However, no era in traditional Chinese society has the conditions to form this model.

1. The government is highly centralized, has no contractual spirit, does not protect private property, and private capital cannot complete the original accumulation.

2. There is no mechanism for checks and balances of power, and highly centralized states are accustomed to interfering in economic activities in accordance with political principles.

3. The huge small peasant economy is difficult to disintegrate, and cannot disintegrate. (Because in the pre-industrial era, the capitalist production model could not digest a large amount of free labor and would only form a wave of refugees.)

4. There is a lack of ways to spread capital, because there is no new technology to promote the emergence of new industries to provide higher profits. Commercial capital lacks other ways to proliferate, and ultimately all are converted into agricultural capital and return to the small peasant economy.

5. China is dominant in East Asia, and is huge, self-sufficiency, and without the need for transactions, it cannot promote the development of business.

6. Lack of precious metals, backward financial environment, monetary system and fiscal system.

Capital in capitalism refers to private capital, while authoritarian centralized states like the Ming and Qing dynasties never respect or protect private capital, because no force can check and balance the exploitation of private capital by the authoritarian government.

After the collapse of Rome, European society existed in the form of feudal society for a long time. Under such a state, no country could achieve unity of power. The monarch, aristocrat, and citizen groups were evenly matched and checked and balanced each other. No one could enjoy power alone, nor could he impose his will on the other party. The result was that everyone had to negotiate and cooperate and take care of each other's interests. Under such conditions, a contract spirit was formed.

And what about the Ming Dynasty? We were not a feudal society. The power in the whole country came from the central government and from the emperor. There was no sharing and checks and balances of power.

Therefore, there is no negotiation condition. If you want to tax, you don’t have to negotiate with you. Huge wealth itself means power. The expansion of private capital will inevitably cause the autocratic government to panic, and then kill you before you are strong enough to challenge it. Therefore, the capital owner cannot compete with the government, either cooperate with the government to become official capital or comprador, or go bankrupt in exploitation. No one can truly complete the original accumulation of private capital, let alone the spirit of power sharing and contract, and private capital. At most, it is just the emperor’s shepherd, and if you are fattened, you will be cut off.

More importantly, those deprived private capital will not be used for economic production in the hands of authoritarian governments, nor will it be able to complete the original accumulation, but will be used to fight wars or buy luxury goods, and will be squandered.

The most typical example in Europe is Spain. It first completed centralization. Although it discovered the Americas and accumulated a large amount of gold, these wealth were not used by private capital to develop the economy, but were spent by the palace to buy British cotton cloth. As a result, it promoted the development of the capitalist economy in Britain. This was the case in Spain, let alone a conservative agricultural country like the Ming Dynasty.

To develop capitalism, we must first realize the original accumulation of capital, so that wealth and means of production can be quickly concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The original accumulation method is two: one is to make money, that is, business, and the other is to rob, that is, to plunder.

And what about the Ming Dynasty? Suppose Hua Huang himself was a businessman who traveled to the Ming Dynasty. In the Ming Dynasty, everyone closed down the men and women weaving, and there was no need for too many transactions. Therefore, the domestic market was small and could not make a lot of money.

On the nine borders, the imperial court and the Mongolians engage in border trade cooperation, but on credit, you will cut you off if you ask for money. Needless to say, foreign trade is prohibited, you can't go out, and if you go out, you will be killed by Japanese pirates. But you still can't resist the temptation of profits. You finally went back to save some money, but you were not caught, you made a fortune, and you made some money, and you still went out to seek death? If you have money, your life will be valuable, so you won't go out to work hard.

In the Ming Dynasty, the most profitable thing in China was selling salt, but you have to buy salt from the country. The big one is still the country holding it. Selling grain, transporting tea, selling silk, making porcelain? Are you selling it if the country doesn't participate in the shares? Finally, you will be sanctioned by investing in this country, or by the high bureaucrats and literati class making money. In the end, they will also go to the road to becoming officials. Once officials are linked to money, they don't have to think about social development. This is also the reason why Emperor Hua strictly prohibits officials from doing business, or finds that officials and their immediate relatives are linked to business, and they will be punished.

The safest method is the most profitable. The safest investment channels are all agricultural economy, plus the traditional national policy of emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce, as well as political risks. Therefore, when the feudal system was prosperous, they could only buy houses and land to become officials, so commercial capital finally returned to the land to support the capital. The merchant class eventually transformed into a large landlord, which consolidated the old order of the agricultural society. As for foreign barbarians, you don’t come at all. Not only did you say tribute envoys, but you also wanted to talk about equal trade with the Celestial Empire. It was simply arrogance. At that time, foreigners could not defeat the Ming Dynasty and could only do business with the coastal merchants happily. The court could not control it. They turned a blind eye. Later, in order to solve the life problems of the Fujian people, they opened a month-long port to allow Fujian to conduct foreign trade. Mexican silver flowed into China in this way, but was eventually replaced by land, buried underground, or made into handicrafts.

In Europe, due to the numerous countries and no one can truly be self-sufficient, there is a huge international market, and active trade demand continues to stimulate business development. Spanish tyrants brought gold from the Americas to buy cloth woven by British country bumpkins, and Dutch middlemen were trafficked from it. The inflow of capital eventually stimulated the development of commerce in various countries, and development brought greater demand. New demand provided new investment channels for capital, and eventually formed a virtuous cycle. This is something that a huge empire with self-sufficientness does not have. Without demand, how can it be developed?

Let’s talk about plundering. From the perspective of European history, it either plunders peasants internally or plunders indigenous people externally. Behind both are the call of a market that longs for wealth!

In order to expand production and then earn capital, the latter is to directly grab capital. After grabbing it, invest and earn again. Since there are friends around you, you must try harder to grab it.

A static agricultural empire like the Ming Dynasty was both rich and lacked internal and external competition, and had no motivation to go out to plunder. The country's main obligation was to provide disaster relief and keep small farmers from going bankrupt. If society is harmonious, it would be good. Don't do anything about speculation and fraud. Therefore, without the support of market demand and the protection of private capital, commercial capital has no way out and can only return to agriculture in the end. Let alone primitive accumulation.

From a policy perspective, the development of capitalism requires the cooperation of the state. Both Britain and the Netherlands encouraged the development of business and overseas trade, encouraged the proliferation of private capital, and forced farmers to go bankrupt in order to expand production to provide free labor. The government benefits from the proliferation of private capital through taxation.

This was simply impossible in the Ming Dynasty. As a huge agricultural country, China's national taxation relies almost entirely on land taxes and capita taxes. The tax source mainly comes from self-cultivated farmers, that is, small farmers! They are the real country's foundation, and the profits brought by the development of commerce were very inferior to countries of the Ming Dynasty. The benefits they provided could not attract the government to interest them. The development of commerce would inevitably drive population mobility and taxation and management difficulties. These are all things that shake the foundation of agricultural countries. In addition, the demand for freedom brought by commerce is a taboo for autocratic countries with strict hierarchy. What's more, the economic policies of the Ming Dynasty were conservative and negative even in traditional agricultural society.

There are two characteristics of this: one is egalitarianism: because of his disgust and reactionary towards Mongolian rule, Zhu Yuanzhang planned to "restore China" at the beginning of his founding. He expected the country to return to the situation before the Mongols' fishy pollution, so he began to restore to the ancient ideal society, and his economic performance was very negative. In order to maintain the harmony and stability of the agricultural society, he cut the meat from developed commercial areas in Suzhou and Hangzhou and filled the pits in underdeveloped areas in order to maintain the balance of development of the entire country. What the development of capitalism requires is imbalance, allowing capital and labor to be concentrated in one place. However, under the interference of this national policy in the Ming Dynasty, all this was basically delusion.

The second is to give up the management of economic order. The most important thing is the negative impact on financial management, which is mainly reflected in the minting. The amount of minting in the Ming Dynasty was very small compared with the Song Dynasty. One reason is that China lacked copper. After the issuance of paper money in the early Ming Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty ignored finance, so that before the large inflow of silver in the Americas, local taxes returned to the state of payment in kind, which was extremely unfavorable for the development of commercial trade.

Furthermore, under the traditional idea of ​​emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce, politically correct practices have always been to protect the interests of farmers, not merchants. The focus of state work has always been centered on the interests of small peasants. Striking big landlords, increasing tenant farmers, and allowing tillers to have their own land. This is the standard for measuring whether a court rule was successful in ancient times, and this is precisely the enemy of capitalist development.

One condition for the development of capitalism was a large amount of free labor, which did appear in the Ming Dynasty, because the rule of the Ming Dynasty seemed to be a failure in traditional politics. Zhu Baba's retroism enfeoffed a large number of vassal kings who were only allowed to eat and not work. In addition to the various privileges of the bureaucratic class, a large number of landlords and landless peasants were cultivated. These people without land were consistent with the formation of free labor in the British land enclosure movement, and were all proletarians with nothing. The name of these people had a proper term in the Ming Dynasty, called refugees. In the end, the Ming Dynasty was overthrown by these people.

Why did the same free labor promote the development of capitalism in Britain but overthrow an empire in the Ming Dynasty? The difference lies in the different economic structures. The British had demands for free labor in order to expand production for trade profits, and these demands digested them and transformed them into industrial workers. However, due to the various reasons mentioned above, there was no industry that digested these extra labor forces that had nothing to do, and they could only be buried by refugees in the end.

In addition, more importantly, the Ming Dynasty lacked a financial system that matched the development of business. Due to the lack of precious metals, it was difficult for China to supply currency to the market stably. Until the invention of paper money, the government lacked financial knowledge and indiscriminate issuance of paper money led to bankruptcy in the money credit and eventually gave up monetary policy.

Therefore, the money substitute used by the people spontaneously appeared, that is silver. However, silver is not a currency, and it does not have complete monetary attributes. Silver is not an abstract symbol and does not have the concept of currency value. As a currency, silver is still bartered as a currency and does not require the certification of the regime and credit guarantee, which is far from the nature of copper coins. It is precisely because of this that the government cannot interfere in the market through monetary policy, and the backward fiscal system in the Ming Dynasty made it difficult for it to effectively obtain tax sources from private wealth. Fiscal crisis became the norm, so it can only further plunder farmers through tax increases and intensify social conflicts.

The Qing Dynasty alleviated this problem by purchasing Japanese copper ore to issue copper coins, but it was never able to solve the natural defect of lack of precious metals. Finally, the Ming Dynasty was too big. No matter how the capitalist production model developed, it was a small matter in the face of the huge agricultural economy, and it was difficult to digest huge free labor. The demand for labor during the industrial upgrading process and the rate of seizing means of production from these labors was unbalanced. Therefore, this society either collapsed in transformation or new economic factors withered in transformation. For the Ming Dynasty, the latter was most likely to appear because it did not even have the soil for capitalism to survive.

Even in the 21st century when Emperor Hua traveled through time, many countries still faced such problems on the road to developing capitalism, and they must engage in urban-rural duality to avoid social turmoil.

Another disadvantage of being too great is that no one can compete with it in East Asia, and the progress of any civilization is achieved in the process of competition and exchange. The reason why the Song Dynasty made great progress in all fields was related to its always facing strong pressure from the north. Moreover, its opponent was not the backward civilization like the Tatar Oirat faced by the Ming Dynasty, but the Liao and Jin Dynasty, which was not inferior to that of the Liao and Jin Dynasty. This benign competitive order was an important condition for the progress of the Song Dynasty and was not possessed by the Ming Dynasty. When a region was completely incorporated into a force, a culture, or a model, its development would inevitably be shackles of self-satisfaction.

Therefore, it is impossible for the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty to develop again and again, it is impossible for them to embark on the path of capitalism.

The Qing Dynasty was able to defeat the Ming Dynasty not because of the so-called self-reliance on the cold weapons, but on the contrary, because its development and application of firearms were even or surpassing the Ming Dynasty. Under the strategy of the Ming army using artillery by the Ming army, it was difficult for the Qing army to break through the Ming army's defense line. However, after the Western-style new army organized by the Ming Dynasty rebelled and surrendered to the Qing Dynasty, the Manchus also formed their own professional firearms force "Wuzhen Chaoha".

It was precisely with the power of artillery that the defense of the Ming army could be broken through, especially in the attack on the Southern Ming Dynasty. Artillery has always played an important role. In the battle of Jiangyin, the Qing army relied on hundreds of artillery to bombard Jiangyin City.

After entering the pass, the development of firearms by the Qing army also made great progress on the basis of the Ming Dynasty. By the Yongzheng Dynasty, the equipment rate of shotguns in the south had exceeded half, and replaced the chaotic firearm systems of the Ming Dynasty, unifying the standards.

As for the various battles in the Qianlong Dynasty, the use of artillery and muskets was very frequent. Compared with the use of various firearms that were thrown in the Ming Dynasty, which were unorganized and untouched, it was undoubtedly progressive. This is also the reason why the Qing Dynasty disdained Magarni's display of firearms.

Because the Qing Dynasty stipulated that the firearm troops would conduct regular drills every month.

Compared with Europe, the development of firearms in the Qing Dynasty was naturally backward and stagnant, because at that time there were almost no enemies around the Qing Dynasty, and the development of military technology naturally had no need. Without demand, there would be no development. This is the same as capitalism did not appear in China.
Chapter completed!