Reborn as King of South America

Chapter 336 Export Trade
The construction of railway transportation in the Han Dynasty will be mainly entrusted to Germany, while about one-third of the railway lines in the southern region will be allocated to the Austro-Hungarian Empire for construction.

South America and North America are the largest grain importing regions in Europe. Argentina earned a lot of foreign exchange during World War I and World War II by exporting agricultural and livestock products. At the same time, because of the export of agricultural and livestock products, it has maintained close economic and political ties with Germany.

The Han Dynasty occupied the entire territory of Argentina, and unified the core grain-producing area of ​​La Plata, including two southern states of Brazil and Uruguay, into one country. As a result, the farming and pasture conditions of the Han Dynasty were much better than those of Argentina in history, and the traditional habits of hard work and intensive farming from the farming nation also increased the output of agricultural products.

Chinese immigrants have low labor costs, and the first two years of immigration are a period of free labor. Under the influence of various factors, China's three major agricultural and animal husbandry products, namely grain, meat products, and fishery products, have cost and price advantages when facing competition from other agricultural exporting countries in the Americas.

Germany is located in central Europe and has a large population. Part of its local food supply is imported from Tsarist Russia, while the other part is purchased from America.

The German Empire was established in 1871, and the relationship between Germany and Tsarist Russia gradually became distant. In order to reduce its dependence on food imports from Russia and to reserve sufficient food supplies and mineral raw materials before the war, the German government turned its attention overseas and exchanged Samoa and Zibo, which had little economic benefits and a small area in the South Pacific, for the Cameroon colony, which was proven to have giant aluminum mines, and increased imports of food, meat products, rubber raw materials, leather products, etc. from the Han Dynasty.

As the territory expanded and the population increased, Han gradually became Germany's most important overseas importer of agricultural, animal husbandry and industrial raw materials, and the gap with Russia, the largest grain importer, was also narrowing rapidly.

The agricultural and pastoral products and primary processed products related to agricultural products from the Han State brought valuable foreign exchange income to the Han State. Among them, ordinary leather shoes, military leather boots, and leather coats made from the hides of beef cattle and South American bison as raw materials are increasingly popular with German importers. According to the latest import agreement signed by the two countries, the German government and businessmen will gradually increase the import amount of leather products. On the one hand, they will directly purchase finished leather products from the Han State. On the other hand, they will hire a group of leather workers from the Han State every year to go to Germany to process and manufacture special military boots, military coats, aristocratic leather clothes and other commodities for the German army and aristocratic businessmen.

Germany has a cold winter climate, and leather products have a broad market base there. Stimulated by German orders, the government took the lead in organizing local leather processing factories to purchase a batch of professional machinery from Germany and Austria-Hungary to expand the scale of leather factories. At the same time, it encouraged leather merchants to visit Germany to investigate the business environment, accept the conditions put forward by the German government, and jointly build leather processing factories with German merchants.

The leather industry was allowed to establish a joint venture factory in Germany, which was the first step for Han's industry to go abroad. As a corresponding condition, the Han government also allowed German light and heavy industries to establish joint ventures locally. Moreover, in the local area, the first batch of two-party joint ventures were steel smelting and processing companies that provided steel, screws and other supporting industrial products for railway trunk line construction.

Economic cooperation is based on mutual benefit. Han State exported agricultural and pastoral products, industrial raw materials, and earned considerable foreign exchange from Germany. Germany, by supporting Han State's industrial development, exported machinery, lathes, dispatched engineers, skilled workers, contracted railway construction, and established joint ventures based on industrial technology. This not only found a new market for Germany's excess industry and commerce, but also earned large sums of money and deepened the economic and trade cooperation between the two sides, thus killing two birds with one stone.

Political and economic factors prompted Germany to strengthen its cooperative relationship with the Han Dynasty. It did not follow Britain, Italy, Belgium and other countries in implementing a trade blockade policy against the Han Dynasty. It also did not tear up the 1878 colonial exchange agreement after the end of the Argentine War and refused to transfer Samoa and Zibo to the Han government.

The Han State, which was still in its development stage, was still not on the same order of magnitude as Germany in terms of comprehensive strength. The reason why Germany did not break the contract was not the strength of the Han State itself, but Germany's strategic considerations. Therefore, the Han State was able to find a country with which it could temporarily cooperate during the blockade and hostility of Europe and the United States.

However, cooperation between countries only concerns political and economic interests. It is foreseeable that after William II ascended the throne, with his attempt to use the Yellow Peril Theory to win over Europe's Russia and divert the difficulties Germany faced in Europe, the cooperative relationship between Germany and the Han Dynasty would also face huge challenges.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. When a country cooperates with other countries, it cannot always rely on one country. Finding multiple alternative countries to cooperate with is the key to maintaining the stability of international relations. Among the 18 independent countries in Europe, Britain, Russia, and Italy either have tense relations with the Han Dynasty or lack the basis for close cooperation. They are all excluded. After careful analysis and screening, Austria-Hungary is the most suitable potential country for cooperation besides Germany.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was one of the six major countries in Europe. It had many ethnic groups in the country, and its government's attitude towards yellow-skinned countries was slightly better than that of Britain, Russia and other countries.

In the second half of the 19th century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the only one of the six major European countries that allowed domestic nobles to marry people of the yellow race. More than a decade later, there would be cases of counts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire marrying Japanese women, and their mixed-race children would also inherit the title of count.

Although it is rare for ordinary white people to marry yellow people, it does happen from time to time. However, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the first European country to officially marry a white aristocrat. Therefore, some later authors imagined that it was almost impossible for yellow people to obtain Western aristocratic titles or marry Western aristocratic women in the 19th and early 20th centuries, unless a yellow country rose at that time and the protagonist happened to marry a member of the Austro-Hungarian aristocratic family, then there was still a little chance.

Entrusting part of the railway project to Austro-Hungarian merchants for construction is just the beginning. The Han Dynasty will subsequently send an official delegation to the Austro-Hungarian Empire to investigate the specific feasibility of commercial cooperation.

With the help of an interpreter, German engineers were busy directing a group of young Chinese people to fiddle with surveying tools. In several nearby Chinese settlements, huge banners and slogans showed a different scene of the Han homeland.

"One person joins the army, the whole family is honored,

If rural areas want to be prosperous, they need to have more children and build more roads.
Have more children and farm more, and the government will give you subsidies!
It’s better to have more children, each child is a treasure!

It’s equally good to have a boy or a girl, and the government will give you land to provide for your old age!
The population will double in ten years, so we should work hard

Have children, raise them, and serve the country!
If each family has two more babies, the population of the whole town will explode!"

…………

The contents of the banners or slogans are simple and easy to understand. They are all the results of efforts by grassroots officials to complete the biological indicators of newborns in their jurisdiction.

(End of this chapter)