Reborn as King of South America

Chapter 371 Local Development
On the outskirts of Chang'an (Cordoba), two steam locomotives belching thick smoke pulled into the train station with shrill whistles.

Chang'an Railway Station is located in Wen'an Town, 20 miles away from the city center. Benefiting from the government's large-scale railway development plan, Chang'an Railway Station has become an important hub for north-south railway transportation. Every month, tens of thousands of businessmen, soldiers, and ordinary people take the train to transport local people's daily needs of food, meat, industrial and commercial products, and important mineral resources to different parts of the country.

Railways are the lifeblood of economic development. Among the four trunk railways planned and built by the government in 1879, the northern section of Songjiang (Buenos Aires) - Zhangqiu (San Salvador - de Juhi) Railway started construction in May 1880. On December 5 of that year, the Huaiyang - Songjiang branch railway was completed. On December 12, the Yongnian (Tucumán) - Zhangqiu branch railway was completed. On January 17, 12, the Huaiyang - Songjiang branch railway was integrated with the Huaiyang - Chang'an branch railway completed in previous years and opened to traffic. On January 29, 1881, the four branch railways of the Songjiang - Zhangqiu Railway were integrated and opened to traffic. As a result, the Han country had its first long-distance railway connecting the northern forests, northwestern mountains and the central Pampas Plains.

The construction of the Songjiang-Zhangqiu Railway was delayed by about one and a half months than the government's planned construction date. During the construction process, due to lack of construction experience, two railway subgrade collapses and one failed cave excavation accident occurred, which led to the German design engineers and local engineering construction forces temporarily changing the construction plan. The Jinzhou railway section bypassed a mountainous area of ​​about twelve kilometers, increasing the total mileage of the railway section in Jinzhou by eight kilometers and delaying the overall construction progress.

It was the first time that a railway was built with the assistance of foreign engineers, and it was inevitable that some difficulties and setbacks would be encountered along the way. However, in view of the important position of railways in the country's economic development, on March 1881, 3, after discussion by the heads of various central departments and approval by Li Mingyuan, the Railway Development Department was separated from the Ministry of Industry and a separate Ministry of Railways was established to be responsible for railway construction, management, maintenance and other related matters.

With the growth of the country's population, the increase of land area and the increase of various internal government affairs, some of the 12 central ministries and agencies established in the early days had more functions and affairs, and the responsibilities and functions of each sub-field were unclear. This also led to hundreds of incidents of wrangling and shirking of responsibility between departments. There were even four cases involving important military and political affairs, and the lawsuits were brought to Li Mingyuan.

The Ministry of Works, the Ministry of Revenue, the Ministry of Finance, and the General Staff are the departments most involved on a daily basis. The Ministry of Works often has functional conflicts with the Ministry of Revenue, the Ministry of Finance, and the General Staff over areas such as water conservancy construction, financial construction appropriations, and military industries. The Ministry of Revenue and the Ministry of Finance also have disputes with the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Personnel and other departments for other reasons.

Faced with the chaos among departments, Li Mingyuan has discussed with major officials the issue of reorganizing the central ministries and dividing the functions of sub-departments, and has reached a preliminary consensus on dividing the four departments with overly concentrated power: the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Revenue, the Ministry of Industry, and the General Staff.

According to Li Mingyuan's plan, the Ministry of Finance will split into two new departments: the Audit Department and the National Bank and Financial Management Department.

The Ministry of Households will be split into the Ministry of Land and Resources Administration, the Ministry of Industry will be split into the Ministry of Railways and the Ministry of Water Resources Construction, and the General Staff will be split into two, establishing independent Navy Department and Army Department respectively.

Among them, the Audit Department is mainly responsible for statistics on major projects related to national development, the implementation of the Ministry of Finance's annual budget, national fiscal revenue and expenditure, and other fiscal revenue and expenditure, as well as the supervision and management of state-owned industrial assets.

In addition to its original functions of issuing currency and maintaining a stable exchange rate, the National Bank and Financial Management Department was given new powers to manage and supervise local private banks, finance, and lending. At the same time, its administrative level was upgraded to the same level as the original twelve ministries and commissions, and it was directly responsible to the emperor.

The Ministry of Land and Resources is responsible for the allocation and management of local land resources, the planning, management, protection and rational use of national mineral resources, agricultural and forestry resources, marine fishery resources and other natural resources.

The Ministry of Household Registration will retain the functions of local household registration management, implementation and supervision of birth incentive policies, rewarding and providing living security for military dependents, meritorious personnel, and disabled servicemen.

The Ministry of Water Resources is responsible for the construction, maintenance and management of water conservancy projects in the local area.
Formulate national and cross-regional water supply and demand plans and programs and supervise their implementation. Responsible for the water resource dispatching of important river basins, regions and major canal excavation projects. Organize people to conduct flood discharge and drought relief drills, formulate natural disaster response plans, formulate and supervise the actual situation of industrial and agricultural water use, etc.

After the separation of the Ministry of Water Resources and the Ministry of Railways, the administrative functions of the Ministry of Industry were changed to planning the development layout of local light and heavy industries, reporting and reviewing major industrial development projects, and supervising and managing local industrial enterprises, factories, and companies from a national perspective. After the decomposition and splitting of various administrative departments, the central-level administrative agencies will increase from the original 12 to 19, namely the Ministry of Revenue, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Personnel, the Ministry of Rites, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Justice.

Ministry of Industry, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Commerce, Inspectorate, Legislative Yuan, Advisory Council (composed of representatives elected by retired soldiers and local residents), Ministry of Railways, Ministry of Audit, Ministry of Water Resources, National Bank and Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Land and Resources, Ministry of Navy, and Ministry of Army.

The newly added departments have refined and clarified their functional responsibilities, while also avoiding the drawbacks of some departments having too many responsibilities and a lack of checks and balances on power.

Differentiation and checks and balances are necessary political means of governing a country. By subdividing administrative functions, conflicts and contradictions between departments can be resolved. At the same time, this also leaves more room for advancement for officials and military officers under them, allowing them to rise in social class in a relatively fair manner. This is the purpose of changing the functions of central departments.

The train stopped at the station. After the doors of the two trains in a row opened, all kinds of people poured out of the carriages: ordinary people in coarse cloth short coats, Westerners and diplomats in suits and holding walking sticks, and many more soldiers and officers who walked hurriedly in worn green uniforms.

The Grand Railway Project was an important part of the Ten-Year Development Plan. By July 1881, the local railway construction project was still in full swing. These soldiers in green uniforms and carrying all kinds of construction tools were all members of the engineering corps. Before the Ten-Year Development Plan was released, although the Han Kingdom had a standing engineering corps, it only had three to five thousand people, and was not as large as it is now.

After the Argentine War officially ended in September 1879, in order to solve the huge labor force needed for railway construction and local transportation development planning, the Han government decided to draw soldiers from the second-line garrison and the third-line militia reserve to strengthen the engineering corps, and within three years, the number of engineering corps was expanded to 9.

The rapidly expanded engineering corps retained 4,000 technical soldiers, and the rest of the troops were mainly used to carry out railway construction work after simple military skills training. During the service of the engineers, their military pay and labor subsidies were all paid according to the standards of the second-line garrison army.

After the service period is completed, soldiers with good performance and qualified professional skills will be admitted to the engineering field force and become an enviable technical soldier.
Those soldiers who do not meet the military requirements and are unwilling to continue to engage in engineering construction work will choose to receive military pay subsidies according to their own wishes after the expiration of their service, or respond to the call of the country and go to newly developed counties to receive the state's priority distribution of 50 acres of arable land or 500 acres of pasture grassland as a reward, and start a new life in a newly reclaimed home.

The local industrial development has significant advantages over the general late-developing countries, but due to the limitations of the times and the relatively insufficient population of the country, the light and heavy industries can only accommodate a small part of the population. Moreover, the annual salary of ordinary workers in the industrial field does not have an economic advantage compared to a Chinese farmer with a family of six and one hundred acres of arable land or one thousand acres of pasture. Therefore, in the late 19th century, in South America, where agricultural development is more profitable than industrial development, more engineers chose to go to the newly developed states and counties after their service. The family would be allocated fifty to sixty acres, one hundred acres of arable land, or five hundred to one thousand acres of pasture.

The core of the Han Empire is the vast La Plata Plain and the endless Pampas. In the central region, the grassland is even larger. An immigrant family can raise hundreds to thousands of cattle and sheep on 500 to 1,000 acres of grassland. Moreover, compared with cultivated land, a family of the same population can get nearly ten times more pasture land. The cattle and sheep produced on the pasture are sold at a higher price than grain. For this reason, more and more people have seen the benefits and are more inclined to choose pastures that occupy less labor and have a high output ratio as the foundation for starting a family and building a career.

The boundaries between farming and pastoral peoples quickly mixed and even disappeared in the Han Dynasty of South America. The reason for this is that although the Pampas region is mainly grassland, the local rainfall is far more than 400 mm. The Pampas grassland does not have the extreme weather such as drought and cold that are common in the Mongolian grassland. On the contrary, the climate is mild and very suitable for Chinese people to live in. It’s just that due to special reasons, the pasture has not been replaced by forest.

Therefore, the Chinese who raise livestock do not need to go through the ordeal of the harsh natural environment that nomadic peoples face. They can settle down in an area according to their original living habits and plant trees near their houses. Because of the abundant rainfall, the trees planted near the houses can grow normally. However, trees are rarely seen on uninhabited grasslands. As for the reason, neither Li Mingyuan nor ordinary Chinese people know it, and they simply attribute this phenomenon to a type unique to South America.

(End of this chapter)