Chapter 1587 Social Relations

For Xun Pengcheng, the life of a rich person should be based on enjoyment. When he was in Sanya, he had seen too many rich people enjoying all kinds of extravagant things, and he had always had a strong desire for such a leisurely lifestyle in his heart.

Envision. Now that I have finally become one of the rich people, I naturally have to try to improve my quality of life, rather than tire myself out like a dog just to make more money. So regarding Lao Gao’s opinions,

He just smiled and had his own concerns in his heart.

Because of his business as a horse and carriage dealer, Lao Gao had many business dealings with the plantations in this area, so according to Xun Pengcheng's request, Lao Gao took him around to see several plantations run by acquaintances. Xun Pengcheng

Before setting off from Sanya, he had learned a lot about the plantation project, so he was not completely a layman. Although he had no practical experience in agricultural technology, it was not a problem that he was worried about. When the time comes, it would be outsourced to agriculture.

Just let the brokerage company under the Ministry run it. What Xun Pengcheng mainly wants to examine is which cash crops are most suitable for planting according to the local natural conditions, how long are the payback period and profit period, and whether the expected return can meet his expectations.

The first thing Xun Pengcheng visited was a sugarcane plantation about 20 miles north of Changhua Port. According to Lao Gao, the owners here were several Ming businessmen who jointly owned 1,200 acres of land here. In addition to setting aside

In addition to several acres of land to build warehouses and employee residences, there are all square sugarcane fields. It is the season when sugarcane is mature and harvested. Hundreds of migrant workers are harvesting sugarcane in the sugarcane fields and stacking them into bundles.

Stack them up.

Even though Xun Pengcheng had seen a lot, it was the first time he saw sugar cane piled up like a hill. There were more than 20 large flatbed carriages waiting in line outside the sugarcane fields. When the coachmen saw Lao Gao, they all took the initiative to greet Lao Gao.

While nodding in greeting, he proudly showed off to Xun Pengcheng: "These carriages belong to our family."

Xun Pengcheng said: "This owner hired so many trucks to transport the sugar cane to other places for processing? Why don't they squeeze the sugar themselves?"

Lao Gao responded: "Pressing it yourself is slow and not as clean as the outside workshops. Nowadays, the workshops here send the sugar cane to Changhua for processing."

Xun Pengcheng asked curiously: "This sugarcane garden has more than a thousand acres of land, which is already quite large. How about building a better workshop by yourself?"

"I can't buy a steam engine." Lao Gao shook his head and said, "Everyone wants to buy good things, but we can't build many steam engines in a month, so we have to pay and wait."

"Then how come someone can buy it and open a workshop?" Xun Pengcheng asked in confusion.

"It depends on the connections!" Lao Gao explained the mystery in one sentence: "Think about it, how could ordinary people buy something as precious as a steam engine in the first place? Even if you have the heart, you don't have the capital, and if you have the capital, you can't buy it.

There is no way! People bought the things back and the workshop opened. Gradually, other people knew that this thing was useful, and then they thought about buying one themselves. Only then did they realize that it was not just what they wanted to buy.

You can buy it!”

Xun Pengcheng nodded thoughtfully. He knew that most of the steam engines produced by Haihan were used in fields called "industry" by the Executive Committee, and the number left for agriculture was relatively small.

After the public discovered the role of this kind of machine in agricultural production, especially in the deep processing of agricultural products, it was almost inevitable that supply would exceed demand. And those who used steam engines to make the first pot of gold relied on more than just

Luck and vision most likely come from the close relationship with Haihan's upper class.

Of course, Xun Pengcheng has lived in Sanya for a long time, and he also knows that this kind of interest chain is not necessarily illegal. In the process of promoting steam engines, the government will inevitably have many support targets, and these people often cooperate most closely with the government and have different positions.

The most consistent group of people who can be the first to eat crabs are not necessarily full of shady stories as Lao Gao thinks. It's just that he may not believe it if he says it.

Not long after, one of the owners of the plantation appeared. This man named Gu Wenchong was from Guangdong and had been operating a plantation in Changhua for three years. It was said that it was earlier than Xun Pengcheng came to Haihan.

.However, although Gu Wenchong has been in Hainan Island all year round, he has not acquired Haihan nationality and still retains his identity as a Mingren.

"It's mainly for the convenience of doing business." Gu Wenchong, whose accent is obviously Chinese-Chinese, readily explained the reason why he retained the Ming Dynasty nationality: "70% of the sucrose we produce here is sold to the Ming Dynasty, so there are still many times

If you want to move around the Ming Dynasty, if you change your Haihan nationality, it will not be so convenient after all."

Although the current influence of Haihan in the coastal areas of the Ming Dynasty is very strong, and there are almost no obstacles for Haihan personnel to land and enter the Ming Dynasty, but after entering the inland areas, people with Haihan identity will not be able to cross the state.

It’s convenient. Therefore, although many Ming merchants have deep interest entanglements with Haihan, and even live in Haihan for a long time like Gu Wenchong, they still retain Ming nationality for emergencies.

Xun Pengcheng himself came from the Ming Dynasty and had a relatively clear understanding of the situation between the two countries. He nodded and said: "Brother Gu's words are reasonable, but now that the two countries have established diplomatic relations, personnel exchanges have also been relaxed a lot. I don't know what happened in the Ming Dynasty.

How is the current situation?"

Gu Wenchong shook his head and said: "The establishment of diplomatic relations will not be effective so quickly. If nothing else, just the business tax issue, I don't know how many years it will take the two sides to negotiate for it to be finalized."

The city shipping tax of the Ming Dynasty is a wonderful system. How much and how to collect it are almost all decided by the people in the shipping department. The trade volume between Haihan and the Ming Dynasty is huge, and a ship of goods is often worth a fortune.

If the tax is one cent more or one cent less, the difference is a lot. In the past, there were obvious differences of opinion between the two sides in this regard, but Haihan has strong military power, and no shipping company anywhere has the courage to collect this money.

Therefore, the main targets are Ming merchants engaged in cross-border trade.

Of course, there are policies from above and countermeasures from below. Ming merchants, especially well-informed maritime merchants, will not be easily stumped by small shipping companies. Smuggling, a trade method, became a

This is the most common method in the coastal areas of the Ming Dynasty. Even powerful merchants such as Fulifeng only transport some relatively low-value goods into Guangdong and Guangxi and pay taxes through open channels, while higher-value goods

Almost all of them enter the country through smuggling.

When it comes to issues involving economic interests, there will inevitably be disputes. Businessmen and officials in coastal areas have made a lot of money from the limelight of smuggling, while their counterparts in inland areas are not so lucky, so many

Even if Haihan merchants can travel unimpeded in the coastal areas, they will still encounter specific difficulties after entering the inland. Although the two countries have announced the establishment of diplomatic relations, the high-level governments have only reached some framework agreements.

When it comes to implementation, there are still many specific issues that require further negotiation between the two parties.

The Ming Dynasty now attaches great importance to the security of the northern border. It no longer pays much attention to these border trades in the Lingnan region. Of course, it is essentially beyond the reach of the imperial court and cannot exert much influence on the south. And this kind of consultation linked to interests,

In the end, it will still be reduced to a transaction, and the winners are those who have the power of life and death in their hands.

Regarding the topic of diplomacy, Xun Pengcheng did not want to discuss it too deeply, so he took the initiative to change the subject and discuss the management and profits of sugar cane plantations with Gu Wenchong.

Gu Wenchong’s answer was quite frank: “The larger the planting area, the lower the average cost of development and operation, and the greater the income. I heard that there are larger sugar cane plantations in other places, and the costs are probably lower than here.

20%, which is very impressive in total. But if Brother Xun cannot build such a large formation, the income will certainly not be too high. On a scale of 1,000 acres, almost 50% to 70% of the income can be recovered in three years.

Get involved.”

Xun Pengcheng calculated in his mind that the funds he currently had were not enough to cultivate more than a thousand acres of plantations, and he also had to consider setting aside three years of operating expenses. It seemed that it was far from the level assumed by Gu Wenchong. However, he still

A little unwillingly, I remembered that I had heard from Wang Hao in Sanya that there was also a lot of cheap land being developed into sugar cane plantations in Xuwen County across the strait, so I asked Gu Wenchong for information about this.

Gu Wenchong shook his head and said: "It is not so easy to get land in Xuwen County. Almost all the people who open plantations there are big families like Furifeng and Zhan. Their plantations start from a few thousand acres, and the land price can naturally be obtained."

It has to be cheaper. Now the sucrose production on both sides of the Qiongzhou Strait has increased several times, and the competition has become more and more fierce. To reduce costs, we can only continue to go bigger. For example, we plan to invest all this year's profits and open another

We will release three to four hundred acres of land and try to lower the cost next year."

Xun Pengcheng felt half cold when he heard this. It seems that the path of this sugarcane plantation is not that easy. People who have entered the industry early are already taking the route of large-scale operations to reduce costs. If he cannot do a certain business,

scale, then the competitiveness must be one or even several levels behind. Of course, this does not rule out that Gu Wenchong is deliberately alarmist and wants to use such an introduction to make Xun Pengcheng retreat in the face of difficulties, thus reducing one potential competitor.

After leaving the sugar cane plantation, Xun Pengcheng asked Lao Gao whether what Gu Wenchong just said was true. Lao Gao didn't expect to get the intestines in Xun Pengcheng's belly, and he didn't doubt him. He responded honestly: "Sir, sir,

In fact, what Mr. Gu just said makes sense. In recent years, Changhua and Danzhou have opened forty or fifty sugarcane plantations. Although the cane sugar produced in the end can definitely be sold, they still have conflicts with each other.

There is competition, right? Those with large output can gradually control the pricing power and squeeze out those smaller peers in the market, so everyone is getting bigger and bigger."

Xun Pengcheng praised: "I didn't expect you, Lao Gao, to know these business methods. Being a coachman is really an incompetence!"

Lao Gao waved his hands and said: "How can I understand those profound truths? These are all what my son-in-law said. He is a smart man."

When Xun Pengcheng heard that Lao Gao mentioned his son-in-law again, he stopped talking at all, so as not to talk about his most taboo topic. He took the initiative to change the topic and said: "But to expand the scale of the plantation, there must be

So much labor is needed! These places originally relied on immigrants to move in, and the country has to give priority to the smelting and mining industries in Changhua. Can these plantations recruit enough immigrants?"

Lao Gao responded: "Of course immigration alone is not enough. How many immigrants are allocated to Changhua every month now? Sometimes it is less than one or two hundred, and sometimes it is more than three or four hundred. After removing half of the old, weak, women and children, the remaining half is

It’s labor force. The iron and steelmaking jobs in Changhua have been exhausted, so there’s no leftovers left for these plantations! If they want labor force, they basically find their own way.”

"Find a way by yourself?" Xun Pengcheng rolled his eyes and remembered something: "Could it be that he bought slaves from Nanyang?"

"That's the method." Lao Gao nodded and said, "How else can we get so many laborers by the hundreds? Sometimes the slaves bought from the plantations nearby are more than the new immigrants who have moved here."

Xun Pengcheng did not ask why the country did not care about this kind of thing, because he had been exposed to related fields in his work as a reporter in the past, and knew that the country turned a blind eye to the slave trade. Because if this were not the case, countless people on Hainan Island would

Numerous plantations simply did not have enough labor force to maintain operations. Portugal and the Netherlands would send Haihan several ships of foreign slaves every month, from the long coastline from Southeast Asia to East Africa. Sometimes there could be two to three thousand people a month.

.

Of course, these slaves did not have the same opportunities as Han immigrants to obtain naturalization. The purpose of their coming to Hainan Island was all kinds of manual labor. Most of them could only spend the rest of their lives on plantations. Only a handful of lucky ones,

Maybe you will get the opportunity to join the army because you have special skills or have outstanding physical conditions, thereby breaking away from slavery and changing your destiny.

Because there is no need to pay salaries to these slaves, the cost of purchasing them will be very cheap compared to the cost of hiring a Haihan citizen for a long time, and there is no need to pay too much attention to their feelings, as long as they are given the most basic living conditions

That's fine, so plantation owners are generally more willing to purchase large quantities of these slaves who can exploit their labor without any bottom line. From a certain point of view, the treatment of these people is not much different from that of the prisoners in the Shilu Mine hard labor camp, and even

Not as good as those prisoners. After all, many prisoners only need to serve their sentences before they can be released. However, it is hard to say how long it will take for these slaves to regain their freedom.

Haihan officials have promulgated some regulations in the past, specifying the maximum service period for slaves, after which they must be given freedom from slavery. However, the actual implementation of these regulations is not smooth, because they often have not yet completed their service.

When the time limit expires, the slaves will be exhausted from the high-intensity work.
Chapter completed!