In April 1651, the Ningbo Mansion was gradually warming up in early spring. Outside Ninghai County, Taizhou Prefecture, Wei Boqiu, accompanied by Xie Qian, commander of the Sixth Division of the newly built Army, was supervising a collective execution. The targets of the executions were the local Qing court generals and some immediate male relatives, of course, there were also some local gentry and landlords, and the crimes committed by these people were nothing more than "loyal and pseudo-Qing" and "stubborn", so they were taken down and executed by the Sixth Division of the servant army that conquered this place.

Hundreds of officers and men of the Sixth Division circled a large open space on the school field outside the city, and these soldiers, uniformly dressed in khaki uniforms, with large black-brimmed caps on their heads, fur shoes on their feet, and white leggings on their calves, armed with spears, drove the people who were gathered outside to watch the excitement. They speak a Shandong accent that is difficult for the locals to understand, the swords and guns in their hands are shining, and they killed the heads of the Qing soldiers when they broke the city more than a month ago, so they are still very deterrent in the eyes of the local people.

The division commander Xie Qian dusted off the dust on his well-made tweed uniform, stroked the handle of the command knife with his left hand, and subconsciously placed his right hand on the flintlock pistol holster on his waist.

He himself turned out to be just a domestic slave of a certain official in Qingzhou, and because he was not angry with the Qing court's policy of shaving his hair and making it easy to obey and the excessive exploitation of the people, he and some friends in the rivers and lakes pulled up a pole and rebelled. His greatest "merit" was the capture and killing of Wang Aoyong, the Manchu ambassador to Shandong and Henan, who was the first to write to Dolgon asking for a shaved hair. Xie Qian was full of awls on the top of Wang Aoyong's head at that time, saying "Grow hair for you", which greatly made people's hearts happy.

However, after being surrounded and suppressed by the Qing army, he almost died (thanks to the people on the east coast to relieve the siege). Xie Qian took refuge in what he saw as the only "unknown force" on the east coast who insisted on resisting the Qing Dynasty. After a few years of ups and downs in the East Coast servant military system, Xie Qian has changed a lot, and now he no longer has many of the spirits of the past, and gradually began to move closer to a warlord and politician, for example, he is now more interested in making money than killing Tartars, and for example, he is now not only shaving his hair and easy to wear (he has shaved his flat head and worn the East Coast military uniform, but this seems to him to be much better than the money rat tail or horse coat promoted by the Tartars). There is no rejection of many things from the East Coast (such as various household items), and it is almost a different person than it was a few years ago.

The Qing court officials on the school field who were tied up and waiting to be executed were all poor and stupid in his opinion. Why? Unknown situation. I don't know the general situation! Not to mention anything else, just talking about the situation in Zhejiang Province now, it is a great disadvantage to the Qing court! A few months ago, Navy Commander Liu Haiyang, commander of the Southern Theater and Navy Commander in Yinxian County, mobilized the Fourth and Sixth Divisions of the Servant Army to the south. It took two months to recover Xiangshan County, Changguowei, Ninghai County and other places, and eliminated more than 2,000 landlord regiments guarding these counties. When they returned to the division, they passed through Fenghua County and put down two gentry riots that occurred there, which can be described as extremely majestic.

They took advantage of the opportunity of the Qing army's main force to withdraw north to Hangzhou, and attacked continuously in the coastal areas of Taizhou and Wenzhou, and successively conquered many of the walled cities defended by the Qing army. Its main force of tens of thousands of people, led by Zhang Mingzhen, Ruan Jin and others, is now outside Yongjia County, the capital of Wenzhou, besieging day and night.

Qing troops in eastern Zhejiang, southern Zhejiang, and even northern Fujian. The troops are already scarce, and when Chen Tai and others went north to rescue Hangzhou, they looted a batch, and now there are only a few crooked melons and cracked dates, and they are still too late to protect themselves, let alone talk about rescuing others. This unfavorable situation of the Qing court was even more under the deliberate propaganda and painstaking persuasion of the people on the east coast. It was deliberately magnified -- Zhang Mingzhen, Ruan Jin, and others, who held the military power of the Lu Wang's department, began to conquer the cities in Wenzhou and Taizhou, and their strength grew somewhat. It is no longer the half-dead embarrassment when he lived on Zhoushan Island a few years ago.

The Zheng group, which was guarding Jinxia, also began to exert force, and they besieged the coastal areas of Fujian under the banner of the Southern Ming Dynasty, so that the Qing army was exhausted and constantly lost cities and land. Li Chengdong took advantage of the situation to lead the army to counterattack, defeated the Qing army, and recovered most of the Chaozhou capital. The situation on the southeast coast, deliberately stirred up by the people on the east coast, set off earth-shaking changes, and the Qing army was helpless.

"If the situation in the southeast is reversed like this, such local tyrants and inferior gentry are still willing to do things, they are really stupid as pigs and dogs!" Xie Qian, the commander of the Sixth Division, thought disdainfully. After seeing Wei Boqiu on the high platform waving his hand indifferently, he tightened the belt around his waist, pulled out the snowy command knife, slashed down, and said, "Execution!" ”

Following his order, a large group of green battalion soldiers still wearing Qing soldier uniforms will be kicked by the officers and soldiers of the Sixth Division, holding the short knives issued, and tremblingly stabbing at these former superiors and generals. The officers and men of the surrounding Sixth Division wore armor and swords, supervising their executions.

"After the petition is handed in, these people will be incorporated into the ranks of military husbands, and they will almost be digested after a few trips." Wei Boqiu got up and left the execution ground, and said to his student Li Cardo: "Ninghai County is located in the mountains and valleys and plains, which is easy to defend and difficult to attack. If the Qing army brigade comes, it will be over the mountains and mountains, and it will be extremely tired, and its momentum will not be able to penetrate Lu Mianye. On the contrary, our army has the advantage of boats, and naval warships can transport a large number of troops and military materials ashore at any time, and it has an internal line advantage that is difficult for the Qing army to match. Therefore, it can be well digested into our rear, which of course may take many years. ”

Li Cardo nodded, he really understood what the teacher meant by "it will take many years", because the practical example was there: in the counties of Ningbo Prefecture that the East Coast people had conquered, the various policies currently implemented were quite resistant in the countryside, and the landlords and gentry, ordinary scholars, the remnants of the Qing army, the local clan forces, etc., for various reasons, almost all became the enemies of the East Coast people.

They spread public opinion unfavorable to the East Coast among the people, colluded with various anti-East Coast forces, reported to the Qing court, killed the grain collection teams and work teams sent by the East Coast, and even incited foolish men and foolish women or clan relatives and friends to rise up to fight against the rule of the East Coast people, and almost dragged the six or seven thousand men and horses of the Fourth and Sixth Divisions firmly to the locality, and they were never able to be transferred to the front line to fight against the Qing army.

However, the people of the East Coast were not soft-hearted, especially the leaders of the East Coast, who had grown up in blood and fire with the Spaniards from the beginning of the crossing, and they had two policies towards the local rebels: repression and exile, that is, the minor (usually the foolish men and women who were coerced) were exiled to Sakhalin, Ezo, and Tahiti, and the serious ones (usually the planners and organizers) were killed on the spot. The vacated homestead land was nationalized, and then it was distributed to the disabled and veterans, or rewarded to those who took the initiative to move closer to the east coast, in order to buy people's hearts.

As far as Ricardo knew, Yinxian, which was currently the most effective in the rule of the people on the east coast, had already given more than 2,700 soldiers free land; At the same time, they also organized tens of thousands of people who had been taken captive from Shaoxing Prefecture to resume production around the county seat, dredging the long-blocked canals, rebuilding the embankment of the Potang River, which had fallen into disrepair, and planting overwintering wheat.

After the wheat is harvested, these Shaoxing people from the west will plant another crop of rice, and some miscellaneous grains such as taro and black beans are also planted around the rice fields as a supplement to the rations. You must not underestimate the enthusiasm of these Shaoxing people, because the people of the East Coast once promised them that as long as they give the East Coast government free of charge to cultivate the fields for five years (during which they receive a salary, the monthly salary of adult men is three yuan, including food and shelter, and the wages of women, children and the elderly are reduced), they can redeem the land they have cultivated for several years at a low price of five yuan per acre of land, with a maximum limit of 30 mu.

Thirty acres of fertile land is a family property that can be passed on to future generations, and these people cannot be unmoved. Therefore, their short-term enthusiasm was mobilized, and at the same time, they completely formed an irresolvable mortal enmity with the local landlords and gentry -- because the land they would buy in the future was obviously confiscated from these gentry by the people on the east coast, and these gentry often had many of their sons and daughters serving as officials in the Qing court, and the Qing court clearly defended the interests of the landlords and gentry, so they had irreconcilable contradictions with the Qing court. In this way, they became the most effective helpers of the East Coasters in ruling their own land—what could be a more reliable relationship than the convergence of interests?

In addition to dividing land among these Shaoxing immigrants and veterans, the people on the east coast were also trying to divide and disintegrate the original local clan social system, and they found various excuses to confiscate the land of the landlords and distribute it to the landless poor. In his long-term research, he found that the so-called clan power in the local villages is not monolithic, the rich Zhumen wine and meat stink, and the poor have no place to stand.

Therefore, he proposed to divide and disintegrate the clan power, that is, to distribute land to the landless poor households (following the previous policy, they were hired to cultivate the land, which could be bought cheaply after five years), and the source of this land was naturally the landlords who owned a lot of land in the clan - he did not believe that with the support of the soldiers on the east coast, those poor households who could not eat enough and were in a state of malnutrition all year round would not be moved! The Chinese's attachment to the land cannot stop anything! As long as I can have a land to pass on to future generations, who do I care about you? Whoever wants to stand in my way, I'll fight with whomever I want! (To be continued)