Wu Chunfu naturally knew that just relying on his few empty words, he wanted to dispel the resentment of Xu Xinsu and other maritime merchants, which was undoubtedly a fool's dream.

Moreover, in order to obtain political protection, the Zhangzhou maritime merchants pushed him to the position of Shangshu of the Ministry of Industry, and spent at least more than 200,000 taels.

In order to get the support of Yu Zhigao, the chief military officer of Fujian, the one-time gift to his father-in-law alone reached 20,000 gold.

These maritime merchants were all merchants who had to compete with each other, and after spending such a huge amount of money, they still failed to break through the monopoly power of the Fujian and Guangdong gentry on overseas trade, but were blocked by these Fujian and Guangdong gentry and the Eighteen Zhi Pirate Group.

If you want them to swallow this loss and watch Zheng Zhilong control the entire maritime trade route, this is undoubtedly more difficult than ascending to the sky.

Although Xu Xinsu was submissive verbally, he didn't listen to Wu Chunfu's words at all in his heart.

In fact, whether it is the Zhangzhou maritime merchants around Xu Xinsu or Zheng Zhilong's Eighteen-Zhi Group, which is dominated by Quanzhou maritime merchants and Guangdong maritime merchants, they used to be a family.

They were all part of the Li Dan-Yan Siqi Maritime Merchant Group, a native of Quanzhou, a pirate who was a maritime trade merchant and owned a powerful armed fleet under his wealthy family.

Li Dan originally operated a trade route between Fujian and the Philippines, but because of his bad relations with the Spanish rulers, he moved to the Japanese island of Kyushu and became the leader of the local Chinese community.

And Yan Siqi was born as a civilian, because he was humiliated by the gentry and slaves in his hometown, he killed the other party in a fit of rage, fled to Japan, and became a pirate.

Although Li Dan has a powerful armed fleet, he is still a merchant at heart, not a pirate king who dreams of crossing the seas.

As for the East Asian seas of this era, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and even Britain are eyeing this rich East Asian region.

A pirate leader who lives on land is not up to the challenge of such a fierce sea.

Yan Siqi, who has a bold personality, is proficient in martial arts and can convince the public, has become the representative of Li Dan to control the maritime order and protect his own maritime trade routes.

With Li Dan's strong financial support, Yan Siqi was able to gather a huge pirate group in just a few years. He also joined forces with Yang Tiansheng, Chen Xinji, Zheng Zhilong and other 28 people as brothers, and developed Taiwan as a base for pirate groups.

Although the formation of the Li Dan-Yan Siqi maritime business group resisted the expansion of the influence of European colonial trading companies in East Asia.

But within this maritime group, it is not monolithic. The old man under Li Dan's command, because he mastered the mainland's supply organization and the Japanese sales market, basically accounted for seventy percent of the trade between the Ming Dynasty and Japan.

And Yan Siqi, Zheng Zhilong, Chen Xinji and other rising stars, although protecting the safety of the sea route from the mainland to Japan, but the lack of supply and market, so that they can only eat some leftovers.

For these budding pirate merchants, they were quite dissatisfied. They drift at sea all day long, but their income is not as good as that of the merchants who sit on the ground and share the spoils in Japan and Fujian, which is completely unreasonable in the eyes of Zheng Zhilong and others.

After all, the navigation technology of this era was not perfect, and before the longitude measurement method was found, the ships that could not be located at sea would often disappear into the vast sea because they got lost, adding navigation diseases and many pirates.

If there are ten ships to trade at sea, being able to return nine ships is already blessed by Mazu. In a normal year, only about 7-8 ships can return.

Therefore, Zheng Zhilong, a new pirate businessman, believed that it was fair and reasonable for them, the merchants who maintained the shipping lanes on the sea, to get the same benefits as those who sat on the shore.

However, in the face of the aggressiveness of the Dutch East India Company and the Spanish colonists in Southeast Asia, Yan Siqi was unwilling to break with Li Dan, and he suppressed the dissatisfaction of these pirates.

Although Li Dan is old and frail, the fleet he established at sea when he was young is still not to be underestimated.

Zheng Zhilong and other emerging pirates could only endure it, but in August of the 5th year of the Apocalypse, Li Dan died on the way back to Pinghu from Taiwan, and then in September, Yan Siqi, who was in the prime of life, suddenly contracted typhoid fever and died.

Then the so-called Eighteen Zhi leaders claimed that Li Dan and Yan Siqi had passed on the foundation of the entire pirate group to Zheng Zhilong.

This kind of incredible remarks made Xu Xinsu and other mainland businessmen completely unbelievable. After all, Li Dan has a biological son, how could he pass on his inheritance to a righteous son.

However, Xu Xinsu and others were not willing to obey Li Dan's son Li Guozhu, because Li Guozhu grew up in Hirado, Japan, and did not have any prestige for them, the maritime merchants of Fujian.

Moreover, Li Dan's industry in Fujian is also really attractive, since Zheng Zhilong has set a precedent, they Zhangzhou maritime merchants will also push the boat easily.

As a result, the Li Dan-Yan Siqi Maritime Business Group, the defender of the East Asian maritime order, quickly disintegrated into three parts.

The foundation of the Japanese Hirado Domain naturally fell into Li Dan's son-in-law Li Guo's assistant. Taiwan's foundation and most of the fleet fell nominally into the hands of Zheng Zhilong. Xiamen's industry has entered the pockets of Xu Xinsu and others.

Next, according to the assumption of Xu Xinsu and other Zhangzhou maritime merchants, everyone should not interfere with each other and trade freely.

However, Xu Xinsu and other Zhangzhou maritime merchants forgot one thing, they were the shippers of the mainland Fujian and Zhejiang gentry, and the sources of bulk commodities such as raw silk, silk, cotton, tea, porcelain, dyes, and ironware were all in their hands.

If there is free trade without mutual interference, whether it is Li Guozhu or Zheng Zhilong, they will all become distributors who rely on their snorts in the end.

As for the gentry of Fujian and Zhejiang, as long as they are families with some background, they will not directly engage in direct maritime trade with huge risks, nor will they risk direct transactions with pirate merchants such as Zheng Zhilong.

They bought raw silk from farmers, silk from machine households, tea and porcelain from the interior, and then sold these goods to legitimate merchants such as Xu Xinsu, monopolizing the supply between land and sea, to obtain stable and risk-free profits.

Therefore, Li Guozhu and Zheng Zhilong quickly put aside their feud and joined forces to blockade the ships of Xu Xinsu and other Zhangzhou maritime merchants at sea, in order to force them to give up their share of the mainland cargo organization.

How could Xu Xinsu and these Zhangzhou maritime merchants give up and let them accumulate a source of wealth, this economic irreconcilable contradiction led to a brutal naval conquest between the two sides.

But these merchants, who were accustomed to enjoying themselves on the shore, were no match for the pirates who roamed the turbulent seas after all, and they were soon driven to land by Zheng Zhilong.

The collapse of the Li Dan-Yan Siqi maritime business group finally gave the Spanish colonists and the Dutch East India Company an opportunity to expand their influence to the island of Taiwan.

The Dutch East India Company, on the other hand, tried to take advantage of their contradictions to gain exclusive trade rights with China.

Xu Xinsu, who could not defeat Zheng Zhilong at sea, strictly controlled the supply of goods on the mainland, preventing Zheng Zhilong and other maritime merchants from obtaining channels for goods and cutting off their economic resources.

On the one hand, he started from the imperial court and the Dutch East India Company, hoping to unite the forces of the imperial court's sailors and the Dutch East India Company to eliminate the eighteen zhi and restore order in the East Asian seas.

Xu Xinsu's plan was very good, and he also successfully bribed Yu Zhigao, the general soldier of Fujian, with money, and persuaded the Dutch East India Company to encircle and suppress Zheng Zhilong.

However, Xu Xinsu and others could spend money to buy the Fujian general army, but they never really thought about using this to build a powerful fleet that obeyed the orders of the maritime merchants.

Their short-sighted vision made the Fujian Navy Division not gain any reinforcement in combat effectiveness at all, and they just found an enemy for Zheng Zhilong.

The problem is that Xu Xinsu and others are inseparable from Zheng Zhilong because they have a dispute over huge economic interests.

And there is no great hatred between the Fujian Navy Division and Zheng Zhilong, and the compensation for the officers and soldiers of the Navy Division after the death of the pirates is also low and terrifying.

The officers and soldiers of the Navy Division who were demoralized would fight to the death with Zheng Zhilong. As for the Dutch East India Company, as a colonial commercial company, they could do the icing on the cake, but they would never do anything in the fire.

The Dutch East India Company came to Asia to gain wealth, not to help the Ming Dynasty suppress pirates.

The Ming Navy Division couldn't defeat a group of pirates, if it weren't for 1604, Wei Malang, the deputy commander of the Dutch Eastern Fleet, was frustrated by Shen Yourong, the commander of the Ming fleet. In 1623, the governor of Fujian, Nan Juyi, repelled the Dutch fleet led by Reyes Zorn at Penghu.

Because the Dutch East India Company has not yet retreated from the memory of the power of the Ming Dynasty, then according to the convention, it should be the Dutch East India Company and the Chinese pirates to attack the southeast coast of the Ming Dynasty and plunder the wealth given by God.

The successive defeats of Xu Xinsu and other Zhangzhou maritime merchants and the officers and men of the Fujian Navy Division forced those Fujian and Zhejiang gentry who controlled the supply of goods from all over the country to make a choice, acquiescing in Zheng Zhilong and other Quanzhou maritime merchants to replace Xu Xinsu and other Zhangzhou maritime merchants and restore the order of maritime trade.

Xu Xinsu naturally knew that for other businessmen, maybe as long as they bowed to Zheng Zhilong, they could change their court.

But for him, a representative of Zhangzhou maritime merchants, Zheng Zhilong will not give him a chance to make a comeback.

Therefore, when he learned that Chongzhen was summoning him, he also summoned Zheng Zhilong and others to go north to the capital, and Zheng Zhilong actually ran out of his lair in a daze and came to Beijing to meet the emperor, Xu Xinsu had already made up his mind that Zheng Zhilong would not be allowed to leave Beijing alive no matter what.