Chapter 49: The Value of Guadeloupe
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Out of "respect" for the Spanish government and Columbus, Butterfly Island continued to follow the "convention" of annexing and naming Bermuda, and the full name adopted the combined title of "Guadeloupe Butterfly Island".
Sandwiched between the east and west islands and in the bay on the southwest coast of the east island, the twin ports have emerged from the barrenness and chaos of the beginning of the year. In the damp rainy season, in the shadow of the tropical jungle in the distance, a new port with a modern atmosphere is revealed.
Based on the experience of the original development of Bermuda, in addition to the key municipal public buildings and military defense units, the construction of the first phase of the residential block in Twin Ports will be simplified, and the urban water supply and drainage and other infrastructure and public facilities will be focused on to facilitate the future expansion and transformation of the urban area. To this end, a large number of prefabricated cement houses, simple style of residential buildings, with the appropriate area of greenery were built within half a year, even so, its façade and environmental greening are much more comfortable and beautiful than the earliest old city of Manchester City, a lot of money is spent.
In order to allow the nationals who moved to the Twin Ports to adapt to the local climate, almost all of them arranged for the settlers to stay in Bermuda for 10 days and a half before being transported to the Twin Ports. Some of these nationals are families of employees of local companies that have set up branches on Butterfly Island, and some are immigrants who immigrated to mainland China last year, and their national status has been upgraded by one level, except for those who have been granted formal residency rights.
Not only can they enjoy a special living allowance for the next three years, but they will also be allocated free housing and cheap plantation land contract management rights. Compared with those who stay in the country and need to repay the resettlement loan for a long time, it can be said that they are all pampered. Much to the chagrin of a significant number of European families who are still indentured servitudes or temporary settlers today, the relocation petition forms almost filled the offices of the Department of Immigration. However, this kind of cheapness is only available to immigrants. This year, the new arrivals will continue to implement the country's resettlement policy.
According to the plan of the "Atlantic Checkers Project", from now on, migrants from Daming will no longer be transported from Brazil to the city of Shuangwan in Bermuda, but directly to the city of Twin Ports on Butterfly Island. For this reason, the Chinese fleet bound for Brazil had already conveyed the news to the Portuguese.
Since September, in addition to hundreds of construction company employees and thousands of Caribbean prisoners of war in the Twin Ports, there are more than 600 nationals who have officially settled in the Twin Ports after the relocation project has been completed. This number will eventually exceed 1,200. Unfortunately, there are less than 200 ethnic Chinese who have become citizens of Twin Ports on Butterfly Island, and more than half of them are recent immigrants who have only arrived this year.
Since the first domestic migrant family moved into the urban area more than two months ago, the Shuangzigang City Government has been officially put into operation. However, the candidate for acting mayor is very interesting, and it is actually Zhang Mingcheng, the CEO of the largest private building materials enterprise in China, "Zhang's Building Materials Group". The only Taiwanese guy who crossed the crowd, is 33 years old this year, and he was stationed at the Y City Wharf as a salesman of a Taiwan-funded logistics company. As a result, it was swept up to North America.
Zhang Mingcheng was known for his decisiveness among the Huamei capitalists, and in the privatization of shares in state-owned enterprises in the early years of the founding of the People's Republic of China, cement and building materials factories were jointly eaten by a gang of state-owned construction engineering groups. It stands to reason that everyone's industrial division should end here, but Zhang Mingcheng started a new stove and started a "dirty and tired" private cement brick and tile company from scratch without saying a word.
What people don't know is that Zhang Mingcheng was before the crossing. His ancestors have been in the building materials business for a long time, especially the production of cement and other building materials. Then Zhang Mingcheng was out of control, and a large amount of building materials and cement required for national infrastructure construction fed Zhang Mingcheng in one mouth, and it only took a few years. As for the building materials factories directly exceeding the "absent-minded" state-owned construction engineering group, a variety of important building materials varieties are exclusively monopolized supply. It has ascended to the top position in the domestic building materials industry.
Since a visit to Butterfly Island's investment environment in May, Zhang Mingcheng has quickly fallen in love with this place. Zhang Mingcheng used his eloquence to the fullest, and he sought the mayorship of Butterfly Island on the grounds that he would invest in the large-scale development of Butterfly Island's abundant limestone and clay resources, and strive to supply the overseas building materials of the Atlantic Checkers Project locally within three years, instead of relying on local transportation.
A company is suddenly so keen on politics, and it is also a choice made for the development of its own industrial monopoly, which makes people have to be vigilant, but now that all industries are waiting to be developed, what government official does not have a few industries behind him? In any case, for the first time since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the first capitalist at the level of a boss became a government administrator. In addition to the special "State Civil Servants Supervision Law" to prevent accidents, the National Assembly also specially agreed with the government cabinet and Zhang Mingcheng to allow Zhang Mingcheng to serve only as acting mayor, and the term of office is only four years.
Subsequently, Zhang Mingcheng announced the keynote of the development of the Butterfly Island Twin Ports at the government's cabinet meeting: in addition to entrepot trade, the local core economy will vigorously develop building materials, salt, sugar and wine, food, chemical industry and various plantations, and the industrial tax of investment enterprises related to it will be given preferential treatment within the local management rights stipulated by the state.
As soon as these words came out, "the truth was revealed", and it turned out that Zhang Mingcheng's bid for the mayoral position was a bigger "premeditated" plan. It is not so much that Zhang Mingcheng is fighting for his own one-third of an acre of land, but that he is an agent of more domestic private enterprise capitalists "jointly launched".
……
Friday, September 5, 1625.
The drizzle slowed down the expansion of the Butterfly Island Twin Ports, but a heavy steam crane was unloading a sail galen ship at the first phase of the port terminal, which had already been completed and put into use.
A few months ago, the coordinates of the twin ports had reached the Caribbean and South American Spaniards and Portuguese. At the beginning of last month, the first Spanish merchant ship invited from San Juan, on the island of Puerto Rico, arrived at the Twin Ports and brought about 100 tons of grain and cane sugar, opening a new chapter in the history of Butterfly Island as the hub of trade between the Eastern Caribbean and South America.
The sail galen moored at the port to unload cargo in front of him is a Spanish merchant ship from Port of Spain, Trinidad off the coast of Venezuela. Natural bitumen from that natural asphalt lake south of Port of Spain. Buckets of ground are being hoisted ashore in nets, a famous local specialty that was developed nearly 300 years ahead of schedule. Now it has officially entered the market in China and the United States, and has become an important chemical and construction raw material to replace Nordic asphalt with better quality.
In the eastern suburbs of the city, a new industrial park is still under construction, but most of the sites are still in the stage of land reclamation, and due to the impact of the rainy season, a large number of construction sites and building materials are inevitably soaked in the rain, which makes the management of the construction company in charge of the construction extremely annoyed. The only ones that have completed construction and officially started construction are a small asphalt chemical treatment workshop of Xinhua Chemical Company and a small building materials factory of Zhang's Building Materials Group. and a timber processing workshop of the state-owned Agriculture, Forestry, Fishery and Animal Husbandry Group.
At present, in addition to Zhang Mingcheng's Butterfly Island building materials industry, the largest local private enterprise is probably Xinhua Chemical Company. According to the company's board of directors, the Butterfly Island branch will build a large-scale asphalt treatment chemical plant and an acid and alkali plant to take advantage of the favorable local access to raw materials. Needless to say, the raw materials required for asphalt chemical industry, Trinidad and Butterfly Island are very close, and naturally there are Spaniards who send them. The large-scale acid and alkali plant has been planned by the company's CEO Zhou Junting for a long time.
In the past, Xinhua Chemical Company spent very high money on imported sulfur every year, and the state was still charging a lot of industrial taxes, because Xinhua Chemical Company was an absolute monopoly in the acid and alkali chemical industry. The volcanic geology of Butterfly Island West Island makes it have natural abundant sulfur ore resources, which is simply a fat meat to the mouth for Xinhua Chemical Company, which is limited by the bottleneck of imported raw materials and the production cost and scale of acid and alkali chemicals.
Atlantic Checkers plan one announced. Zhou Junting became the first large domestic private enterprise to complete its investment intention, and cooperated with the state-owned energy and mining group to set up a sulfur mining company, and circled all the sulfur mining rights in the west island of Butterfly Island for the next 10 years. Although the West Island is still in the hands of the indigenous Caribbeans, Zhou Junting believes that the company will make a lot of money on the island in the future.
The second largest investment enterprise is Ren Changle's COSCO International Trade Group. Today, the group's business is a hodgepodge of privately owned enterprises. He also extended his hand to the plantation industry. Although the soil of Butterfly Island East Island is not as fertile as West Island, the terrain is relatively flat. Historically, there have been large-scale plantations, which are well suited to the cultivation of tropical crops.
Relying on the restrictive policies formulated in the original "Supplementary Act on Agricultural Development", the state-owned agricultural, forestry, fishery and animal husbandry groups almost monopolized the vast majority of farm operations, on the grounds that the state needed to control the distribution and flow of domestic industrial labor at the macro level. In response to this, a number of capitalists who are bent on setting up private farms are gritting their teeth, especially Ren Changle and his son. The deadline for the restrictive policy of the Supplementary Act for Agricultural Development was December 31, 1625, after which large-scale private capital was allowed to enter the agricultural industry, but for local agriculture, which had basically completed the layout of state farms, this policy opening time had already made Ren Changle miss the best first train.
High-value agricultural products in the 17th century, such as cotton, sugar cane and tobacco, have been coveted by Ren and his family for a long time, and cotton is the most in demand, after all, Yang Wenwen now maintains a textile factory with an annual output of 1.2 million pieces of cloth. Although a number of agricultural plantations have been established in Brazil in joint ventures with the Portuguese, and the import of wool from England and Spain has gradually increased, this reliance on the supply of raw materials from European merchants not only limits the scale of production, but also has hidden dangers in cost control and risk.
Now that the conditions are about to mature, Butterfly Island, as the geographical position of the Atlantic Checkers Program, has given Ren Changle the opportunity to officially enter the domestic agricultural plantation industry. In addition to investing in a number of textile, salt and sugar refining and trading warehouses on Butterfly Island in the early stage, Ren Changle and his family united with a number of investors, and also prepared to carry out the planting project of several bulk agricultural products such as cotton and sugarcane on the spot after the "ban" was lifted in 1626. For this reason, the two companies prepared funds in advance and booked 20,000 acres of the most fertile land in the central plain of the East Island in advance.
This is true for private enterprises, and state-owned groups are not lagging behind, but the largest state-owned group that has entered Butterfly Island this time is actually a state-owned agriculture, forestry, fishery and animal husbandry group. It stands to reason that indigenous agriculture is far from saturated, and there is no need for large farms on islands like Twin Harbors, where agricultural labor is more scarce; Although the forest resources on the island are abundant. But in terms of development value, perhaps North American forests are more suitable for the current raw material needs of the construction and marine industries; Surrounding aquatic fishing. Without modern refrigeration technology, it would not be able to have any supply relationship with the export of aquatic products, which is far inferior to the whaling business in the waters around the mainland. So no matter how you look at it, there is no reason to travel thousands of miles to Butterfly Island.
However, this is not the case, it is said that the state-owned agricultural, forestry, fishery and animal husbandry group immediately occupied most of the forest resources on the eastern and western islands of Guadeloupe as early as the announcement of the Atlantic Checkers plan, and for this reason the group paid a huge land purchase fee of 1.2 million US dollars, which made the government cabinet responsible for selling land to raise money laugh badly.
For the state-owned monopoly enterprises to be so "despicable" and "not to give people a way to live". Huamei Wood, which is bent on building a Caribbean wood processing center in the region, has even sued and even threatened to withdraw from Guadeloupe's development plans. I thought that such an anti-state-owned monopoly lawsuit full of the light of fairness and justice could be supported by the majority of people, but the litigation materials were rejected by the Manchester City Court only a few days ago, and they did not accept it at all!
Fortunately, several congressmen who have a heavy stake in Huamei Wood directly roared at the regular congressional meeting. Declared the Mansa City Court strictly unconstitutional. It seems that no one can justify it at all, and several Wen Qing waved their fists, and they were about to sue the supreme judge Zhong Jinshan if they didn't give an explanation at this time.
The noise finally stopped in the warning sound of the speakers of the two houses slamming the gavels, and then Senator Bao Zitu, who is the chairman of the Science and Technology Commission, stood up and said a few words, claiming that this was the scope of the Science and Technology Commission's authority and was directly responsible to the Senate. The development is not subject to the jurisdiction of the City of Manchester courts.
This is strange, when does the Senate have the power to direct a science and technology commission to intervene in the country's normal economic construction projects? Bao Zitu did not give a direct answer, but brought out the "National Security Law", and then explained it in detail, and the members of the entire National Assembly suddenly realized.
It has to be said that God favors Guadeloupe. This island on the edge of the Caribbean Sea is home to an extremely important tree species: the Healing Tree. Heal sores wood, also called Tieli wood. It is a wood resource that is extremely important and cherished in the machinery industry and shipbuilding industry in later generations.
The hardness of Tieli wood is not inferior to that of steel, and it will not decay and deform when buried underground or soaked in water, and has strong self-lubrication and corrosion resistance, even termites and sea worms and other strong rot organisms are helpless. Tieli wood has an almost irreplaceable use in the machinery industry, often used to add the most important wear-resistant parts and bearing materials. In the shipbuilding industry, ship propeller bearings, bearings, and sliders made of Tieli wood are more reliable than most metal alloys.
However, the growth of Tieli wood is extremely slow, and it is only a thick bowl mouth for tens or hundreds of years, so such an important tree species is naturally a strategic resource that the Commission of Science and Technology has gone all out to protect. In accordance with the "Military Defense Export Restriction Act" and the "National Security Law", the Ministry of National Defense has strongly urged the government cabinet to prohibit the development of private enterprises.
In fact, there is no domestic law that prohibits private companies from participating in the competitive exploitation of valuable natural resources, but the National Security Law only has a sentence that any commercial conduct that poses a threat to the country's military or strategic security, or has a serious impact, should be prohibited without the authorization of the National Assembly.
The authority for this definition is not the government, but Congress. The Commission of Science, Technology and Industry is a key national organ under the Congress, which specializes in providing core opinions on various types of national development and is directly responsible to the Senate, so it naturally has the power to intervene.
To prohibit, but to exploit, then it can only be in the hands of the state. As a result, it is only natural that the state-owned agricultural, forestry, fishery and animal husbandry group has the legal monopoly right to develop all the Tieli wood resources on Guadeloupe Island and a number of surrounding islands at this stage. However, in the view of the Commission of Science and Technology, the most important thing is to adopt a reasonable policy of development and long-term protection, so as to prevent the dilemma of the lack of iron Li wood in the world in the future.
In the end, Huamei Wood Company can only suffer this dumb loss, which is linked to the national strategic security, what else can you do? It seems that in order to get a piece of such a pie, we can only wait for the future when the state will privatize these evil state-owned enterprise groups!
In order to appease the injured board of directors of Huamei Wood Company, the state-owned Agriculture, Forestry, Fishery and Animal Husbandry Group lowered its posture this time and handed over part of the ordinary forest farms in Dongdao to Huamei Wood in the form of subcontracting, which can be regarded as an "internal coordination".
All in all, thanks to the tireless efforts of the military, the most critical half of Guadeloupe's Butterfly Island has been launched, and the related development plans have been carried out on a large scale. After that, the Ministry of Immigration and the Ministry of Civil Affairs jointly promoted population expansion, striving to gradually put in place the productive labor needed for local economic development within a year.
Time waits for no one, the second phase of the "Atlantic Checkers Project" Cape Town strategy in South Africa will be carried out before the end of 1627, whether the goal can be achieved smoothly, the management of Butterfly Island is naturally the top priority.
In addition to the local advantageous industries, the fuel sources needed for the development of all walks of life are more difficult. Including copper and iron, there are some small metal mines on Butterfly Island, but there are basically no coal resources, and if the coal required by modern industry is all shipped from the mainland, it will be a very painful thing.
Therefore, the acting mayor Zhang Mingcheng plans to make a personal trip to the Brazilian port of Recife in the near future to promote his building materials and obtain a stable supply of coal, and by the way, to pave the way for a more important event.
This is the "Foreign Labor Importation Act", which has been controversial in Congress in recent years, and to put it simply, it is the importation of slave labor in a glossy garment. No matter how this word is embellished, no matter from which angle it is viewed, it is something that Zhang Mingcheng and other modern human rights youths have to turn a blind eye to.
If the state does not pass a formal bill for a day, the introduction of slaves cannot take place for a day. Whether it's mining, timber harvesting, or farming, the large number of junior labourers required for the economic industry of Guadeloupe's Butterfly Island cannot be effectively met. The Caribs captured by the military have long been divided among the mines in the country, and even the Caribbeans who are still alive and well in the West Island have been "booked". Expecting these jobs to be filled with large numbers of immigrants is clearly a desperate choice.
At present, the only way Zhang Mingcheng can think of is to learn the model of "legal use of prisoners of war", bypass the "Foreign Labor Importation Act", which is still in the controversial stage, and "hire" labor from Spain or Portuguese in mainland Europe and Central and South America in the name of enterprise "employment". It doesn't matter what the original identity of the laborer is or what the color of his skin is, and the "hired laborers" are all contracted and sent back to the "employer" when the time comes.
Such an act of being a bitch and setting up an archway is probably the only way that domestic capitalists can think of, and it can only be used in overseas territories like Butterfly Island, and at the front desk, it is exactly what Zhang Mingcheng, a "corporate representative", must do. (To be continued)