Chapter 577: The Bureaucratic System That Holds Back
The construction and future development of Donghua is mainly the concern of the eldest brother Dong Shutong.
The Pacific Ocean is too wide, Donghua is too far away, and Dong Shuheng is beyond his reach.
Dong Shuheng didn't even know that Donghua had officially been founded as a nation.
But he had already foreseen such a day when he made the South American plan. In other words, it was Dong Shuheng's plan to establish Donghua. This is the southeast corner of the Great China Circle.
Therefore, plans were made for several possible situations, and these plans were later sent to the hands of Dong Shutong, Cai Qiming and others.
In February of the third year of Fuxing (1858), a merchant ship finally came back and reported back the situation in Donghua three months ago, when the Donghua Army was still fighting in the south.
However, from the battle report, Dong Shuheng felt that the Donghua Army should be able to win.
Historically, an army composed of 20,000 remnants of the Taiping Army and Chinese laborers could be considered a strong army in South America.
What's more, the Donghua Army inherited the mantle of the Fuxing Army.
Those Chinese militiamen all received basic training from the Renaissance Army before being sent to South America.
All middle- and high-level officers were trained by the Fuxing Army Military Academy.
If this still fails to defeat the Peruvian government forces, Dong Shuheng can only blame himself for being wrong.
Now that he encountered the situation there, he had to be prepared.
Immigration and money are the two things Donghua needs most after its establishment.
As for money, Dong Shuheng has already found someone to foot the bill. Now the Fuxing Army and civilians have abundant funds.
In the past two years, everyone has tasted the benefits of buying national bonds. Dong Shuheng is planning to issue a special batch of national bonds and lend them to Donghua.
With Donghua's minerals as collateral, this debt is very safe. Of course, the premise is that Donghua must persist.
In the face of immigrants, the Renaissance Army is currently promoting a river management project and will relocate a large number of people along the river.
There is also the hydropower station reserved land project, which will also relocate a large number of people.
These people must have good arrangements, otherwise Dong Shuheng himself will feel sorry for them.
Although Donghua is far away, the land there is suitable for farming, the environment and climate are pleasant, and the mineral resources are rich, so it is actually a good place.
It is very easy to support a population of tens of millions in Peru alone.
Moreover, Donghua’s territory will become larger and larger in the future.
So the immigration reception capacity there is very large.
It's just that the immigration work of the Renaissance Army is no longer as easy as before.
Society has become stable, people have peace of mind, overseas immigration is becoming more and more difficult, and no one wants to travel so far away.
Speaking of the hydropower reserve relocation project, Dong Shuheng has received a lot of reports recently.
There are many problems reported in various places. In some places, people have even died.
It's all caused by the ancestral grave matter.
It is necessary to do an overall relocation. After the people move out, they can be allocated more and better land, which everyone can barely accept.
But everyone’s ancestral graves are located locally.
In many places, clan power is still very strong. Some families have lived in the same place for generations, and some families have even been passed down for thousands of years.
If you ask such a family to migrate, they will be willing to do so.
As long as they move out, the original clan system will be destroyed.
Dong Shuheng didn't want them to move as a whole. He originally wanted to use this incident to weaken some clan forces.
The family, the country, and the world, sometimes the family and the country are one, sharing prosperity and loss together.
But sometimes the family and the country will embark on the path of conflict and confrontation.
This depends on the choice of the person running the home. Most people will put their home before their country.
Once there is a fundamental conflict of interest between the two, the family power may become the gravedigger of the country.
The Fuxing Army's hydropower reserve project will vacate the land for the future construction of hydropower stations as a barrier lake storage area.
Since it is determined that hydropower will be fully developed in the future, it is better to prepare early.
When the time comes, the province will spend a lot of money on resettlement.
Now that many places have been destroyed by the turmoil a few years ago, it is the most cost-effective time to relocate and resettle them. Moreover, the Renaissance Army also needs a large number of immigrants now.
After all, there is so much new territory to occupy.
No one wants their ancestral graves to be submerged underwater. According to most people’s understanding, this will affect the luck of future generations.
Dong Shuheng really had no way to ask his officials to explain this kind of thing to the people in a scientific way.
Many times there is no clear line between superstition and custom.
This issue also involves religion. Dong Shuheng called in the heads of religious associations to negotiate a solution.
After unification, Dong Shuheng established associations for several major religions in the country and incorporated them into the management of the Renaissance Army.
At the end of the discussion, everyone came up with only one ridiculous solution, which was to have people from various religious sects set up a tomb relocation team.
Since they are superstitious, then try to persuade them from a superstitious perspective.
If you believe in Buddhism, I will send a monk to explain it to you and do it for you for free.
If you believe, then send Taoist priests.
Of course, the government has to provide some subsidies to the monks and Taoists, but it is definitely much cheaper than paying for it on their own.
In the process of handling this matter, some problems with the bureaucracy of the Renaissance Army were also exposed.
The cabinet set the time for immigration mobilization on the fifth day of October. When it came to the province, the deadline for documents became September 30, when it came to the government, it became September 25, and finally when it came to the person specifically responsible for local migration work
In the hands of township officials, it became September 20th.
Why is it necessary to advance the work at all levels? Because officials all want political achievements and are not willing to affect their future development due to delays in completing this matter.
The multi-level bureaucracy of the Renaissance Army has increased competition among bureaucrats.
If you want to be promoted, you need to combine seniority on the one hand, and you need to rely on political performance on the other.
How do political achievements come about? The first thing to do is to see how well the things assigned above are done? Are they completed in a timely manner?
Therefore, the officials of the Renaissance Army have very high requirements on execution ability.
However, the Renaissance Army expanded too fast, and many officials were only trained for a short period of time, so they had to quickly get to work. The source of the official team is mainly those who have promoted talents, staff, and officials.
Many of these people are indeed very capable of execution.
But most of them lack an overall view. It's okay for them to do things, but there are big problems with the party in charge.
The most important thing is that I don’t know how to adapt.
The Fuxing Army attaches great importance to the system. Basically, all government affairs have detailed rules to check, and most officials do things according to the rules.
But many things are not that simple. Most things that need to be dealt with by the government are composed of many complex and changeable elements.
For example, the matter of moving graves is very complicated, and the customs and habits of this kind of thing are different in different places.
If every place strictly follows the regulations, there will definitely be problems.
Dong Shuheng was very angry recently about an incident in Ganzhou Prefecture, Jiangxi Province. Even the cabinet came out to apologize after the incident was withdrawn.
The newly appointed Vice Minister Zuo Jigao also made a special trip to Jiangxi to handle follow-up matters.
Jiangxi has a developed water system, and Ganzhou is located at the source of the Gan River. There are many tributary water systems in the territory that are very suitable for the construction of hydropower stations.
Moreover, this place has many mountains and little land, and the people are poor and have always suffered from banditry. Banditry always goes hand in hand with poverty. And this kind of poverty caused by the natural environment is the most difficult to eradicate. The best way is to move the people to another place.
placement.
Jiangxi Province has also been preparing to move the people out of the mountains for a long time. Because the Fuxing Army attaches great importance to the immigration work, it is also an achievement of the local government to successfully persuade the people to move. The local government still attaches great importance to the matter of relocation.
Shangyoujiang is located in the southwest of Ganzhou. It is surrounded by mountains and has stable geological conditions. It is a good place for building hydropower.
The survey team from the Ministry of Water Resources has already conducted on-site inspections here and confirmed the location of the dam.
A range of people who need to be relocated is defined.
Most of the people in Pujia Village are surnamed Pu. They have lived by the Shangyou River for generations and are a large local clan.
This time the entire Pujia Village will be relocated.
The government only said that they would double the land compensation, but they did not know where they would be relocated.
Because as long as they participate in immigration, the government will be responsible for their food and accommodation during the migration period.
But everyone must obey the unified deployment.
In order to take care of those landlords, rich peasants, who were originally landlords and had more land, were compensated with more land after relocation.
People who have no land or little land will be allocated land according to the standard, and of course this amount is also quite large.
Therefore, immigration is absolutely beneficial to ordinary people, but it is not so friendly to landlords.
Because although the landowners can obtain more land, they have no one left.
What they exploit is people, not land.
The head of the Pu family, Pu Dingshan, is the largest landowner in Pujia Village. Before the superiors appoint the village chief, he has the final say in the entire Pujia Village.
After the town appointed a village chief, he also had the final say behind the scenes.
Naturally, he didn't want to move. After he moved, who would he call his orders? Pu Dingshan was an educated landowner, and he knew that the big landowners who moved to the northeast would hire people to farm the land, and there would be no tenant farmers there at all. Because everyone
All have land.
So he didn't want to move away even if he wanted to. He wanted to mobilize his tribe to collectively resist the move.
But to do this, he must have sufficient reasons to convince his tribe to support him.
So he clung to the matter of ancestral graves.
In addition, not all villages along the river will be relocated this time, because the government's relocation plan is determined based on the future scope of the barrier lake.
Pu Dingshan soon discovered that this could be exploited. Why did everyone live along the river, and some villages wanted to be relocated while others did not?
There were already conflicts among these mountain villages. After this incident spread among the tribesmen, everyone was naturally aggrieved.
Pu Dingshan found the town officials, but the town only told them that this was an area designated by water conservancy surveyors.
This explanation does not convince the Pu clan.
They found the county again, and the county gave a map of how the reservoir would be filled in the future.
The entire Pujia Village will be submerged.
Okay, this raises a new question.
Pu Ding Mountain finally brought out a new point of contradiction - the Pu family's ancestral graves will be submerged.
It was this incident that made the Pu clan unite behind Pu Dingshan. Because Pu Dingshan told the clan members that if the ancestral graves were moved, the descendants of the Pu clan would be punished by their ancestors in the future.
Therefore, even if the government immediately expressed its willingness to compensate the Pu family for relocating their graves, the Pu family members still refused to relocate because they would not give them a free ancestral grave.
The government is also very anxious. After all, the time given by the superiors is to start diversion of immigrants within a month.
So the county left the task of doing Pu's work to the town.
The chief official in the town could not even enter Pujia Village. Pudingshan had people guard the village entrance and not let anyone in. They claimed to protect the Pu family's ancestral graves and pretended to be a victim to win the sympathy of the surrounding people.
Was he sure that the government would not do anything to him?
The town had no choice but to initiate forced relocation procedures.
In the end, a fight broke out, and the villagers and the militia organized by the town were injured. Even the county's garrison camp was eventually dispatched.
To be honest, this incident can be regarded as a civil uprising. In the end, it caused quite a stir.
In the past, such things would have been nothing. Under the rule of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, there were countless rebellions in various places.
But now it has been three years since the restoration, and Kyushu has long been in a stable situation.
Even a small popular uprising is enough to make headlines.
Dong Shuheng also realized the stubbornness of local clan forces through this incident.
The Pu family completely sidelined the village chief appointed by the superiors. The militia in the village was also controlled by the Pu family.
Of course, this matter is not entirely Pu's problem, and it is not right for the local government to use coercive measures when negotiations fail.
The way things are done is simple and crude.
If they could just be patient, they wouldn't be able to find a breakthrough.
Several of the Pu family's sons are serving in other places. This is a breakthrough. You can definitely talk to these people.
Or we should first divide and disintegrate, and start working with the poor tribesmen.
Most of the people in the village are still landless farmers. They are torn between the moral constraints of their clan and their desire for land.
At this time, as long as they can do their job well and expose the true face of Pu Dingshan's rhetoric of moral kidnapping, these people can still be won over.
Without the support of ordinary tribesmen, Puding Mountain would have lost its minions and would not be able to achieve success.
This incident sounded the alarm for Dong Shuheng, that is, the Fuxing Army's weakening of local clans was not complete.
Now with local stability, these clan forces have the momentum to rise again.
In addition, the current bureaucracy established by the Renaissance Army is dominated by old literati.
These people are still power-based at their core.
Deep down in their understanding, they still behave like Daitian herdsmen.
Therefore, they may rely too much on power at work, or even abuse it.
Dong Shuheng is worried that this situation will become more serious as time goes by.
Such a bureaucracy that is out of touch with its ideas and systems is likely to ruin the great situation he created.
It is not that Dong Shuheng has never thought about implementing a council system at the local level to supervise local governments and serve as a bridge between the government and the people.
However, he was also worried that the council would become a means of local government indirectly controlled by local clan forces.
Nowadays, the Fuxing Army's remote appointment system and the vertical appointment system of officials can concentrate local power into the hands of the government, thereby suppressing local clan power.
During the Manchu and Qing Dynasties, local clans controlled local power through county officials, which brought clan power to its peak.
Although they are not as powerful as the clans in the Han and Tang Dynasties, these clans have a wide coverage and almost control the foundation of the entire country.
Their greatest harm is that they control social resources and solidify society, leaving poor farmers with no chance of success.
What a society fears most is the solidification of classes. This is like a person's blood vessel being blocked. If it is not unblocked in time, it will cause a series of complications.
If local clan power cannot be used, then what can be used to establish communication between the government and the local government?
This problem troubled Dong Shuheng.
He asked Wei Yuan this question.
Wei Yuan asked back: "You are just worried about the power of the clan, but have you ever thought about why ordinary people don't communicate directly with the government?"
Only then did Dong Shuheng realize that he was in over his head.
For a long time, ordinary people have been unwilling to take the initiative to deal with the government.
This is because in all dynasties, the government has always been aloof.
They are sent by the emperor to manage the people. No government has ever said that it is here to serve the people.
When it comes to things done by the government, ordinary people mostly have a mentality that it has nothing to do with them.
They will only come forward unless their own vital interests are involved and it affects them greatly.
They relied on the local gentry, and the local gentry always regarded themselves as the spokespersons of the people.
It seems that what they say is the voice of the people. Ordinary people are also used to this situation because they are dependent on these gentry for their lives.
It's not that the people have no emotions, it's just that they choose to be patient more often.
This is a group of people who are very good at forbearing.
But they also broke out very violently. Never in the history of that nation have there been so many peasant uprisings.
And it's a huge one.
"Shuheng, don't worry. When the generation educated by our textbooks rises, many of them will become ordinary people, but they don't need to find others to speak for themselves. They all know how to express themselves.
At that time, there was no need to worry about the control of the clan, because everyone learned to think for themselves. We have set up so many courses, aren’t we just teaching students to learn to think for themselves? Only when everyone has the ability to think independently can this country
Energetic."
Sure enough, Wei Yuan, who has been committed to the development of education, explained this issue to him from the perspective of education.
"Teacher, the first batch of graduates from the academy have entered the workplace. I don't know what kind of changes they can bring to us." Dong Shuheng said.
The first batch of graduates from Huaihai Academy have entered all walks of life.
Many of them have entered the government service.
As more and more students from the academy enter the government.
Dong Shuheng hoped that they could bring some changes to the Fuxing Army's bureaucracy.
He has been paying attention to this aspect and has asked someone to help him investigate.
Students from these academies are not necessarily more capable than those who were originally talented and talented.
But they are more thoughtful.
When they were in the academy, they were exposed to a wide range of things.
Wei Yuan himself is a well-educated scholar at home and abroad. He knows that the more he studies, the broader his horizons and the more open his mind.
Such talents can break away from narrow-mindedness and form their own independent thoughts.
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