After the China United Company occupied Luzon, since Yin Feng had little experience in political power management, the final work of building the grassroots political power was done by the veteran traditional bureaucrat Zeng Yue and several of his students.
Several students brought by Zeng Yue were recruited when he was an official in Yazhou and Quanzhou. They were all relatively wealthy businessmen and children of military families. They were specially sent to him to seek a future. Yin Feng summoned him After hearing these Confucian scholars, he publicly told them: Chinese companies do not need officials who can write poems and poems, but they need people who can do practical work.
Most of those students who expected to get ahead in the imperial examination gave up and looked down upon Yin Feng's so-called achievements overseas. Therefore, most of the students Zeng Yue brought to Luzon were children of businessmen and descendants of the Zeng family. .
Yin Feng has always believed that under the influence of traditional Chinese culture, the government is always in a strong position; and a government cannot be completely confused with a company that makes money. In this case, a government that is too strong will definitely infringe on the interests of ordinary people. Of course Zeng Yue does not I would agree with him. In traditional culture, the state power is used to "herdsmen" - to govern all people, and it is not appropriate to compete with the people for profit, but the people being governed only have obligations and no rights.
In the end, Luzon established a management organization based on the traditional county system and bureaucratic vertical management; the Luzon Governorate was essentially an overseas colonial regime of the Chinese, and it was impossible to create any other political system.
After the land auction in Luzon, a total of more than a dozen powerful Fujian and Cantonese merchants bought land in Luzon and established various agricultural estates and professional plantations. Official ranks are useless in Luzon. Any landowner who purchases land in Luzon does not have the right to tax exemption. Regardless of the size of the land, he must pay land tax to the Luzon Governor's Office, and also pay management tax - for manors that do not pay management tax, If the Chinese military generals do not send troops to the village, they will have to be responsible for the security of the manor themselves.
The landowners have the right to handle the output of these agricultural estates and professional plantations on their own, but as long as they obtain cash income through trade, they must pay commercial taxes. The detailed provisions of all tax items are clearly engraved on a wooden black The lacquered notice board is hung in the bulletin hall outside the gate of the Luzon Guards House. This form of government affairs disclosure is adapted from the traditional Chinese model:
In the Ming Dynasty, from the capital government office to the county government office, between the government office gate and the screen wall in front of the door, there were two pavilion-style buildings symmetrical to the east and west, one was called Shenming Pavilion and the other was called Jingshan Pavilion. Special facilities for local government to educate the people were initiated by Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty. Historically, they were used until the late Qing Dynasty. Inside the Shenming Pavilion, there is a wooden black-lacquered plaque called "Ban Bang", which is established by the local government and Grassroots organizations regularly publish decisions on bad people and bad deeds in the area and how to punish them. The so-called "statement" has several meanings, including solemn declarations, repeated enlightenment, justification and appeals. Corresponding to the function of announcing bad people and bad deeds, Jeongseonjeong is a place used to praise good people and good deeds. It also hangs several boards. It is actually an honorary list, but the background color is changed to red paint.
At the gate of the Luzon Governor's Mansion, there is the announcement hall on the right and the appeal hall on the left.
After Zeng Yue asked someone to carve out the tax details, he added a few words, saying: In addition to the clearly listed tax items, this government will never impose any excessive taxes and miscellaneous taxes. The Chinese Company will rely on its trustworthiness when doing business and trade. According to the principle, in the five years since the public land sale until now, taxes have never been increased arbitrarily. However, the people under the rule of the Chinese Company must pay taxes regardless of their high or low status. Yin Feng has always adhered to this principle. Zeng Yue It is also implemented in this way. The internal investigations of corruption by the Company Security Department and the Business Information Department have never stopped. Since these investigators are rotated to independently perform their duties and are directly responsible to Yin Feng, they have always been ruthless in internal investigations. Known for being ruthless.
During this period, the aboriginal village and township merging plan has been implemented, and new land on the island has been continuously vacated. People from the mainland, Lianghuai salt merchants, Shanxi merchants and other business gangs have come to Luzon to buy land and start businesses. The reputation of the governor's office as efficient and clean also spread among overseas businessmen.
When the news came out that the Spanish army was about to counterattack Luzon, the number of Chinese immigrants who came to Luzon one after another already exceeded 150,000. There were always hundreds of Chinese immigrants arriving in Manila from Fujian and Taiwan every month. Thousands of mainland farmers and unemployed vagrants came ashore.
In order to attract immigrants, Yin Feng established a system. All agricultural immigrants who wanted to farm were allowed to farm for free for one year. Many domestic landless farmers rented land owned by the China Company in Luzon for farming. However, the China Company stated in the contract: As long as one-third of the harvest is paid as rent each year without interruption for three consecutive years, the tenants are allowed to farm permanently and can pass it on to their children and grandchildren. However, they cannot transfer it to other families for farming without the consent of the company. After all, the tenant's land ownership belongs to the China Company. .
This basically gave tenants permanent tenure rights. For the countless landless farmers in the Ming Dynasty, the attraction of vagrants was too great. During the Ming Dynasty, permanent tenure rights had already appeared in the Jiangnan area, but the court had never officially recognized it in legal form. However, China Corporation has announced this content as a law in clear words.
If the tenants who cultivate the company's land serve as soldiers and fight in the war, they can immediately get another piece of land; if any family serves as a soldier and fights with merit, they can also get half of the ownership of the land they cultivate free of charge. This is another form of the military-peasant integration system. However, the Chinese Company has the right to have priority in obtaining the products produced by the land owned by the military. Moreover, the company encourages these tenants, and the military family members hand over the land to the farms uniformly managed by the company, and then use the share dividend system to repay them.
Of course, the system whereby Chinese Army soldiers can obtain their own land after retiring or making great contributions is still valid.
Therefore, when the Spaniards were about to fight back, the company's tenants and military families fully supported the Chinese army. There were long lines of people coming to the garrison recruitment office every day to enlist. This was to fight for their own land and homeland, and people's emotions were high. , actively petitioned for war, and after living locally for only a few years, these farmers from various provinces in mainland China have fully adapted to the rule of the China United Company-Luzon Governorate. The immigrants who came here, including some literati, all valued tradition. Influenced and grown up in the cultural background of festivals and ethical etiquette.
Over the years of doing business overseas and establishing Chinese companies, Yin Feng has gained a better understanding of traditional culture: Traditional Chinese culture values social order above all else. If the people cannot obtain order from themselves, they will accept it no matter what. No matter who provides the order, as long as this order can bring a stable life, people will generally support this order. No matter who provides this order, in fact, many human beings living on this earth live this way. .
When faced with the Spanish attack, the behavior of the large estate owners and large landowners was different from that of ordinary people. They were still uneasy about the strength of the Chinese Company. Worried about gains and losses, some people came to the company and asked to vacate their land and return to the country. Or eager to transfer it to someone else.
At the same time, war preparations were also hindered by the owners of large estates: for example, San Miguel in the north of the city had to build a fortress to defend the northern flank of Manila, but the estate manager of the Shanxi merchant Qiao family who bought the land - Zhuangtou George Ping, but took the lead in opposing the construction of a fortress on his own land, saying that it would affect the production and feng shui of his land.
Many large landowners and agents of manor owners instinctively object to the Chinese Company requisitioning manpower from their own estates to build fortifications. The rules and regulations published by the Chinese Company clearly state that unless it is an emergency requisition in wartime, the company will recruit laborers to work in peacetime. Ten people are paid daily wages, and there is also a situation like this: those coolie laborers can earn one tael of silver after working for ten days, which is much more than working for the landlords and manor owners. Therefore, Many estate tenants, day laborers and even domestic servants abandoned their bosses to work for the company.
Those agents of big businessmen and big landowners either bribed or used their own official power to pressure people, demanding that the Chinese company change its labor recruitment policy and implement the human rights regulations implemented by the imperial court in the mainland: unpaid corvee labor.
"These guys, thinking that our company is the same as those corrupt officials in the imperial court, actually bribed me," Yin Feng said helplessly to An Xiaosi, holding a stack of internal investigation reports from the Security Department and the Business Information Department. He smiled bitterly and said: "Don't worry about these things for now. Zeng Shan will take over the Internal Affairs Investigation Section of the Business Information Department of the Luzon Branch. Your main task now is to deal with the Spaniards."
Zeng Jingshan sat at Yin Feng's desk and was reading some reports, and said distressedly: "A Feng, this won't work. The construction projects of the four castles in the east, west, south and north will never be completed on schedule."
"Do these wealthy businessmen who bought the land think we are easy to fool? What's the point of having the Spanish come?" Yin Feng said, not understanding the resistance attitude of many landowners to defense projects.
He thought for a while and said: "Let's do this. Let's call all the village heads and housekeepers to have a meeting..."
Yin Feng had the idea of setting up a discussion bureau, allowing all businesses and landowners who invested in Luzon land to send representatives to participate to evaluate the policies of the Luzon Governor's Office. As a consulting and evaluation organization, Zeng Yue disagreed and believed that Everything in Luzon is in its infancy stage, and power can only be highly centralized to implement some policies. Therefore, although the council was established, it only played the role of various landlord associations and chambers of commerce, which was equivalent to a social club.
Now, Yin Feng held the first formal review meeting of the Council with a try mentality. In the bottom of his heart, Yin Feng believed that this was equivalent to a small-scale democratic experiment.