Chapter 1728: The Tang Navy never pursues quantitative superiority
The mainland of the Tang Empire is now extremely vast, but in fact not all places are suitable for large-scale development and survival. At least the northern provinces are not currently suitable for large-scale development.
The best areas of the empire are still a few central provinces and eastern coastal provinces, especially the four major regions of the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta, Bohai Bay Rim, and Huguang.
In other places, development is actually very average, mainly limited by natural conditions such as transportation, terrain, and resources.
Among the inland areas, only Shanxi has developed relatively well, and the reason why this place has developed so well is purely because of the coal here and the opening of railways.
Now is the age of steam, and the demand for coal is getting higher day by day. This can be seen from the fact that although the output of coal is rising year by year, the price has still not dropped.
Shanxi also relies on its large coal resources to develop its economy.
However, this is only limited to the industrial part.
However, even though it is now the period of the Industrial Revolution, the actual scale of industry is still far from being comparable to that of later generations.
For the current Tang Empire, the primary industry represented by agriculture still plays an unshakable role. The living standards of ordinary people in a place depend more on the development of local agriculture.
As for industry and commerce, the jobs provided by industry these days are still very limited compared to the Tang Empire's population of more than 200 million.
Although many typical industrial and commercial cities emerged in the Tang Empire, such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Tianjin, these three major industrial and commercial cities all developed rapidly, and because of the concentration of factories, the urban population increased sharply, and it has already exceeded one million people.
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The next-largest cities such as Wuhan, Dangtu, Jinling, and Zhenjiang also have hundreds of thousands of people.
In addition, there are many small and medium-sized cities that have gathered a large population. There are already many cities with more than 100,000 people.
This can be seen as urbanization caused by the industrial revolution, with a large agricultural population gradually transformed into an industrial and commercial population.
Cumulatively, within the entire country, that is, the mainland, Donghai Province, which has subsequently completed localization, and some partially localized areas, the urban population is only about 20 million.
The urban proportion is less than 10%.
Therefore, regardless of the cities with a population of one million, there are many cities with hundreds of thousands of people, but compared with the population of more than 200 million, the proportion occupied is very small.
Most of the people in the Tang Empire still lived in the countryside and relied on farming to make a living.
Therefore, in most cases, the quality of agricultural development in a place is directly related to the local people's livelihood.
Generally speaking, people's livelihood is better in places with relatively fertile land and a large amount of arable land, such as Jiangnan, Huguang, North China, etc., they are all similar.
As for Shanxi, even though it has a large amount of coal resources, which has brought a lot of help to the local area, people's livelihood is still relatively difficult because of the large number of people and little land.
Therefore, the people's living conditions in many places in the mainland are actually very average. It seems that the total economic volume is large, but the quality of life of the local people is not as high as that of immigrants in the Americas.
Even if you go to South Africa, any immigrant can get a lot of farmland. I dare not say anything else, but as long as you work hard and have enough food, there will be no problem at all.
In fact, it is precisely because of this that so many people immigrate overseas every year, or settle in border provinces.
In this regard, Li Xuan is also powerless. For these backward areas restricted by natural conditions, although the government level can promote the development of one or two places, it is absolutely impossible to promote the development of all places.
But even if it is difficult, we have to do it!
For example, in fact, it is not that many places are not suitable for industrial development, but that they do not have this opportunity!
For example, Sichuan, a land of abundance, actually has good conditions, but it has not developed much in recent years. The main reason is that the transportation into Sichuan is relatively poor.
There is no railway, but although there is an ordinary road, it is very difficult to walk on that road.
In terms of shipping on the Yangtze River, the section from Yichang to Chongqing is home to the famous Three Gorges. Not only is navigation very dangerous, but the depth and width of the waterway are insufficient, and the current is very fast, so it is often necessary to use a high-horsepower steamship to go up the river.
Furthermore, this not only increases transportation costs, but also limits transportation volume.
Therefore, so far, the industrial and commercial development in Sichuan is more focused on serving the local light industry, but the proportion is very small.
For the most part, the local area still relies on traditional agriculture.
Sichuan is like this, but other provinces are actually not that good. For example, Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi and other southwestern provinces are not developing very well.
But in Li Xuan's view, it is still possible to develop. Even if it is not to engage in large-scale industry, it is still possible to develop more light industry or specialty product processing industry.
In Li Xuan's opinion, what restricts the development of these places is traffic problems!
Especially in places where inland waterway shipping conditions are not very good, because of inconvenient transportation, economic development, especially industrial and commercial development, has been greatly hindered by places with convenient transportation.
Naturally, Li Xuan would not pretend he didn't see this situation.
In the past few years, the development of the empire's internal affairs was mainly concentrated in places with better conditions. Even the construction of railways was done in places where it was easier to build railways. The development of the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the Bohai Rim area was focused on.
Plus a Huguang.
Now, Li Xuan is already preparing to lean towards other provinces. Anyway, other well-developed provinces have been able to develop independently and sustainably, and they can develop very well without the support of Jinling.
But without the support from Jinling, it is estimated that it will be difficult for other provinces to catch up.
And according to the experience of later generations, if you want to get rich, build roads first!
To develop the local economy, transportation problems must be solved first!
In these days, there is no other way to solve the transportation problems in inland provinces except relying on railways.
For this reason, Li Xuan has already asked Datang Railway Corporation to start planning to build the southwest railway trunk line.
At present, the railway construction in the Tang Empire has basically completed several major trunk lines planned in the early stages.
Mainly from Ningbo to Hangzhou, Shanghai, Zhenjiang, Jinling, Jiujiang, there is also a Jiangnan railway network from Hangzhou to Jinling in the middle.
Then it starts from Hong Kong and passes through Guangzhou, Changsha, Wuhan, Zhengzhou, and Tianjin North-South Main Line Railway.
Next is the East-West Railway, which runs from Jinling to Xuzhou, Zhengzhou, Chang'an, Lanzhou, Suzhou, Hami, Tubo, Kashgar, and Kuri. This railway includes the Beijing-Zhengzhou Railway, the Northwest Railway, and the Central Asia Railway. East and West sections.
Next are the secondary trunk lines, such as:
The Shandong Cross Railway Network is centered on Jinan and connects Tianjin, Xuzhou, Zhengzhou and Qingdao at the same time.
Nanwu Railway from Nanchang to Wuhan.
Then there is the Prairie Railway, which starts from Tianjin and passes through Youzhou, Fengzhou and Black Rock City.
Then there is the Northeast Railway that runs east from Tianjin and passes through Jinzhou, Shenyang, and Harbin.
Then there is the Liaodong Railway heading east from Shenyang, entering the Korean Peninsula, and reaching Busan.
The above-mentioned railway trunk line constitutes the main railway trunk line in the empire. At the same time, there are many railway branch lines surrounding these railway trunk lines. The more economically developed the region, the more railway branch lines there are.
For example, in the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and the North China Plain, there are many railway lines, and their total length is also very long.
However, there are still many places without trains, such as Sichuan, Yunnan-Guizhou, Guangxi and other provinces. Although they have some short-distance railways in their own provinces, they are not connected to the railway network.
The next step that Li Xuan wants the railway company to do is to build the railways in the above-mentioned provinces first. As for more border provinces, such as Turpan Province, Northeastern Province in the north of Heilongjiang, and Hexi in Siberia. Province, Xibei Province will not do it for the time being.
The natural environment there is too harsh. Turpan is a plateau. It will be very troublesome for future generations to build a railway. Don't expect to build a railway these days.
In the northern provinces, there are not even many people, and most of them are frozen soil, which is difficult to repair and will be useless if repaired.
But the southwestern provinces and Fujian are different.
Li Xuan has made a decision, and there will naturally be no delay on the part of the Railway Corporation.
Soon he reported the planned railway construction plan to Li Xuan.
On the Fujian side, the main purpose is to build a railway connecting Jiangxi and Fujian. As for the coastal areas, there is sea transportation, so there is no need to rush to build it.
The railway has been delayed in repairing, purely because the terrain is too complex and the construction cost is too high. At the same time, Fujian's coastal transportation is actually very developed and sea transportation is convenient, so the demand for railway transportation is actually limited.
Now that simple and convenient sea transportation is available, the railway, which is difficult and costly to repair, has naturally been suspended.
After all, there are no shipping safety issues in Fujian now.
The East Taiping Sea is the private territory of the Imperial Navy. It is basically impossible for foreign ships to threaten the safety of the Empire's navigation in this sea area.
As for breaking through the Imperial Navy's blockade and entering the Eastern Pacific Ocean, unless there is an alien invasion, there is no possibility.
It is actually difficult to measure how strong the Tang Empire's navy is these days, because if they randomly pull out a squadron, it will be stronger than all the navies of other countries combined.
During the period when the sun never set, Britain once adopted the two-power standard, and its naval strength exceeded that of the world's second largest and the world's third largest combined.
Although the U.S. Navy after the Cold War has not been clearly announced, its conventional navy plays according to global standards, that is, the U.S. Navy alone can challenge the navies of other countries around the world!
But it was different when it came to the Tang Empire Navy!
The Imperial Navy of the Tang Dynasty never pursued any numerical advantage. What it pursued was absolute control of the global navy!
What is absolute control?
That’s where they want to go!
If you don’t want anyone to go there, don’t let anyone go there!