The machine flour mill of Gao Jinzhong and others is located by a small river, and its name is "Rabbit Hole Flour Factory" - a very vulgar name. There are currently only eight workers, or eight shareholders in the factory, because they cannot afford to hire additional full-time workers, and can only spend money to hire people to buy wheat in a short time during the busy season of the wheat purchase season every year. Now, under the promotion of some economic liberal elements, the private trade of miscellaneous grains (corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, soybeans, etc.) was liberalized, and then a few months ago, the transaction of three main foods, wheat, rice and sorghum, was also liberalized, which suddenly activated the domestic grain market. Of course, the transaction price must be controlled by the government, that is, only a certain amount of up and down floating outside the guide price of the Ministry of Agriculture was allowed. In the past, it was 10%, but now it is 20%.

In addition to buying raw materials for grain, flour mills and farmers in various places also have to compete for tight transportation tools, such as carriages, ships and even trains. Of course, trains are not the turn of small business owners like them to talk about it. The transportation cost of carriages is too high and is only suitable for short-distance transportation in the county and townships. Therefore, the competition for transport ships is very critical.

In fact, it is not just the machine powdering industry, but also other industries currently include private brick and tile kilns, lime kilns (supplementing the insufficient production of large state-owned building materials companies), wood product processing workshops (mostly opened by carpenters, processing various furniture, musical instruments, wooden barrels and other daily necessities), private fishing product processing workshops (mostly fishing in the river such as Duck Lake and Milin Lake and artificial breeding of box cages) and so on. With the implementation of the grand strategy of accelerating the development of productivity levels and creating more material wealth, today with increasingly abundant private capital, various private workshops have developed like mushrooms after a rain. Therefore, higher requirements have been put forward for the existing infrastructure, transportation, financing and other services in the East Coast Republic.

Not to mention anything else. Just talk about the private shipbuilding industry. Currently, in the Yazi Lake basin (Zhenhai County, Xihu County, Ping'an County). Private shipbuilding yards have been built as many as four or five, among which the largest and most high-end one is naturally the Xinxing Shipyard built by former Minister of Transport Xiao Bailang, current senior manager of the modern special shipyard Wei Hua and Zhang Xiao (through agents). This shipyard is located near the later city of Palmares in the northeast corner of Yazi Lake, with more than 80 workers.

Some of them are technicians poached from three major shipyards with high salaries. In addition, they also ask people to recruit technicians in Europe through relationships to further expand their technical team. In addition, the factory is also preparing to build a vocational school in order to cultivate talents on its own in the future. This factory is also the only one among many private shipbuilding companies in China that can be named "factory". Others are either insufficient funds, insufficient scale, or insufficient technical strength, and they cannot get the market.

However, there are still many problems in Xinxing Shipyards. First, they do not have large docks and ship platforms, and cannot make large profitable ships; in addition, they have not yet obtained a steam engine use license approved by the State Council - which is particularly difficult for private enterprises to obtain. Therefore, the factory currently produces small ships with sail power, generally no more than 150 tons, and generally no more than 10 crew members. They are mainly used for bulk cargo transportation on fixed routes.

At present, the improvement of state-owned transportation capacity is relatively slow due to various reasons. In addition, the Executive Committee is also intending to relax some industries to provide extra funds to relieve domestic inflation pressure. Therefore, the current situation of domestic water transportation capacity is that state-owned transportation capacity still occupies the mainstream, but the proportion is gradually declining; small ships mainly in several tons or even dozens of tons have gradually undertaken a considerable number of inland river transportation tasks. These ships only require two or three boatmen to start, and drive forward in the inland river with poles or rowing, which is very practical.

The timber required for shipbuilding is partially imported from abroad and partly provided by China. At present, near the entrance of the Mishui River (the Great Arroyu River, so the river water carries a lot of mud and sand), people on the east coast have built a large timber trading market, and most of the timber required for domestic shipbuilding can now be purchased here (except for the timber required for naval shipbuilding, but it is not ruled out that the Navy occasionally purchases secondary-level timber construction auxiliary ships on the market).

This market is so large that it almost covers more than 60% of the country's non-military timber trade, such as the Parana pine provided by some logging farms in the hilly areas of the lake in China according to the cut-off quota, such as the suma from Brazil, the Central American husk exported by the British, the Southeast Asian teak exported by the Dutch, and the rare trees (Spanish walnut, Jamaican mahogany) exported by some "unscrupulous" Spanish merchants or Genoa merchants, and of course, we cannot forget the red sandalwood, yellow sandalwood, African ebony imported from the New China region. In short, this market has everything, from species to quantity.

All wood transported from abroad was first inspected by customs in Sanpaotai Township, Zhenhai County and paid customs duties. Then the water digger boarded the ship to guide the ship along the opened deep waterway to the Mudshui River timber trading market. In recent years, due to war and capacity factors, the gap in high-quality wood in the East Coast Republic has been quite large, especially the demand for high-end furniture, musical instruments, horse-drawn carriages and ship-making materials.

At the beginning, the Ministry of Trade was criticized by the Ministry of Trade for its lack of high-quality wood for shipbuilding. While they switched to the second-class New China Wood, they also demanded that the Ministry of Trade significantly lower the tariffs on various high-grade timbers, including guarantor, Brazilian suma and Spanish walnut. The Ministry of Trade was also criticized by the Executive Committee. In desperation, as for those rare wood and the wood transported from the New China Colony, the tariffs were zero, which made the Ministry of Trade a little satisfied.

To be fair, the wood shipped from abroad is not cheap, and its unit freight rate (per Rhodes) ranges from 5-10 yuan. However, due to its various advantages in quality and size, it still has a great impact on the wood logging, processing and a series of downstream industries in the East Coast. Let’s take the big pine as an example. The big pine wood, fir and other logs shipped from the New World (especially North America) are extremely huge, and the texture is also quite good, significantly exceeding the forest in the hilly areas of the East Coast Lake. More importantly, the production capacity of timber resources on the East Coast is seriously insufficient - this industry can also be said to be a labor-intensive industry, and it is also impossible to use machine logging on a large scale, so the local timber production capacity of the East Coast has always been quite limited, and at the beginning it could only meet three-quarters of the domestic demand.

However, with the great development of various industries in the East Coast, the consumption of important industrial and agricultural raw materials, wood, has increased significantly, and the original domestic output has gradually become less than enough. In addition to the previous economic depression that lasted for one and a half years, the contradiction between supply and demand of wood has always been very prominent. The Ministry of Trade urgently contacted the Dutch people for this purpose. The English began to increase imports, and at the same time lowered tariffs, giving foreign captains who came to trade with preferential tax rates. It is not a bad thing to attract foreign captains, because they will never return to the starting point without buying any goods.

In addition to importing these logs, people on the East Coast particularly like to import a large amount of processed round wood, pine boards, wide boards, narrow boards, barrel boards, etc., which will greatly make up for the shortcomings of the East Coast processing capacity. You should know that the large ships and boats, rail trucks, road heavy trucks, rail sleepers, gun mount brackets, tool materials, etc. alone that exported to the Ottoman Empire has already overwhelmed the wood processing industry in the East Coast. Some of the time-consuming and laborious but profitable small products should be gradually separated from state-owned factories. Part of these stripped industries will be undertaken by domestic capital - of course they need to find workers themselves; on the one hand, they are subcontracted for processing abroad. At present, many wood processing workshops have emerged in the Portuguese towns between the Gerard Mountains.

There are at least a dozen people in these workshops, and the few are a master and two or three apprentices. They take over the orders placed by the East Coast people, use hydraulic power or footwork machinery eliminated from the East Coast, and process various standard sizes of wood with efficiency several times higher than the old continent, and then transport them to the East Coast to settle material fees and processing fees. In addition, there are a large number of handicraftsmen serving the East Coast Republic in these towns. It can be said that the number of Portuguese villages and towns near the Gerard Mountains has increased to six Portuguese villages and towns, at least economically, have been firmly included in the East Coast system.

The government on the East Coast had no control over them and had no obligations, but through the magic of money, these towns were driven to operate according to the will of the East Coast. This magic even transcended the chasm of race, religion and culture, allowing the Portuguese, Germans, Irish and Scots who had come from the Old Continent to produce a large number of handmade products for the East Coast that they did not produce. At the same time, they purchased a large amount of daily necessities from the East Coast to maintain their lives, which was equivalent to returning a large part of the hard-earned profits. They were unable to even be self-sufficiency and needed to buy east coast flour from Ping'an County nearby, just like the standard East Coast colonial economic system.

However, overall, with the accelerated population growth of the East Coast Republic of China and the gradual increase in tariffs on ordinary large woods such as large pine and fir from abroad (increased at the strong demands of domestic manufacturers to protect domestic industries), the self-sufficiency rate of east coast wood is also gradually increasing. At least, in the first ten months of 1648, more than half of the imported wood from the New China Colony, an increase of eight percentage points compared to a year ago! (To be continued, please search for astronomy, novels are better, updated and faster!
Chapter completed!