My Apprenticeship to Uncle Jiu: I Was a Warlord in the Republic of China

Time passed day by day, and three months passed in the blink of an eye.

During this period, thanks to William's strong support, various factories were successfully built, school libraries were officially put into operation, and facilities such as hospitals, nursing homes and orphanages were also arranged.

The most important thing is that after the hard work of the 20,000 workers, the 600-mile main road of the county town was successfully completed.

Afterwards, he kept his promise and released the 15,000 prisoners. In order to prevent them from causing trouble, he also assigned them jobs.

Allowing them to quickly integrate into today's society without the oppression of landlords and powerful people, there will naturally be some soldiers who refuse to change their bad habits and continue to do as they please.

Jiang Li would certainly not tolerate them and would directly invoke the laws of the Qing Dynasty to deal with them all according to the law.

After that, these more than 10,000 people obviously restrained themselves a lot, and the number of people committing crimes dropped drastically.

In addition, because the number of blood mushrooms planted has quadrupled, all kinds of livestock in Qinghe County farms have been fed feed mixed with blood mushroom powder. It will probably not be long before the soldiers will be able to eat meat that can strengthen their bodies.

The confused breeders unexpectedly discovered that the livestock were becoming more energetic and their growth rate was significantly accelerated. However, since they were unaware of the existence of blood mushrooms, they had no idea what was going on.

Just when Jiang Li was vigorously developing infrastructure and industrial power, the outside world was in chaos.

As the saying goes, a centipede is still alive even after death. After all, the Qing Dynasty lasted for two or three hundred years, and there were still many princes and nobles alive. Many of them still dreamed of restoring their country.

The most powerful one was named Aisin-Gioro Puwei. He was the great-grandson of Emperor Daoguang Minning, grandson of Prince Gong Yixin, cousin of Emperor Xuantong Puyi, and was also known as the Master of Xijin Zhai.

His father was Zaiying, the second son of the first Prince Gong, Yixin. Because Yixin's eldest son Zaicheng died without an heir, Puyi was adopted by Zaicheng as his son.

He was a man of strong will and courage. Even after the Qing Dynasty was officially declared destroyed, he was still unwilling to give in. He used his former connections and the savings of his ancestors to form an army to try to restore his country.

However, he knew that with his strength, it was impossible for him to defeat the warlords and re-unify the country, so he took his army back to his hometown in Northeast China and occupied a piece of land in Dandong, which borders North Korea.

At that time, North Korea had been colonized by an island country and there were several powerful warlords around it. In order to protect himself, he simply surrendered to the island people.

He attempted to use their power to restore his country, and at this time the islanders were also willing to reach out to China, so they readily agreed to his request.

They provided him with a lot of support in terms of weapons and equipment, and helped him to annex several pieces of territories, allowing him to gain a firm foothold.

But how could the Japanese let him grow bigger? When he wanted to expand further, the Japanese no longer gave him much help.

However, with the small number of men he had, they were more than enough to protect themselves but were far from enough to expand into other areas. In desperation, he had to change his strategy and use diplomatic means to stir up trouble.

First, he won over a group of Qing dynasty remnants who had considerable wealth and power in the Northeast, and with their help, he achieved some victories.

After that, he continued to deceive the Mongolian nobles and the old people from other provinces, asking them to recruit soldiers and form armies in various places, occupy a piece of land and develop on their own.

But he was not done with all this, he sent out many of his men to live as bandits in the mountains all over the country.

After they have developed some power, they will try to sow discord among warlords of similar strength, attempting to make them fight each other in order to weaken their power.

Among those people, except for a small number who failed for their own reasons, most of the others succeeded.

In addition to the fact that these people have good abilities, the main reason is that there have been constant natural disasters and man-made disasters in recent years, and some of them are displaced.

With a wave of their arms, they can quickly gather a team, and then they will rob villages, and keep snowballing, and soon they will be able to gain a foothold in a place.

When the local warlords came to encircle and suppress them, they simply hid in the mountains. Those small warlords with not very high combat effectiveness could not do anything to them.

As soon as they retreated, these guys jumped out again and secretly instigated wars among warlords in various places.

If it were just them, it wouldn't have had such a wide impact. However, after the Japanese saw this, they immediately joined in, continuously reselling arms and allowing their power to grow.

It was with the funding from the islanders that the number of people who were ordered to rob increased, their power grew, and some of them were even able to directly eliminate some small warlords.

It is precisely because these people's power continues to grow and, under their constant stirring, wars break out everywhere in China.

At the beginning, it was just a fight between some small warlords, then there were some medium-sized battles, and later the big warlords also started to join the fight, and for a while the whole country was in chaos.

The instigator, Aisin-Gioro Puyi, naturally took this opportunity to expand rapidly.

...

It was April 1923, and Jiang Lizheng had just completed the rice planting and started planting corn and sweet potatoes. As for pumpkins, they had been planted a month earlier.

Speaking of which, Jiang Li's territory has become quite prosperous after nearly three years of development. With the strong support of William and Earl Edward, his industry has also made considerable progress.

Especially in the military industry, he now has four arsenals and can produce rifles, light machine guns and heavy machine guns by himself.

Even grenade launchers, mortars, and some small-caliber mountain artillery have been mass-produced.

Unfortunately, the development of machinery is a little backward. Although he now has two automobile manufacturing plants, he cannot produce the key engines by himself and can only rely on imports.

As for bullets, grenades and the like, there is no need to mention it. Hundreds of thousands of them are produced every day, and now his arsenal is already full.

During these three years, he has been developing steadily step by step, fighting a battle to occupy some territory, and then moving on to the next step after digesting it. There is no situation where he takes too many steps and makes mistakes.

As a result, his territory only doubled in three years, with only 38 counties under his jurisdiction, occupying only one-third of Guangdong, and a population of only about 10 million.

There are only 13 million acres of farmland. This is of course because Guangdong has many mountains and relatively less arable land. Fortunately, two years ago, Antonio had mastered the technology of industrial production of fertilizers.

Now, he is able to produce chemical fertilizers on his own, and use them together with farmyard manure to greatly increase grain production, and then combine them with orchards, mountain products from the mountains, and mushrooms from the mushroom cultivation base to produce other side dishes.

His grain output was able to fully meet the needs of the people. Because there were no landlords as middlemen, and because he established the regular price warehouse and price bureau, he controlled the hoarding and reselling of grain by unscrupulous merchants, so that the grain price under his rule remained stable.