Chapter 583 Investing in Land and Exploration
So this is a very important reason why Sheffield supports the xenophobic Democratic Party. Inciting blind hatred is helpful to stabilize the dissatisfaction of domestic workers, but when you come to Australia, you have to follow the other side's rules.
Before meeting with the Western Australian Labor Party officials, Sheffield was urging the San Francisco shipyard to work overtime to build battleships and send them to China, as he was afraid that trouble would arise if it was too late.
At this time, the Qing Dynasty was on the verge of collapse. First of all, the bureaucrats representing the Manchu nobles were no longer capable. Ronglu was the last Manchu bureaucrat who could suppress Yuan Datou. There were even rumors that before Ronglu died, he had talked with Yuan Datou about the future of the country and was worried that something unexpected would happen in the future.
Once the Qing dynasty collapsed, the regime would definitely fall into the hands of the Beiyang Army. This is certain. One of the characteristics of the Qing dynasty is that it would never make the same mistakes as the previous dynasties. This includes its attitude towards the army. No matter how bad the national situation was, the Qing government would always try its best to support a decent army. Until the fire of the uprising spread to the south, the Beiyang Army's military pay had always been allocated by the court. In the middle period of many dynasties, the army had become a small self-sufficient group in various places, either turning into beggars or completely becoming private soldiers.
Even if the Qing government did not believe in the series of local armed forces after the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, it always provided as much funding as possible to support them. This meant that the imperial court was still there, which led to the Qing army rarely rebelling. Each of the six Beiyang towns had an artillery regiment, and each battalion had 18 heavy artillery pieces, while the Changgongde division during the Anti-Japanese War had only 12.
Thanks to such powerful firepower, the Beiyang Army was able to capture Hankou and Hanyang, where 100,000 new troops gathered, in a short period of time.
So although the Beiyang Army eventually forced the emperor to abdicate, the Beiyang military leaders also knew that the Qing government had never treated the Beiyang Army unfairly. The transition from the Qing government to the Beiyang government could be considered a peaceful handover, and the Tongmenghui had nothing to do with this process.
If the two battleships fell into the hands of Beiyang in time, Sheffield felt that it would not be a loss. Unlike the Beiyang Six Towns, which had been continuously expanded, resulting in a continuous decline in the number and quality of the Beiyang Army since the Six Towns period, it was not so easy to expand the navy. Moreover, as an aristocratic military branch, the navy could maintain its combat effectiveness for a long time as long as it had government support and its weapons were not behind its opponents. The decline of the navy's combat effectiveness was actually much slower than that of the army if it was not in an era of drastic changes.
In the end, don't let it fall into the hands of those who would rather buy than build. If it falls into their hands, the invisible losses brought to Sheffield will be extremely huge, just like the Soviet Union selling fighter jets to India, and then watching the Indians crash one every week. This is definitely negative advertising.
After sending the telegram in front of Jimmy, Sheffield finally breathed a sigh of relief, which prompted Jimmy to ask, "Boss, you seem to be very optimistic about China's development, otherwise you wouldn't sell battleships to them."
"Haha!" Sheffield smiled but didn't answer. He was optimistic. China would soon experience a free fall, comparable to the New York Stock Exchange during the Great Depression. However, there was no need to tell his subordinates this. He just said, "For an ancient country like this, internal problems need to be slowly adjusted. There is no question of whether it is optimistic or not."
"Just like India?" Jimmy said to himself smartly, thinking he had understood his boss's spirit.
"These two countries are different, and their national cores are different." Sheffield corrected firmly. If the current Western system has more or less the shadow of the Roman Republic and the Senate, the future China can be said to still establish a national system based on centralization.
As for the colorful India, the slave owners had no idea what useful experience they could extract from Indian traditions. Thousands of years of history were not recorded, and what was recorded was related to the Hindu caste system, which was terrible.
The meeting with the Australian state officials had two main purposes. There was no United Bank business, which would be located in the prosperous east side of Australia. In Western Australia, Sheffield's business was agriculture, animal husbandry and mining. That's why he brought Jimmy from United Mining with him.
The first is agriculture and animal husbandry. Australia's agriculture and animal husbandry have great development potential, which is based on vast land and sparse population. Although most of Australia's land is not habitable, the remaining land can still allow the scarce Australians to live a prosperous life.
Everyone knows that the land in the United States is based on private ownership and is freely traded, which has led to the existence of countless family farms in the United States, with one family farm managing thousands of acres of land.
But in the future, the companies that can be called big landowners in the world are not in the United States, not in Brazil which also has a legacy of manor economy, not in Russia and Kazakhstan which have vast land and sparse population, but in Australia.
One hundred years later, of the world's top ten landowners, Australia alone accounted for more than half, and each of them had an area of more than one million hectares. Australia was the paradise for big landowners, and the United States did not even rank on the list.
One of the important cooperations that Sheffield discussed with the Western Australian government was to establish a large ranch, so the slave owners offered to purchase land in Western Australia at a price of four dollars per hectare to purchase 12 million hectares of land as the world's largest food processing base today, mainly raising cattle and sheep and building farms.
The purchased land belongs to the United Company, and the market is mainly for the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and the wool produced is supplied to the United States. In fact, this is just rhetoric. Sheffield has never thought about what to do with such a large piece of land, but it is a pity not to seize the opportunity in sparsely populated Australia.
To increase the strength of his team, Sheffield brought Edith Rockefeller and Louisa Morgan with him. But the two ladies were obviously shocked by the slave owner's gluttonous mouth. Twelve million hectares? Thirty million acres of land? What was this man going to do?
In fact, Sheffield is more accustomed to the metric system. As a company that started out as an agricultural and animal husbandry company, it purchased 120,000 square kilometers of land in order to continue to be a landlord. The purpose is so simple.
Only in Australia could Sheffield dare to quote such a high number. This would be impossible in any other country. First of all, Australia's current relationship with the United States. When McHale came a few years ago, if he had spoken like he is now, he would never have achieved his goal.
But in just a few years, the international environment has changed again. When the Great White Fleet arrived in Australia, it was not fake that it caused cheers from all over the streets. As a colony surrounded by an Asian population several times or even dozens of times larger, Australians themselves knew the difficulty of confrontation and were always looking to their cousins to see if they could rely on them.
The Western Australian Labor Party officials did not directly refuse, which showed that everything was negotiable. In fact, it was a statement. Although four dollars per hectare did not seem expensive, the total amount was too large. In the early 20th century, Sheffield said he would take the huge sum of 50 million US dollars, which was also a considerable expense for Western Australia.
This was not Sheffield's first land purchase. When he passed through South Australia, he had asked the officials of South Australia about the local land prices. However, he did not formally express his intention to buy land. If everything went well in Western Australia, he would make a surprise move when he returned.
For this trip to Australia, Sheffield planned to spend $100 million, of which $30 million would be used to invest in iron ore exploration, because he knew that Australia's iron ore was due to his experience as a keyboard warrior during the iron ore price hike in his previous life. The slave owner knew the approximate location of Australia's iron ore, which was in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
In fact, traces of iron ore have been found in the area, but because the resources are so abundant, almost everyone's attention is focused on the gold mines in Western Australia. Sheffield said that once the gold mines are discovered, he is willing to share them with the Western Australian government. The joint company will take 10% of the fees and the rest will be given to the state government, but copper and iron mines are not included in this scope.
The slave owner had never been so conscientious in the United States. Between gold mines and iron mines, he decisively chose iron mines. But in fact, this is a false proposition. As long as the United Company has a firm foothold in Australia, the next step will be a large influx of capital. If the gold mines are not taken now, they will be taken sooner or later.
Even officials from Western Australia were shocked. Are all foreign friends so conscientious?
Of course you can be so conscientious, but you can never be so conscientious towards your own citizens.
Regarding the purchase of land and exploration in Sheffield, some officials expressed their willingness to allow the joint company to contribute to the development of Australia, while also hoping to open up the market of the United States and strengthen relations between the two countries.
The basic meaning of this statement is that the matter has been agreed upon in principle, but it will take some time to go through the procedures.
Faced with 30 million exploration investment and 48 million US dollars of land purchase funds, the Western Australian government, which still relied on gold mine income in the early 20th century, could not take it lightly. And it seemed so conscientious!
The meeting between the two sides was extremely friendly, and for the sake of the US dollar, everyone was like a family.
"Edith!" After walking out of the state government in Pace, Sheffield suddenly called out to Edith Rockefeller, "Can you accept our son's immigration? Everything here needs to be inherited by someone in the future."
Edith Rockefeller was stunned by this unexpected question, but Louisa Morgan's eyes suddenly became hot, as if she had heard the news while playing a game that the guild president was going to distribute benefits.
(End of this chapter)
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