Chapter 405 — Gao Yang's Grand Plan
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
Not to mention that this plan also amounted to abandoning more than eighty percent of the South's land in the short term. Once the population was all concentrated along the White Water River–Dark Mountains belt, what would become of the resources and the cleared farmland of the rest of the South? Without that resource output and those grain-producing regions, Cecil's present level of development alone could never sustain a self-sufficient industrial structure built on a population in the millions.
So Gao Yang could only choose the second plan: to move only the population of the southern districts, settling them in Cecil's north-bank development zone and along the east and west flanks to form new industrial belts, while concentrating the population of the other regions nearby. By establishing second-tier civil administration halls, several sub-tier new cities would be built in those other areas. Since there was already experience from forming a second-tier civil administration hall in the Kande region, this plan was highly feasible.
And in this way Gao Yang could also ensure control over most of the South. The resources scattered across it would be fully developed and poured, endlessly, into the belly of that great beast, the arcane industry.
Of course, the pressures to be faced were still enormous, but Gao Yang had every reason to do it.
"Population migration, building an arcane industrial system like Cecil's, having experienced Cecil administrators take charge of the construction — forging a new order and promoting arcane industrialization is only one of the goals. The other is to destroy the foundation on which the old noble system depends for its survival."
Having spent so long at Gao Yang's side, Hetty grasped his meaning at once: "Land and population?"
"Exactly," Gao Yang nodded. "It isn't enough simply to outlaw this batch of landed nobles or kill them. So long as their land and population system remains, sooner or later new landed nobles will appear. So we must break this system and make certain the old nobles can never come back."
The old nobles secured the authority and stability of the noble system by granting land in fief, and the land system that existed alongside it bound commoners tightly to that land. Commoners could not leave their lord's land at will, could not even do anything other than work it. In the days when Anzu's nationhood was not yet secure, this enfeoffment maintained the basic order of the whole country, but once the age of arcane industry arrived, that state of affairs — people bound to the land — became a set of shackles.
Under the agricultural model Cecil had built on large-scale industrial production of alchemical potions and centralized, efficient farming, a considerable part of the agricultural population could be converted, and indeed needed to be converted, into industrial population.
Gao Yang's population migration was, on one hand, a necessary means of building arcane industry, because an ample population enjoying basic freedom to labor is the precondition for ensuring productive forces; on the other hand, it was meant to utterly destroy the soil in which the old nobles of the South lived.
Of course, saving on administrative costs was part of it too. Cecil's administrative strength was limited, after all, and the South was vast; what Gao Yang meant to build in the South's other regions was the same advanced administrative system as Cecil's, and to achieve that degree of management across the whole South, the present state of affairs — sparse population over wide land, and a chaotic structure of settlements — had to be changed.
Rationally concentrating the population, redistributing land, and establishing a more scientific and standardized structure of towns and villages were all effective approaches.