Chapter 120 Undertaker Sheng Xuanhuai

Among the royal cabinet, Sheng Xuanhuai, the newly appointed Minister of the Post Department of the Cabinet, recommended himself to play this great role. Since Yuan Shikai set off a climax of railway construction, the Qing government has basically identified the model of "if you want to get rich, build roads first".But not all railways can raise funds and design themselves like Yuan Shikai built the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway. Most railways have to borrow money from foreigners to repair.Because the imperial court does not have enough money, after all, there are so many indemnities to pay and so many corrupt officials to support.

But borrowing foreign debt to build roads also has two huge disadvantages: One is to damage the sovereignty of the railway, for example, the management right belongs to the other party. The second is that the loan must be mortgaged by the railway industry. If the principal and interest cannot be repaid when the loan expires, the other party will take the railway as its own. Seeing this, the gentry, represented by the constitutionalists, stood up and took the lead in shouting: reject foreign debts and take care of themselves, and the governors of many provinces stood up to respond. In desperation, the Qing government agreed to allow the provinces to raise funds for the construction of the main railway line.

The specific method is that the Qing government allowed local investment promotion bureaus to attract private capital to build railways in the name of investment promotion.Therefore, many commercial railway companies have been established in various places, absorbing a lot of funds from the private sector. Naturally, the involvement of the constitutionalists is indispensable in this matter.Several of Zhang Jian’s acquaintances are bigwigs related to railways, such as Tang Shouqian, the prime minister of Zhejiang Railway Company, Tang Hualong, the chairman of Hubei Railway Association, Pu Dianjun, the chairman of Sichuan-Han Railway Improvement Association, and Tan Yankai, who initiated Hunan’s “Railway Shareholders’ Meeting” .I would like to add that Tan Yankai's father has appeared as a secondary player before. He is Tan Zhonglin, Governor of Guangdong and Guangxi.

However, only eight words can be used to describe this kind of commercial railway company - the enthusiasm is commendable, but the method is wrong. Not to mention the lack of funds, there is also a lack of overall planning for road construction, and even the width of the docking rails is different.As a result, the efficiency of road construction is extremely low. What's even more hateful is that many corrupt elements took the opportunity to fill their own pockets and embezzle public funds, causing the company to be unable to make profits for a long time.For example, the Sichuan Railway suffered a loss of as much as three million taels of silver.

With such a bad situation, for Sheng Xuanhuai, Minister of Posts and Communications who is in charge of road construction in the cabinet, he must stand up to speak out and think of a solution for the public; privately, he has a plan-building road It needs a large amount of rails, so that the fertile water does not flow to outsiders' fields, and it can be handed over to its own Hanyeping Company for production, and the road construction will definitely require borrowing from Western banks, so I can also take the opportunity to earn some kickbacks. Therefore, on May 9, 1911, Sheng Xuanhuai announced the implementation of the "State-owned Railway Main Line Policy" in order to promote the "Road Construction Project to Get Rich", and decided to nationalize the "right of way".

The so-called rights of way are actually mostly half-assed projects.He hopes to solve the funding problem in the form of foreign bank shares, and at the same time hand over the construction rights to foreign companies, so as to solve the situation of rampant corruption and low construction efficiency, and quickly establish a domestic railway network. In fact, Sheng Xuanhuai's method is basically correct.In the case of insufficient funds, what is wrong with introducing foreign capital to build ourselves?In fact, the Beijing-Hanzhou Railway and the Shanghai-Nanjing Railway, which were built with foreign capital, have been completed one after another, and the benefits have been seen early, which is not comparable to those commercial railways.

However, in the process of implementing a good policy, something went wrong. Sheng Xuanhuai did not consider or deliberately ignored the interests of shareholders in Sichuan.Sheng Xuanhuai's closing plan is: different provinces treat them differently. For example, Hunan and Hubei basically return the cash at the original price when the shareholders bought shares, while Guangdong returns the cash after a certain discount according to the loss situation, while Sichuan does not return a penny of the cash, and all the capital invested by the shareholders is converted into national bonds. returned to shareholders.

Sheng Xuanhuai's reason for doing this is that the shares in the first three provinces are all "commercial shares", which means that they are basically funded by gentry, while nearly 70% of the shares in Sichuan Province come from the "rental shares" of farmers in the province. "Rent shares" are scattered silver taels from each farmer, and it is difficult to return to the farmer's hands-many farmers may no longer exist, or the receipts in hand are gone. In short, the amount paid to each farmer is not large, and the money from farmers is easy to bully. Sheng Xuanhuai did this, so he didn't even have to return the money he brought to the gentry from Sichuan, and it was directly nationalized.Killing two birds with one stone, the country took advantage of nearly 10 million taels of silver in Sichuan.

When the news reached Sichuan, it exploded immediately. Of course, when the conflict was not too intense, if the central government represented by Sheng Xuanhuai could communicate well to appease the Sichuan people and return some cash, the problem might be solved, at least the conflict would not be intensified. However, a small incident that happened after that broke out in a way that was beyond everyone's expectations with high intensity and on a large scale, and finally turned into an armed riot. what trifle?The Sichuan constitutional faction established the "Road Protection Comrade Association" to oppose the closure of the road.