Chapter 84: The Choice

Luoding was a land of barren mountains and foul waters. Its prefectures and counties had suffered years of war, and the surviving population numbered less than ten thousand.

Worse, it lay between Ming and Qing spheres of power, a place both sides would have to take if they wished to advance — what was called a repeatedly contested ground.

Clearly, a territory where fighting could break out at any moment did not suit the Taiping Camp's interests, nor could it possibly allow the Taiping Camp to grow and strengthen.

From ancient times to the present, any power that wished to develop relied on nothing more than population, money, and grain. To maintain troops one needed money and grain; to have money and grain one first needed people.

Only with people, money, and grain could one do things like "store grain broadly, build walls high, and delay claiming kingship" — or, in the words of later internet novels, farm, farm, and farm again, then use money, grain, population, and superior institutions and weapons to bulldoze the enemy.

Yet Luoding was precisely the sort of place that lacked population, money, and grain. With no men, no money, and no grain, how was one supposed to play the game?

Herding commoners along to swell one's own strength was one thing, but no one in this world had ever gone the distance by herding commoners and only plundering without ever sowing!

Even Li Zicheng in his later period threw his strength into developing a base in the Hu-Xiang region, and Zhang Xianzhong, after all his running about, still ended up fleeing to Sichuan to try to settle and develop for a while.

Had the Qing army not suddenly poured through the pass, the Great Xi and Great Shun dynasties might well have staged a "Shun-Xi struggle for supremacy."

Herding was only a means, never the end.

Without a secure place to develop, even if he herded another hundred thousand commoners into the camp, Zhou Shixiang did not believe he could contend with the two traitor princes in Guangzhou.

He could not even be sure of beating Geng Jimao and Shang Kexi, let alone the Mongol Eight Banners or the Manchu Eight Banners.

More troops were needed, troops had to be drilled, troops had to eat and drink, and equipment had to be upgraded — so what to do? Beneath every tall tower there must be a foundation.

To truly become an army that made the Qing army tremble at the mere rumor of its approach, one first needed a territory where one could develop in peace. That territory was the foundation beneath the tower — indispensable!

After much deliberation, Zhou Shixiang decided to use Luoding, that chicken rib of a place, and the Taiping Camp's ten-thousand-odd men as bargaining chips in a deal with the Gaozhou side.

He did not ask for much — only that the Southern Ming authorities in Guangdong allow the Taiping Camp to take any one county in the coastal prefectures of Lian or Lei for garrison and supply.

As long as the other side agreed, it did not matter whom the Taiping Camp nominally obeyed. After all, he was already flying the banner of the Yongli Son of Heaven and claiming the Yongli Son of Heaven's righteous cause.

As for whom he actually obeyed, that hardly mattered.

Once he truly had a secure place, whether he answered summons and decrees then would be a matter for later. In this age, generals who held troops and ignored summons were everywhere.

The Yongli Son of Heaven could not even command Sun Kewang, the Southern Ming's greatest warlord — surely no one would fix their eyes on his mere thousand-odd men.

As for why he chose a county in Lianzhou or Leizhou rather than Gaozhou or Qiongzhou — the answer was simple.

Zhou Shixiang had heard from Song Xianggong that the one truly in control of Gaozhou was neither the Four-Prefecture Governor Zhang Xiaoqi nor the Guangdong Governor-General Lian Chengbi, but Regional Commander Le Tongwu, who served under the Prince of Xining, Li Dingguo.

Li Dingguo's great name was renowned in both his past life and this one. At first, Zhou Shixiang's plan had been to go to Guangxi and join Li Dingguo.

Only later, unwilling to live under another's roof and entrust the national fate of resisting the Qing and his personal vengeance to others, he had seized the opportunity of Cheng Bangjun recruiting the bandits of Daqiao Mountain to urge Boss Hu and the others to seize Luoding — so that, on the eve of China's complete fall to an alien race, he might hold a piece of ground and accomplish something.

Say a thousand words, say ten thousand — to forge iron, one must be hard oneself. As long as he had troops under his command, why borrow another's hand?

Having set his heart on standing on his own, Zhou Shixiang was naturally unwilling to go to Gaozhou. First, he feared Li Dingguo's troops would not accept them; second, he feared being swallowed by Li's forces.

After all, the Daxi Army was far too powerful — compared with them, the Taiping Camp was no more than a baby just learning to crawl.

How could a baby trade blows with a strong man?

Thus Gaozhou was naturally ruled out by Zhou Shixiang.

Moreover, there were many Southern Ming factions within Gaozhou: Li Dingguo's army, the Four-Prefecture Governor Zhang Xiaoqi's troops, and, it was said, several units under Governor-General Lian Chengbi were also stationed there for supply.

Zhou Shixiang did not know how these factions had reached their agreement to garrison Gaozhou, but he did know that Gaozhou was in fact not wealthy either. Supporting so many troops at once must have long since made the people of Gaozhou miserable.

If he plunged the Taiping Camp's ten-thousand-odd men in as well, he feared they would get little money or grain to sustain them.

Rather than eat others' leftovers, better to seek another way out. Qiongzhou — the later island of Hainan — was, from a long-term development standpoint, actually a good place.

Because Qiongzhou lay far from the mainland, there was no worry that the Qing army would cross the sea to attack. Without threats, one could naturally throw off all restraints and develop vigorously — climb the tech tree, or set off a technological explosion of inventions.

Whether it succeeded or not, at least one could work in peace, without worrying today about tomorrow.

But while distance from the mainland meant freedom from enemy attack, the problem lay precisely in that distance — Zhou Shixiang had no navy!

Had he possessed a powerful fleet like Zheng Chenggong's, Zhou Shixiang would have headed for Qiongzhou without a second word. But he did not — to say nothing of a single ship, he did not even have a single sailor.

Furthermore, Han people were scarce on Qiongzhou Island; the island was mostly inhabited by native peoples, such as the Li.

Zhou Shixiang bore no hostility toward the island's natives, but as a Han man, he carried in his subconscious the idea of Han supremacy — in later terms, he was a Han nationalist.

A Han nationalist accepted only his own race, affirmed only his own race's interests, and placed his own nation's interests above all. Other peoples — those willing to become Han were gladly accepted; those unwilling were met with blade and spear.

The Han possessed the highest and most advanced civilization in this world; most other peoples still lagged behind. Therefore civilization naturally had to absorb the backward — surely one could not let barbarism swallow civilization instead.

The Han people themselves had constantly absorbed foreign peoples; thousands of years of history had long proven that the Han's inclusiveness far surpassed that of any other people on earth.

Therefore Zhou Shixiang's Han nationalism was by no means an extreme racism; on the contrary, he was a pragmatic nationalist.

He was glad when non-Han peoples willingly merged into the great Han family, enjoying the civilization the Han had created and progressing together with it.

In terms of human feeling, he had no thought of exterminating any people; rather, he hoped all peoples would disappear — not in the sense of physical extinction, but in the sense that they would all become Han.

Only by becoming one family, one people, would China be free of ****, free of those eight blood-carved words — "Those not of our race must have different hearts."

In any case, the fact that Qiongzhou Island's natives outnumbered its Han was not the reason Zhou Shixiang was unwilling to go there. The main reason was still that he had no navy — a navy capable of dominating the Southern Seas!

Without a navy, there was no way to transport population on a large scale, nor to wage campaigns abroad.

Ten years, twenty years... with no way to draw large numbers of Han from the mainland to fill Qiongzhou, Zhou Shixiang simply could not build the Taiping Camp into an elite force of a hundred thousand men or more.

Moreover, no matter how well one developed Qiongzhou, it was still only an island. To expel the barbarians and restore China with the strength of a single island was plainly hard to achieve.

Zheng's Taiwan and the later Chiang Taiwan had both proven this. So unless it was absolutely unavoidable, Zhou Shixiang would not go to Qiongzhou, because doing so would to some degree mean he might never again in this life return to the mainland, return to his homeland.

"Choose any one county in Lianzhou or Leizhou. If the Governor agrees, from this day forward the Taiping Camp will follow your lead!"