New Shun 1730

The Dutch smugglers were not without reason to worry.

The direct flights of the Dashun Western Trade Company, coupled with the opium case, should have led to the British thinking about the tea tax issue.

However, the gap between reason and reality is often very huge.

It was different from what the Dutch smugglers had guessed.

This time, the direct flights of the Western Trade Company and the opium case did bring an impact to Britain.

But the direction of the impact was more on the macro-emotional, political and spiritual levels.

As for the more realistic tariff issue, Britain did not immediately solve it.

The British government was busy with other things.

With the signing of the Treaty of Aachen, the Austrian Succession War, which lasted for many years, came to an end.

King George II of the United Kingdom ordered the composer George Friedrich Handel, who returned to London to protest against the Dutch betrayal of the alliance, to compose the "Fireworks Music" suite and held a grand celebration in Green Park.

During the celebration, the huge pillars collapsed, which cast a dark shadow on this "celebration" that had already made the people dissatisfied.

The fireworks show was only held on a small scale in London.

The forces of the "patriots" led by the Prince of Wales also began to fan the flames.

The whole of Britain was asking whether the king was the elector of the Holy Roman Empire or the monarch of England?

People were asking why they were celebrating.

Asking what the War of the Austrian Succession had brought to Britain?

Why was it worth celebrating?

Prussia gained Silesia.

The Habsburgs retained the crown.

Spain gained Parma.

France completed the neutrality of the Netherlands.

Russia received subsidies.

Dashun gained Southeast Asia and started cooperation with the Netherlands.

Even Poland received hundreds of thousands of pounds of money for renting soldiers.

What did Britain get? Is it worth celebrating?

Hanover was saved?

But what does Hanover have to do with the British?

England, Scotland, and Ireland are still clearly divided, and Hanover, far away in the Holy Roman Empire on the European continent, has become an indelible thorn between the British people and the king.

Fighting a war costs money.

It also costs money to aid Austria and give subsidies to Russia.

But the money was not spent from the king's treasury.

A large group of politicians who opposed the current king had already gathered around the king's eldest son, the first heir, the Prince of Wales.

The Austrian War of Succession ended in this way. The king's top priority now was not the issue of trade with China, but the dispute with his own son.

The Prince's Party was already in power.

War, military expenses, war aid paid to the Habsburg family, emergency national debts borne by the East India Company before the war... Now that the war is over, Dashun's cargo ships have also sailed to the English Channel.

But what can Britain do after the war just ended?

Should it choose to go to war in advance and push Dashun back while it is not firmly established in Europe?

But fighting a war costs money.

The East India Company, the only company that can buy emergency national debts, is opposed because it means that their trade in India and China will be strangled by China.

Dutch financial capital, which likes to buy British government bonds the most, has just experienced the Amsterdam stock market crash, and then lent a large amount of capital to the Dashun Huai River Conservancy Bond, which has an interest rate 2% higher than that of the UK.

The extra 2% interest is enough to make the Dutch forget the traditional friendship between Britain and the Netherlands.

The remaining capital either flowed into the Chinese goods auction in seven provinces, or flowed into the smuggling group, or flowed into the Dutch reserved shares of the Dashun Western Trade Company.

Dashun relied on the extreme poverty of the people in the country, the per capita income ridiculed by Europe, and the extremely high return on investment to absorb most of the surplus money in the financial market.

This era is not the era of printing presses, but the era of precious metals.

There is only so much money in the financial market.

Dashun takes one cent, and Britain lacks one cent.

If it is impossible to raise government bonds, then it can only rely on tax increases.

However, in the current situation, how can taxes be increased when the fireworks show was ridiculed by the British people and various political commentators and ended at the beginning?

If taxes cannot be increased, how can the tea tax, which is an important source of government revenue, be cancelled?

There is no shortage of politicians and economists in the UK.

Even the tea tax issue does not require many professional economists to understand: tariffs do not necessarily lead to smuggling, but the highest tariff of 220% will definitely lead to smuggling.

High tea taxes harm the interests of the British people, but benefit the smugglers outside.

However.

Reason is reason.

Reality is reality.

The reality is that no matter who is the prime minister or the chancellor of the exchequer, it is impossible to cancel the tea tax and cancel the government's important fiscal revenue at this time.

Anyone with a discerning eye knows that this war that just ended has not solved anything.

This is not peace, but just a truce with an unknown duration.

The trade issues between Britain and Spain, the colonial issues with France, and the Austro-Prussian issues within the Holy Roman Empire... None of these three powder kegs have been resolved.

Especially the colonial conflict between Britain and France, because the Dashun government was playing the game, Britain had no results.

In this case, the major contradictions in Europe have not been resolved.

It is impossible to cut taxes in the context of expanding the army, preparing for war, and preparing for the next war during the truce period.

The king was busy dealing with his fully fledged son. His son always called his father a "tyrant". This time the war ended in this way, and this title of tyrant can be regarded as irremovable.

The old king is already over 60 years old. After all, in history, his son died of pulmonary embolism while playing tennis. This kind of bizarre situation is a "particularly accidental accident". The old king felt that he would definitely not survive his son.

The confrontation between the two sides escalated rapidly.

Half of the cabinet was busy confronting the "patriots" around the prince's party.

The other half, who were sober, understood that the most important thing to do during the truce was to create a good diplomatic environment before the next war began.

The diplomatic situation was also very unfavorable. Dashun pulled the Netherlands into the armed neutral alliance, and threatened to impose tariffs on Denmark in Denmark. This was obviously trying to win over Russia and Sweden to monopolize the Baltic trade rights. France is not mentioned, Spain is still fighting. If the diplomatic situation cannot be opened up, it will be a big deal next time.

From the king to the cabinet, either out of indifference, or out of helplessness, or busy with the real overall situation, in short, there was not much attention paid to the direct flights and opium case of the Dashun Western Trade Company.

However, the impact of the Dashun Western Trade Company on Britain did cause a real uproar among the people.

The background here is very complicated.

There was the dispute between mercantilism and free trade in Britain because of the previous "confidence in handicrafts" when Dashun was the background board.

There were disputes about parliamentary system, royal power, tradition and modernity, imperial system and virtual monarchy.

There were also disputes about "religion" or "rationality", "rule the country by virtue" or "rule the country by religion".

And these three factions will undoubtedly use Dashun as a scarecrow.

Just like the Britain and China described by Voltaire, the truth is not important, what is important is the position.

The key is that Dashun is too suitable to be this scarecrow.

Too far away, but the goods are close. Before Liu Yu came to Europe, he was calling for free trade. After that, Dashun was the template of the empire - of course, it was a weird template. The three things that are completely unrelated, the moral philosopher king, the absolute monarchy, and the bureaucratic cabinet system, can be freely changed in the mouths of various people as needed.

No one cares what the truth is. What is important is to say what you want to say through China.

He is good.

He is also bad.

The peak of the dispute over "religion" or "rationality" is the Houyhnhnms, which refers to "China in their mouths" in "Gulliver's Travels".

Later generations may not feel the relationship between this Houyhnhnms and China.

That's because the "China" at that time was not the real "China".

It was the China described by a group of people headed by Sir William Temple, "which has surpassed all imagined systems such as Xenophon's system, Plato's ideal country, More's utopia, and Harrington's Oceania, and is ruled by the greatest wisdom and rationality."

It's just that utopia, Oceania, and ideal country are peeled off, and a country that really exists in reality but is intangible and invisible to ordinary people is found.

After all, in an era when most people cannot travel abroad, a real and powerful country sounds more credible than those utopias and Oceanias that are known to not exist.

Now that Dashun has gradually stepped out of the background, the dispute between free trade and mercantilism, rationality and religion, and strengthening the power of the monarch or continuing to weaken the power of the monarch, which has never been decided, has been pushed to a new peak.

This time, the cargo ship of Dashun Western Trade Company sailed directly to Europe. For those opponents, it should be said that it was a nightmare.

It is their own nightmare.

It is also Britain's nightmare.

The more real, the closer, and the more it can be seen everywhere in life, the more terrible this nightmare is.

The so-called own nightmare is a very special emotion that many people in Britain have towards China at this time.

This emotion is difficult to explain clearly.

It is not a simple commodity shock.

We can use a person who has died at this time as an example to understand the mentality of some people in Britain at this time.

For example, Defoe, who wrote "Robinson Crusoe".

There is a paragraph similar to "Two trees in front of the door, one is a jujube tree, and the other is also a jujube tree" to analyze why the author wrote this way.

That is, Defoe always mentioned various "pottery pots" in his various novels.

Woolf, a female representative of stream of consciousness literature and the author of "Mrs. Dalloway", once commented: He repeatedly put an ordinary pottery pot in the readers' attention, allowing us to see the distant deserted island and the depths of the human soul through this pottery pot...

But in fact, why did Defoe always like to write pottery pots and satirize porcelain? Is it really to let readers see the depths of the human soul?

No, in fact, because before Defoe wrote novels, he opened a pottery factory with his friends.

Then, in those years, Chinese porcelain entered the UK in large quantities, and his pottery factory...

So Defoe has been madly criticizing Chinese porcelain and China all his life.

In any of his novels, there must be a paragraph such as "China's technology is actually very poor, just because their soil is good", "porcelain and tea are vampires", "the stupid British people are flocking to China's silly and insignificant waste".

Or it is a description of the Chinese silly way of firing ceramics to burn houses and other weird imaginations.

Of course, Defoe died early, and before his death, Dashun might still be sleeping and passively became a vampire.

The industries affected were limited to the British pottery industry, which was not comprehensive enough.

But this time, the cargo ships of the Dashun Western Trading Company sailed directly to Amsterdam, and the grand auction was on the headlines of newspapers. This was not just the impact on the pottery factory.

If it were just this, it would only be called an impact, not a nightmare.

The nightmare refers to the fact that most of the practitioners and stakeholders in these affected industries are supporters of "free trade".

Including Defoe, they all have a nearly unanimous view:

China is not a country that pursues free trade, so our woolen cloth, pottery, wool, etc. cannot be sold on a large scale in China.

Trade is universal and sacred. Our goods are so easy to sell in Europe, but we can only buy them with silver in China. This must be the reason why China does not engage in free trade.

This is the root of their nightmare.

They believe that it must be China's trade policy that has caused their advantageous products such as woolen cloth, pottery, wool, etc. to be unable to be sold in China.

This confidence comes from their woolen cloth being invincible in Europe.

But in China, they encountered a situation that they could not understand, that they could only buy goods with silver.

It was difficult for Protestants to understand the logic of "because we can't, so we can't".

Instead, they naturally thought that we were very good, and if we couldn't, there must be something wrong with the other party.

Protestants cannot fail, because they are the chosen people of God, and God does not choose waste, so they must be able to do it.

In their previous trade with Europe, they themselves gave the sanctity of free trade.

It has even become a kind of divinity that they believe in and is universally applicable.

The Western Trade Company of Dashun came to Amsterdam this time, actually forcing them to make a choice between "faith" and "reality".

This is the true meaning of nightmare.

If only the industry is impacted, it is not called a nightmare, it is at most a practical problem, not involving the spiritual level.