Chapter 146: Forcing Peace Through War

Finally, at the end of the letter, he wrote that if they agreed to peace talks, a delegation would be sent from Lingao in a few days. The location for the negotiations could be Macao. If the Guangdong authorities had a reply, they could also entrust it to the Jesuits in Macao for delivery.

“In this humble one’s opinion, we have no choice but to negotiate a settlement,” Li Xijue said cautiously.

Since suppression had failed, the only option was to seek a settlement. Wang Zunde’s heart was filled with pain. He knew very well that the task of pacification would likely not fall to him. And the emperor might not even allow him to do so.

He could neither suppress nor pacify. He couldn’t even come up with a viable countermeasure. A sense of powerlessness enveloped him, and he remained silent for a long time. It was only when Li Xijue softly reminded him that he should submit a memorial to the emperor that he was startled back to reality.

Such a great defeat could not be concealed. Once others submitted their memorials, he would lose all initiative. Li Xijue could only remind his master that this matter had to be handled early and quickly, without delay.

Wang Zunde nodded. Although he couldn’t figure out how to write this memorial, what Li Xijue said was entirely correct.

A sense of mental fatigue washed over him. He just nodded and said, “As you wish, sir.” He then waved his hand weakly, dismissing Li Xijue.

“Advisor Lu’s letter…”

“We’ll discuss it another day.”

After Li Xijue left, he gathered the other advisors to discuss the matter. They all agreed to first draft a memorial and submit it to the court as soon as possible, to leave themselves some room for maneuver. An advisor specializing in drafting memorials was assigned to work through the night. At the same time, a messenger was sent to Guangzhou to discuss the aftermath with Governor Li Fengjie and others.

As for the peace negotiations, Li Xijue did not have the audacity to make such a decision on his own, and Lu Yizhong’s letter could not be leaked. He only secretly sent someone to Macao to see if the Australians were willing to come there for further discussions.

The most difficult issue was the remnants of He Rubin’s forces, now trapped in Haikou. Several thousand men were besieged in the Haikou-Qiongshan area, with no supplies from within and no reinforcements from without. Even news was completely cut off. Under the siege of the “kūnzéi bandits’” army, they would likely be annihilated before long.

The death of so many court-appointed military officers at Chengmai was already shocking. If He Rubin was also killed or captured, it would shake the court and the country even more than the great defeat at Chengmai—comparable to the defeat and death of Lu Qin in the sixth year of the Tianqi era. That would truly shake the two Guangdong provinces.

Li Xijue pondered at the advisory meeting, “If only we could safely withdraw General He and his men.”

“The strait is now blockaded, and our navy is at a disadvantage. How can we cross?” an advisor said, shaking his head repeatedly.

The “kūnzéi bandits’” navy had demonstrated its superiority in the small-scale battles to blockade the Qiongzhou Strait. The Guangdong navy was no match for them.

“We must first send spies to secretly infiltrate Qiongzhou and establish contact with General He. After all, we need to know how many troops are left, their morale, and their supply situation.”

“And what if we find out? If we don’t quickly seek a settlement with the ‘kūnzéi bandits,’ I’m afraid General He’s forces…”

“Should we report to His Excellency the Governor-General and ask him to quickly summon General Chen to Zhaoqing for consultation, to see if we can mobilize more troops to relieve General He?”

Chen Ting was the Assistant Regional Commander of Guangdong, stationed in Nan’ao. Although he was nominally an “Assistant Regional Commander,” he was not actually under He Rubin’s command. He was a high-ranking military official who independently guarded a region.

“He has so few troops. What use would they be?” Li Xijue held no hope that any military action could resolve the stalemate. Since twenty thousand government troops had failed to capture Lingao and had been utterly defeated, a few thousand men would be even more useless.

A silence fell in the warm pavilion. The advisors and assistants of the governor-general’s yamen looked at each other. After much thought, besides “pacification,” there was truly no other viable plan.

---

In the operations command room of the Naval Command building in Bopu, Naval Command Minister Chen Haiyang was holding a staff meeting in front of a huge nautical chart of the Guangdong-Hainan area.

Present at the meeting were the naval staff and several Transmigrator military officers. Two non-naval Transmigrator officers were also in attendance. One was the naval advisor, Wen Desi. As an authority on sailing-era navies and shipbuilding, his voice carried great weight. The other was Xu Ke from the Intelligence Bureau, who now held the title of Naval Intelligence Staff Officer, responsible for collecting and organizing naval military intelligence. However, according to Xu Ke, he was just a “do-it-all handyman” at the Foreign Intelligence Bureau.

This unprofessional naval staff highlighted the navy’s predicament in terms of professionalization. There were fewer former navy men among the Transmigrators than army men, and none had ever served as staff officers. This meant that most of the staff work fell on the shoulders of the two highest-ranking naval officers, the People’s Commissar for the Navy and the Minister of Naval Command, both of whom were former professional naval officers. As for Li Di, the naval officer who couldn’t go to sea, he had been serving as the commander of the naval fortress and the port director. Now, Chen Haiyang had simply appointed him as the chief of staff to learn the staff business.

Of course, Li Di’s performance in learning the staff business was not good. He was still at the most basic, unqualified level—an amateur naval officer with little knowledge of basic naval operations had a lot of catching up to do to become a professional staff officer.

The navy had already taken on the task of blockading the Qiongzhou Strait. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a blockade of the strait, as the navy only blockaded the government-controlled ports in Qiongshan County, such as Shenying Port, to prevent the remnants of the government forces from receiving reinforcements from the mainland. Other ships passing through the strait were left alone.

Any ships entering or leaving these ports were seized and escorted to Maniao for processing. All cargo ships attempting to transport goods in or out of the ports of Qiongshan were confiscated. Civilian ships that had been commandeered by the government were allowed to be ransomed by their owners at a low price.

This blockade was devastating to the flow of goods in Qiongshan. True, the Fubo Army had not blockaded the ports in government-held areas like Wenchang, but the ports of other prefectures and counties were of no help to the transport to Qiongshan itself. The prefectures and counties of Hainan relied almost entirely on coastal shipping for the transport of bulk goods. Given the poor condition of the post roads, long-distance land transport of goods was almost impossible.

Tang Yunwen, seeing that the blockading “kūnzéi bandit” warships were mostly small and medium-sized and few in number, made several attempts to break the blockade at sea. Each time, he was utterly defeated. The navy’s ships were no match for the Ming navy of the medieval era in terms of equipment and training. In the end, the navy’s ships completely retreated to the Baisha Naval Base and no longer ventured out.

As a result, Qiongshan was effectively under siege. Although Qiongshan itself was not short of grain stores, and the summer harvest was soon to come, the sense of hopelessness from being cut off from the outside world caused the morale of the besieged government forces to plummet even further.

The initial goal of the naval blockade had been achieved. The Executive Committee believed that the state of war could not continue like this and must be ended as soon as possible. The war had a huge impact on the economy, especially the stagnation of foreign trade. Previously, a large amount of goods, manpower, and money could be obtained from the Guangzhou station every month. Now, besides a small amount of population and goods that could still be transported from Foshan, Leizhou, and other places, this channel was basically cut off.

The losses were not just in transport channels but also in the commercial network. Before the situation became clear, the commercial partners on the mainland were terrified of continuing to distribute “Australian goods.” Even exporting goods to Lingao had become a potentially high-risk business and had become very expensive.

The Executive Committee had originally planned to wait for Xiong Wencan to come and pacify them, so the two sides could hold peace talks. But it seemed it would be some time before Old Xiong came to govern the two Guangdong provinces. According to the historical timeline, he would not be appointed Governor-General of the two Guangdong provinces and Governor of Guangdong until the fifth year of the Chongzhen era. The Transmigrators could not wait that long. They decided to quickly initiate “peace work” to end the state of war between the two sides—at the very least, to restore the flow of goods.

Although many Transmigrators were skeptical about how Wang Zunde or Li Fengjie would deceive their superiors and cover up this great defeat before seeking peace, the Executive Committee believed that was their business and had nothing to do with the Senate—provided they had the will to seek peace.

The Executive Committee had once held a secret meeting on the post-war situation, inviting about thirty Transmigrators to discuss and predict how the situation would develop. The Transmigrators believed that the possibility of another war with the Guangdong officialdom was extremely small, but they had to be wary of the other side adopting a “no war, no peace, no surrender, no retreat” strategy.

“During the Opium War, after the Manchu local officials realized that military means were completely ineffective against the British, they dared not negotiate peace privately, nor were they willing to die in battle for nothing, so they adopted this kind of turtle tactic,” Yu E’shui warned at the meeting. “If the Guangdong government adopts such a method, it will be the biggest threat to us.”

In that case, the Transmigration group would have no choice but to follow the British example and continuously escalate the war until they forced the emperor himself to make the decision to seek peace. But the Transmigration group’s war potential and war machine were not comparable to the British in 1840. The final straw that broke Daoguang’s resistance, the military action of bringing troops to the gates of Nanjing and cutting off the Grand Canal, required a long-range projection force that the navy was not capable of.

“In addition, we must consider that Qiongzhou itself is too remote and not a very important place on the map of the Ming dynasty. Losing it for five or six years is not a particularly important matter for the Ming regime, which is already facing fires on all sides. They can completely put it aside for later. For us, this means being trapped in a long-term state of war—even without armed conflict.”

Therefore, the keynote of the meeting was to take advantage of the chaos in the Guangdong officialdom to quickly bring the flames of war to the foot of Guangzhou, the most prosperous city in southern China, and force the Guangdong officials to seek peace before a worse situation occurred. Since Qiongshan Prefecture was just a remote place, a direct incursion into the Pearl River Delta should be enough to shake the officials throughout Guangdong. At the very least, Li Fengjie would certainly not be able to sit still. As long as he couldn’t sit still, he would have to seek peace.