Though Southern Shandong, Northern Jiangsu, eastern Henan, and Northern Anhui—the four economic zones the Hohenzollern Conglomerate had planned in the Far East—were called economic lowlands, they were in fact the combined result of years of natural disasters and human-caused calamities.
Human-caused disasters had certainly been the main factor. Ever since the Yellow River had changed course during the Song Dynasty, its mouth had remained in Northern Jiangsu, and flooding had never ceased to be a problem. Yet with the Grand Canal, this region had remained one of the most prosperous areas from the Ming Dynasty through the Qing Dynasty.
In its early years, like every unified imperial dynasty, the Qing Dynasty had possessed the ability to govern the Yellow River. Now, having chosen to simply lie flat and let things rot, coupled with the rise of maritime shipping, this region's decline had become inevitable.
Yet by the time the Hohenzollern Conglomerate established itself here, the Yellow River had changed course twenty years earlier, the floods had subsided, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement and the Nian Army had both been suppressed. It was an excellent window for development, and the Hohenzollern Conglomerate had, in a sense, picked up a bargain.
Without the successive natural and human-made disasters, it truly would not have been easy for the Hohenzollern Conglomerate to enter this region. While the floods and warfare had inflicted tremendous damage upon the area, they had also shattered its local feudal economic system.
Take Huai'an Prefecture, for instance. It had once been an important stronghold of the Anhui Merchants during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, second only to Yangzhou, yet it had been seized by the Hohenzollern Conglomerate. In truth, it could not exactly be called a seizure. The Anhui Merchants were currently shifting their focus toward Songjiang Prefecture. With