Han’s Son is Not a Slave

Generally speaking, the settlement of debts in Songjiang, Suzhou and other places has come to an end, and the amount of taxes on the income from the debts is staggering. If it was in the past, it must be a considerable amount of income, which is enough to alleviate the current financial crisis of the Dingwu court. However, in today's troubled times, gold and silver are obviously not more important than food. Gold is hidden in troubled times, and jade is hidden in prosperous times. This is the philosophy of the ancients to avoid chaos and protect themselves, but at the turn of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, this principle is somewhat inapplicable.

After Wanli, border troubles were not the main reason for the collapse of the Ming Dynasty, but the rebellion of rogue peasants. The reason why the peasants fought so hard was because the natural disaster left them without food to feed their stomachs. In order to survive, they raised the pole and rebelled against the Ming Dynasty, until the Ming Dynasty was overthrown to the ground. The Han peasants can be said to be the most industrious and obedient group in the world. They will not rebel unless they are in a desperate situation. Submissiveness can be said to be the most typical portrayal of Han peasants. However, they still rose up and rebelled, because they really couldn't survive, and they couldn't survive selling their sons and daughters.

The peasants rebelled, and the Ming Dynasty naturally wanted to suppress it, but in addition to suppression, there was another means to disintegrate the crisis of the empire, and that was effective disaster relief. It's a pity that there was no food in the Ming Dynasty, and the money could not buy food, and the money could not be collected. After the Qing Dynasty entered the customs, the massacre of the city was not only to intimidate the Han people so that they would not resist, but also because they had no food. To not repeat the mistakes of the Ming Dynasty, reducing the population is the only and most effective means.

Where did the food go, Zhou Shixiang has been thinking about this issue, and natural disasters are definitely not the most critical reason. No matter how big a disaster is, it is impossible to spread all over the country at the same time. In fact, the natural disasters in the late Ming Dynasty have always been concentrated in the northwest region, and the Central Plains and Jiangnan have hardly been affected, or the severe cold climate is not enough to destroy the production in these places. people can still live. But why the Central Plains has become so dilapidated and become a hardest hit area, in Zhou Shixiang's view, this is because the peasant army and the Ming army continue to go back and forth.

The peasant army without a base had to live and to **** food from other people. If they want to grow their team, they must encompass the young and strong. Without young and strong people in their homes, production will stagnate, and it will not be necessary to go back and forth several times. No matter how rich and stable places are, they will become disaster areas. The result is a cycle of evil consequences, one after another. Broken ground. As the official army of the Ming army, the soldiers are not as good as the bandits, and it is naturally the driving force that aggravates the disaster.

The inefficient Ming government and the huge gentry class were also the key reasons for the destruction of the Ming Dynasty. The former imperial power did not go to the countryside, resulting in a very low government operation, and very few taxes were collected or used, which could not solve the problem at all. The situation faced by Emperor Chongzhen also corresponds to the saying that a clever daughter-in-law can hardly cook without rice. If you want to make a difference, you need to compete with the people for profit and ask the officials to donate money, but no one responds. This is impossible. The gentry were sitting on fertile fields, but they refused to take out the money and grain, and in the end they could only be swallowed up by the tide of peasant uprisings. What's even more ridiculous is that some officials are able to say why you don't wait for your death honestly, but come out to rebel against the court. Is this a human word?

Don't be starving to death, especially the mantis!

Jiangnan has an extremely developed economy, but it is difficult for the Ming Dynasty to benefit from it, and Jiangnan itself has a big fatal flaw, that is, the more developed the economy, the less food there is. This result led to the great chaos in the north, but the purse of the Ming Dynasty could not play a role for the court. Even if the gentry in the south of the Yangtze River know the general situation and take the overall situation into consideration, they should pay a lot of money to the court, and Emperor Chongzhen cannot solve the northern land where the bees are everywhere. Because silver buys things, it is called money. It cannot buy things, it is just a piece of metal. In the flood of oceans, is it possible for those with burlaps to live on trees, or those with money to live?

Zhou Shixiang has never been a person who sits at home and decides things by slapping his forehead. He needs money to solve the current financial problems, but he sees it more clearly than the officials in the court, and also grasps the essence of the problem at the end of the Ming Dynasty. It is food that decides everything. In order to obtain food, Zhou Shixiang started to resume production since he raised his army, and even sent troops to Annan.

With food, people can't starve to death, so they can talk about other things. Without food, a pile of gold and silver is useless.

After recovering the southern capital and occupying Jiangnan, Zhou Shixiang was under pressure to clear his debts. Naturally, it was not that he was obsessed with money, but that he wanted to solve a problem. To solve a big problem that had been accumulating for two hundred years, he had to have money and food at the same time. As those gentlemen said, the thief Xiucai is insane, and wants to learn from Li Zicheng. In fact, it is true, but the purpose of the two is different. The essence of clearing debts is to attack the Jiangnan gentry, to disintegrate their privileges, and to weaken their local influence, not for the silver and copper coins in their pockets.

Repayment is only the beginning, not the end. To achieve the purpose of clearing debts, it is necessary to "build villages and build townships". Solving the inefficient administrative operation system, allowing imperial power to go to the countryside, and effectively mobilizing local governments is undoubtedly the essence of “building villages and building villages”. When Zhou Shixiang came to Songjiang, he was in charge of "building a village and building a township" and personally supervised it. Songjiang is the first prefecture in the south of the Yangtze River to carry out "building villages and building townships". Songjiang has done a good job and made achievements, and other places will follow suit.

The next step in "building villages and building townships" is naturally to vigorously produce, using Guangdong's method to integrate fields and carry out centralized and effective farming, similar to the "field farming" model, except that it is not completed by the army, but by people who have been thoroughly mastered. The local administrative power of the village is done by itself. In the middle, the gentry class was thrown aside and replaced by disabled and retired Taiping army personnel. The township and village chiefs who came from the Taiping army carried out every order issued from the Qi Wangfu, and implemented and urged them. The layers of circles put everyone in a collective, where everything is moving, and everything is still.

On the first day of coming to Songjiang, Zhou Shixiang still adhered to the idea before coming, that is to weaken Songjiang's textile industry, restore arable land, and become a big granary. He has drawn a red line, food is more important than everything else. Just like in his previous life, even if the economic volume is already huge, the red line of arable land cannot move at all. No matter how society develops or civilization progresses, what maintains this system is neither law nor morality, but food. Without food, no matter how rich a place is, it is nothing but a castle in the air; without food, no matter how secure the people are, they will become desperate desperadoes.

Jiangnan is good, but outside Jiangnan is not good. The territory that Zhou Shixiang conquered was very large, but like the Chongzhen Emperor back then, it was actually a rotten beach. Guangdong and Guangxi are broken, Jiangxi broken, Hunan broken, Anhui broken, Jiangnan and Zhejiang are slightly better. After several years of governance, Guangdong has become a little better, but it has to bear the support of Guangxi and Yunnan and Guizhou in the future. The food from Annan is continuously imported into Guangdong, and it is continuously transported from Liujiang to Guangxi, and it is consumed little by little. Because of the lack of access by sea, Zhou Shixiang could not expect Annan's food to be transported all the way to the north. If he traveled by land, it would be a huge and bottomless investment, and the gains outweighed the losses. Therefore, Zhou Shixiang must have a new granary so that he can help Jiangxi, Anhui, and Jiangbei, and ensure that wherever the Northern Expedition goes in the future, there will be a steady stream of food to keep up.

It was only after Songjiang visited many places that Zhou Shixiang changed his mind. He found that the nearly 20 years of military disasters have not damaged the local business ecology, and farmers are not very enthusiastic about planting rice. When the income from farming and the profits from mulberry and cotton are not at the same level or the difference is too large, farmers will consciously choose to grow cash crops instead of continuing to grow rice and wheat. Because they only consider the immediate interests, their own interests, not the interests of the government and the court. Nor do they think about how many people are dying of starvation outside their homeland. They just think how much money they can make this year.

Driven by direct interests, the farmers in Songjiang did not want to grow grain, and the merchants and workshop owners did not want to "turn mulberries into fields". Zhou Shixiang was very strange. Under the years of war, how could these textiles in Jiangnan still be sold. Wang Shirong reported one thing, that is, these textiles in Jiangnan have their own sales. Songjiang has an outlet to the sea, and Jinshanwei is the largest port. According to Wang Shirong, a large number of textiles were loaded at the Jinshan port, and then sold to Jinxia, ​​and then resold overseas by Jinxia. In addition to this sea route, is the Northland. The Qing court once set up the Jiangning Weaving Bureau in the southern capital. The Weaving Bureau purchased a large number of Jiangnan textiles and shipped them to Beijing, and then sold them to various places by the imperial merchants of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. There is no shortage of poor people in this world, and there is no shortage of rich people either. The rich have food and shelter, and naturally have money to spend on clothing. In addition, silk may not be a necessity for people's lives. After all, few can afford it, but cotton is needed. No matter how poor, a family should always have a set of clothes to wear, no matter how worn or old, they can always wrap their bodies. With this rigid demand, textile workshops are not worried about running out of work.

Farmers who grow cotton, mulberry, and silkworms, weavers who work in UUkanshu www.uukanshu.com workshops, businessmen who buy and sell goods, and gangs who run goods, etc. constitute a huge interest group, even in many places in Songjiang. , peasants have looms in their homes. After working in the fields during the day, they pick and weave cloth at night under the oil lamp. If the sales of these textiles continue, and if you want to force the cultivation of food in Songjiang, I am afraid that not only will the people not be grateful, but they will be resentful. But really want to forcibly destroy Songjiang's textile industry, the drawbacks are also great. The scope of clearing debts is very wide, but it is limited to the gentry class. It does not affect the merchants and the common people. If the merchants and the common people are really resistant to and hostile to the Taiping Army, no matter how fast the Taiping Army's sword is, I am afraid it will not be killed. absolutely.

And murder was definitely not Zhou Shixiang's original intention.

There are not many people anymore, and his anti-clearing is not to reduce the small population.

How to solve this problem, so that the farmers in Songjiang are willing to farm, and the textile industry can survive in an orderly manner, Zhou Shijing really racked his brains.

The arrogant heart said thank you for taking the past away from the book friends with a 20 yuan reward; thank you Jianjiawu, the hero Sui Feng, and the secretary of the Party Committee of the United States Special Administrative Region for the 10 yuan reward; thank you for not covering my eyes on this day. , Yongting Hansi 5 yuan as a reward; thank you is loneliness, Li Haitang, the good brother who kills Tartars, the year of the beast who eats the feces, the free benevolence, the Han nationality network Ophiopogon, (_Du Wei Ni Ji Dong, Bai Diqiu gave a reward of 1 yuan.