My life is like walking on thin ice

Chapter 507 Focus on the heart
After Cheng Buzhi bluntly suggested that the leaders of each department should focus on the military and on the path of "making achievements" to become a noble, this shopping dinner was declared over.

When leaving, the leaders of various tribes in the Hetao region had their own feelings.

Over the past year, the Hetao region has really been "spoiled" by the Han family.

So whenever something happened, the various tribes in Hetao thought: It’s okay, the Han people will hold up the sky even if it falls.

Just like this bonfire dinner, when people heard that Cheng Buzhi had summoned most of the tribal leaders in the Hetao area, their first reaction was that the Han people were going to give out benefits.

To be honest, the content of this bonfire party can be regarded as a wave of benefits given by Cheng Buzhi to the leaders of various tribes in Hetao.

However, this benefit cannot be given by force or squeezed in, nor can it be obtained directly. Instead, it requires efforts from all departments.

——New system.

The Hetao region will try out a new system tailored for nomadic people by Emperor Liu Rong.

The first of them is: Three Articles of Law.

In the future, Hetao will build the most basic social order and initially present the prototype of a harmonious society.

The second article is that the judicial and law enforcement powers will be returned to the counties and prefectures, depriving the chieftains of the Hetao tribes and the tribes within them of the judicial and law enforcement powers.

In the future, the control of the chiefs of the Hetao tribes over their respective tribes will inevitably become weaker and weaker, until no one listens to their words and no one carries out their orders.

However, Emperor Rong did not give up on these tribal leaders. Instead, he used them as a bond to further promote the process of the county system in the Hetao region.

In the future, although the leaders of these Hetao tribes would most likely no longer be the privileged class within the tribe, they could become county magistrates and members of the Han bureaucracy.

These people will understand the treatment and rights that an official at the level of "county magistrate" should enjoy.

Therefore, it is hard to say whether these people had more power and better treatment when they were tribal leaders, or whether they lived an unprecedented good life after becoming county magistrates in the future.

The day after the bonfire dinner, a more formal meeting was held in Bowang City.

Compared to yesterday's bonfire dinner with a relaxed and joyful atmosphere, today's meeting was undoubtedly much more serious.

The content of the meeting naturally revolved around the new system that would be piloted in the Hetao area, and some key issues were discussed.

For example: After the county system is further implemented in the Hetao region, how should the production and living order in the Hetao region be established?

In the past, the Hetao region was almost cut in half by an east-west straight line into two parts, north and south, namely Shuofang County and Wuyuan County.

But apart from the two counties in terms of geographical location and their respective county governor's offices, no other changes have taken place in the Hetao region.

Nomadic tribes still exist, and each tribe is still nomadic at a high frequency and on a large scale. The entire Hetao area is still a huge "sheepfold".

The two counties demarcated by the Chang'an court essentially only facilitated the construction of two county governor's offices.

Under the new system that is about to be implemented in the Hetao region, the Hetao region will be divided into two counties, Shuofang and Wuyuan, and will further establish county-level administrative units based on tribes.

It sounds easy, but it is very troublesome to do it in practice, as there are many details that need to be resolved.

For example, a small tribe may have a population of no more than a thousand and a herd of cattle and sheep of no more than tens of thousands.

And a certain medium to large tribe nearby has a population of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of cattle and sheep!
Are these two tribes, which have such a huge gap in strength, going to be on equal terms after being established as counties?
Are the two headmen going to be appointed as county magistrates on an equal footing?

In addition, the two counties are adjacent to each other, but now they have become counties. How should the county boundaries be divided, and how should pastures and water resources be allocated?
If we take too much care of the medium and large tribes, what is the difference between this and the past grasslands that believed in the supremacy of fists and the law of the jungle?
If we take care of that small tribe instead, wouldn't that be ignoring the facts?
Moreover, these are just the most insignificant problems, which can be solved by wrangling and negotiating.

The real troublesome problem is: how to make these nomadic tribes truly become "counties" instead of just changing the name of the original nomadic tribes to a "county" which is actually the same thing in a different name?

The Han Dynasty's county system strictly controlled population mobility. The country was divided into many parts based on "counties", and then the counties were further divided internally to show their effectiveness.

So how should the county system be implemented on the grassland?
Also divided by region?

What should we do about the population mobility of the lower-class people?
Like the Han area, strictly control population movement?

Or just let it go?

Obviously, both approaches are undesirable.

——Controlling population movement of grassland nomads is obviously undermining the survival foundation of the nomads.

Controlling population movement on the grassland is equivalent to preventing nomadic people from being "nomadic". In this backward ancient era, they can only transform into "pastoral people" on the barren grassland.

For the Han Dynasty, it is certainly a good thing for nomadic people to become pastoral people.

But this is not realistic for this era.

Unless one day, the Han people can find a new type of fodder that can grow several times a year, that the roots cannot be damaged by the cattle and sheep, and that can be harvested and stored.

Otherwise, nomadic people will always be nomadic people and will never be able to settle down or raise livestock in a fixed place.

This means that the Han Dynasty's establishment of counties in the Hetao area and the division of counties by region were essentially meaningless.

You have just drawn the county boundaries here, and tomorrow the herdsmen from this county will run to that county.

And this is not just the case with a few individual tribes; it is the case with every tribe.

The tribes in County A went to County B, and the people in County C went to County D - the "counties" that were originally based on tribes would undergo large-scale migration as a whole.

Then what is the meaning of your county’s existence?
We set up County A, but it welcomed County B in the spring, solved the problems in County C in the summer, and waited for the herdsmen from County D in the autumn.

It is not until winter that the herdsmen in your County finally return from their nomadic migration.

——May not even come back!

- In case something goes wrong during the nomadic journey, or if some unexpected reason changes the original pattern, the herders in your county may even spend the winter in other places.

And it's not just one or two, or just a few people, but all of them, going out together, coming back together, or not coming back together.

If even the people are not in the county for a long time, then what is the meaning of the existence of your county?
You are the herdsman of heaven, whose people are you herding?
The leaders of the various tribes in Hetao were obviously confused and had no idea what to do with this issue.

Are the Han people crazy?
How to implement the county system in the grassland... But it is obvious that Liu Rong had already thought of this problem long before the leaders of various tribes learned that the new system was to be implemented in the Hetao region - even before this idea appeared in the mind of Liu Rong, the emperor in Chang'an.

Why did Liu Rong implement the so-called "new system" in Hetao?
Why should the new system be tried out in Hetao first and then popularized to Hexi?
Naturally, it was to explore a new path so as to eliminate future troubles once and for all and completely resolve the fundamental contradiction between the nomadic peoples in the north and the Chinese agricultural civilization in the south.

The contradiction lies, of course, in the harsh living environment of nomadic peoples, which forces them to resort to plundering in order to gain a tiny chance of survival.

The Chinese agricultural civilization, which is relatively stable, close enough, and where "the monk can run away but the temple cannot", naturally became their best choice.

In this way, if we want to fundamentally solve the nomadic civilization and completely resolve the conflict between nomadic civilization and agricultural civilization, the first thing we need to do is to ensure the survival of nomadic civilization and reduce the difficulty of survival of nomadic civilization.

To put it bluntly: If you can make a living by farming, who would be willing to rebel against the emperor with a hoe?

The same logic applies: when they can feed themselves and even have a wife and children to feed themselves by herding, why would nomadic people risk their lives to survive on the grasslands?
Therefore, the key to solving the problem of nomadic civilization is to point out a path for it so that it no longer relies on plunder and war.

In addition, the second key is population mobility.

——When facing the invasion of nomadic civilization, the reason why Chinese agricultural civilization was unable to cope with it was because of the saying: The monk can run away, but the temple cannot.

The city is there, and the farmers’ homes and fields are there too. They cannot be taken away, and they cannot run away anywhere.

On the other hand, the nomadic people on the grasslands can leave either passively or actively - whenever they want to leave, they just leave their felt tents, drive their cattle and sheep, and go.

In most cases, once a nomadic tribe decides to leave a place, as long as the decision is made before noon, they will be able to set off on the same day.

If you decide to set off early in the morning, you might reach the nearest destination by dusk.

With such low cost and efficiency of migration, there is a natural concept on the grassland that "do a job and leave, the sky is high and the birds fly freely anyway."

Even a tribe that is wealthy enough and not under great pressure to survive may, based on this kind of thinking, decide to eat up its neighbors before leaving.

And such a decision has no side effects at all.

Because the grassland is large enough and the population movement is frequent enough.

No one knows who persecuted a tribe that was massacred.

When the remains of a massacred tribe are discovered, the first thought of other tribes is not fear or grief.

But: What a pity~
Why not me?

Why didn't I massacre this tribe and take away their cattle, sheep, livestock, women, slaves and other wealth?
Under such a social order and universal value system, the law of the jungle naturally becomes the only trustworthy order on the grassland.

The powerful dominate the weak by default and own everything they have, including but not limited to their lives!

However, when facing agricultural civilization, this characteristic of nomadic civilization also means that when the Chinese agricultural regime wants to seek revenge, settle accounts, or "eradicate the nomadic people" when it becomes powerful, it often cannot even find them.

There is a joke in later generations that says that after Kublai Khan entered the Central Plains, the first thing he did was to get rid of the poor relatives on the grassland. He knew exactly where the poor relatives were hiding.

But the fact is: even the nomadic people themselves may not know where they will be in half a year.

The original plan was to head west, but there was a high possibility that a battle would break out along the way, causing the tribe to detour north.

Walking north, you may reach the desert, and then turn east.

Walking eastwards, we finally reached the north of our ancestral land. We discovered that a war had broken out in our ancestral land, and there was a fertile grassland in the north. This tribe might have turned north...

With this aimless "nomadism", the tribes that originally set out from their ancestral land to the west may eventually come to the east, which is the opposite of their ancestral land, or even the west.

Even they themselves don't know where they are going.

When war breaks out, or natural disasters such as epidemics, droughts and floods occur, they do not have any emergency response plans and often just look for a good place to hide.

Before hiding here, even the tribal leader, who was the decision maker, might not have predicted that the tribe would return here.

This is what the Chinese agricultural civilization really feels like: when faced with the nomadic peoples of the grasslands, it truly feels that it has power but nowhere to use it, and is unable to completely resolve the crux of the nomadic civilization.

——Can’t find anyone!
Even if you want to destroy their country and exterminate their race, you won't be able to find anyone.

The monk can run away but the temple cannot. It turns out that he is a wild monk and there is no temple at all!

Therefore, agricultural civilization could only use grasslands, water sources, and habitable areas with suitable climate as bait to limit the activities of nomadic peoples to a certain area in order to engage in a decisive battle.

But this is just soft coercion.

——Pastures, water sources, and habitable places are just baits, not traps.

Nomadic people will of course covet these places and will certainly be attracted here.

But once the situation is not right and they find that they cannot defeat the Han people and cannot obtain these Feng Shui treasures, the nomadic people will inevitably give up resolutely, and then go deep into the grassland and disappear without a trace.

To put it bluntly, the bait may not be bitten, and even if it is bitten, the fish may not be hooked.

Therefore, in addition to solving the survival problems of nomadic people and finding a way for them to survive without looting and war, the second problem Liu Rong needed to solve was to control the population movement of grassland nomads to a certain extent.

You may not settle down;
People do not have to live in villages, and their activities do not have to be limited to a township or a mile.

But it cannot be completely out of control.

In short, a nomadic people under the rule of the Han Dynasty cannot use the entire grassland as the scope of their "free activities".

For Liu Rong, it would be a success if he could limit the unlimited range of activities of this "entire grassland", or even the entire earth, step by step to a fixed area - such as a county.

In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to address the nomadic civilizational characteristics of nomadic peoples.

——Large-scale and high-frequency migration is a survival necessity for nomadic people.

In other words, Liu Rong not only had to find a way for nomadic people to survive without plundering or fighting, but also had to find a new way for nomadic people that no longer required "nomadism".

The difficulty of achieving this goal can be imagined.

(End of this chapter)