My life is like walking on thin ice

Chapter 526 Ambitious Goals
To talk about what issues would affect feudal dynasties is a proposition that is too broad.

But if we narrow the scope to: which issues will have a significant impact and a serious blow to the feudal dynasty, it will be much simpler.

- External military, cultural and economic threats;
Internally, there is uneven distribution, class stratification, bureaucratic corruption, and oligarchic rule.

As for the current Han Dynasty, and even for most of the Chinese dynasties in history, there are basically no cultural and economic threats from the outside.

The brilliant light of Chinese civilization makes it impossible for any foreign forces to threaten China on a cultural level.

As for the economy - at least in the feudal era, there was no other entity on earth that had the strength to threaten Chinese civilization at the economic level.

Therefore, for the Chinese feudal civilization, external threats are actually military threats.

In fact, in the five thousand years - or possibly eight thousand years - of Chinese history, the military threats posed by foreign races to Chinese civilization were, most of the time, not disasters that shook the foundations of Chinese civilization, but external incentives that encouraged Chinese civilization to work hard and make progress.

For example, in ancient times, the Chinese civilization occupied only a few hundred miles in the Yellow River Basin, and carried out semi-slave and semi-tribal civilization activities.

If there were no external threats, it might take thousands or even tens of thousands of years for Chinese civilization to develop from a "tribal civilization" to a social civilization.

Under the "compression" or drive of external threats, Chinese civilization completed the evolution from tribal civilization to social civilization in just a few hundred years.

The group composition of the Chinese nation is no longer the slave farming tribes of ancient times, but has become a unified semi-slave and semi-feudal regime.

Moreover, this process did not stop with the establishment of a unified Chinese dynasty, such as the Xia Dynasty, or earlier regimes such as the Yu and Tang Dynasties.

As time went by, the scope of activities of Chinese civilization gradually spread from the lower reaches of the Yellow River in ancient times to the Zhou Dynasty, occupying the Central Plains region south of the Yellow River and north of the Yangtze River.

During the Zhou Dynasty, China's feudal system was improved. Under the catalysis of the feudal system, Chinese civilization entered a period of rapid development and expansion.

——Relying on the Zhou emperor's "opening up the territory on the map", piece by piece of barbarian land was granted to the Ji clan members on the map by the Zhou emperor.

Afterwards, the royal families of the Ji clan, who were granted fiefs, raised armies out of their own pockets, and went out of the country one after another, and with swords and guns, they conquered the territories granted to them by the Zhou emperor.

When the Zhou Dynasty fell and the Qin Dynasty rose, the outward expansion of Chinese civilization seemed to have stagnated.

But in fact, this is not the case.

——The land of Baiyue in Lingnan was incorporated into the territory of China for the first time after Emperor Qin Shihuang sent out his army to conquer the south!

Before that, let alone the people of Baiyue and the Lingnan area - even the people of Wu and Chu, Changsha, Huainan and other places were recognized by the people of the world as foreign lands and uncivilized people.

To put it more bluntly, it is the deep mountains and forests where savages live.

Hundreds of years ago, even King Zhuang of Chu once said half sarcastically and half self-mockingly: I am a barbarian.

And now?
Who dares to say that the people of Wu and Chu today are "uncivilized barbarians"?
Who dares to say that Changsha and Huainan are unconquered places?
Even the Baiyue people in Lingnan have already reached a considerable degree of recognition of Chinese civilization!

In the north, however, the outward expansion and development of Chinese civilization did encounter considerable obstacles.

The reason for this is that for hundreds of years during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, Chinese civilization was plagued by internal strife and had no time to look north.

Also, in the past hundred years, Chinese civilization has undergone dramatic changes.

First, Qin unified the world, but then it perished in the second generation, and the Chu and Han dynasties fought each other.

By the time the Han Dynasty was unified again, Chinese civilization had already been devastated by internal wars and was riddled with holes.

Being unable to do anything and having no time to look north, and even being exposed to the serious military threat from the nomadic peoples in the north, became the primary problem faced by the Western Han Dynasty in the first half of its history.

Of course.

If it was just an external military threat, Chinese civilization wouldn't have taken hundreds of years to recover.

Because of the dimensionality reduction attack of agricultural civilization on nomadic civilization and the epoch-making lead of feudal civilization over tribal slave civilization, the Chinese feudal dynasty naturally had the huge potential to "develop in a few years".

But as mentioned earlier: Chinese civilization, or any civilization or political system in history, is not only threatened by external threats.

It can even be said that external threats, in most of the time, are not the biggest headache for Chinese civilization.

What really gives Chinese civilization a headache are internal problems.

For example, when Emperor Qin Shi Huang unified the world, he was extremely tough towards the outside world and could attack at will.

The Qin army marched north and south - the northern nomadic peoples did not dare to go south to graze their horses. The Baiyue in the south, the Yi in the southwest, and even the Korean Peninsula in the northeast all submitted to the black dragon flag of the Qin army.

What really gave Emperor Qin Shi Huang a headache, and ultimately led to the demise and disintegration of the Qin Dynasty in its second generation, was the concentrated outbreak of internal problems.

Specifically speaking of the Han Dynasty today - during the early years of the founding of the country, during the reign of Emperor Taizu Gao, the Han family was filled with all five evils.

All the internal problems that a feudal dynasty might have were present in the early Han Dynasty.

Economy and people's livelihood;
Social security and stability;
Separatist forces and oligarchs.

Under such a harsh internal environment, the external military threats, which were not particularly difficult to deal with, have become a difficult problem that people cannot deal with.

——Are the Huns difficult to fight?

At least for Emperor Taizu Gao of the early Han Dynasty, it was obviously not difficult.

In the Pingcheng battle between Han and Xiongnu, the Han was not completely crushed by the Xiongnu. Instead, the Han held the advantage from beginning to end.

If it weren't for the unexpected Siege of Baideng and the rebellions of the foreign princes in Guandong that broke out one after another at that time, the Battle of Pingcheng between the Han and the Xiongnu might have become the founding battle of the Han Dynasty, the "Monster House Owners of East Asia".

After that, the Han Dynasty decided to adopt "marriage alliance" as its national policy, shelving external military threats indefinitely and focusing on dealing with internal problems.

In response to the princes of different surnames, Emperor Taizu Gaodi Liu Bang adopted iron-fisted suppression measures.

Taking into account the smooth transition from the feudal system to the county system, and to minimize the central administrative costs, after the princes of different surnames were eliminated, Emperor Gao replaced them with princes of clan relatives as a stopgap measure.

The subsequent Emperor Xiaohui, the former and latter Shaodi – or rather Empress Dowager Lü, as well as Emperor Taizong Xiaowen and the former Emperor Xiaojing;

During the reigns of these six consecutive emperors, or three emperors, the Han Dynasty was always busy solving internal problems.

The system of mausoleum towns and villages strangled the possibility of the emergence of aristocratic families and suppressed the power of local tyrants.
Reducing taxes and giving the people a rest was the way to maximize the recovery of the Han Dynasty. In addition, the Wu-Chu Rebellion and the "Strategy of Reducing the vassal states" that led to the Wu-Chu Rebellion also eliminated the clan princes who were too powerful to be eliminated, becoming another "vassal of different surnames" that threatened the ancestral temple and the country.

In this way, each issue was dealt with and resolved one by one. By the time Liu Rong came to power, all the problems within the Han family seemed to have been resolved.

The Han Dynasty seemed to have completed the historical process of "pacifying the country", and now it seemed that it could concentrate on "resisting foreign aggression".

But in fact, the development and expansion of Chinese civilization did not come to a halt with the establishment of the Zhou Dynasty.

The historical progress of Chinese civilization will not stop because of the internal stability of the Han Dynasty.

——Stability is not the ultimate goal.

For the Chinese dynasty, the eternal proposition is development and progress.

As for stability, it is only a prerequisite for development and progress - first seek stability, then develop. Only a stable internal environment can provide good conditions for development.

Therefore, the Han Dynasty does not seem to have too many problems now, at least there are no hidden dangers that need to be solved urgently or will cause big problems if they are not solved;
External threats: The Huns in the north seemed to gradually disappear as the Han and the Huns won battles one after another.

But as the current controller of the Han family, Liu Rong knows clearly that everything is not over yet.

Whether it is external military or internal governance - what Liu Rong needs to do, what the Han family needs to do, and the path that Chinese civilization needs to take are far from over.

At best, we can only say that after decades of recuperation and hard work, the Han Dynasty finally evolved from a "quasi-feudal regime" in the early days of the founding of the country to a truly unified feudal dynasty.

So next, do we not need to do anything anymore? Are we just going to eat and wait for death?
Obviously not.

——The separatist forces within the Han Dynasty, from the princes of different surnames in the early Han Dynasty to the royal relatives and vassal kings during the reign of Emperor Taizong, have become nothing more than royal relatives and vassal kings whose minions have been eliminated.

And these clan vassal states that occupied most of Guandong - or even "most of the Central Plains" - would eventually be transformed into counties and directly governed by the central government in Chang'an.

The second emperor of Qin died because the first emperor Ying Zheng abolished the feudal system in one go when the Qin Dynasty did not yet have the ability to "establish counties throughout the country."

At the beginning of the Han Dynasty, Emperor Taizu Gao restored the feudal system. In addition to the need for transition from the feudal system to the county system, the main reason was that the Han Dynasty at that time did not have the ability to implement counties throughout the country.

Both the administrative costs and the difficulty of direct administration were far beyond what the Han Dynasty could afford at that time.

what about now?

After decades of development, has the Han Dynasty become strong enough to directly govern the entire Han territory through the county system?

The answer to this question is probably not easy to say.

Take the example of Liu Rong raising salaries for officials across the country.

——It was said that the salaries of officials all over the country were increased, but in fact, the salaries were only increased for officials in the Guanzhong area, as well as Beidi and Longyou in the north, Bashu and Hanzhong in the south, and counties directly under the jurisdiction of Chang'an.

As for Guandong, which occupied more than half of the Han Dynasty's territory, especially those clan vassal states, they were not included.

The salaries of officials of the clan vassal states still need to be borne by these vassal states themselves, and whether to increase their salaries is not up to Liu Rong.

If one day, Liu Rong decided to follow the example of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, completely abolish the feudal system, depose all the vassal states, and implement the county system throughout the world, the first problem to be solved would be the suddenly increased salaries of officials.

Today, the Chang'an court directly governs nearly half of the Han Dynasty's territory, which means that only half of the Han officials need to be paid.

The remaining half of the officials were supported by clan relatives and princes.

If all counties are implemented, it means that the Han Dynasty will be directly governed by the Chang'an court, and the number of officials who need to receive salaries from the central court will at least double!
Although agricultural taxes may also increase significantly, it is still a huge fiscal pressure.

Furthermore, governing a place does not mean that simply paying salaries to officials will lead them to do their job well.

——Even in later generations, there is still the saying "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away", let alone more than two thousand years ago before Christ?
The farther away from the capital, the worse the quality of officials, the lower the government's credibility, and the lower the administrative efficiency. This was the norm in the feudal era.

The advantage of the feudal system is that the negative impact of "the emperor is far away" is reduced because of the existence of princes.

——For example, Wu, under the county system, was thousands or even tens of thousands of miles away from Chang'an, which was truly a case of the emperor being far away from the mountains.

Even if officials really oppressed the people and even provoked a civil uprising, it would take several months for Chang'an to receive the news, send envoys to understand the situation, and then return to Chang'an to report.

But if there is a King of Wu, who is in charge of Wu, then the distance of thousands or tens of thousands of miles can be shortened to the distance between local counties and the capital of Wu.

Even if the court in Chang'an was out of reach, there was always the King of Wu in the capital of Wu to deal with it nearby, so there was no such thing as "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away".

However, the county system will cause this problem to arise again.

Think back, what was the first place where problems arose after the death of Emperor Qin Shi Huang?

——Chu Di.

How did the Qin court respond when problems arose in Chu?
First, the central government in Xianyang dispatched Shaofu Zhang Han to recruit prisoners from Mount Li. Starting from Xianyang, he almost defeated all the enemies along the way - he started to fight the rebels of Chen Sheng and Wu Guang in Guanzhong.

If we keep pushing forward like this, we will be invincible.

But it was more than half a year later when Zhang Han arrived outside the Great Wall.

There was also the Northern Great Wall Corps, which was ordered by Emperor Hu Hai, or Zhao Gao, to go south to quell the rebellion. Not only did this end up benefiting the Huns, but it also killed the last elite troops of the Qin Dynasty.

From the perspective of hindsight, if the Qin Dynasty was in Chu at that time, there was a member of the Ying clan as the King of Chu;

That would be a very different situation.

At the very least, the chaos in Chu would not have happened so quickly, and Liu Bang, Xiang Yu and other rebel leaders would not have been able to pacify Chu so quickly and expand outward based on Chu.

As long as the speed is slowed down, the central Qin court in Xianyang will have time to react. Whether it is mobilizing troops from the surrounding areas of Chu or slowly dispatching elite central troops from Xianyang, it will always be able to deal with changes more calmly.

Therefore, the Han Dynasty now does not have "no internal problems", the external Huns have also been completely resolved.

Externally, the Huns had only suffered setbacks and injuries, but had not been completely defeated, and even the foundation of their rule had not been shaken.

Internally, the Han Dynasty's goal of controlling the entire world through the county system was still an ambitious one with no sign of success for the time being.

(End of this chapter)