The Qing Dynasty is about to end

Chapter 602: Are you guys worthy of being called feudal? (Please vote and subscribe)

At the foot of the earthen wall of Yaocun Town, three landlords in patched silk clothes were drinking porridge from coarse porcelain bowls. These three landlords were all locals of Yaocun Town. One could tell at a glance that they had very little land, and only in East Asia could they be considered landlords. If they were in Russia, they would definitely be classified as poor peasants after the October Revolution with their small amount of land.
Look at the food in their three bowls. The bowl of landlord Kong contains sorghum rice porridge with some vegetable leaves added in. It tastes so delicious!
The landlord surnamed Meng's pickled vegetable strips were as thin as hemp rope, and he was reluctant to swallow them all in one gulp. He had to chew them slowly and eat them with millet porridge.

Only a piece of dried bacon sank to the bottom of Mr. Yao's bowl - this was his "benefit" as a private school teacher, and it was part of the thank-you gift from one of his students who passed the exam to become a "new scholar" in Yanzhou Prefecture. That kid went to the official school run by the Datong Association in the prefecture, and I heard that he could become a local official after graduation. How envious!
"Three gentlemen, the foreign master is asking questions!" As soon as Bai Siwen finished speaking in Beijing dialect, three Taiping silver dollars fell on the bluestone slab with a jingle. The three men hurriedly stood up, picked up the silver dollars, ate the rest of the meal in a few bites, and ran to Moore and Friedrich.

Moore squinted at the three "landlords": Kong's cloth shoes had holes in them, and his toes were visible. Meng's robe had long been washed out. And Yao Xiucai's blue silk gown had patches of the same color on the elbows. Friedrich sketched in his notebook: the three people's thinness and shabbiness formed a huge contrast with the fat and glamorous European manor owners.

"I am Kong Zhaoming, the 76th generation grandson of the Kong family in Qufu." When the landlord surnamed Kong bowed, an opium pipe was exposed from his waist, which was polished to a shine.

Bai Siwen pointed at the pipe and sneered: "If you keep smoking, you, the 76th generation descendant of the Kong family, will have to beg for food!"

Kong Zhaoming, who was smoking a lot, sighed: "There is no way, I can't quit. I see that opium is getting more and more expensive. I have to live one day at a time!"

The landlord surnamed Meng also sighed: "After the second sage Mencius, there is Meng Guanglu."

Bai Siwen looked at Meng Zi, whose expression was relatively normal, and asked, "Brother Meng, why are you sighing? Are you also a fan of opium?"

Yao Xiucai, who was standing by, said, "He doesn't smoke opium, but his father lost more than half of his fifty acres of land by smoking opium. Last year, he got so high on it that he went straight down to see the Second Sage."

"Stop talking, Mr. Yao, just stop talking." The landlord surnamed Meng shook his head repeatedly.

"My name is Yao Wenxue." Yao Xiucai bowed and also introduced his name.

Bai Siwen glanced at his blue shirt and asked, "Are you a student on government stipend?"

Yao Xiucai sighed and shook his head gently: "It's all in the past. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom doesn't recognize it anymore."

"Swenson," Moore called Bai Siwen by his foreign name, "What is a student on government stipend? Is it a privileged status like a noble or a Japanese samurai?"

"Shengyuan are not nobles, and they are also different from Japanese samurai. Samurai are inherited from their ancestors, but Shengyuan are obtained through examinations." Bai Siwen thought for a while and said, "It's a bit similar to the diplomas in Europe, right? It's a good diploma, but it doesn't qualify you to be an official. You can get it by taking the imperial examination. You can see officials without kneeling, and the government will subsidize you with four taels of silver every month. You are also considered a top figure in the clan. But the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom no longer recognizes the Qing Dynasty's honors, so his Shengyuan exam was in vain."

"What? A landowner owning 20 or 30 mu of land?" Friedrich's pen tip almost pierced the paper. In his hometown in Prussia, the land managed by the landowners was more than 2,000 mu. Farmers owning 20 or 30 mu of land were only considered small producers.

Yao Xiucai smiled bitterly, "Mr. Wang in this town owns 600 acres of land. He is a real master. As for us, a small family..." He suddenly lowered his voice, "Two years ago, when the Yellow River flooded, Mr. Wang brought six thugs to force the tenants to pay the rent they owed, and beat two people to death on the spot - that's what we call power!"

Moore noticed that Kong Zhaoming's shoulders trembled. This "descendant of saints" was resisted by tenants when the Yellow River flooded two years ago. As a small landlord with only 30 acres of land, he could not afford to hire thugs, so he had to endure it.

But now the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's Farmers' Association has been opened in Qufu County. It is specifically for supporting tenants and poor farmers. I wonder how long he can keep his 30 acres of land?
"Are there many landlords like Mr. Wang in Shandong?" Moore asked in stiff Chinese.

"How can it be a lot?" Yao Xiucai shook his head. "Six hundred acres, how can an ordinary person save that? Mr. Wang passed the imperial examination and had the opportunity to work as a secretary, so he saved some money and bought five hundred acres of land, which is how he got his current family business. But he has five sons, none of whom have made achievements in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. When he dies, his family property will be divided into five parts."

After listening to Bai Siwen's translation, Moore asked, "Swenson, is the inheritance system popular in China?" Bai Siwen nodded and said, "Yes, a good family business cannot withstand three parts. Therefore, most of the rural landlords in China are small families and are not worth mentioning."

Friedrich wrote in his notebook: "China's inheritance system may be an important reason why Chinese landlords have generally become small producers, and the general miniaturization of landlords makes it difficult for them to acquire or maintain feudal characteristics."

Moore then asked, "Swenson, how big is your farm? How many serfs do you own?"

Bai Siwen smiled bitterly and said, "My family's farm is not very big. It covers about 500 acres, but there are no serfs. Why do we need to raise serfs on such a small farm? It would be much easier to rent it to tenants and collect rent."

Friedrich shook his head and said, "Without serfs, you can't control the population, Svensson, you are still not feudal enough!"

Moore asked again: "Swenson, how much land does your entire Eight Banners Group occupy and how many serfs do you control?"

Bai Siwen said proudly: "There are hundreds of thousands of nobles in the Eight Banners, occupying 70 million acres of land. The slaves under them add up to hundreds of thousands! How about this, isn't this feudal enough?"

Friedrich and Moore looked surprised.

"That's it?" Friedrich said, "China is so vast, with more than 1 billion mu of arable land and pastures, and a population of 400 million. And the largest feudal group only owns about 7% of the land and a few thousandths of the population. It's incredible!"

Moore also felt the same way: "You seem to be too unfeudal! Well, Chinese society is really very unique. It is not only very different from Europe, but also very different from Japan and the original North Korea!"

As dusk fell over Yaocun Town, Moore wrote quickly under the oil lamp of the inn: "The landlord class in China is essentially the petty bourgeoisie - they lack hereditary privileges, their land ownership is highly mobile and easily dispersed, and their economic status is between the rich peasants and poor peasants in Europe. Only a small number of large landowners can control a certain amount of violence. However, there is no clear relationship of dependence between large landowners and small and medium-sized landowners, making it difficult for them to form a samurai group or a knight group. In fact, the economic status of most large landowners is also very unstable, and their political power usually needs to be obtained or maintained through imperial examinations, which makes their power inheritance full of uncertainty."

Friedrich opened the "Fish Scale Book" that "Tianshi Moore's" student "Wei Juda" helped him get, which recorded the land distribution in Yaocun Town: Wang Juren, the largest landlord in Yaocun Town, owned 10 acres of land, accounting for less than 40% of the town's arable land. In Prussia, many Junker nobles owned % of the land in the county or county area.

"They are not feudal lords, but the middle class oppressed by the feudal system." Moore tapped the account book with his pipe. "The ones who really control the violence machine are the Eight Banners nobles and the bureaucratic group - these talents are the feudal fortress in the East! However, the land and population that the Eight Banners nobles and the Han bureaucrats attached to them can directly control are also very limited. And because the Han bureaucrats need to pass the imperial examination, they have greater mobility and it is difficult for them to form a hereditary group with a high degree of feudalism. Therefore, although the Qing Dynasty in China was a feudal dynasty, the empire it ruled was not too feudal. For a feudal dynasty, this is a fatal weakness!"

"This may be the reason why their feudal rule collapsed quickly under the attack of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom!" Friedrich said as he wrote in his notebook: "Weak feudalism made it difficult for successive dynasties in China to establish a stubborn rule. This may be the reason why dynasties frequently changed in Chinese history."

Moore concluded: "The feudal lords in Europe and Japan passed on power with swords, but the Chinese landlords placed their hopes on the brush. Their insight was not even as good as that of the Korean nobles, who at least monopolized the imperial examinations and maintained the inheritance of the direct line of the family. The relatively fair imperial examinations and the system of dividing the property made it difficult for the Chinese landlords to achieve true feudalization."

Bai Siwen lit up a Cuban cigar and took a puff, then said with a bit of sadness: "Our ancestors were short-sighted and thought the Han system was easy to use. We didn't expect that there were so many feudal systems in the world that were better than the Han system. Even Japan is better than today!"

Friedrich drew a triple pyramid in his notebook: the top of the pyramid was the Eight Banners nobles and bureaucrats, the middle was the imperial examination landlords, and the bottom was the impoverished tenant farmers. He looked at this triple pyramid and suddenly said, "Karl, have you noticed that China's social structure is very similar to those European countries that have experienced the storm of revolution!"

Moore showed an expectant look: "Yes, the stability of European countries under the rule of the bourgeoisie is far less than that of the suffocating feudal era!"

When the night watchman rang the bell for the third watch, a group of militiamen from the Farmers' Association, holding torches, passed by the inn where Moore, Friedrich and others lived, and headed towards the mansion of the Wang family in the north of the town - the mansion was now occupied by Wei Changhui, Hong Rengan, Zuo Zongtang and their personal guards. Bai Siwen looked out the window and saw that in the moonlight, the lecturers of the Qufu County Farmers' Association were posting slogans everywhere saying "Those who till the land own the land." The storm of land distribution is coming!
(End of this chapter)