Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming Dynasty

Chapter 657 The Complicated Social Structure of Ming Dynasty

"If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed that the village was so empty."

Zhu Youjian couldn't help asking Bai Yunming to call the local Li Zheng, but Bai Yunming ran back and forth:
"Your Majesty, according to the old man who stayed in the village, Lizheng has already moved to the city of Nanjing, and he usually goes to the countryside every summer and autumn to check his household registration."

"Lizheng has moved into the city, so why should he be Lizheng? Will the servants of Yingtian Mansion come here?"

Zhu Youjian asked Bai Yunming.

"Since the southern provinces have exempted land tax and head tax, they will basically not come here. I dare not lie to your majesty, and the servants will not get much money here. They can only pick a few melons and fruits. It is better to go to the city to blackmail merchants. Come quickly, not to mention the servants, even bandits are unwilling to come to these villages now, there is really no place to rob."

When Bai Yunming said this, Zhu Youjian couldn't help laughing: "According to this, the world has really changed, and the countryside has really become a peaceful place, but these lands are just so vacant, and the food consumption of Nuo Da Nanjing City has never changed. Where is it?"

"Reporting to Your Majesty, some of them were transported from Huguang, and some were transported from outside the customs and overseas. The farmers in the vicinity can only be self-sufficient now, which is not enough to meet the needs of the entire Nanjing city. This is the case for several prefectures under the jurisdiction of Weichen. , a large number of people live in the city to work, and the land has been desolate, which is even more serious than during the war."

After hearing what Bai Yunming said, Zhu Youjian couldn't help but feel more confident that with the development of industry and commerce, Ming Dynasty has begun to urbanize rapidly, and a large number of farmers have been transformed into citizens.

But to what extent this change has reached, Zhu Youjian is still not completely sure. Perhaps it is more prominent in the south of the Yangtze River, especially near Nanjing, but if it is the southwest and northwest regions, has such obvious urbanization already occurred?
These all require Zhu Youjian to ask Dongchang to investigate in detail after returning to Beijing.

At the same time, combined with Zhu Youjian's own experience in Northern Zhili and Henan, he has to admit that the current Daming, the north and the south are different.

There is no such obvious commodity economy in the north, and it is still a small-scale peasant economy society with a large number of self-cultivating farmers, but it is more dependent on Huangzhuang.

Needless to say, the south, especially in the Jiangnan area, has not been looted by Jianlu, so that the original highly developed commodity economy has been preserved. Coupled with Zhu Youjian's fuel, there has now been a "village shortage" The phenomenon.

Even the servants and bandits no longer cared about the countryside.

This made Zhu Youjian have to admit that the Ming Dynasty was still an era in which the small-scale peasant economy and the commodity economy coexisted.

"Go, go back to Beijing!"

Zhu Youjian decided to return to Beijing immediately and negotiate with court officials again to come up with a better system. Even if major changes cannot be made, improvements must be made as much as possible. At least the bureaucratic group will not be allowed to exploit the citizens like they used to exploit the owner farmers.

But just when Zhu Youjian was about to get up and return to Beijing, the commander of the Jiangxi capital found Zhu Youjian:

"Your Majesty, a rebellion has taken place in Huichang County, the capital of Ganzhou. Ruijin, Changning, Anyuan, Xinfeng and other counties have now been captured. Jiangxi Commander and Jiangxi Governor Ding Chukui have sent troops to suppress, but there are less than [-] troops in Jiangxi. [-] rioters have gathered, so I asked the Grand Marshal's Mansion to dispatch the main force of the Standing Guards to suppress them."

Zhu Youjian was stunned.

"What's the matter? How could there be rebellion among the people in Jiangxi? I ​​have already issued an edict after the victory of the Northern Expedition. In order to commend the common people in the south for their assistance in the Northern Expedition, I will permanently exempt them from land taxes. As a result, there are no officials and servants going to the countryside to urge the collection. The common people should Living and working in peace is the key to why there are riots."

Zhu Youjian slapped the table angrily while talking, pointing at the people in Dongchang and questioning him.

"Your Majesty, southern Jiangxi has always been troublesome. Although His Majesty's policy is good governance, once they are free to cause trouble, it is inevitable that their banditry will be hard to change."

When the person from Dongchang said this, Zhu Youjian slapped the table on the spot: "Fart! Don't talk about making trouble for me. Since you are a troublemaker, your nature is hard to change. Why did you start to make trouble until now? There must be something in it The accident happened, go and check it carefully, if you can't find it out, I want your head!"

After Zhu Youjian finished speaking, he threw up his sleeves and entered the steam locomotive.

Now Zhu Youjian is very irritable. He doesn't want to throw tons of steel on the people who are in trouble in the country. His original intention is not to let the powerful infantry cooperate with arms to deal with and maintain the stability of his rule.

He would rather choose to maintain stability at the expense of royal interests.

Therefore, he exempted the common people of the southern provinces from land taxes on the grounds that the common people in the central and southern provinces contributed a lot in the Northern Expedition.

In this way, the common people in the southern provinces not only have no poll tax but also no land tax, which is equivalent to no agricultural tax, which can greatly reduce the economic burden of the self-cultivating farmers.

At the same time, it can better free the common people from the land.

At that time, this edict was unanimously recognized and praised by the bureaucratic and gentry groups. Zhu Youjian was also very proud of his great pioneering work. After all, his good governance of exempting the people from agricultural taxes did not appear until more than 500 years later in the original history. .

However, Zhu Youjian didn't expect that there were still people in Jiangxi who rebelled and rebelled, which was a slap in the face for him.

When Zhu Youjian returned to the capital, he received a secret report from Dongchang. It turned out that the people's rebellion was not exploited by the government, because the agricultural tax was exempted, and the government had no reason to collect taxes from them.

But the south is different from the north.

During the Northern Expedition that year, Zhu Youjian used the reason that the northern gentry betrayed the country to eradicate most of the northern gentry.

However, the gentry in the south were not eradicated. Even in the years before and after the Northern Expedition, because of the wars in the north and the peace in the south, most of the court officials were from the south.

These southern gentry naturally have more rights to annex land.

Coupled with the accumulation of land mergers and acquisitions with the Ming Dynasty for more than 200 years, most of the land in the southern provinces today is owned by gentry.

There are few homesteaders.

And Zhu Youjian's original intention was to let these self-cultivated farmers who had not yet been reduced to tenant farmers not sell their fields because of tax exemption, and became tenant farmers of the landlord's family.

But what Zhu Youjian overlooked is that in today's south, most of the people engaged in land cultivation are tenant farmers. Although the imperial government's tax exemption has lightened the burden on farmers, the landlords have taken advantage of this to increase rents.

Most of the land in the south was owned by gentry landlords. Once the landlords increased their rent, the tenant farmers could only accept it.

Fortunately, land fertilizer in the south was acceptable at the beginning, but with the active capital market, more and more gentry and landowners, that is, vested interests, want to get more money to invest in the capital market, resulting in higher and higher land rents.

As a result, a large number of tenant farmers finally could not bear such oppression and rebelled. At first, they just robbed the wealthy households, but later, due to the government's suppression, they developed into a rebellion trend.

Zhu Youjian fell into deep thought. The civil unrest in Jiangxi made him realize that there were not only two economic methods in Ming Dynasty, but three economic methods.

Jiangnan is a commodity economy society, and the huge citizen class is staging a drama of fighting wits and courage with the government.

In the north and outside the customs, it was the recovery period of the small-scale peasant economy in the early days of the founding of the country. There was no land merger, so a large amount of land was in the hands of self-cultivating farmers, and they were responsible for the food needs of the entire Ming Dynasty.

However, in the southern regions except Jiangnan, the small peasant economy collapsed at the end of the dynasty, and land mergers were serious. No matter whether Zhu Youjian raised taxes, reduced taxes, or even exempted them, he could not stop the historical law of small peasant economy bankruptcy.

(End of this chapter)