Chapter Deep Contradictions
In the debate between the government and the public on horse farms, Zhao Bing found that the arguments in the end would be one point, that is, "fighting for land with the people", and reasons such as consuming the country and increasing the burden on the people are all paved for this. Anyway, it is to change the current land policy, not curb transactions, and restore the ancestral system. In short, it is to oppose the practice of retaining official fields that began in Qiongzhou, but to push the land to the market.
The current land policy was originally formulated by Zhao Bing in Qiongzhou in order to solve the food self-sufficiency and financial difficulties. He turned the abandoned official land and abandoned civil land into official land ownership. Then he summoned refugees to farm through preferential policies, and the court collected the land rent to obtain fixed income. Later, after recovering Jiangnan, he continued this practice and confiscated the land occupied by the Mongols, traitors and rebels, except for part of the land lost people, the rest were allocated to official land and handed over to refugees to farm with the same policy to solve the financial shortage of local governments and obtain a stable source of military rations.
This land policy has a very significant effect in solving the financial difficulties in how to gain a foothold in Qiongzhou and enter Jiangnan in the early stages of the Northern Expedition. Therefore, Zhao Bing continued this land policy while dealing with the newly collected Lianghuai and other areas, implemented the "equal land system" to achieve that everyone has their own land, and still classified a large amount of abandoned land as official land.
After sorting out the list of memorials, Zhao Bing discovered an interesting phenomenon. In addition to the officials of the court, the so-called people are the gentry and scholars in the village. However, ordinary people have no objections to the policy of land advancement, and according to the response of the Bureau of Affairs, they are obviously represented in this debate. From this and that, he suddenly realized that he had touched the interests of some people.
Everyone knows that land in ancient times was the most important means of production. For a centralized bureaucratic system that ruled the agricultural civilization, ensuring that grassroots producers who account for the vast majority of the population will not "flee from the mountains and forests and turn into thieves" is undoubtedly a life-and-death and an overwhelming political task. Which dynasty ignores it, which dynasty is seeking death.
The key to implementing this task is that "those who plough the land have their own land". Therefore, from the Han Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty, "famous field system", "providing the field system", "profiting the field system", "equal field system", etc. have emerged. The core goals are all to curb annexation, restrict or even prohibit land transactions, so as to ensure that the majority of the population has the minimum means of production. However, land annexation is a difficult problem to solve.
Because in feudal society, politics was clear at the beginning and the land was relatively even, but as time went by, the successors of the emperors in the founding dynasty gradually became mediocre and even stupid, which led to the landlord class and bureaucrats using their wealth and rights to oppress peasants, resulting in serious land annexation. After the contradictions intensified to a certain extent, an uprising broke out, a new dynasty was established, and then it continued, and the same was true for the Song Dynasty.
After the founding of the Song Dynasty, in order to appease the Wuxun Group and the landlord class, when regaining the military power of founding fathers such as Shi Shouxin and Gao Huaide, Zhao Kuangyin encouraged them to return to their hometown to support their elderly, spend their old age in peace, and benefit their descendants. For this reason, he acquiesced to the landlord class to buy and sell land, and indulge the powerful landlords' annexation homes to wantonly annex the land. Although this economic policy created convenient conditions for the social and economic development at that time and maintained the stability of the regime, it left hidden dangers for later generations.
After Zhao Bing came to this world, he was involuntarily involved in political struggles and understood Zhao Kuangyin's difficulties at the beginning. Perhaps he might not have known what kind of evil consequences would be caused by indulging in land annexation, but in the political environment at that time, he had to make compromises in order to maintain his position. The price he offered to appease and bribe the scholar class must be large. Officials enjoy tax exemption and service privileges, in exchange for support from the literati and landlord class and suppress the Wuxun Group.
However, Zhao Bing thought that this cheap ancestor was wrong because he did not adjust the land policy in time when the regime had just been consolidated and the literati group had just risen and had not yet controlled the entire court, so that he could not lose his position. It was also possible that he had already made plans, but he died before he could implement it. The successor Emperor Taizong had doubts about "improper position", so he naturally did not dare to offend those literati who grasped the direction of public opinion, and continued to choose to compromise and maintain the existing preferential policies.
Later successors of the throne also maintained preferential policies, gradually formed conventions and consolidated them at the legal level. Under the policy of "respecting Confucianism" in the Song Dynasty, the status of scholars was improved, and the imperial examination system also allowed more people to advance to the bureaucratic class, forming a huge group that was enough to control the government affairs, and then a new class was created - gentry.
According to Zhao Bing's understanding, the so-called gentry is people with fame and fortune in the imperial examination, not aristocrats in the traditional sense. They can be divided into two groups, one group is alternate bureaucrats who have not officially become officials after they have fame and fortune, and the other group is bureaucrats who retire after they have become officials, that is, retired. Because of the fame and fortune in the imperial examination, these people have the right to be exempted from taxes and become privileged classes. Of course, they can also be classified as one type of people, because they are originally people in the bureaucratic system and have a very close relationship with the court, and are basically the front and back of bureaucrats.
Because the gentry class has the privileges and exemptions, it makes it easier for them to grow bigger. When the government imposes excessive taxes, it is most likely to accumulate land, because rich people are not willing to hold land as long as they are not privileged people. Because they have land, the rent is not collected much, but the taxes are extremely high. Sometimes the taxes are higher than the land rent. What is the use of land at this time? The government imposes excessive taxes to hold land so high that it is unacceptable.
Therefore, in this case, it is particularly important to have superior rights and exemption. In order to evade heavy taxes and labor, some people would rather escort the houses of officials and gentry and powerful people, and make contracts, pretending that the land has been sold and become tenants, but they are still farming on the original land, but they should hand over part of the harvest to the houses of officials and gentry and gentry and gentry.
The gentry's large-scale annexation of land would inevitably directly affect the country's tax revenue. Zhao Bing also thought that this was something Zhao Kuangyin had expected at the beginning, but it also gave rise to new contradictions. The increase in the country's financial pressure caused the tax to continue to increase and the society to turmoil. The bankruptcy of self-cultivated farmers and civilian landlords led to the intensification of conflicts between officials and the people, and the officials forced the people to rebel.
However, Zhao Bing discovered a very interesting phenomenon, that is, the banners raised by many "branders" are like Song Jiang in "Water Margin", which is against the court and not against the emperor. After studying such an interesting thing, he understood the reason.
Because land annexation is becoming increasingly serious, those gentry and landlords enjoy the privilege of tax exemption and service, the court can only transfer taxes to ordinary landlords and self-cultivated farmers. Therefore, if the government bullies the people, generally those who will not bully the tenants will basically bully people who are directly related to the government, and these two types of people are mainly these two types of people.
The gentry who enjoyed the privileged and exempted power were also the most disliked group among all social classes. It was not because they were rich, but because they had privileges. It was hard to say whether they were the richest people in society at that time, but if they did not pay taxes, the tax was overwhelmed by others. It was precisely because the gentry class was the most closely relied on the government and the court that opposing the gentry was almost equivalent to opposing the court.
In addition, the most common changes in the Song Dynasty were the so-called "tenant change" and "slave change". Let's read "Water Margin" and know that if the owner and the manor have a good relationship, they can rebel. If the manor and the manor themselves have a mess, how can they rebel? If the manor and the manor themselves want to rebel, they will generally not be in trouble with the court. There are even many slave change. The manor and the manor are willing to go to the government to sue their masters, saying that their masters want to rebel, but they are like supporters of the court.
Zhao Bing found from many cases that the places where tenant changes are most likely to occur rarely have civil changes. He thought about it for a long time before he could figure out the relationship, because the crucial point of civil changes is that the common people have to join forces. Most tenant farmers have no land and no other means of production. They can only rely on the landlords and rely on their only labor to farm for the landlords. This is the so-called "mediocre slaves" and their dependence on the landlords is very serious.
So if the tenant farmers rebelled at that time, they basically rebelled with the landlords. To put it simply, the landlords led the tenant to rebel together. It was not the tenant to fight with the landlords, but the landlords led the tenant to fight with the court. If the landlords did not rebel, generally speaking, the tenant would not rebel. If the rebellion was rebelled, it would be a harassing the master. Therefore, the so-called conflict between the master and the tenant would not lead to the tenant farmers to rebel the court. However, all the rebellions of the court were related to the officials and the people, and they were related to the conflict between the officials and the people.
In this way, there are basically no tenant farmers in the conflict between officials and the people, but self-cultivated farmers. The reason why these small landlords rebelled was because they had no privileges and had to bear royal grain and national taxes, and they had to wait until governments at all levels to divide the severity of the severity of the governments. However, tenant farmers did not bear money and grain, but only land rent. They were often extorted by privileged people, so they would rebel. Moreover, they had many tenants, many forces in the local area, and even had their own land encirclements, but the land could not be taken away, and the tenants could not be taken away, so they were unwilling to move, so they occupied the mountains and became kings, killed the families and rebelled, and became the so-called land bandits.
Chapter completed!