Text/Yuzi
To measure the quality of Kangqian's prosperity, we can provide a standard. To measure the effectiveness of a regime's rule, we can observe it from several dimensions: financial control, thought control, armed control, and behavior control.
First, let's look at the finances of the early Qing Dynasty.
There are three main types of taxes for the Chinese people: one is land rent, which is generally paid in the form of grain, rice or money. The second is labor, that is, working for the imperial court without compensation, usually civil construction or transportation, during which the imperial court not only does not have to pay wages, but even the food, clothing, and transportation costs incurred by some dynasties have to bear their own. The third is physical objects, such as sackcloth, silk or local specialties.
Ordinary people are usually not very sensitive to tax rates, and when they have a mouthful of food to eat, they are safe and stable. The two things I was most afraid of were: one was servitude. Helping the imperial court to do things, often to blame, often lose money, even dead people often occur. The other is the corruption and exploitation of officials, which are often paid by the people at the bottom, several times higher, and there is no standard. Therefore, Zhuge Liang ruled Shu, although the punishment was harsh and the taxes were extremely heavy, but it could be relatively fair, how much to say, officials did not dare to arbitrarily increase the weight, and many people missed his governance.
The Qing Dynasty inherited the fruits of Zhang Juzheng's reforms in the Ming Dynasty, and the land tax was healthier, except for the grain still levied in the canal area, the taxes in the rest of the places were paid in currency. During the Yongzheng period, the reform of dividing the land into mu was completed, and the tax was no longer levied according to the hukou or population, and the government's collection was greatly simplified. Coupled with the "return of fire to justice", the waste and corruption of intermediate links have been controlled.
On the whole, the government's taxation methods in the early Qing Dynasty were relatively simple and efficient, so they could maintain high taxes without triggering fierce civil resistance. Several large-scale rebellions in the middle and early Qing Dynasty, such as the White Lotus Rebellion during the Jiaqing period and the Taiping Rebellion during the Xianfeng Tongzhi period, were not mainly economic reasons, but underground social behaviors that were condensed by faith.
Let's talk about thought control.
The two great empires of the Mongolian Yuan and the Manchu Qing Dynasty were both established after the military conquest of the Central Plains by the northern nomads. The difference is that the Yuan dynasty ruled for less than 100 years, while the Qing dynasty ruled for nearly 300 years. In addition to the lack of ruling experience and limited social control of the Mongol nation, another reason is the difference in thought control.
The Mongols believed in the concept of the family property system and the state, and nakedly believed that everything under the heavens was the private property of the emperor, and that the relationship between the emperor and the chancellor was also a master-slave relationship that could be disposed of at will. Although most of the autocratic emperors regarded the subjects of the world as leeks that could be harvested at will, and their actual harvesting strength was far better than that of the Mongol King, they would still cover the harvest relationship with a layer of warm veins.
Professor Yao Nianci, who had studied the Kangxi Emperor, said:
> The cleverness of the rulers of the Qing Dynasty lies not only in ensuring that the manchu ruling position is unshakable, nor is it not only to avoid the assimilation of the Manchus by the Han people, but also to make every effort to make the main ethnic group, that is, the ruled han nationality, accept the Manchu rule to inherit the Zhengshuo of the Central Plains dynasties, and recognize the greatest rationality and legitimacy of this rule.
Professor Yao Nianci believes that the tragic victory in the San Francisco Rebellion and the Manchu-Han contradictions between them became the shadow of the Kangxi Emperor's life. The "Notes on Living" says: "The three rebellious things are not forgotten for life." He had thought that with the crushing superiority of strength and financial strength, San Francisco could pass on the law. Unexpectedly, he ignored the political tendencies of officials and soldiers everywhere and the broad masses of the people. Less than a year after the uprising, eight provinces fell, and at its worst, spread to fifteen provinces. If wu Sangui had not let the Qing army enter the pass, killed the Yongli Emperor, lost morality in the hearts of the people, and suddenly died during the Battle of Yongxing, the war would have lasted longer.
The San Francisco Rebellion nearly destroyed the Qing Dynasty
Therefore, the three emperors of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong dynasties all worked hard to construct the historical narrative of the Manchu Qing Dynasty that "won the world's righteousness".
The Kangxi 56th Emperor's "Imperial Decree on Faces" says:
> Since ancient times, the world has been righteous, just like my dynasty.
Yongzheng's "Mystery of the Great Righteousness" says:
> The world of this dynasty is more righteous and smooth than the fang of Cheng Tang and the cutting of Zhou Wu.
Qianlong wrote in the Preface to the Records of Emperor Shizuzhang:
> Since ancient times, the world has been righteous, and there is no comparison.
In their narratives, Nurhaci and Huang Taiji "did not take the heart of the world at the beginning", and the Emperor Taiji soldiers besieged the city of Beijing, and they could take it but not take it, as if "there are two of the three worlds, in order to serve Yin", the Holy King Zhou Wen Wang. The mean-spirited and self-righteous Chongzhen Emperor became a bad-timed and powerless back-and-forth man, and died inappropriately, so the Qing army entered the customs, mourned for Chongzhen, and destroyed the "intruders", and followed the heavens to follow the orthodoxy of the Ming Dynasty.
Kangxi used the imperial heart technique to play politics to the fullest. Kangxi twenty-three years of southern tour, personally sacrificed Ming Xiaoling, inscribed "Zhilong Tang Song", performed three kneeling and nine prostrations, and raised the tyrant Zhu Yuanzhang to a new height, in order to win over the Han people under his rule, but exterminated the suspected Prince Zhu San, who was over seventy years old. He also worshipped Confucius Que Li, knelt three times and prostrated nine times, and was a master who claimed to be a master of morality, theory and practice in one statue, and knocked down all the famous ministers of Han science (such as Xiong Zhilu, Tang Bin, Li Guangdi, and Wei Xiangshu) and gave them the name of "pseudo-theory". The scribe Wei Yijie, who had attained the high position of Zaifu at the age of forty, called Kangxi "a master with the way of kings".
The Kangxi Emperor had learned from missionaries in China about arithmetic, astronomy, calendars, etc., but in fact, he was not interested in knowledge itself. On the one hand, Kangxi used Western knowledge to display itself everywhere, torturing Han Intellectuals, such as calculating the flow of river water. He also used his superficial mathematical knowledge to wear chisels and appendages, measured the laws, and personally made ceremonies and music, indicating that he was not only a monarch in the hands of Tai'a, but also a religious leader who had learned from China and the West, the most holy and the most clear, and unparalleled in the world.
The art of mind control reaching the pinnacle of perfection is the hell of words.
According to the statistics of the article "The Overall Situation of the Qing Dynasty Literary Prison and the Narrative of the Qing Dynasty", there were 171 literary prisons in the Three Dynasties of Kangyongqian, of which 11 were in the Kangxi Dynasty, 25 in the Yongzheng Dynasty, and 135 in the Qianlong Dynasty. The Kangxi Dynasty is mostly the historical material of the Ming and Qing Dynasties; the Yongzheng Dynasty is mostly involved in parties, such as the Nian Tangyao case; in the Qianlong Dynasty, the prison of words affects the lower strata of society with rough literature and ink, and under the "prosperous world", it is not allowed to complain or use words carelessly. The post-crime processing was very arbitrary, implicating hundreds of people, beheading or exile.
Power seems to be in the hands of the Emperor alone in the Forbidden City, but in fact it is omnipotent, and Professor Wang Fansen calls it "the capillary function of power". Under the general psychological fear is self-inhibition, self-censorship and self-censorship. Slightly sensitive topics, can not be touched without touching. The "sensitive words" that may be involved in publications are replaced by a system of hidden languages, such as "Han" and "Song" to refer to "Ming", and "Qin" and "Jin" to refer to "Qing". There are also more advanced "rhyme pronouns", like the codebook in the spy war, when encountering words that cannot be understood, it is necessary to find the corresponding real words from the codebook, such as gu Yanwu's collection, with "Wenqin Jugeng" referring to "Yunnan raising troops".
Mr. Wang Fansen believes that the suppression of the cultural field in the Qing Dynasty produced a "ripple effect", which brought about the shrinkage of various cultural fields, the shrinkage of public space, the shrinkage of political criticism consciousness, and the shrinkage of the self-soul, forming a mentality of retreat of all people and a mentality of "non-politicization". Political interference in the cultural sphere is not only about actively transforming how people think, but also about making people think in their direction, or asking people to think about nothing.
If there is an era in which the people avoid political topics and dare not participate in politics, this era will ultimately be an era of "ten thousand horses" and no hope. The reaction to those in power will only intensify with time.
After the Manchu Qing entered the customs, they banned written records recording their slaughter of the city. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, banned books such as the Ten Diaries of Yangzhou and the Chronicle of the Slaughter of The City in Jiading had become propaganda weapons of the revolutionary party. However, what these two works say is not true, and the true figure of the 800,000 deaths and injuries recorded is 80,000. When the Manchu Qing dynasty banned the truth, did they want to get that the future overthrow of them would be more difficult to accept than the truth?
Next, let's talk about armed control.
After the Manchu Qing Dynasty entered the capital of Beijing, the system of separating flag people from non-flag people from inner and outer cities was implemented in the capital. The inner city is all inhabited by the eight flags of soldiers and civilians, and non-flag people can only live in the outer city, and the proportion of the population is much lower than that of the flag people. Taking the 46th year of Qianlong as an example, there are about 160,000 eight banner soldiers in the capital and about 700,000 flag people stationed in Beijing, while there are only 235,000 non-flag people in the outer city.
The Qing government distributed silver rice to the flag bearers in the capital and "raised" them, allowing them only to engage in politics or become soldiers, not to engage in other trades, and not to move at will. The eight flags disciples who were originally shangwu quickly degenerated into idle people who could only carry caged birds. When the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement broke out, the decaying Eight Banners and Green Camp were vulnerable, and the Qing government had to use Han officials such as Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang to train local armed forces such as the Xiang Army and the Huai Army, and the army gradually became controlled by the Han.
The degradation of the flag people
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Yuan Shikai trained the new army. The central government is unable to take care of itself and is powerless in ideological control, and when the new army gradually absorbs revolutionary ideas, the world will no longer be a family and a surname.
Finally, let's talk about behavior control.
Centralized states see small communities such as large families as a threat to political power, and they do not allow people's relatives to live together, so that the small people at the bottom, rather than the family community, are directly confronted with the huge state apparatus. For example, the Shang Martingale Transformation Law requires that "those who do not distinguish between two or more men in the people shall be doubly endowed" ("History of shangjun lie biography"). After Zhu Yuanzhang established the country, he formulated a land scale book and a yellow household registration book, which firmly tied the population to the land and could not arbitrarily migrate and change jobs.
The Qing Dynasty was very vigilant against population movements, especially religious associations and gathering activities, monks, beggars, and tourists, all of which were the focus of prevention. These lower-class immigrants are stigmatized and become a venting channel for people to panic and malice. In the absence of big data and information technology, governments can only rely on grassroots and civilian forces to eliminate possible threats. The populace is generally xenophobic, and once the state is mobilized, they will try to seize these occasional opportunities to seize the social power of free floating and persecute those who are weaker than themselves. The American sinologist Philip Kuhn has a wonderful analysis in his famous book "Calling the Soul".
In order to monitor officials, the Kangxi Emperor invented a system of secret folding, allowing partially trusted officials to bypass government offices and send the text directly to the emperor's court, which was personally approved by the emperor. The Yongzheng Emperor also set up a military aircraft department to complete the system of secret folding. The Military Aircraft Department handled the secret folds according to the emperor's wishes and became the institution of the Qing Dynasty that held actual power. Friends familiar with Chinese history know that this is just another time for the imperial power to bypass the government's design, with new institutions supervising past corruption, and new institutions becoming new sources of corruption. In the stacked bed frame house again and again, the absolute monarchy and centralized power have reached the extreme, and the risk has been accumulated to the maximum. Finally, the two-thousand-year-old imperial system was finally swept into the garbage heap of history.
Professor Yao Nianci said it well:
> The reign of a generation of monarchs, or even the duration of a dynasty, should not be the criterion for the dethronation of historians. I think that the more important purpose of the study of political history seems to be to explore the various factors that perpetuate a dynasty, the cost of society in order to obtain and sustain it, and whether the political landscape of the period can revitalize a society.
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