The Manchu dynasty was the last feudal dynasty in Chinese history, and the state lasted for 296 years.
When the bannermen entered the Central Plains, the population of the land of China was only about 70 million, and when the guns of the Xinhai Revolution rang out, the slogan of the revolutionary army was to save 40,000 compatriots, 40,000,000, that is, 400 million people.
In just 300 years, the population of the Qing Dynasty increased by more than 300 million, a growth rate that was beyond the reach of other countries in the same period.
With a steady increase of more than 100 million people every hundred years, which was almost an unimaginable miracle in the development model of the feudal dynasties of the old era, why did the population of the Qing Dynasty explode? What factors contributed to this phenomenon in the Qing Dynasty?
War and peace
As the saying goes, it is better to be a peaceful dog than to be a troubled person.
Even animals know that they take the initiative to stop reproduction in the harsh natural environment to maintain their own survival, for people, war and disasters are the biggest existential threats, natural disasters are natural disasters, unavoidable, and war is man-made disasters - war is the continuation of politics, and unstable political situation is a problem of social contradictions in the final analysis.
At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, the war lasted from 1618 to 1683 AD.
A large number of young and middle-aged people, who were both laborers and the main force of childbearing, took the initiative or were forced to join the army, losing their agricultural labor, a large amount of land was wasted, and it was even more difficult to feed the remaining people.
Every time a child is born, there is an extra mouth to eat, in times of war, there are many famines, and the people even change their children to eat, and the lives of adults cannot be saved, let alone the children who are waiting to be fed?
With the Shunzhi Emperor sitting firmly on the throne, the foundation of the Qing Dynasty's rule gradually solidified, and the years of war finally subsided, and there were only small-scale armed fights caused by local rebellions in various places, and there were no more major wars with corpses all over the field.
Political stability and social peace have allowed the common people to return to normal life, farming, laboring, and having children.
This peaceful and prosperous era lasted for more than 150 years, after three generations of emperors of Kang Yongqian, the three generations of emperors were still outstanding Ming monarchs, and they were all in the line of cultural and martial arts.
Kangxi's peace of the three feudatories, the acquisition of Taiwan, maintained the internal stability of the Qing Dynasty, and laid a good foundation for the prosperous Kangqian era.
Yongzheng reformed the rule of officials and promulgated a variety of new economic policies, which greatly increased productivity, not only filled the deficit of the national treasury, but also brought the Qing Dynasty to the peak of the economy.
Faced with the threat of the Dzungar rebellion and the invasion of Tsarist Russia, Qianlong resolutely sent troops to the frontier to keep the threat out of the country and protect the people in the interior from suffering from war and chaos.
In the early days of Kangxi's reign, the population of the country was just over 100 million, and by the 36th year of Qianlong, the population had grown to more than 200 million.
Reform liberates the productive forces
The rule of the Qing Dynasty continued the political model of the Ming Dynasty, which also included the tax on the number of people that had existed since ancient times.
Ding tax is a tax imposed by the government on the people, only men are collected, not women, and a tax per person is paid, so it is called poll tax among the people.
Considering that the ancient people did not have the concept of eugenics, it is very common for a pair of young parents to have seven or eight children in ten years, so the tax to bear can be imagined to be very heavy.
In this way, the tax is not conducive to population growth, and under the production model of the ancient small-scale peasant economy, the population is the labor force, and the more labor force, the higher the productivity, and the higher the productivity, the more people can be fed. Dante's tax policy stuck the neck of the common people.
It can be said that feudal society has long been in the contradiction between the strong demand for the agricultural population and the heavy burden of the Ding tax.
However, taxation is a major national matter, and there are many wise monarchs in the past dynasties who know the unreasonableness of the Ding tax, but they are helpless against this policy, and it was not until the Qing Dynasty Kangxi Yongzheng Emperor was in power that the Ding tax policy was gradually abolished.
Emperor Kangxi was the first person to start reforming the Ding tax policy, and the new policy was promulgated in the 51st year of Kangxi (1712 AD), announcing that the newborns of the Qing Dynasty would no longer collect poll tax, and the total tax burden would be taken as the total amount of the total tax burden in the previous year.
Since then, "never raise taxes" is a positive signal for the people, because the Ding tax is fixed, and there is no need to pay more for children in the future, and the number of newborns can grow rapidly.
Emperor Kangxi's fixed tax policy got off to a good start, and his son Emperor Yongzheng's new policy, the apportionment of the land into the mu, completely made the poll tax a thing of the past.
After the fixed tax, the poll tax is gone, and the people can finally no longer bear the heavy tax, and have a few children if they want, but the family has a large population and little land, and they can't afford to have too many children.
What is even more unfair is that the landlords of the gentry have a small number of people in their homes, not only do they not work, but also pay less taxes, and if this continues, it is still not conducive to the growth of the population.
To put it simply, the apportionment of the ding tax into the mu is to apportionment the ding tax into the land tax, and the inherent ding tax of each family will no longer be collected from now on, only the land tax.
In feudal society, farmland is the most important means of production, and the amount of land determines the income level of a family.
In the past, the peasants were worried that they would not be able to feed all the people who had enough to eat, but now that the tax is gone, the remaining money can be used to feed more children and reclaim more wasteland.
According to statistics, the explosive population growth of the Qing Dynasty began after the implementation of the new policy such as the Yongzheng Emperor's apportionment of the land into the mu.
Alien species and land reclamation
Peppers, corn, tomatoes, potatoes and sweet potatoes are the ubiquitous vegetables that can be found today, but in fact, these species have only been introduced to China for a few hundred years, and the earliest introduction to China was in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties.
Chinese at that time probably did not expect that these seemingly strange new crops would become an important factor in feeding many eating mouths and promoting the explosive growth of the population in the future.
At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, the Chinese people found that unlike the traditional soybeans, wheat, rice and other staple foods, the "three-piece set" of sweet potatoes, corn and potatoes introduced to China from the New World of America was simply a miracle rewarded by God.
For thousands of years, mountainous areas were considered uncultivated by farmers, but the introduction of the American trio to China has brought these uncultivated wastelands to use.
Most of China has a monsoon climate, and the humid lowland foothills are ideal for growing sweet potatoes; Further up the elevation, the relatively arid half-hillside slopes are suitable for maize; And in the barren area near the top of the mountain, it is more than enough to grow potatoes.
In this way, the ruling class of the Qing Dynasty was pleasantly surprised to find that there was suddenly a large amount of mountainous land available for reclamation.
The increase of farmland greatly alleviated the social contradictions such as land annexation that must have occurred in the middle and late stages of the feudal dynasty, so that the peaceful rule of the Qing Dynasty continued after three generations of Kang Yongqian's prosperous era, and the people were able to live and work in peace and contentment, and the birth of children was more than one by one, and the population of the Qing Dynasty grew rapidly, and by the time of Daoguang, the population had exceeded 400 million.
It can be seen that the population of the Qing Dynasty jumped from 70 million to 400 million, and the influencing factors behind this rapid population growth phenomenon are very complex.
Stable and peaceful social politics, the emancipation of the working population, the reform and development of the new economic policy, and the introduction of new alien species are all complementary and indispensable.
The combination of many factors, which played a crucial role in every stage of history, was the fundamental reason for the explosive population growth of the Qing Dynasty.