Gu Yanwu, a thinker at the end of the Ming Dynasty, discovered a strange phenomenon when examining the economy of the Ming Dynasty. He said in the "Treatise on Money and Grain": "Whoever sells his wife in a fierce year cannot do without the world of Yu Tang; he who sells his wife in a good year has not tasted it in the season of the Tang and Song Dynasties... In Guanzhong today, as far as Qixia is west of Zi'an, he is very old and has many valleys, and the people sell their wives at a rate. This shows that a new problem arose in the economy of the Ming Dynasty—during the famine years, peasants had to sell their wives and children in order to survive; but in the good years, this phenomenon still existed. Logically, in a good year, the peasants' harvest is very good, and food and clothing should not be a problem, so why are they still forced to sell their wives?
In fact, this strange phenomenon was also mentioned in the middle of the Tang Dynasty, for example, Li Shen's "Mercy Farmer" said: "Plant a grain of millet in the spring, and harvest ten thousand seeds in the autumn." There are no idle fields in the four seas, and the farmers are starving to death. "Against the backdrop of the rulers' efforts to govern and persuade nongsang, most of the country's land was cultivated, but poor farmers still died of frostbite and starvation. On the one hand, the rulers sang praises merit and boasted about production in Zhumen, and on the other hand, the common people were frozen and starved, abandoning their wives and children, indicating that the country's production is still normal, but there have been major problems in distribution. If we do not turn our gaze from production to distribution, we cannot understand the causes of this strange phenomenon.
Compared with the poor and white early Ming Dynasty, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, there was already the bud of capitalism, and the number of household registrations also ushered in a peak. However, economic prosperity cannot hide the tearing of the class, and in the case of uneven distribution, the level of economic development can no longer solve social problems. Whether it is a famine year or a good year, the people will suffer the same suffering, and they have no way out. So how exactly does this distribution problem arise? Gu Yanwu's "On Money and Grain" attempts to answer.
In good years, why do farmers still face the dilemma of being forced to sell their wives?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > how was the wealth of feudal society distributed among the classes? </h1>
The fact that the common people still have nothing to gain in the good years shows that they are in an unfavorable position in distribution, which is determined by the relations of production, so if we want to study the question of distribution, we must go deep into the economic base and understand the relations of production in feudal society.
William Petit once said, "Labor is the father of wealth, and land is the mother of wealth." In the slave society, slaves represented labor, and they were owned by the slave owners like the land, and it was really "the whole world, the royal land". By the end of the period, with the destruction of the well field system, private ownership of land was widely recognized, and slaves were liberated as peasants by acquiring part of the land. During the Qin Dynasty, the practice of "Qianshou from the real land" was no longer a direct exploitation of labor, but allowed the peasants to cultivate the land and then distribute their income by collecting rent.
But this does not mean that the land under the whole world is divided by the common people, in fact, the feudal rulers still occupy a large number of "official land". Gu Yanwu summarized the classification of ancient Guantian in the "Examination of the Beginning and End of Guantian", which roughly includes:
"Hereditary Official Field", the official field inherited from the previous dynasty after the change of dynasty;
"The Field of the Officials", the field of the Imperial Court to reward the officials;
"The field of the barracks", which was assigned to the fields cultivated by the army camps;
"Through the land of confiscation", the field obtained by confiscating the family property of corrupt officials;
"Kaigen Field", a field obtained through the reclamation of land;
"The Field of the Monk's Path", the field occupied by the Taoist temple;
In addition, the fields after the family's extinction will also be subsumed into the officialdom. Therefore, compared with the private land divided by the common people, the area of official land is very large. Official land still needed to be cultivated by ordinary people, and in the beginning, the imperial court stipulated that the men of each household were required to serve in servitude—to cultivate the official land for a certain period of time without compensation, and could not share the proceeds of labor, called "servitude rent", which was an open form of exploitation.
Later, after the peasants had completed their servitude, if the private land was not enough to supply due to the excessive number of people in the family, the government also allowed them to cultivate by renting the official land, and after the harvest, most of the products were delivered to the government, and a part of it could be left for their own use. Among them, the part of the products delivered to the government is called "rent"; in addition, the government will also partially collect the private land products of the people, called "taxes". Therefore, the "Jin Shi Food Chronicle" says: "The official field is known as rent, and the private field is taxed", and the rent and tax belong to the hidden form of exploitation.
In feudal society, peasants representing labor combined with the land to produce products. The court of the rulers, the relatives of the emperor, the bureaucratic aristocracy, and the scholars participated in the distribution of products in the form of servitude, "rent" and "taxation", and when their share became larger and larger, the peasants were bound to become more and more impoverished.
The peasants cultivated the land, and the rulers then participated in the distribution as landowners
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > tax reform from "grain collection" to "collection of money"</h1>
The Tang Dynasty was the pinnacle of China's feudal society, thanks to a stable economic foundation and an ideal social structure. At the beginning of the founding of the Tang Dynasty, in addition to the official land, private land was granted according to the population, and then the common people were ordered to return to the imperial court in the form of rent, mediocrity, and transfer. At that time, the taxes were not in the form of money, but directly levied local products (grain) - millet, rice, silk, cloth, hemp, etc. from the land products. Therefore, farmers do not need to take agricultural products to the market to sell in exchange for money, and then use money to pay rent, but to directly transfer some agricultural products to the government as rent and tax, which is very convenient. In the early Tang Dynasty, the servitude was also very light, stipulating that "the main service should not last for fifty days", so the peasants still had time to rent official land to cultivate after serving the servitude, and paid the prescribed amount of tax on time every year, and the remaining amount belonged to themselves.
However, after the Anshi Rebellion, the imperial court used troops for many years, resulting in the depletion of the national treasury, so the theory of wealth and profit flourished and the amassive ministers advanced. In order to curry favor with the court, many loyal slaves vigorously instigated the imperial court to carry out tax reforms, replaced the rent system with two tax laws, and no longer levied native products from the people, but demanded "money as a tax" - the sale of products was transferred to the peasants, so that they could bear the risks caused by fluctuations in grain prices, and change "grain collection" to "collection of money". Thus the Treatise on Money and Grain says:
"Since the three generations to the Tang Dynasty, what has been taken from the people is only millet. Since Yang Yan's law of two taxes, he has changed and levied money. ”
This tax reform theoretically increased the burden on peasants. Farmers have lived all their lives in the countryside, living a self-sufficient life and not needing much money. Moreover, the land only produces native land, not money. In response to taxes, they are forced to send their products around the city for trading, bearing the brunt of fluctuations in the price of agricultural products.
The imperial court did not nominally increase the amount of taxes, but through the monopoly of salt and iron officials, the prohibition of private coinage, the borrowing of merchants to contribute to the help and other policies to suppress the price of agricultural products, so that the goods are light and the money is heavy; the simple taxes have also become a variety of young seedling money, land money, and so on. The aggregators, who were well versed in economics, changed the distribution pattern in the past under the guise of tax reform, so that the government could conceal the income of the peasants by controlling prices without increasing taxes. At that time, the famous minister Lu Zhen saw the cattiness in it, and he once wrote to Tang Dezong, vigorously denouncing the two tax laws as a strategy to harm the people, saying:
"What is offered is not what is done, what is not supplied, what is increased is not available in the market, what is reduced is owned by trade, the power of cultivation and weaving is limited, and the price is expensive and impermanent."
The tax reform in the middle of the Tang Dynasty changed the rent in kind to a monetary rent, leaving farmers at risk of price fluctuations. The government monopolized the right to mint coins, and could control prices by increasing or decreasing the amount of money in circulation. Nominal taxes have not increased, but in practice the peasants have been allocated less and less.
Lu Yan and Bai Juyi all opposed the tax reform of "substituting money for grain."
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the Ming Dynasty's "one whip method" exacerbated the imbalance of distribution</h1>
The two tax laws were implemented in the Tang Dynasty, and began to collect monetary rent from peasants, but there were still more currencies in circulation during the Tang and Song dynasties, and the carriers were not the same. In some places, the imperial court would levy cloth, while in others copper and silver would be levied.
By the time of the Ming Dynasty, silver gradually became the mainstream currency of the upper and lower levels. After the implementation of the "One Whip Law" in the middle of the period, the government decided to collect silver from peasants throughout the country without distinction, stipulating that "each grain is woven with a number of silver per stone, and each grain is a number of silver", requiring farmers who cultivate fields to send silver to the government. This one-size-fits-all policy really lacks common sense in economics, and Gu Yanwu pointed out in "On Money and Grain" that the "one-whip law" ignores two major issues:
First, most of the country's people are grain farmers, not silver miners. The amount of silver is small and the amount of grain is large, and instead of collecting grain from the peasants, they levy silver from them, which is to force the peasants to sell agricultural products cheaply in order to pay taxes;
Second, in the Jiangnan region, where the economy is developed and there are many large towns and schools, peasants can obtain silver by selling grain; but in northern Shaanxi, Liangguang, Liaodong and other places, because of the large number of rural wilderness and underdeveloped trade, farmers simply cannot obtain silver;
Therefore, Gu Yanwu believes that "in this way, the sick people will not be able to obtain, and as for the sick country, it is as appropriate as to the land, the number of rights and revenues, the discretionary method of conversion, and the accommodation in the meantime." "Why can't we, when formulating policies, adapt to local conditions and allow them to pay rent in kind for economically underdeveloped and underolciable places?"
However, the rulers of the Ming Dynasty did not care so much, and the Wanli Emperor still levied a large amount of mining taxes throughout the country in order to build palaces and cope with the deficit in the national treasury caused by the three major levies; Chongzhen Shi, in order to resist Hou Jin, pacify the rogues, expand the levy of Liao, suppress and train wages, and also engage in land annexation. In this context, even though the cultivated land area in the country was already very large at that time, and the productivity was also very advanced compared with the Tang and Song dynasties, the lives of the common people were still difficult. They had large piles of grain in their hands, but they could not pay taxes because they did not have silver. In the Guanzhong area, Gu Yanwu saw with his own eyes that there were poor villages and remote areas everywhere, and there was no trade with the coast, resulting in a lack of silver available, even if "the years are very high, the valleys are very many", the people still have to "sell their wives at the same rate", and it is advisable that this place has become the birthplace of Li Zicheng's peasant army.
In order to solve the financial problem, the government took more and more from the peasants
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the social unrest of the late Ming Dynasty had a historical inevitability</h1>
At the end of the Ming Dynasty, there were embryos of capitalism, which were leading in terms of economic development. But the whole country has not solved the distribution problem, especially after silver became the mainstream currency, and the drawbacks of monetary rent have become more and more serious. "Money" is becoming more and more expensive relative to "grain", and in order to cope with the "expropriation" of the government, the peasants have to sell grain in large quantities at a low price, and their share in the distribution of society as a whole is becoming smaller and smaller.
It is precisely because grain is not valuable that the trend of abandoning the original and abandoning farming and engaging in commerce has gradually emerged, and a large number of lands have been annexed by rich households because of the waste of farming; in the Jiangnan region, a class of weavers and weavers has also emerged. However, nature soon punished this social atmosphere, and since the end of the Wanli Calendar, various natural disasters have emerged in an endless stream, resulting in successive years of underproduction of grain, famine in many places, and many places suffering from the loss of grain to farmers.
Under this unjust distribution system, no matter how the economy develops, they cannot see a way out, and finally they finally rise up and form the Great Peasant Revolt at the end of the Ming Dynasty.