The largest landlord in feudal society is the emperor, who owns the land of the whole country, followed by the clan landlords and gentry landlords with higher social status and political privileges, who rely on hereditary or non-hereditary status and privileges. Again there were the landlords of lower social status and no political privileges. They are mainly small and medium-sized landlords. They are bullied by powerful landlords, and they have to work hard and hire people when they are busy.
Since land could be bought and sold, the composition of the landlord class often changed. With the development of the social productive forces, the minimum necessary amount of land required to obtain landlord status was reduced, and the numerical superiority of the common landlords increased. After the great development of the commodity economy, industrial and commercial people bought land and industrial and commercial landlords appeared. In addition, the grain merchants, salt merchants, silk merchants, and gangsters who had a lot of wealth in feudal society were also large landlords, and there were many of them.
Among them, those who become landlords by privilege, bribery and cunning are very important to them, so the moral restraint on them becomes very low. They oppress small landowners, often by snatching or forcibly buying large amounts of land at low prices. And the morally corrupt little landlords oppress and exploit the peasants by the same means.
The immediate consequence of land annexation is that the economic situation of a large number of self-employed peasants who have lost their land has deteriorated, which has led to the intensification of class contradictions. Land is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of large landowners and big bureaucrats, while the peasants are increasingly losing their land, or even having no land at all. At one time, less than 5 per cent of the landlord class controlled no less than 50 per cent of the land.
This reminds me of a passage from Marx in Capital: "Just as the nature of the wolf is coagulated in the blood, the capitalist predatory system is the life essence of the capitalist system." No matter how advanced science and technology is, how rich material wealth is, the essence of capitalism cannot be changed. The working people can only sell their labour-power to the capitalists like machines, but they receive less than half the value of production, and they are legally and economically completely incapable of self-defense. ”
Of course, the enlightened emperors of various feudal dynasties have issued laws to curb land annexation, but the effect is obvious in the early stage, and it is still becoming more and more intense later.
When a peasant revolt occurred and the feudal dynasty was unable to suppress it, a part of the relatively weak landowners would use the name of suppressing civil violence to overthrow the larger landlords, that is, the emperor, in order to seize more power.
In the process, the peasant rebel army is essentially a force that overthrows the big landlords, unites multiple forces to wage war with the ruling class, and finally becomes the new ruling class after the victory of one force, and all the privileges and even lives of the people of the old ruling class will be stripped away. But once the feudal dynasty entered a period of prosperity, most of the people in the privileged class became morally corrupt, and the annexation of land through various means led to a new cycle.
During the period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, there were reforms to suppress land annexation, when Sang Hongyang, with the strong support of Emperor Wu of Han, successively implemented economic policies such as suan, jiao, salt and iron official camps, equal loss, equalization, currency reform, and wine, and at the same time organized 600,000 people to defend the Xiongnu. Among them, the most effective land annexation method is the arithmetic law.
Suan is a kind of property tax levied on merchants, because the main object of exploitation by merchants is the peasants, especially the rich merchants, who wantonly annex the peasants and make the peasants extremely impoverished, thus destroying the economic foundation on which the feudal state depends, so heavy taxes are levied on the merchants to restrict the excessive development of commerce.
Suing is an extension and development of the arithmetic, punishing those who refuse to pay or conceal property and evade taxes, and confiscating all assets; and rewarding the people to report illegal merchants, "those who can tell, with half of them" (those who successfully report can get half of the property of the offender). The assets confiscated by the informants amounted to hundreds of millions of people's property, tens of millions of slaves, hundreds of hectares in large counties, and more than 100 hectares in small counties. As a result, the Shangjia zhongjia and above went bankrupt, and Emperor Wu distributed the confiscated money to various departments. The effect was to significantly increase government revenues and curb the pace of land acquisition.
However, in the late Western Han Dynasty, bureaucrats, landlords and merchants gradually merged, which intensified the development of land annexation, which directly led to the serious social crisis at that time.
Wang Anshi of the Northern Song Dynasty also carried out reforms and changes with the support of Emperor Shenzong of Song, among which the Qingmiao Law and the Fangtian Equal Tax Law were laws against land annexation.
The Green Shoots Method is mainly used by the government to borrow money and grain from the peasants in February and May every year, and every six months, two or three points of interest are taken, and they are returned with two taxes in summer and autumn. It greatly increased government revenues; restricted the exploitation of peasants by landlords with usurious loans, and alleviated class contradictions to a certain extent, but because the peasants were forced to borrow money; the interest rate was high, the peasants' burdens were still heavy. The law of the average tax on square fields is to order the whole country to clear the land, verify the landowners, and classify the land as the fifth grade according to the quality of the soil as the basis for collecting land grants.
Qingzhang concealed a large amount of land, rented a large amount of confiscated land to the poor peasants who had no land, and increased the government's income; some peasants were exempted from taxes and benefited. However, due to the vacillation of Song Shenzong and the opposition of a large number of conservatives, Wang Anshi's change of law was still not too successful, and even plunged the Song Dynasty into the quagmire of party struggle (those who supported the change of the law were called "Yuanfeng party members", and those who opposed the change of law were called "Yuanyou party members"), and they could not extricate themselves.
"Its rise and fall are also bold, and its demise is also abrupt", looking at the historical situation and savoring the rise and fall of successive dynasties, we are surprised to find that the process of creating prosperity of successive dynasties is very similar, and its decline and fall have also undergone a surprisingly similar trajectory. Although the specific way in which each dynasty perished may vary widely, the root cause is land annexation, which is the inevitable result of a very small number of people in control of the vast majority of resources. Therefore, the world is not the world of one person, but the world of the world, when and where we should put the "people-oriented thinking" in the first place, after all, the masses of the people are the creators of history.
"People-oriented thinking" is placed in the first place, after all, the masses of the people are the creators of history.