Whenever people mention the Qing Dynasty, they will feel that this is a corrupt and degenerate dynasty, in fact, it is not so, during the Qing Dynasty, the three generations of emperors of Kangxi Qianlong Yongzheng jointly created the "Kangqian Prosperous Era", and the economic ranking of the Qing Dynasty in the world at its peak was still very high, so the Qing Dynasty was a relatively strong dynasty in general, the most surprising of which was that the population of the Qing Dynasty reached an unprecedented 400 million, an increase of nearly 6 times, how did this work?
1. Abolition of the population tax
In ancient history, the people's taxes have always been very serious, heavy taxes make the people miserable, and for the rich and noble, these things have little impact on them, so taxes have always been a tool to polarize the rich and poor in the whole country, and it is also a method used by the rulers to exploit and squeeze the people.
In ancient times, there have always been people who have evaded taxes and avoided taxes, the heaviest taxes are population tax and land tax, as the name suggests, population tax is paid according to population, land tax is paid according to the amount of land, these two taxes have always been used by various methods to evade taxes. The rich will evade land taxes by lying about land, and the poor will lie about people to evade taxes.
All kinds of tax evasion had a great impact on the finances of the Qing Government, so in the prosperous period of Kangqian, the Qianlong Emperor fixed the population tax to a value, no matter how many people could pay a fixed tax, so to a certain extent, this stimulated the increase in the population of the Qing Government. In the Yongzheng period, Yongzheng completely abolished the population tax and increased the scope of the land tax, so from then on, people no longer had to pay taxes because of too many people.
And Yongzheng also issued a lot of laws, relaxed the people's servitude life, relaxed the management of the people's household registration, which also made more people willing to have children, because in ancient times was an agricultural society, so there were more laborers more favorable for agricultural production, for rural people to raise children does not need to pay too much price, so after the population tax was abolished, the population of the Qing Dynasty soared.
For Yongzheng, the abolition of the population tax would make the Economy of the Qing Dynasty recover faster, and the increase in labor force and the conscious payment of taxes by the people made the Qing Dynasty prosperous. Therefore, the population of the Qing Dynasty directly rose from 70 million to 400 million, more than five times!
Ii. Progress in all aspects of the Qing Dynasty
The Qing Dynasty did not close the country in the early days, and with the introduction of foreign crops, this also made the Qing Dynasty more abundant in grain, abandoning the rice previously produced and choosing better crops. Moreover, the medical level of the Qing Dynasty has also been greatly improved after synthesizing the empirical knowledge of the previous dynasties.
In general, although the Qing Dynasty has made new innovations in the traditional order, it has never been able to go out of the way of closing the country off the country, the root cause of the problem has not been solved, no matter what reform is empty talk, so the Qing Dynasty has never been able to catch up with the pace of progress in the West, and the large country with a population of 400 million people was wantonly humiliated by foreign powers at the end of the Qing Dynasty.