In the early years of the Ming Dynasty, after Zhu Yuanzhang completed the Northern Expedition and expulsion of the Mongolian Yuan, the domestic situation tended to be stable, but immediately after the end of the war at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, the potential interest disputes between the newly built Ming Dynasty and the landlord class also began to gradually appear and began to gradually erupt. Jiangnan, the ruling and economic center of the Ming Dynasty at that time, was also the focus of this struggle.
First, the resurgence of the landlords in Jiangnan in the Ming Dynasty
During the peasant war at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, the landlord forces in Jiangnan suffered a serious blow, and many people's family businesses were destroyed. However, soon after the end of the war, they developed rapidly again. Taking Suzhou Prefecture as an example, at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the total amount of taxes and silver in Suzhou Prefecture was about 2.89 million stones, and the total number of households was about 490,000. About one in a thousand households, accounting for one-twentieth of the total number of land grants in the seven counties of a prefecture. It can be seen that at the beginning of the founding of the Ming Dynasty, the land in Jiangnan was highly concentrated. If there is a wealthy merchant Shen Wansan, "the field produces all over Wuxia"; Dantu Cao Ding, occupying more than 10,000 acres of land; Yiwu giant room Lou Tuxiang, only diners have raised dozens of people. Their property strength, which looks majestically at Jiangnan, is "enough to hold the handle of the government, and enough to clamp down on the wealth of the small people."
Why did the development of the landlord power in Jiangnan be so rapid?
In the Yuan Dynasty, jiangnan landlords had two distinctive characteristics.
One is to live in groups. For example, Lishui's surname is Duanshi, "the group of sons and daughters live in the mountains before and after more than a hundred families, flying high, and connecting hundreds of miles around the ring." "Xin'an zhuda surnames, for thousands of years" live in groups, and there is absolutely no one who is involved in the family. "At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, there were many powerful local clans living in various parts of Jiangnan.
The second is the eunuch of the past generations. After the Southern Crossing of the Song Dynasty, Jiangnan was the political center of the Southern Song Dynasty, and the landlord class in Jiangnan continued to enter the center of the Song Dynasty for generations. For example, in the Pingyang Cai clan, there were a total of eighty-two officials in the Song Dynasty. During the Yuan Dynasty and the Song Dynasty, although these families had some power due to the change of dynasty, there were still many families serving in the Yuan Dynasty.
The two major characteristics of living together and living in the past generations have entangled the relations between the landlords in Jiangnan and made them have a certain social foundation and political prestige. During the peasant revolt at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, they used this command to order their relatives and neighbors to form a village to protect themselves. Since then, they have gained a certain degree of military strength, and in the process of the peasant uprising at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, most of them were not hit by the rebel army, but took the opportunity to expand their strength, and some of them defected to Zhu Yuanzhang and became the founding fathers of the country.
At the same time, since not all regions were affected by the peasant uprising wars at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, some areas were full of wars, while others were safe and sound. For example, Suzhou and Songjiang (today's Shanghai), mostly occupied by Zhang Shicheng, had fewer wars and less damage.
In addition, in the process of the peasant revolt at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhang Shicheng, who were vying for control of Jiangnan, tried their best to win over the landlords and literati in Jiangnan, which also enabled the landlords in Jiangnan to be protected by their power and arbitrarily carry out land annexation, becoming the new upstart after the establishment of the Ming Dynasty. It is precisely for the above reasons that the landlord forces in Jiangnan were able to develop and grow rapidly in the early Ming Dynasty.
Second, the contradiction between the landlord in Jiangnan and Zhu Yuanzhang
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, with the restoration and development of the landlord forces in Jiangnan, the contradictions between them and the great unified new dynasty established by Zhu Yuanzhang began to intensify rapidly in the distribution of power and wealth.
At this time, there were about three political attitudes of the landlords in Jiangnan toward the Ming Dynasty.
The first was to support the Ming Dynasty, which mainly included Zhu Yuanzhang's Liu Ji and Song Lian from the Dragon Heroes, and later the Jiangnan celebrities Song Ne and Bei Qiong, who were obtained by kaikeshi;
The second was to have an attitude of imminent departure from the Ming Dynasty, such as the famous Scholars Yang Weizhen and Huang Yan of Shanyin;
The third was the people who took hostile measures toward the Ming Dynasty, mainly the widows of the Yuan Dynasty and the supporters of Zhang Shicheng and Fang Guozhen.
Of the above three kinds of people, in addition to the second and third types of people who refused to cooperate with the Ming Dynasty to a certain extent, some of the first type of people also had contradictions with the Ming Dynasty. Their political and economic status in the Ming Dynasty was far inferior to that of the Huaixi clique headed by Zhu Yuanzhang.
For example, Li Shanchang in Huaixi and Liu Ji in eastern Zhejiang were both founding fathers of the Ming Dynasty, and their treatment was completely different. Li Shanchang was reused for a long time, and was made a first-class duke with four thousand stones, while Liu Ji was only given the title of Count of Sanpin and two hundred and forty stones. In the end, he was excluded again and died of grief.
In short, the various attitudes of the landlords in Jiangnan towards the newly built Ming Dynasty caused instability in the Ming Dynasty's rule over Jiangnan.
Since the Tang Dynasty, Jiangnan has gradually become the country's financial powerhouse, the Yuan Dynasty national tax grain a total of more than 13 million stones, of which "Jiangsu and Zhejiang tax grain A world", Only Zhejiang province reached 4.49 million stones, accounting for almost one-third of the country. After Zhu Yuanzhang raised an army, he was financially strapped and mainly dependent on Jiangnan economically, and many areas did not reduce the amount of land levies levied in various names before the founding of the country, especially in the Suzhou area, because there were not many lands under Zhang Shicheng's subordinates as official land, and the taxes were particularly heavy.
Therefore, when the Ming Dynasty was established, Jiangnan Chongfu began to stand out as the main social problem at that time.
At the same time, the system of servitude in the early Ming Dynasty was also unfavorable to the landlords in Jiangnan. Before Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang had already implemented the system of dispatching servants in Jiangnan. In the first year of Hongwu, the Ming Dynasty formally established the system of "one person from tian yi to ding", which was a servitude apportioned by the central government to the localities. However, due to the fact that the social economy of the Central Plains had not yet recovered due to war damage at that time, a large number of jungong workers were sent to Jiangnan.
To a certain extent, this reduced the working time of the landlord tenants, and the more fields were inspected, the heavier the service. The Jungong Campaign once again exacerbated the contradiction between the landlords in Jiangnan and the Ming Dynasty.
As for the Ming Dynasty's policy of enlistment, which was obviously unfavorable to the landlords in Jiangnan, the landlords in Jiangnan also adopted three methods of anti-enlistment: tax evasion, order-seeking, and armed rebellion.
Among them, tax evasion is the most important method. In the three years of Hongwu, Suzhou bore more than 35,800 stones of autumn grain. The cao ding family, a large landowner in Dantu County, used the method of "making a waste of familiarity" to evade taxes of four hectares and seventy-three acres.
During the Hongwu period, Jiangnan officials often risked killing their heads and asked the emperor for a reduction in their land endowments. Zhu Yuanzhang had ordered that the Jiangnan tax be exempted, but the "autumn tax was restored". Zhou Heng, a Wuxi official, believed that this was "showing the world to disbelief." Zhu Yuanzhang had no choice but to fulfill his promise, but his heart was very unhappy. Soon, Zhou Heng returned home on leave and took a day off. Zhu Yuanzhang said: "I do not believe in the world, and Ru does not believe in the Son of Heaven, so I ordered you to abandon the city." Zhu Yuanzhang used the excuse to kill Zhou Heng, but in fact he killed the spokesman of the jiangnan landlord forces. The famous Jin Jiong incident also belongs to the same nature. Jin Jiong, a native of Jiaxing and the prefect of Suzhou, is said to have written to request a reduction in view of the heavy rent of Suzhou guantian tenants. Zhu Yuanzhang sent someone to investigate, and found that the economic family's official tian was too private, so he angrily rebuked Jin Jiong.
The main example of the landlord's armed rebellion against conscription was Wu Yuannian, when Xu Da was ordered to "inspect the people's fields and requisition bricks and burn the city" in Songjiang. Qian Hegao, a rich man, refused to obey the order, proposing that "we cannot do it with our strength, we cannot die if the city is not finished, and if we survive to gain riches", the drumming movement was chaotic, although it was not successful in the end, but it also reflected the hostility of the landlords in Jiangnan to the Ming Dynasty at that time.
Third, Zhu Yuanzhang's restrictions and attacks on the landlords in Jiangnan
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the capital was Nanjing, and Jiangnan became the ruling center of the Ming Dynasty. In order to strengthen the centralization of power, Zhu Yuanzhang carried out various restrictions and attacks on the landlords in Jiangnan.
First, curb mergers and restrictions on the expansion of the economic power of the landlords in Jiangnan
From his personal experience, Zhu Yuanzhang knew very well that "rich people are many and powerful", and it is inevitable to "bully small people and arbitrarily cut off rural songs", causing the sharpening of social contradictions. Due to the large amount of wasteland in the early Ming Dynasty, landlords often took advantage of Zhu Yuanzhang's reward policy to annex land. In this regard, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered those who went to Linhao to reclaim the land, "It is advisable to test their strength and give it to them, so that the poor can have funds, and the rich cannot be annexed." If the apostles who occupy many fields think that they have been employed, but turn the poor into the seeds, sin." This policy of curbing mergers and acquisitions not only played a definitive role in the development of the land ownership system of large landlords, but also enabled the reclamation of the land in the early years of the Ming Dynasty to proceed smoothly.
Second, clean up the land and prevent the landlords in Jiangnan from concealing taxes
Since the Southern Song Dynasty, fish scale atlases have become popular in Jiangnan. After the war at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, most of the fish scale atlases in Jiangnan were lost. After the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, in order to comprehensively rectify the Jiangnan Tian nationality, in the first year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang sent Zhou Zhu and 164 other people to branch zhejiang west to verify the field mu and draw a fish scale atlas. Other places are sorted out by the local government.
However, the work of re-cleaning up the land was met with stubborn resistance from the landlords in Jiangnan. To this end, after Zhu Yuanzhang carried out another severe crackdown, he sent his son Wu Chun to wait until various places to measure the fields and acres to draw a book, until Hongwu twenty years later, after twenty years, the fish scale atlas in Zhejiang and Suzhou was finally drawn.
Third, the relocation of rich households weakens the social foundation of the landlords in Jiangnan
Most of the landlords in Jiangnan live in clusters. Ethnic groups are their strength against the government. Therefore, Zhu Yuanzhang often forced them to leave their homeland by relocating rich households, thus losing the strength to rebel. The largest one was in the fourteenth year of Hongwu, when Zhu Yuanzhang ordered Yu Tongyuan to "migrate to the south of the Jiangnan Haomin to fill in Fengyang". The main targets of the migration were Zhang Shicheng and Fang Guozhen, Chen Youyi, the remnants of the Yuan Dynasty, and the rich families in Jiangnan.
Fourth, use heavy codes to crack down on the landlords in Jiangnan politically
After Zhu Yuanzhang eliminated Zhang Shicheng, almost every three or four years, the landlords in Jiangnan were about to suffer a heavy blow. They were implicated in a series of major struggles, including the Hangzhou Feiliang Incident in Hongwu in four years, the Empty Seal Case in nine years, the Hu Weiyong Case in thirteen years, the Guo Heng case in eighteen years, and the Blue Jade Case in twenty-six years.
Later, in the thirty years of Hongwu, there was another incident of "North and South Lists", and Zhu Yuanzhang, under the pretext that all the soldiers he had raised in that year were southerners, expelled and killed the chief examiner, ordered a re-examination, and took all the northerners, reversing the situation in which the southern scholars monopolized the examination. The following year, "with everyone in Jiangnan as the nest master, Xu Xiang accused of adultery", and Luo was woven into prison. Through thirty years of uninterrupted blows, the three Wu giant surnames in Jiangnan "are both surplus and return, or die or migrate, and there is no one who survives."
In order to strengthen its control over the Jiangnan region, the Ming Dynasty adopted a policy of "from pastorship to participation in politics, do not choose their own people carelessly" for officials here. However, during the Hongwu period, there were very few local officials in Jiangnan who could finally serve. For example, in Suzhou Province, thirty prefects have been changed in the past thirty years, of which one was demoted, two were deposed, eight were imprisoned, one sat on the stolen face, and two were killed. Zhu Yuanzhang's frequent changes of horses for local officials in this region, and the tragic end of these officials, reflect the sharp performance of the Ming Dynasty's struggle for control between the ruling class and local forces in the Jiangnan region.
The political blows of the landlords in Jiangnan will inevitably lead to economic bankruptcy. The Ming Law stipulates, "Whoever violates the law among the people shall have no home, and the land and the land shall be detained by the officials." Through this series of blows to the landlords in Jiangnan, the Ming Dynasty not only consolidated its rule over Jiangnan, but also made great economic gains. Due to the lack of a large number of landlords' private land, the number of official fields in Jiangnan increased greatly in the early Ming Dynasty.
As the number of official fields increased, the Ming Dynasty's field endowment in Jiangnan also increased exponentially. During the Yuan Dynasty, Suzhou's tianfu was only 360,000 stones, but by the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the tianfu had increased to more than 2.89 million stones, about seven times more.
epilogue
Zhu Yuanzhang's restriction and attack on the landlord forces in Jiangnan was fundamentally to maintain the centralized rule of the feudal dynasty. Like all feudal emperors, Zhu Yuanzhang also regarded centralized power above all else, whether poor or rich, untouchable or noble, and demanded that they be satisfied with the status quo, obey the law politically, and pay taxes and serve economically. The actions or strength of any force, once it grows to constitute a threat and blow to the dynasty, is ruthlessly suppressed. In the early years of the Ming Dynasty, its blows on the landlord forces in Jiangnan were the main embodiment of this idea of strengthening centralized power, which inhibited the development of local forces to a certain extent and strengthened the rule of the Ming Dynasty's centralized politics.