The shaving order and the several massacres of the Qing army in Jiangnan caused by it have been denounced by many people. But without the shaving order, the Qing army massacred the Jiangnan region, especially against the gentry. Won't it happen? History has never been a simple and crude binary division, everything is causal. Whether there is a shaving order or not, Jiangnan is inevitably poisoned. In history, the Qing Dynasty made such a choice, in fact, there were deep interests behind it, not simply to kill Li Wei. All this is related to the organizational structure of the Qing Dynasty regime and the characteristics of the Han people in the two core areas of Liaodong and Jiangnan.
[In fact, before entering the customs, the Qing army did not only represent the Manchus]
The Han people in the Liaodong region had long been integrated by the Qing Dynasty
After vigorous reclamation in the early Ming Dynasty, the Liaodong region is no longer a barbaric area, but an agricultural area that can be cultivated on a large scale and achieve self-sufficiency. In the process, a large number of Han Chinese migrated to Liaodong in the Ming Dynasty, mixing with ethnic minorities such as jurchens outside Guanwai.
But today,tohoku rice, which every Chinese praises, did not exist before the Japanese occupation era. Under the premise of only one season of cultivation, the low yield doomed the Han people in the Liaodong region to be unable to live on agriculture alone. So Liaodong formed such a peculiar scene, that is, the Jurchens constantly learned to cultivate the land of the Han people, and the Han people learned to ride and hunt to subsidize the family. Xiong Tingbi, who was slightly in Liaodong, pointed out that the Han people in Liaodong were "immersed in Hu customs and had similar breaths", and if the husband was killed by the Hu people, his wife would not be sad for him, and if the imperial court sent her husband on errands, he would be angry. Faced with this mixed situation of Hu and Han, Ming officials from Guannei were the first to have doubts about the Han people in Liaodong. For example, Xiong Tingbi would rather recruit new soldiers from northern China in Guannei and even from Hunan and Sichuan in the south than use a large number of Liao people.
[If it weren't for the Fact that the Liao people still had the specialty of riding and shooting, it is estimated that Xiong Tingbi would have dismissed the Liaodong people in the army.
Although Xiong Tingbi's words had a "map cannon" attribute, it was no secret that the Han people outside Guanwai and Guannei were at odds with each other at that time. The coordination between the local soldiers in Liaodong and the reinforcements from Guannei was extremely poor, and "friendly troops having difficulties and not moving like mountains" became a common phenomenon on the battlefield of Liaodong.
Under the arrangement of the later Jin upper echelons, the Han officers and soldiers who surrendered to the Later Jin were actively incorporated into the Later Jin regime, such as after the Battle of The Great Ling River, the surrendered Han army from officials down to soldiers married a large number of Manchurian women. This situation is very common in Liaodong, and from the perspective of kinship, a considerable number of Liaodong Han people are closer to Houjin than the Guannei people. Coupled with the fact that Huang Taiji was not stingy with all the soldiers, including the Han army, he was far more impartial than the Ming army that was in the wind. This also caused a strange phenomenon in the history of the late Ming Dynasty: the Han army of the Eight Banners was very strong in combat, and even the same general often judged his performance in the Ming army after surrendering to the Qing army.
[Zu Dashou pit friendly forces twice in a row, and can also be regarded as a "model" for the Ming army in Liaodong Province]
Of course, it was not without the Liaodong people who were loyal to the Ming Dynasty, and in order to escape the military disaster, they fled to Guannei in large numbers, but Guannei was suffering from natural disasters of Xiaoice period, and the famine caused by continuous low temperatures and drought triggered the great peasant revolt at the end of the Ming Dynasty, and of course, there was no surplus grain to support so many influx of people outside Guanxi. This led them to run back without starving, after all, they still had a mouthful of food to eat when they were slaves.
With the passage of time, the Later Jin and later Qing regimes were more reliable and popular in the hearts of the Liaodong people than the Ming Dynasty. At the same time, because the Jurchens were not good at management, a large number of Han people in the Liaodong region were recruited to join the officials who surrendered in the Ming Dynasty to administer Liaodong for the Later Jin regime. For example, the later famous Fan Wencheng is a typical example of this - born in Liaodong and submitted to Manchuria at a young age. This group of people was the key proxy class that the Qing Dynasty was able to govern the Han Dynasty in the future. At the same time, because they spent most or all of their lives serving the Qing regime, their identification with the Ming Dynasty was very weak or even non-existent.
[The Liaodong literati led by Fan Wencheng believed that they had no shame, because in the Ming Dynasty he was an ordinary reader, and everything he had was given by Manchus. As Liaodong people, they identify with the Manchus who were born in Liaodong rather than the Guannei people across the Great Wall.
The Jiangnan problem of the Ming Dynasty
In the Ming Dynasty, Jiangnan was undoubtedly a large taxpayer, but the Ming government was very bad at financial management. The strong centralization of power has forced the country's wealth to flow northward, which has undoubtedly made the Jiangnan people, who bear most of the country's tax payments, very dissatisfied.
To make matters worse, the Ming Dynasty has begun to levy silver and silver as a large-scale tax, and all the goods must be "folded" to be used as taxes, which produces "fire consumption". Originally, it meant that as precious metals such as gold and silver were inevitably lost in the smelting process, it later began to refer to all the losses in the transportation process, including the expenses of the collection of personnel, the packaging and transportation costs of rice and money, and the loss of silver and two castings. In the Ming Dynasty, fire consumption was set by local governments, and the salaries paid by officials in the Ming Dynasty were so low that low-level officials could not even support their families on their salaries. At the same time as the income is low, the time for officials to rest is very small, only three days a month. This harsh treatment forced officials to unite in corruption in disguise. If the local government stipulates that there is an additional income of "fire consumption", is it a compensation given by the imperial court to these local officials? As a result, the looting carried out under this name became another major burden for the Ming Dynasty, especially in the Jiangnan region.
The problem of corruption in local governments has always been a problem for people of insight in the late Ming Dynasty, but considering that officials do have difficulties and the problem cannot be cured, killing a few corrupt officials and corrupt officials is simply not enough to change the situation.
[In the rich and prosperous Jiangnan region, the imperial court constantly plundered the wealth here, but the corruption in the Jiangnan region was rampant.
Over time, officials in the Jiangnan region formed a model of "officials protecting each other". To control corruption is to move an official is to move the entirety of his network.
The corrupt bureaucratic system cuts a lot of money from normal taxes, and the state's normal taxes cannot be collected. The civil officials of the Ming Dynasty basically came from the imperial examination, so that the sons of jiangnan gentry who were good at the imperial examination since ancient times accounted for a large proportion of the officials, and once the imperial court opened the knife indiscriminately, triggering a collective strike by officials from Jiangnan nationality, the whole country immediately entered a "state of shock". So there was such a strange scene in the Ming Dynasty, the imperial court in order to cope with the Qing army, constantly increased taxes, resulting in a continuous increase in taxes and "fire consumption"; therefore, the pockets of corrupt officials in the Jiangnan region were inflated at an alarming speed, while the people complained. The imperial court, which could not collect taxes, constantly ordered local officials to collect taxes, but the high-pressure policy against officials set at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty forced the Qing officials without backstage to complain bitterly, and even starving their wives and children to death could not complete the task of the imperial court. In the end, they can only join forces with corrupt officials who have "backstage" to protect themselves and join forces with the same stream. As a result, the Qing officials became corrupt officials, and the money that the people had to feed was expropriated, but the imperial court still could not collect the money, which became the dead knot of the political situation at the end of the Ming Dynasty.
After all, there are a few people like Hai Rui who are willing to starve their daughters, so it is a matter of time for them to join the same stream.] This vicious circle at the end of the Ming Dynasty eventually led the dynasty to the end.
The root cause of the Qing Dynasty's brutal suppression of Jiangnan
As the Qing army entered the pass and captured a large area of Han China, including Jiangnan, the ming dynasty's dead knot also plagued the Qing dynasty. With the Qing Dynasty no longer being a "barbarian outside the Guanwai", it became a dynasty that will rule the world. In the long term of peace and stability, it is no longer possible to use the means of plunder in the past, so taxation has become the top problem for the continued survival of the Qing Dynasty. At this time, the Qing army in the north, the rebel army of the Ming Dynasty, and the rebels of all walks of life had been poisoned for a long time, and it was difficult to produce a large amount of taxes, and the wealth of the Jiangnan region became the primary target of the Qing government.
The system set by Zhu Yuanzhang was very harsh on officials. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, it became the dead knot of the "strangled" country.
The gentry in the south desperately resisted the "shaving order" and eventually led to tragedies in Jiangyin and other places, only because of the waves caused by ideology. What the Qing Dynasty really wanted to do was to make room for "its own people in Liaodong". Since the wealth of Jiangnan is so important, and the gentry from Jiangnan have many entangled interests in the Ming Dynasty, it is they who make the Ming Dynasty unable to collect taxes, then for the Qing Dynasty, the problem is simple - kill you all, the problem will be solved.
[The shaving order is all over the country, and it has been implemented outside the Guanxi, but it is so famous in Jiangnan, and the reason is because of the massacre]
The Qing Dynasty wantonly killed these corrupt Jiangnan gentry officials who vigorously defended the old system of the Ming Dynasty, confiscating their family property to cover military expenses. After the officials of Jiangnan origin were purged to the point of being almost completed, the Liaodong people in the system took office to fill their vacancies.
For the Liaodong Wu people such as the Tong family, who had already entered the Qing Dynasty system, killing the "Southern Barbarians" had no psychological burden on them at all, but on the contrary, dyeing the red top with their blood was simply impossible to ask for. For Fan Wencheng and other Liaodong literati, Jiangnan people have been suppressing them in the official arena for hundreds of years, and this time it can be regarded as raising an eyebrow! Even for a general like Li Chengdong, who was born in the peasant army and was later recruited by the Ming Dynasty and then surrendered to the Qing army, the Gentry of Jiangnan had always ridden high above his head, and there was no psychological burden on them to kill them.
[The concept of the flag man actually joined the Han people at the beginning, of which the Liaodong Han people were the main force]
Therefore, for the Qing Dynasty, resisting the shaving order was fundamentally secondary. It is impossible for a group of people who hold wealth and are loyal to the previous dynasty and do not have enough force to protect wealth and official positions without killing. After several generations of integration, the Liaodong Han people have been regarded as "their own people", at least much closer than the southerners, many of them are still relatives with the Manchus, and the Guan position is just left for them and their sons. Still taking Fan Wencheng as an example, the second son Fan Chengmo, the official to the viceroy of Fujian, the third son Fan Chengxun, the governor of Guangxi, the viceroy of Yungui, and the viceroy of Jiangxi in Jiangnan.
epilogue
To sum up, all the turmoil at the end of the Ming Dynasty can be said to have been brewing for a long time after the establishment of the Ming Dynasty. Liaodong and Jiangnan, the former alienated the Ming Dynasty, so that Xiong Tingbi, who was the commander-in-chief, would rather pay several times the price to transport troops from the south than the locals. The latter were exploited by the founding patriarchy, and eventually the original model taxpayers became large tax collectors, and finally they were slaughtered in their own land and ruled by the Cypriot outsiders they despised. A dynasty and a country, cohesion is so poor, then it is a natural thing to perish.
[Ming], Bi Gong, Liaodong Zhi, vol. 1
[Ming], Xiong Tingbi, "The Chronicle of the Whole Side"