In the 16th century, when European countries were busy establishing a colonial system throughout the world through seafaring discoveries, expanding their power and plundering wealth. In the far East, after two hundred years of development, the Ming Dynasty faced an extremely serious socio-economic crisis at home, and in the case of internal and external troubles, it was likely to be overthrown at any time.
In 1572, when the ten-year-old Emperor Shenzong was helped by Zhang Juzheng to the emperor's throne, he looked at the ignorant Wanli Little Emperor. Zhang Juzheng, who had the full support of Empress Li and the eunuch Feng Bao, hoped to turn the tide of the tide through a reform and try to save the decline of the Ming Dynasty, Zhang Juzheng had the determination and ability to reform, but he ignored the strong strength of vested interest groups, laying hidden dangers for the eventual failure of his reform.
The troubled Ming Dynasty
Zhang Juzheng, the son of a military family born in Jiangling, Hubei Province, has been famous as a prodigy since childhood, reading through the Four Books and Five Classics at the age of 10, Showing Talent at the age of 12, and Zhongju at the age of 16, because of his outstanding talent, he was quite trusted during the Ming Muzong period, and after Muzong's death, he commissioned Zhang Juzheng and other three ministers to assist the young Wanli Emperor. At this time, Zhang Jizheng, who was the head of the cabinet and held the first power, knew very well that the seemingly huge Ming Dynasty in front of him had already been devastated and could only be saved through drastic reforms.
In Zhang Juzheng's view, there are five major hidden dangers in the Ming Dynasty, namely:
1. The tail of the clan room cannot be dropped;
2. No available talents;
3. There is no basis for the assessment of officials;
4. The armament is scattered;
5. The financial income is not enough.
The fiscal income is not enough, is the focus of various contradictions, but also the top priority of reform, why is there such a serious fiscal crisis? , its roots lie in three aspects,
First, land annexation is intensifying, and the state's tax revenue is not enough
After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, land annexation developed rapidly, and a large number of mintian lands were occupied by relatives of the emperor and state and bureaucratic landlords. Huangzhuang and Wangzhuang spread throughout Gyeonggi, and local bureaucrats and landlords also followed the trend and annexed land and usurped people's property. For a time, whether it was a knightly courtier, a eunuch sent by Ouchi, or a gentry with a meritorious name, they seized the land one after another, and all kinds of farms continued to expand, the land was highly concentrated, and the people were miserable.
At the same time, the aristocratic bureaucrats who seized large amounts of land enjoyed the privilege of not having to pay taxes on grain. After the annexation of land, the use of privileges to falsely report the number of fields to evade taxes also caused more and more land to be annexed in the Ming Dynasty, while the state's taxes were less and less.
For the Ming Dynasty, which used field endowment as the main financial revenue, the number of taxed land was reduced, which directly led to the shrinking of fiscal revenue, but the huge expenditure of the imperial family and administrative organs increased unabated, as well as the corruption of officials and the huge military expenditure, which greatly aggravated the degree of financial income of the Ming Dynasty.
Second, population loss, controllable population sharply reduced
As the bureaucratic landlords' annexation of land intensified, the population actually controlled by the Ming Dynasty began to decrease, and a large number of peasants went bankrupt, or went into exile in the wilderness, or sold themselves to the powerful as slaves.
As a result, at the beginning of the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, the total number of household registrations in the country was still more than 16 million, but in the fourth year of Hongzhi (1491), there were only more than 9 million households left in the country, and the number of people controlled by the Ming Dynasty was greatly reduced, which would also lead to land abandonment, taxation and servitude, which would inevitably aggravate the financial and economic development of the Ming Dynasty.
Third, the enlistment is unfair and the burden on the people is heavy
The ming dynasty's conscription system followed the two tax laws of the previous dynasty, and the field was divided into summer tax and autumn grain. There are Lijia, JuneYao, and Miscellaneous Laws, so taxation and servitude are separated. Taxes are levied on the basis of the number of acres of land, and the object is the field. The object of conscription is huding, and the conscription scheme in this conscription is theoretically fair.
However, since Jiajing and Longqing, the bureaucratic gentry, in addition to having the right to preferential and exempt quotas, have also used various fraudulent means to evade conscription. Generally speaking, they will buy off Xu officials, use methods such as "flying sprinkling" and "trickery" to skillfully evade and evade the responsibility of conscription, and transfer the heavy conscription to the poor people, so that there are cases where "the rich have a wide field and light enslavement, the poor have a narrow field and a heavy enslavement" and "those who have land but no endowment, and those who have endowment but no land" have appeared. This results in serious inequalities in the assignment of military service.
Under the vicious circle of the above factors, the socio-economic crisis and political rule crisis of the Ming Dynasty became increasingly prominent, and the current situation of poverty and poverty forced the Ming Dynasty to begin to find a way to reform and save itself.
Zhang Ju is carrying out reforms
It was precisely on the basis of the above difficulties that the Ming Dynasty had to make changes. At this time, Zhang Juzheng, who became the first assistant to the cabinet, decided to launch a top-down change in order to consolidate the rule of the Ming Dynasty and revitalize the state finances, trying to carry out financial reforms with the "One Whip Law" as the core, but before that, he needed to rectify the ming Dynasty's already decaying bureaucracy.
Officials rule first
In Zhang Juzheng's view, since jiajing in the Ming Dynasty, the corruption of the government and the conformism of officials have been extremely serious, and the ministers' chapters and official documents of various government departments have filled this huge administrative system every day, but the efficiency of solving problems is extremely low.
Zhang Juzheng is very clear that to solve this dysfunctional and inefficient bureaucratic system, it is bound to touch the vested interests of officials at all levels, and the resistance is bound to be not small. But he knew more clearly that it was urgent to rectify the rule of officials, and only when the officials succeeded in their rule could his economic reform "one whip law" be truly implemented.
To this end, Zhang Juzheng began to implement the "Examination Method" in June of the first year of the Wanli Calendar (1573). "Fu press the examination, play two volumes for each body, one to the cabinet, one to the six subjects, and if the stroke is delayed, the ministers will correct it." The six parts are hidden, and the Kochen is corrected. If the six sections are hidden, the cabinet will correct them." Zhang Juzheng controlled the six departments with six sections, and then controlled the six sections with the cabinet, forming a complete administrative examination and approval supervision system, which was restricted at all levels and completed at any time, which greatly improved the management efficiency of officials at the central and local levels.
At that time, every time in the year of the "grand plan" of evaluating local officials, he stressed the need to list officials who acted impartially and served the people in a down-to-earth manner as "upper examinations," officials who relied solely on rhetoric and sought trust were listed as "lower examinations," and those redundant officials who lacked work efficiency were completely dismissed.
At the same time, he adopted the selection criteria of "those who can handle state affairs and are courteous to the king, that is, they are recorded by example", broke with the norm, and selected a large number of talented officials, who appointed important posts according to the strengths of each of them. Talents from various fields, such as Wang Chonggu, Li Chengliang, Qi Jiguang, Pan Jitao, Zhang Xueyan, and Li Wan'an, made outstanding contributions to Zhang Juzheng's reform.
Clean up the arrears and collect the tax arrears
When the reform in the political field achieved initial results, Zhang Juzheng began to go deep into the reform of the financial and economic fields, and the spearhead was directed at the bureaucrats and gentry landlord forces who abused power for personal gain.
At that time, the common practice of Ming officials to increase taxes was to directly apportion the people, rather than dare to collect the taxes they had evaded from the magnates, because these powerful and powerful people all had extremely strong political influence, and they were chased after the taxes they owed, and often before the taxes were recovered, the hats of the black yarn were already lost, so most of them were gone.
Zhang Juzheng put forward the idea that officials should "take qiangu as the test"; all officials who fail to collect the tax arrears should be punished by criticism, transfer, or dismissal, in order to recover the grain of the field and evaluate their political achievements, force officials to crack down on illegal magnates, and make corrupt officials have nowhere to hide.
Clear the fields
Of course, the examination law can only solve the problem of some tax arrears, and a large number of tax evasion and tax evasion are the focus of fiscal reform, but this needs to be changed from the system of servitude, and the clearing of the fields is the basis for this change.
In November of the fifth year of the Wanli Dynasty (1577), amid a wave of protests from bureaucratic landlords, Zhang Juzheng ordered qingzhang to clear the land of the whole country and thoroughly investigate the land that had been annexed and concealed by the imperial relatives, the courtiers and bureaucrats at all levels.
After disposing of some nobles and officials who resisted the encroachment, the work of clearing the fields of the whole country was basically completed in the tenth year of the Wanli Dynasty (1581), and in these three years, more than 800,000 hectares of land were found to be tax-evasive, and the work of the Qingzhang dealt a heavy blow to the illegal magnate landlords, forcing them to hand over the deceitful fields and mu, or pay taxes according to the actual amount of the fields, thus reversing the situation of the Ming Dynasty's financial deficit.
After the phenomenon of uneven taxation was initially corrected, Zhang Juzheng implemented a whip law implemented by Gan Yang, Hai Rui and others to the whole country. The conscription was merged, and the servitude was spread into the fields and acres, together with the taxation and tribute, and the collection of Ding silver was collected, which changed the previous method of collecting physical goods for the collection of conscription, and stipulated that the taxes and silver should be officially collected, which put an end to the exploitation of the people by the Lijia and Xu officials, and significantly alleviated the burden on the people.
The reform was successful, and the Wanli New Deal began
After ten years of reform by Zhang Juzheng, the Ming Dynasty appeared a new atmosphere of unification of government decrees and a full national treasury, known in history as the Wanli New Deal. Regarding the effectiveness of the reforms, the Qing Dynasty historian Zhang Tingyu once commented:
"Self-righteousness, everything does not dare to make things up, and the political system is pure."
In other words, the reforms re-demonstrated a strong government mechanism for the Ming Dynasty, and from this point of view, Zhang Juzheng challenged vested interest groups with the strength of the first auxiliary and achieved certain success.
People die and tragedies end
In 1582, Zhang Juzheng died of illness, and unexpectedly, the tragedy was rapidly staged only half a year after his death. Vested interest groups opposed to Zhang Juzheng's reforms created a strong momentum, dismissing all those who were reused during Zhang Juzheng's reforms, and restoring the reputations and official positions of those who had opposed Zhang Juzheng.
Even the Wanli Emperor, who had always respected Zhang Juzheng, gradually grew up after Zhang Juzheng's figure. The young Wanli Emperor urgently needed to prove that he was an emperor with pro-government ability, he was already tired of Zhang Juzheng's preaching, and there was also a great change in his caring teacher, under the false evidence slandered and framed by vested interests, the Wanli Emperor chose to completely deny Zhang Juzheng's reform achievements, and issued an edict to convict Zhang Juzheng of multiple crimes.
The most tragic thing is that Zhang Juzheng's brother and son either committed suicide or were assigned to join the army, and more than a dozen members of the family were locked up indoors and starved to death by the government when they raided their homes.
epilogue
Zhang Juzheng's reforms, that is, straightened out taxes, solved the financial crisis, eased the internal contradictions of the Ming Dynasty, and saved the Ming Dynasty, which was about to collapse. However, due to the development of the Ming Dynasty at this time after two hundred years, the conservative vested interest groups were very powerful, even if Zhang Juzheng temporarily gained the power of reform, but because his reform was too rigid, the one-size-fits-all reform method touched the interests of many powerful and powerful people, and they were resolutely resisted, and the interests of these people were often accompanied by imperial power. Even if his reforms continued the Ming Dynasty to a certain extent, as long as the interest groups under the old system existed—bureaucrats, clan members, and landlords—any reform could only fail, and the demise of the Ming Dynasty was only a matter of time.
Resources:
History of the Ming Dynasty
The End of the Chronicle of the Ming Dynasty
"Mingchen Concerto"
The Complete Works of Zhang Wenzhong
《Ming Society》
《Ming Tong Jian》