The social contradictions of the late Ming Dynasty were very acute.
The Ming Dynasty, except for natural disasters (Xiaoice River period), to a large extent, was that after the concentrated outbreak of social contradictions, the ruler at that time, Chongzhen Emperor Zhu Youjian, did not take effective measures in time to transfer social contradictions, and only then would he move to the final dead end.
Of course, from today's point of view, the Chongzhen Emperor still had the opportunity to save Daming in the first few years of his reign.
Unfortunately, the Chongzhen Emperor, who had not undergone the education of the imperial system, really responded to the old saying that "the authorities are confused", so that in the eighteen years of his reign as emperor (the seventh year of the Apocalypse, the seventeenth year of Chongzhen's death), the situation was decadent and could not be cleaned up.
During this period, even if some ministers proposed solutions, such as: and houjin discussions, move the capital to Nanjing, etc., if implemented, perhaps, Daming can continue, but in the end they are also bound by so-called morality, resulting in inability to return to heaven.
Death is inevitable.
So, what are the social contradictions in the late Ming Dynasty? Wang Lang believes that it is mainly concentrated in the following three aspects.
First, the unstoppable civilian bureaucracy has led to an imbalance in the power of the central government, which has induced other problems such as politics and economics.
Politics is about balance!
Since the "rule of Renxuan" in the early Ming Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty civilian official clique began to appear on the political stage after experiencing the downturn of Hongwu and Yongle, and correspondingly, with the support of imperial power, the eunuch power also rose and became a force to compete with the civilian officials.
During the Apocalypse Dynasty, the "castration party" headed by Wei Zhongxian was essentially a force that competed with the civilian official clique headed by DongLin with the support of imperial power.
After Chongzhen ascended the throne, there was no problem in cutting off the "castration party", but he did not support his own trusted eunuchs to form a force in the dynasty, so that the civilian officials lost the restraint of being under the supervision of the imperial power, which led to the outbreak of many problems.
1. The party struggle continues, and most of the civilian officials are caught in the party struggle, worried about the country, and widowed for the people!
Where there are people, there are rivers and lakes. Even though, the party struggle at the end of the Ming Dynasty began in the Wanli Calendar and was strengthened during the Apocalypse Dynasty. Although Zhu Youjian removed the castration party after he ascended the throne, he was unwilling to expand the scope of the attack, but only killed the core members of the castration party, which also made many peripheral castrated party members hide in the dprk, thus prompting the party struggle to continue in the Chongzhen Dynasty.
The most typical example is the death of Yuan Chonghuan.
Although Yuan's death was suspected by Zhu Youjian, the essence was that the remnants of the eunuch party and some conspirators tried to use Yuan Chonghuan to attack Donglin Qian Longxi (about Yuan Chonghuan, Wang Lang would write a special article to discuss), thus launching an attack on Donglin and seizing the power of the Chongzhen Dynasty.
The evil result of party struggle is that those who participate in party struggle only oppose for the sake of opposing, and do not care at all whether the tactics proposed by their political enemies are beneficial to the country and the people. Under such a atmosphere, after losing the information refining of the two major eyes and ears of the East Factory and The Jinyi Guard, Zhu Youjian gradually lost control of the court.
"Scholars, peasants, industrialists, and merchants" were the social hierarchy of the feudal dynasty, and the social status of merchants was the lowest regardless of the dynasty. However, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, this situation was completely reversed, and the social status of merchants was increasing day by day, becoming the mainstream of the upper class, and "soldiers, merchants, workers and peasants" was the social reality at that time.
In the "peasant-oriented" Ming Dynasty, the peasants actually fell to the bottom of society, which was the most prominent reason for social contradictions, and the power of civilian officials was the fundamental cause of changes in social classes.
The vigorous development of the budding capitalism at the end of the Ming Dynasty made the civil officials in the court have a merchant background behind them, such as: the Donglin Party represents the emerging industrial and commercial and small landlord classes in Jiangnan, the Zhejiang Party is behind the maritime merchants and large landlords, and the Qi Party and the Chu Party are attached to the magnates and the traditional inland large landlord class, which also makes the Wanli and Tianqi dynasties encounter great obstacles in collecting commercial taxes, but because there are different political demands between the various factions, the imperial court can also collect commercial taxes.
However, in the Chongzhen Dynasty, because there was no eunuch power, and some were only different factions of civil officials, although the various factions fought politically, they reached an alliance in taxation, which was completely transferred to the peasants, which increased the burden on the peasants.
Land annexation became a serious social problem, and landless peasants and landless military households became the main source of rebels at the end of the Ming Dynasty.
If the party struggle is to rip open the roof tiles of the Ming Dynasty, then land annexation is to dig the corners of the Ming Dynasty.
In the ancient times of "agriculture-oriented", the peasant was the foundation of a dynasty, and once the peasants lost the land on which they depended, then the dynasty was not far from the time of extinction.
Land annexation in the Ming Dynasty was divided into two situations, and this was precisely the foundation of the Ming Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang's construction of the Ming Dynasty.
1. The landlord bureaucracy annexes land.
Because of the turmoil at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, a large number of unowned lands appeared. During the Hongwu period, for the sake of world stability, Zhu Yuanzhang implemented the national policy of "cultivating and living", established a system of yellow books and fish scales, counted the population, distributed people's land, reduced official land, and encouraged peasants to reclaim the land.
However, with the further development of the social productive forces of the Ming Dynasty (handicrafts, commerce), especially the increasing perfection of the ming bureaucracy system, the people in order to avoid taxes, tax avoidance, and the forcible seizure of the private landlord class, the yellow book and fish scale book system formulated in the early Ming Dynasty were successively destroyed, the land began to be concentrated, the landless peasants increased, and began to gather in economically developed towns.
However, whether it is Jiangnan or inland, the carrying capacity of industry and commerce is limited, which makes a large number of landless farmers become displaced people, and gradually become a destabilizing factor in Ming society.
2. Thousands of households and 100 households of the health center annexed land.
The military household was established nationwide by Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang when he implemented the national policy of "resting and recuperating" in the early Ming Dynasty, which on the one hand strengthened Daming's military deterrence against the localities, on the other hand, strengthened the army's self-sufficiency and reduced the pressure on the central government's financial expenditure.
To be sure, this was a near-perfect military system, but the problem was that Zhu Yuanzhang ignored the reproductive ability of military households and their desire to change their identities, while also ignoring the desire for wealth of the commanders of local health centers, Qianhuguan and Baihuguan.
The consequence of this is that because of the strict restrictions, many military households are bound in their household registration, and it is very difficult for one person to join the army and join the army for generations, whether it is to take the road of examination or to get rid of the nationality; and those thousand household officials and hundred household officials of the health center, although they are officials, but also because of the restrictions on their status, they cannot be as free as the private households, and the wealth monopoly can only be the annexation of the land of the military households under their own hands.
The key is also that, whether it is a border or a conquest, military households still have to bear the burden of bureaucrats at all levels to serve themselves, and the monthly grain is withheld, so at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the flight of military households has become an indisputable fact.
The fleeing military households became another destabilizing factor in the late Ming Dynasty.
Third, the military tail is not big, and the conscription army and the family system army begin to be unfettered by the imperial court and gradually transform into local warlords.
The destruction of the military household system must have been followed by the reform of the military system, ushering in the conscription system and the family system, but this also caused another social contradiction in the late Ming Dynasty, that is, the contradiction between the increasingly warlordized local military chiefs and the centralization of power.
What is a warlord? That is, the military or military clique that divides one side and forms its own faction behind the use of force, although it recognizes the central government, is more of a way of doing its own thing and ignoring the order and laws of the country.
Under centralized power, the requirements for local military leaders are to take the instructions of the Military Department as the code of conduct and accept the leadership and command of the Military Department.
In fact, the status of the military in the early Ming Dynasty was very high.
However, with the political structure of "co-governance of culture and martial arts" in the early Ming Dynasty, which was transformed into an institutional pattern of "respecting the culture and inferiority with the military", the status of the military also declined, even if it was the same level in the official position, the idea of the civil and imperial martial arts had reached a consensus.
Under such a concept, especially in the case of Daming facing internal troubles (peasant rebel army) and external troubles (Houjin), it is very obvious that the local general soldiers who hold military power on one side tend to be warlordized or completely reduced to warlords when they find that the authority of the central government has weakened, such as Mao Wenlong of Pidao during the Chongzhen Dynasty.
Regardless of Mao Wenlong's role in containing Hou Jin, Mao Wenlong was not under the control of the imperial court, and the trend of transforming into a warlord was already obvious.
In the Chongzhen Dynasty, it was Wu Sangui in the Liaodong Guanning clan who had been completely warlordized, in addition to Zuo Liangyu, who was stationed in Jiujiang and had 200,000 troops.
In Shaanxi, He Renlong, who was beheaded by the overseer Sun Chuanting in the fifteenth year of Yu Chongzhen (1642 AD), was already a well-known warlord in the land of the Three Qins.
Liu Zeqing, one of the four towns in the north of the Southern Ming River, actually killed the civil officials who went south to give Han Ruyu during the Chongzhen Dynasty, which showed the arrogance of the warlords.
What harm will the warlordized daming local generals bring? They ignored the law, corrupted military discipline, plundered by arsonists, and even killed and plundered women, deepening the social crisis of the Ming Dynasty.
Wang Lang said:
Of course, the social crisis at the end of the Ming Dynasty was far more than that, and Wang Lang was only a peeping leopard in the tube.
But one thing is certain, throughout the Chongzhen Dynasty, most of the people occupying the court were a group of speculators vying for power and profit, and if we want to trace the real reason for the Ming Dynasty, Wang Lang believes that the power of civilian officials is not constrained, so that the festering of the civil official system can also be regarded as a main cause.
The decline and fall of dynasties has its historical inevitability.
Wang Lang thought that although at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, The Ming Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang formulated many state systems that seemed to be almost perfect at the time in order to make the country and mountains forever, his descendants did not work hard, or the successive Ming emperors did not think thoroughly, did not seek further refinement in the political, economic, military and other systems, and under the bud of the new production relations that had been born (the bud of capitalism), did not seek more advanced systems to match, but continued to enter the old road of the dynasties, and the demise was doomed.
[I am Jiangdong Wang Lang, bringing you a different historical vision!] Stick to the original, like me please pay attention to me! 】