History entered the 1830s and 1840s, the Qing Dynasty has become like a dilapidated classic car, the parts of aging still have to carry the weight forward. "Squeak, squeal" gasped, Chinese people miserable. Before and after the Opium War, how bitter the Chinese people really were, we can see a glimpse of it in Gong Zizhen's poems and Marx's expositions.
The war scenes of the Opium War, Chinese history here turned a corner
"Regardless of whether the salt and iron are not raised for the river, the southeast alone has many tears, the country has given three liters of people and a fight, and the slaughter of cattle is invincible." This is the deep cry of Gong Zizhen, a wise man and prophet of history, in 1839, the year before the Opium War. If you look closely at this poem, can you see how much oppression the people of the Qing Dynasty suffered, and how much the crisis of the country was?
The poem says that the rulers of the Qing Dynasty did not encourage the production of salt and iron, did not build the water conservancy facilities of the Yellow River, and only blindly paid taxes to the rich areas along the southeast coast. Often the national tax quota is three liters of rice, and the officials are exploited layer by layer, and finally at least a bucket of rice is handed over, and the heavy taxation makes it impossible for the people to live, so they have to kill the cattle to find another way out.
The Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions have always been the main producers of grain for the imperial court and were the granaries of the Qing Dynasty. The poem ruthlessly exposes the heavy oppression of the people by the government in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and also reflects how sharp the contradictions in Chinese society were at that time.
Breathing opium addicts who swallow clouds and spit mist
Under the seemingly peaceful life, there is a serious social crisis. As a thinker, the poet Gong Zizhen keenly observed all this, so the poet has long been worried and shouted loudly: "I advise Tiangong to shake it up and demote talents in an eclectic manner." "Looking at the world, 'chaos' is not far away!" Heralding the coming of a great storm of peasant revolt, Gong Zizhi sounded the alarm bell to the rulers of the Qing Dynasty.
While Gong Zizhen was still groaning and screaming, the Opium War broke out. After a war, the Western powers used guns to blast open the door of China's disaster, pushing the Chinese people into the bottomless abyss of pain.
In the Opium War, the British invaders extorted property and silver, and finally the Treaty of Nanking ceded the land to pay compensation. The military expenses paid by the Qing government for the war, the plunder and destruction of the invaders, and the huge losses of the Qing Dynasty from the government to the people cannot be calculated. However, all this eventually fell to the mud on the water, and all the losses were directly or indirectly transferred to the shoulders of the people.
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The dilemma of selling cigarettes in Humen
What is even more hateful is the poison of opium, which was very serious before the Opium War, and after the Opium War, Britain and other powers even used Hong Kong as a base to pour drugs on the Chinese people who were deeply affected by disasters. In the 1850s, the opium trade grew almost exponentially every year, reaching 50,000 or 60,000 boxes. Opium was traded entirely in cash, and the silver of the Chinese people's white flowers lost 20 to 30 million taels per year, and Hong Xiuquan once denounced the Qing government for "spending tens of millions of dollars a year for tobacco soil", which is by no means an exaggeration, but a very grim fact.
The economic problem of silver loss, silver price rise, and the decline in the price of money is more serious, and the price of copper money for silver has more than doubled. And the income of the people, calculated in money, paid taxes and calculated in copper coins, after the price of silver rose, if the original one or two silver can be exchanged for a thousand, now often rise to eight or nine thousand or even more than ten thousand, the people invisibly pay several times or even 10 times more taxes. This status quo is much higher than Gong Zizhen's "national endowment of three liters and one fight". The people cannot speak of their sufferings, and there is no place to redress their grievances.
What is even more frightening is that the Chinese people are using real money and useful money to buy the harmful things of the Western powers. After the five ports of commerce, industrial products such as low-cost foreign yarns and foreign cloths produced by large-scale western industries flocked to China. Among them, the trade volume imported by Britain into China was 969831 pounds in 1842 and rose to 2394827 pounds in 1845. Chinese people's self-sufficiency economy was completely destroyed, China's trade deficit became larger and larger every year, and real money and silver were lost to the pockets of Western powers.
The handicraft products of the Qing Dynasty were slow to sell, the agricultural products were no longer competitive, and the peasant craftsmen were on the verge of bankruptcy. "The cotton cloth of Jiangsu and Zhejiang is no longer selling well.". "The native cloth produced in Fujian cannot be exported because of this stagnation." In short, "sales have been reduced by more than half". A large number of peasants and craftsmen in Chinese society are bankrupt and unemployed.
The disastrous consequences of the Opium War for the Chinese people could not be seen by even the philosopher Marx at that time. He said: "After China's defeat in the war in 1840, it was forced to pay reparations to Britain, a large amount of unproductive opium consumption, and the outflow of gold and silver caused by the opium trade. The destruction of domestic production by foreign competition and the corruption of the state administration have all had two consequences: the old taxes are heavier and more difficult to afford, and new taxes are added. ”
Needless to say, what is the new tax? The so-called new tax is that the Qing government has come up with a variety of methods such as amortization and compensation to solve the silver shortage of the imperial court in order to repay the war reparations and solve the silver shortage of the imperial court, and to levy various kinds of harsh taxes and miscellaneous taxes from the people. Compared with the land tax before the Opium War, the land tax of the people has increased several times, and the daily necessities have also increased several times, such as the price of salt, which has increased six or seven times. The people are really living in the depths of the waters.
Sculpture by thinker and poet Gong Zizhen
New and old taxes, coupled with silver price discounts and extortion by officials, the actual burden of the people is several times or even more than rated. How can the people afford it. It was common for the government to fight against the people who paid taxes and torture them. In this situation, even the big bureaucrat Zeng Guofan could not look at it any longer. In 1850, he once said in the song: "The servants are out of the country, chasing each other day and night, and the whips are full of blood and flesh." ”
Old and new taxes have left the people with no way to live. The landlord class is adding fuel to the fire. Before and after the Opium War, the landlord class's plunder of land and the plundering of peasants through land were heinous. "The house of annexation, one person according to the affairs of a hundred people, one in the field of a hundred households." This phenomenon is not uncommon. After the peasants lost their land, their personal freedom could not be guaranteed, and the hardships of life were evident.
The people could not afford the heavy taxation, so they had to sell their land at a low price. In this way, almost all the land in the country was concentrated in the hands of a small number of landlords, and the landlords who owned more than 3,000 mu of land at that time were almost everywhere, and there were even large landowners with 100,000 mu of land and 100,000 mu of million mu. Seventy or eighty percent of the country's land is concentrated in the hands of the landlord class, which accounts for a small number of people.
Where there is oppression, there is resistance. Forcing officials to force the people to rebel is an inevitable law of history. The Opium War caused a deep disaster to the Chinese people, and a large-scale peasant revolt was inevitable.