Liu Yu, who held the military power of Beifu during the suppression of Sun En's and Xu Daofu's rebellions
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Gradually controlling the real power of the Eastern Jin court, he forced Emperor Gong of Jin to abdicate the throne in the second year of Yuan Xi (420 AD), declared himself emperor, and established the first regime of the Southern Dynasty. From the time of Liu Yu's reign, due to the implementation of a series of political and economic reform measures, coupled with the less wars and chaos in the era of Liu Song Yuanjia (424-452 AD), the enlistment was reduced, the social economy was relatively advanced, and the people's lives were relatively stable.
In the last year of Yuan Jia, Liu Song's defeat of northern Wei troops, as well as the mutual killing of the clans for the throne, reduced their ruling area and weakened the imperial family's strength, and Xiao Daocheng, the leader of the military power, took the opportunity to seize power in the third year of Shengming (479 AD) and changed the name of the country to Qi. The clans of the Xiao Qi regime continued to tilt each other and compete for the throne, and "the clouds of dispatch, the servitude was excessive, the shou zai relied on the power gate, the mutual growth and abuse, the cultivation of carving, the invasion of the people, and the shaking of the world." Therefore, Qi was the shortest neutral state in the Southern Dynasty, only twenty-two years. In the first year of the reign of Emperor Zhongxing of Qi (501 AD), Xiao Yan, the assassin of Yongzhou, led an army into Jiankang (present-day Nanjing, Jiangsu), and the following year ascended to the emperor's throne and changed the name of the country to Liang.
Although Emperor Wu of Liang reigned during the "Yi'an" era, he pursued the policy of a favorable imperial family and a bureaucratic clan, "for the sake of the law, anxious for Li Shu, slower than the magnates", so the class contradictions in the Liang Dynasty not only did not ease, but became fierce. After Hou Jing's rebellion at the end of Liang, the Liang regime survived in name only. Chen Ba, who had risen up in the Rebellion of Pinghou Jing, deposed Emperor Jing of Liang in the second year of taiping (575 AD) and established the last dynasty of the Southern Dynasty, Yi Chen. In the ninth year of Emperor Kai of Sui (589 AD), Emperor Wen of Sui sent troops to destroy Chen, and the north and south were restored to reunification.
During this period, the uppermost class of the southern dynasty feudal ruling class, the door valve group of the scholars, further declined, and the Hanmen Shu landlords arose, forming a situation of joint dictatorship between the shi and the Shu landlords. The more the scholarly high gate goes into decline, the more its decay is fully exposed.
Although the landlords of the Shou nationality are not as corrupt and reactionary in politics and life as the Shi clan Gate Valve clique, after they enter the supreme ruling clique, they are bound to join the same stream as the Shi clan and are not soft in cruelly exploiting and oppressing the people of all nationalities. In the more than one hundred and sixty years of the Southern Dynasty, due to the gradual rise of the Shu landlords, the strength of local forces, the decline of the central royal power, the continuous rise of the army of the powerful ministers, and the competition for the throne by the kings of various generations of clans, the political situation was extremely turbulent, and the supreme ruling group fought for power and profit within the highest ruling group, deceitfully and conspired with each other, and performed ugly dramas of killing each other one after another. At the same time, the officialdom was in a state of decay, corruption and corruption became a common practice, and except for a few short periods, the politics were extremely dark and reactionary, and the exploitation and oppression of the people of all nationalities by the powerful and powerful people of the warrior clan were deep, and the class contradictions have always been very sharp.
Since the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the fertile soil of the southern plains has long been contested by the warriors and powerful, and it has further developed into mountainous and forest areas. In the seventeenth year of The Liu Song Dynasty (440 AD) and the 30th year of Yuan Jia (453 AD), he successively ordered the prohibition of the ban on Shanze, indicating the prevalence of the shi clan at that time when the warrior clan was privately occupying the mountain fengze. In the early years of the Ming Dynasty (457-464 AD), in order to satisfy the desire of the warriors to obtain land, the Liu Song Dynasty began to recognize this fait accompli, and stipulated that bureaucrats should occupy mountains, forests, and rivers according to their grade, with more occupations of high grades and less occupations of low grades, and ordinary landlords without grades could also occupy one hundred acres of mountains. If it is an orchard fishing farm that has long been opened, although the number of acres exceeds the quota, it must be posthumously recognized as "first business" and must not be "chased". It also stipulates that "the first occupation is lacking, and the sufficient occupation is limited".
In the third year of Xiao Jian (457 AD), before the stipulation of Zhan Shanze, Emperor Xiaowu of Song issued an edict: "The internal and external officials have a field in the near road, and listen to the officials and servants who are sent to the office." For example, in the third year of the Ming Dynasty (459 AD), Liu Yigong, the king of Jiangxia, "increased the number of officials and took 1,000 servants". Officials are an oppressed class of states, counties, and counties that specialize in various kinds of labor or farming public land
Servant refers to slaves. It was rationed to officials and slaves to cultivate on the land they were given. The feudal dynasty stipulated that the time of occupying the mountain and "giving officials" was close, in fact, this was the continuation and development of the custom system of the two Jin Dynasties. The stipulation on the occupation of Shanze is a legal guarantee that the mountain forest and the kawazawa clan, which has always been publicly owned, are forcibly seized as private property, indicating the deepening of the development of the private ownership of large feudal land in the Southern Dynasty, so that more land is concentrated in the hands of the landlord class, and the peasants have even cut off the first line of life for fishing, firewood, and collecting wild vegetables.
Most of the giants of the Beilaishi clan squeezed into the rich eastern Zhejiang region, especially in the Huiji area to find land and look for land, desperately trying to seize the land. For example, Xie Lingyun's villa in Huijianzhining County (present-day southwest of Shangyu County, Zhejiang) contains two mountains in the north and south, with paddy fields, dry land, bamboo forests, vegetable gardens, and orchards. Kong Lingfu was located in Yongxing (present-day Xiaoshan County, Zhejiang), around thirty-three miles, with 265 hectares of land and water, including two mountains, and nine orchards. Zhang Xiaoxiu, a bureaucrat of the Liang Dynasty, at Donglin Temple, "had dozens of acres of land, hundreds of people, and led the field to Force Field". Xiao Ziliang, the qi royal family, was at the junction of Xuancheng, Lincheng and Dingling counties, sealing the mountains for hundreds of miles, and forbidding the people to collect trees. The warriors and powerful people widely occupied the pastoral mountains and carried out cruel economic exploitation of the working people.
With the concentration of the powerful land and wealth of the gentry, the peasants were bound to go bankrupt and go into exile, and a large number of lands became their various dependent populations. By the Liang Dynasty, it was pointed out that only a few of the various dependent populations accounted for half of the total number of the country's consular population.
Due to the shrinking area under the jurisdiction of the Southern Dynasty, frequent wars, and the decay and reactionary feudal regime, the exploitation of poor peasants was extremely serious. The peasants' rent and exploitation by the Song and Qi dynasties generally followed the Eastern Jin Dynasty, that is, the field tax was five stones per mouth (ten buckets per stone), about four horses per household, and sometimes cotton silk was collected in some areas. In the Liang Dynasty, it was changed to collect five stones per Ding, two stones of Lu rice, and half of the Ding women. In addition, Ding Nan collected the cloth two Zhang Silk Two Zhang, Silk Three Two, Mian Eight Two, Lu Silk Eight Feet, Lu Mian Three Two Two, Ding Nu folded half of the levy.
At that time, the amount of household adjustment exploitation stipulated was only the average number that each household should bear, but when collecting, it was also necessary to determine the number of households according to the number of assets of each household, and then distribute the amount of tax adjustment for households with different amounts according to the level of households. Therefore, during the Song and Qi dynasties, in order to raise the people's households and increase the income of households, local officials often expanded the scope of capital calculation, and the people's homes were one foot longer, the fields were increased by one mu, and the houses were increased by tiles. Even "cut down the tree and send the tiles to recharge the endowment". So that the people did not dare to plant trees to reclaim the land, the houses were leaky, and they did not dare to apply mud.
In the fourth year of the reign of Emperor Xiaowu of the Liu Song Dynasty (460 AD), he expropriated cotton silk from peasants in eastern Zhejiang, "with a severe deadline, the people bought one silk horse, to two or three thousand, one or two or three hundred cotton, and the poor sold their wives and children, or even hanged themselves." In the Xiao Qi era, the people were forced to fold the grain and cloth in the rent into money, or to fold other physical goods, and through folding, they often added several times the burden to the people. For example, at that time, the price of cloth fell to more than 100 yuan per horse, but the official price was still converted according to the old price of "500 horses" during the Liu Song and Yuanjia years, which invisibly increased the amount of exploitation of the people by four or five times.
In addition to the so-called positive taxes mentioned above, the imperial court also levied various "miscellaneous adjustments" on the peasants at any time according to their needs, such as mouth money, Tangding tax, Mountain Ze tax, municipal tax, liquor tax, salt tax, pass tax, and so on. There are many kinds of taxes and miscellaneous taxes. For example, xiao Qishi changed the civil service of repairing lakes and ponds to levying a tangding tax in the five counties of eastern Zhejiang, and each man received a thousand yuan, which was a miserable scene of "having a pledge to sell his wife and children to fill this limit, and the road is poor and cannot be heard."
The various exploitations of the feudal rulers of the Southern Dynasty brought endless suffering to the working people, forced them into the abyss of extreme hardship, and sharply deepened the extreme poverty of the peasants. During the Song and Qi dynasties, Shanyin (present-day Shaoxing County, Zhejiang) in Shanyin County, Zhejiang Province, had 30,000 households, 20,000 school households, and the remaining 10,000 households were shi clan haoqiang and other rich households. Of the 20,000 households, half of the total household property is less than 3,000 yuan. When the price of silk is high, each horse is worth two or three thousand yuan, and when the price of rice is high, it is worth hundreds of yuan per appreciation, that is to say, there are half of the poor peasant households in the classroom, and all the family property is worth only one or two horses of silk or one or two buckets of rice, which shows the severity of poverty of ordinary peasants.
In the feudal era, the main means of production was land. In the eastern Zhejiang region in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River in the south and the Yizhou region in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, because the land is fertile and the products are abundant, the warriors and powerful people, the rich merchants and giants compete for land, and extort and extort peasants, so the polarization between the rich and the poor of the peasants and landlords in these two areas is the most prominent and the most typical. At that time, the poor households under the control of the feudal regime, as well as the slaves, tenants, and tribes directly exploited by the nobles and powerful warriors, were "hungry than the room" and "hid from the door", and were squeezed to the point of "running out of muscles" and "running out of bone marrow". They struggled on the death line for many years, encountered natural and man-made disasters, could not even maintain simple reproduction, and finally were forced to embark on the road of escape.