Everyone knows that there is such a "Kang Yongqian prosperous era" in the history books, so the question is, is the Kang Yongqian era really a major peak in Chinese history? Or a more popular way of asking: Is the impact of this master's operation on Chinese history really positive?
Examining historical issues cannot be started from a single angle, whether it is Kangxi or Qianlong, as emperors, their historical merits are down-to-earth. But in the long run, some of their practices have indeed sown terrible consequences for Chinese history.
Let's first talk about why the mainstream view calls the Kang Yongqian era a "prosperous era."
The ancient people's standard for "Taiping" was actually very low, as long as the people had food to eat, there were no disaster victims in the world, and the treasury was full of dynasties and clear, then the emperor of the dynasty was a good person. Thus, "population" became a measure of the emperor's ability to do business. One of the great achievements of Kang Yongqian's grandfather is to create a larger population for China and feed them as much as possible.
Judging from the data, in the fifty-first year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1713), the total population of the Qing Dynasty was about 100 million, and by the fifty-fifth year of Qianlong (1790), the total population had exceeded 300 million, limited by the social productivity of the feudal era. What is even more frightening is that even if there are so many more mouths to eat, the Qing Dynasty can still maintain a strong vitality, and until the time when the young master sat in the jiangshan, there was not much at the grass-roots level of society.
The explosion of population is a double-edged sword, as early as the Qianlong period, many people of insight began to worry about the harm of the large number of people. Among them, the more representative one is Wang Shiduo, who bluntly said that the people only care about a nest like an old sow, but the imperial court does not control it, resulting in people opening up fields everywhere, not hesitating to slash and burn to build fields around the lake, and even on the top of the mountain and in the deep mountains and old forests, there are crops planted, even so it is still not enough to eat. From today's point of view, excessive population makes it difficult to rationally allocate social resources, which invisibly increases the survival pressure of a considerable number of people. But from another aspect, if the Great Qing Dynasty is compared to a building, then people are the bricks and tiles used to build the building, as long as they do not exceed the bearing capacity of the foundation, obviously the more bricks and tiles, the more magnificent the building will be.
In fact, compared with the decline of European powers such as Britain and France, the reason why China today can always maintain self-reliance and self-reliance, not afraid of Western countries to do things, and even maintain a strong position in the context of the sluggish global economic development, is largely due to the large number of people - the demographic dividend is still shining.
However, the feudal era was not as enlightened and free as it is now, and the rapid expansion of the population meant that some people became "redundant", which was also the most feared thing for the emperors.
As the saying goes, "water can carry boats and can also cover boats", "water" once it flows, it will become terrifying waves. Emperors of successive dynasties have spent a lot of time trying to solve this problem. Among them, the more ruthless one is Zhu Yuanzhang, the ancestor of the Ming Dynasty, who divided the whole world into small areas within a mile radius and set up a captain to supervise the people. If someone wants to do something from Area A to Area B one day, even if it is just a relative, they must report in advance what time they go out and what time they come back, and several people are accompanied; once something goes wrong and they fail to return on time, not only are the parties concerned likely to lose their heads, but I am afraid that the mayor, neighbors and other insiders will be implicated.
If the problem cannot be solved, the person who has the problem will be solved - Ming Taizu's methods are simple and crude, but it is said that it fully reflects the cruelty of the word "feudal" in the feudal era. In contrast, the Qing emperor's methods were much more sophisticated.
We take the Qianlong Dynasty as an example, in short, the Emperor of the Qing Dynasty drove the people and took advantage of the "hope" of the people.
"China and the World in the Eighteenth Century" mentions that in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, the annual income of an ordinary middle peasant family in China was about 32 taels of silver; at the same time, the total annual expenditure of a family was between 34 and 35 taels of silver. According to the purchasing power at that time, one or two silver could buy about 100 kilograms of rice, or buy a few square meters of houses in the average city. At first glance, the money doesn't seem like much. The cunning and shrewdness of the court is here: to the eyes of the people, the deficit of a few silver or two seems to be nothing, and a little effort can be earned back. The ancient Chinese people have always had the concept of "small wealth is peace", if you rely on hard work to fill these small pits of silver, you can still have a little silver left on hand, and it is not beautiful to live a comfortable and comfortable New Year?
As everyone knows, the "deficit" of a few silver or two pieces of silver is exactly the means for the imperial court to stabilize the people's hearts and minds, and I am afraid that it is not so easy to fill.
The imperial court has always been careful to maintain a "balance": in the event of a bumper grain harvest, the government will "appropriately" increase taxes, which is reasonable; in the event of famine, the government will allocate funds to release grain, so as not to cause a popular uprising, and the people will shout "Long live the emperor". All in all, no matter how it is operated, the imperial court will never let the wealth accumulated by the people exceed the "red line"; the people only want to get rid of poverty and become well-off, so naturally there will be no "two hearts". This "two or three pairs of silver" said more, no more, less, but it made the people die. On the surface, the people under Qianlong's rule had enough food and clothing and a stable political situation, and it was not too much to describe it as "prosperous", but in a sense, the vast majority of people were actually still struggling above and below the subsistence line.
Inventing such a set of means of taming the people, tying hundreds of millions of people to their own acres and three points of land, honestly offering to the imperial court, considering only from the identity of the emperor, Qianlong is absolutely excellent. Qianlong put imperial power on the hotbed, so that the Manchu Qing regime was always invincible. However, the Qianlong emperor was competent, but this rooted a terrible stubborn disease in the depths of the nation's soul and directly affected the fate of the country.
Nowadays, we are accustomed to calling Europeans "white", in fact, for a long period of history, Europeans preferred to regard Chinese as "white". In their view, this vast Eastern Empire was rich and powerful, and at least until the Qianlong Dynasty, Westerners always had a reverence for the Central Plains Dynasty.
In the summer of 1797, King George IV sent the first mission in history to China. At first, the foreigners were very humble, and they thought that China was still the super empire that was said to be "full of gold". However, the envoys traveled north along the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, and what they saw along the way subverted their three views. Someone wrote in his notes that during the 3-day trip, countless houses and pedestrians passed by the river, but they did not see a decent house or a well-fed people. Everyone's face was covered with numbness, and people walked around in a daze, like walking corpses. Although the streets are still bustling, it feels strange and frightening.
The British also wrote a small episode: as Gentiles, they were naturally subjected to a strong onlooker from curious people. While passing through a city, some onlookers were pushed out of the water because the shore was too crowded. The drowning man struggled desperately, but the horror was that everyone was still busy as if they hadn't seen him. Seeing that the man who fell into the water was dying, the British envoy really couldn't bear to look at it, and asked the boatman to come to the shore to save people, but the boatman refused without thinking about it.
"The speed of the ship at an hour and seven miles is actually the reason why they refused to stop the ship."
From the records of bystanders, the shortcomings of the Qing Emperor's art of taming the people are exposed: the people try day after day to completely fill the pit of these two pieces of silver, but they cannot achieve it in any way, and over time, this situation will breed a pessimistic mood, and the whole society will really change from "still water" to "backwater". In fact, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the living standards of the people of European countries were not much different from those of the Qing Dynasty. According to "China and the World in the Eighteenth Century": At that time, an ordinary peasant family in China, most of the three meals a day were mainly coarse grains and green vegetables, and fish or eggs could be used to improve the diet once or twice a week; except for major festivals, it was difficult to see meat on the table. Until the fall of the Qing Dynasty, this situation did not change much.
Looking at the West: on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the average British family's meals were mostly milk and bread, and although they could often eat some cheese and bacon, they were quite strictly controlled in quantity. In order to prevent this meal from eating too much, some housewives deliberately cut the smoked pork of a meal into several pieces, and then eat the rest every few days, which can be described as very embarrassing. In the middle and late period of the Industrial Revolution, cheese, bacon and other foods not only became the daily consumer goods of ordinary European households, but people could also drink alcohol every three to five minutes. The change in each other's quality of life is more intuitive from the data: the Chinese people still work for the "3 taels of silver" all day long, while an ordinary middle peasant family in the UK has a net income of about 35 to 44 taels of silver per year.
It is no wonder that we always regret that the embryonics of capitalism at the end of the Ming Dynasty have not been further developed - the people have bottomed out their pockets every year, and who has the heart to toss those things? All in all, Kang Yongqian's prosperity ensured the stability of the Qing emperor's rule, but inadvertently stifled the vitality and creativity of the Chinese nation. Looking at the entire history of China, the role played by this so-called "prosperous world" is not necessarily positive, and it is not so surprising to be questioned.
Of course, we can't say that these grandfathers are not good emperors, they are in their own time, they have their own limitations. Even the enlightened Kangxi Emperor, in the process of the collision of Chinese and Western civilizations, put the advanced things of the West on the shelf, for fear that the Han people would touch and trigger changes, and then shake the Manchu rule. As a feudal ruler, who doesn't want their children and grandchildren to live forever? At least in that era, they all fulfilled their mission as emperors very well. But they ignore the crucial point: the real strength of a dynasty depends on the support of the people; and the blind desire to rely on means to control the people, maintain superficial stability, infinitely overdraft the hopes of the people, and turn "hope" into "despair", which will eventually lead to terrible consequences.
In fact, the Qing Dynasty at that time did stop moving forward, and eventually missed the opportunity for contemporaneous integration.