In the context of Chinese history, the term "water transport" mainly refers to the water transportation system of financial materials established by rulers in order to maximize the interests of their rule under the premise of insufficient endogenous power in society, and promote the organization of water transportation technology through a legal method with state coercive power.
The term "Caoyun Law" refers to the legal system in which the unified imperial centralized government uses natural or artificial waterways to transport local tax materials to the national political center in order to ensure the stable implementation of fiscal and tax revenue plans, and elevates the operation and management form of this mode of production to the will of the state and regulates it through the coercive power of the state.
First, the trial and error and innovation of the Tang Dynasty Caoyun method
1. Construction of canals: inefficient technical improvement
In the structure of the Tang Dynasty's technological improvement factor endowment, capital is scarce and labor is concentrated, and at the same time, the cost of increasing capital input by the ruler is much higher than the cost of increasing labor input, and the implementation of the Caoyun Law tends to apply labor-intensive technological improvement and does not encourage capital-intensive technological improvement.
For the three technologies that make up transportation technology, the improvement of shipbuilding technology is classified as capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive. The production and manufacturing of boats, the selection of materials and the production and manufacturing of assembly require a large amount of capital investment to complete technological improvement.
In addition, shipbuilding workers also have strong irreplaceability due to the high aspect ratio professional ability of shipbuilding technology, which is not ordinary labor input can handle, still must capital investment to ensure sufficient technical professional shipbuilding labor supply.
The Tang Dynasty ship production and manufacturing technology is very typical of capital intensive, and the capital required to improve such technology has long exceeded the capital expenditure work capacity that the Tang Dynasty rulers can be responsible for, and the intention of the Tang Dynasty rulers to promote the improvement of the technology of the Tang Dynasty is obviously insufficient and therefore insufficient.
In contrast, the optimization of shipping technology and water conservancy engineering technology does not require excessive capital investment. The lack of shipping technology is specifically manifested in the fact that "the people in the Jiangnan region are not accustomed to rivers" and their shipping standards when they encounter backflow and lack of water in the canal.
Although investing capital to improve shipping technology was a sustainable practice, for the Tang rulers, they had existing policy options that could be replaced, that is, the former could be dealt with according to the general method, and the latter could also be dealt with according to the levy of Dingfu Bangcao.
For the excavation and maintenance of the canal embankment, because of the grandeur of the construction scale and the backwardness of the production and manufacturing technology of its supporting facilities, it was a natural human capital-intensive technology in the Tang Dynasty, and its raw material cost was costly, but civil engineering and other objects that could be adapted to local conditions did not require excessive capital investment, which was very in line with the Tang Dynasty rulers' preference for the expenditure of factors in technological improvement, so it became the most widely used standard and the longest technical rectification measure in the implementation of the Tang Dynasty Transportation Law.
2. Linxing Dongdu: high risk of moving the capital
After the ancient rulers of the mainland established their political power, their considerations in choosing the capital were mainly based on three factors: economic, military and geographical location. The capital of the Tang Dynasty was built in Chang'an, mainly for economic and military considerations.
In terms of economic development, Shaanxi Guanzhong is called good land, and the water body is relatively developed. Since the Western Han Dynasty, Beijing's Chang'an region has generally been used as the political center of the mainland, and resources from all over the country have converged in Shaanxi Guanzhong according to the allocation of state finances, and its location advantages are unmatched.
At the level of national defense, the Guanzhong region stands in the middle of rivers, "four plugs are solid", easy to defend and difficult to attack, strangling the throat of the northwest of the Central Plains, and over the years, it has been the key point where the civilized behavior of the Central Plains resists the Xiongnu in the northwest.
In terms of location, Shaanxi Guanzhong is located in the northwest border of the Central Plains, and there is no traditional "living in the country", and its distance between the middle and upper reaches of the large river with dense population and relatively developed production and manufacturing is far away, and the material supply transfer is long.
In terms of geomorphological standards, Shaanxi Guanzhong is often easy to defend and difficult to attack, depending on the slender landform, its total natural geographical area cannot be extended to the surroundings, the production of land resources is not high, and it cannot continuously supply the needs of Beijing-central and northwestern national defense, so the Tang Dynasty "often turns to the southeast of Cao", and most of the requirements of the emperor of the Tang Dynasty for the Caoyun Law are also deeply rooted in this.
The economic development of the Tang Dynasty was based on agricultural production, which was greatly harmed by disasters such as heavy rainfall, floods, droughts and earthquakes. The Guanzhong region itself is relatively small and narrow, and if it encounters floods, its agricultural production will definitely be severely hit, crop production will decline or even extinction, and famine will follow.
This was also a great blow to the tax collection of Guanzhong and surrounding cities in Shaanxi, so whenever a disaster occurred in the Guanzhong area, the central government of the Tang Dynasty would not use the state well, and a temporary financial crisis would occur. The decline in people's livelihood will aggravate the difficulties of the transition from Luoyang to Shaanxi, so only Dongxing Luoyang City, bypassing this section of the road, can alleviate the urgent need of the national finance.
2. Transshipment and the Tang Dynasty Transportation Law
1. The information transmission structure of the Caoyun Law in the early Tang Dynasty
From the perspective of the distribution structure of functions and powers, the management authority of transportation affairs in the Tang Dynasty underwent a development process from division to total between the central government and local governments.
Taking Pei Yaoqing's concurrent appointment as a transit envoy in the 21st year of the Kaiyuan Dynasty, this process can be divided into two parts: the early multi-headed governance stage and the later special envoy governance stage. In the Tang Dynasty, the Zhou Ji Department was set up under the capital water superintendent, which was specifically responsible for the aforementioned transshipment of "for the imperial court" and had the main supervisory duties.
There is one order in the Zhouji Administration, two people, and the tax materials transferred to Kyoto by the prefectures need to be checked by these officials. After the Daizong Dynasty, with the establishment of a complete set of transportation management institutions from the central to the local level, these original local institutions no longer undertook the main transportation affairs.
2. The setting of the Tang Dynasty transfer envoy
Although the local governor and territorial water and land transport envoy solved a certain problem of water transport within a specific time and space range, and provided the material and institutional basis for the later reform of the water transport law, whether it was to build canals or increase land transportation, it was through the method of increasing the service to transfer the cost of water transportation, saving the government's expenditure and increasing the burden on the people.
Moreover, local officials also take over transshipment duties, and the information advantage of local governments in the implementation of the Transportation Law has not diminished but increased, and the problem of information failure of the Transportation Law has not been solved. Local officials and consuls rely too much on this official for decision-making on the Transportation Law, and the personal quality of this official becomes the key to determining the comparison of information forces between the central and local governments, which is for the centralized government, the information weakness still exists, its control over the Transportation Law has not been strengthened, and the implementation effect of the Transportation Law cannot meet the information needs of the Li and Tang royal families who monopolize the transportation technology.
Third, the enlightenment of the Tang Dynasty Caoyun Law
1. The embodiment of the Song Dynasty Caoyun Law
After the Middle Tang Dynasty, the independent and professional development process of the Caoyun Law greatly released the utility of the state monopoly organization of Caoyun technology, and the law enforcement of Caoyun became the top priority of the national financial legal system, and the maintenance of Caoluo also became the key guarantee for the stability of the regime.
As mentioned earlier, both the peasant uprising in the late Tang Dynasty and the Fanzhen Rebellion adopted the practice of cutting off the transportation routes of the Li and Tang regimes, which dealt a great blow to the Tang Dynasty. The Song Dynasty's heavy Cao thought was mainly manifested in two aspects, one was to build the capital in the important town of Caoyun, and the other was to regard Caoyun as the foundation of the country.
First of all, the construction of the capital Bianliang reflects that the rulers of the Northern Song Dynasty regarded the Caoyun Law as a key factor in ensuring the stability of the regime. Bianliang, now Kaifeng, Bianzhou of Tang, and the transit point of the Jianghuai Caohe River to the Yellow River. Because it is located in an important transshipment area, it was operated in the middle and late Tang Dynasties.
After the fall of the Tang Dynasty, the capital of Later Liang was built in Bianliang, and four of the five generations of the next five dynasties were all located here, as was the case in the Northern Song Dynasty. The Song people believed that building the capital in the river, and mastering the throat of food and goods in the world, could provide rich material resources for the regime's national governance, and avoiding the water risks of the Yellow River could also greatly improve the efficiency of law enforcement.
Secondly, with the continuous strengthening of the governance of the Caoyun Law in the Song Dynasty, the idea of "Caoben" began to take shape. The logic of the Song people's "Caoben" ideology is that military armament is the foundation for maintaining political power, and the development of military armed forces at that time was based on the supply of military food. The supply of military food depends on the central government, and the reason for the rule of law has become the fundamental maintenance of state power.
The Song people inherited the heavy water ideology formed after the reform of the Central and Tang Caoyun Law, and developed this heavy cao ideology into the "Caoben" ideology in their further governance of the Caoyun Law, which economically reflected the further separation of the production market and the consumer market in the Northern Song Dynasty, politically reflected the more urgent need for centralized power of the Biansong ruling clique, and showed in society that the process of north-south integration had accelerated.
2. Standardized the Song Dynasty Transportation Law
The Song Dynasty Caoyun Law basically followed the system and content of the Tang Dynasty Caoyun Law, and under the promotion of the "Caoben" idea, the Song Dynasty Caoyun Law has made great progress in the legal system and normative content. First of all, the form of the Song Dynasty Caoyun Law was mainly order.
In the Song Dynasty, as in the Tang Dynasty, there was no independent written code of Caoyun in the "law, order, edict, and style". However, the legal level of the Caoyun Law in the "order, grid and form" has been greatly improved, and the cage has become the main basis for the operation of the Caoyun Law in the Song Dynasty.
On the one hand, the normative content of the Caoyun Law has been confirmed by the Lingge norms, no longer outside the basic legal system, and has obtained higher legal effect, which has a more general binding force, indicating that the legal system of the Song Dynasty under the "Caoben" ideology attaches great importance to the content of the Caoyun norms.
On the other hand, the law of water transport in the form of a decree must strictly follow the procedures for the production and examination of the Song Dynasty edict, which shows that the intervention of the legislative power of the Song Dynasty in the operation of the law is increasing, the law enforcement officials of the Song Dynasty no longer have the same high legislative discretion as the Tang Dynasty transfer envoys, and the leading power of the legislation of the water transport is once again under the constraints of the regular national legislative mechanism.
Epilogue:
Caoyun, the ancient Chinese have always summarized it as one of the food systems. The process of transforming the transportation from technology to system in ancient China was itself a process imposed by a state, and the operation of the law was no longer subject to the system of issuing laws and orders as the system of ancestors, but more dependent on the law enforcement official model with the edict as the main form of expression. Some of the institutional experience of the Tang Dynasty Transportation Law can also be used as a reference for the current reform of the implementation of the budget law in the mainland, and the comparison between ancient and modern can also complement each other.
Bibliography:
"History"
"Tang Liudian"