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When productivity is backward, people can't eat enough and don't wear warm clothes, spiritual sustenance often becomes the direction that people pursue. For this reason, there were many beliefs and customs in ancient Chinese, and the more decent ones were Buddhism and Taoism, and there were countless small cults that were not officially recognized.
It can be said that in ancient China, superstitious customs were very prevalent and basically became part of the daily life of the people. This superstition is usually limited and has little influence on the ruler, but if it encounters some major changes, it can easily cause great social turmoil, such as the Yellow Turban Rebellion in the late Eastern Han Dynasty and the Red Turban Army Uprising in the late Yuan Dynasty.
Therefore, emperors of all dynasties and generations are investigating folk obscenities and reducing the danger of their own rule. When superstition reaches a certain level, this spiritual sustenance will pose a great threat to the country.
Superstition prevailed and imperial power weakened
In the feudal period, when a country's society was faced with superstition, the most immediate threat to the rulers was that the imperial power was provoked.
Dong Zhongshu of the Western Han Dynasty established a relationship between heaven and man for the king, so that the power and position of the emperor came from heaven in legal theory, and there was a "justified" statement, which was more conducive to maintaining the emperor's rule.
But when folk superstition prevailed, various "new gods" that had nothing to do with the current emperor appeared.
Does the appearance of the "new god" mean that there will be a new king in this land?
Whether the answer is yes or no, it is not the scope of the emperor's consideration, for the emperor, it is his job to strangle everything that threatens his rule in the cradle.
But there are always times when the emperor cannot deal with it in time, and at this time the trend of superstition will become more and more popular, and eventually evolve into a force that poses a great threat to the imperial power, and all kinds of endless troubles appear one after another, and the imperial power is relatively weakened in a certain sense.
Why is that?
In fact, as mentioned above, the new gods constructed in the superstitious trend of thought have cracked the heavenly and human system that supports the emperor's rule, and the emperor's power has been questioned in terms of legal rationality, in this case, if there are some natural disasters and disasters, it is easy to form a great turmoil at the social level, and the most direct result of this great turmoil is the weakening of national strength.
In addition to influencing imperial power in terms of the relationship between heaven and man and the legitimacy of the emperor, the challenge of the prevalence of superstition to imperial power lies at the grassroots level. After Qin Shi Huang unified the whole country and went to the princes to set up counties and counties, the emperors continued to work hard to transfer the imperial power to the grassroots people, which was not only conducive to consolidating the emperor's authority and maintaining the emperor's rule, but also a very good way to promote production in the feudal era.
The prevalence of superstition was to destroy this feudal production under the cover of imperial power, and the emperor, out of realpolitik considerations, often implemented a policy of persuading peasants and persuading Sang. But when superstition prevails, people's trust in the emperor will drop to the freezing point, and they will turn to the rootless and ethereal gods, which will seriously undermine the natural economic development of the feudal era.
Religion of terror
When a certain superstition or a certain sect prevails to a certain extent, and too many people blindly believe in it, religion will reveal the essence of cannibalism, and what eats at the beginning is to prevent the court from spreading their teachings.
Therefore, after the precipitation and brewing of the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong dynasties, in the first year of the Jiaqing Emperor, that is, in 1796, the White Lotus Sect broke out a great uprising. Because the place where the White Lotus Sect rebelled was near Dazhou, Sichuan, it was also called the "Sichuan-Chu Sect Rebellion".
This Great White Lotus Uprising began in Sichuan and was soon echoed by the White Lotus Sect in Shaanxi, Henan, and Hubei. This Great White Lotus Sect uprising was not completely quelled until September of the ninth year of Jiaqing.
The nine-year White Lotus Uprising may seem insignificant in China's thousands of years of war history, but the catastrophic losses it caused are immeasurable. Large numbers of people lost their lives in the war of the uprising and the chaos it ensued.
According to the statistics and analysis of scholars, the population of the Qing Dynasty was about 315 million in 1795, and in 1805, after the White Lotus Rebellion was put down, the population was only 335 million. It may seem that the population has grown by 20 million in just ten years, but if we compare it to another decade, we can still see the gap.
In 1770, the population of the Qing Dynasty was 250 million, and by 1780, the population quickly increased to 270 million, which seems to be a difference of 20 million, but in fact, compared with 1770, the population base was as much as 50 million.
With an additional population base of 50 million, the new population is similar, or even less, why? It is absolutely impossible that the Qing government implemented a family planning policy, only that a large number of people died unnaturally or disappeared.
Therefore, in fact, a large number of people died or disappeared during the war and chaos of this White Lotus Rebellion.
And in the period of natural economy, population and land represent almost everything. A large number of people died or disappeared, causing great damage to production during the Jiaqing period, so that the Qing Dynasty during the Jiaqing Emperor almost licked its wounds.
According to statistics, at the height of Qianlong, the national treasury could have 15 million taels of fiscal and tax revenue a year, but after Jiaqing, this number shrank rapidly, and there is even a saying that when the Jiaqing Emperor was in power, the imperial court only collected a few thousand taels a year.
This data may be exaggerated, but during the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor, the Qing Dynasty had passed its strong period for various reasons and began to weaken rapidly, but it is an ironclad fact. Among these reasons, there must be factors of these policies of closing the country, but the White Lotus Sect uprising also definitely played an extremely important role in it.
Corrupt state and army
When religion prevails, not only the poor people at the bottom will be seduced by religion, but even at the top of a country's pyramid, there will be many people immersed in superstitious ideas.
In 1820, the Daoguang Emperor ascended the throne, and when the emperor, who was in the prime of life, had just ascended to the Great Treasure, his heart was half cold. At that time, the Great Qing Kingdom, facing the increasingly undisguised colonial threat of Britain and other colonial countries externally, and facing frequent natural disasters and long-standing contradictions between land and people at home, the Great Qing Kingdom was like a sieve, from south to north, from east to west, there was no good meat.
What is even more tragic is that the Daoguang Emperor found that the Great Qing State under his rule, the people were ignorant, the imperial court was corrupt, the army was scattered, the treasury was empty, the city walls were broken, and only twenty or thirty years after the Kang Qian prosperous era, the Great Qing State had already decayed.
What is even more frightening is that almost everyone from the common people to the university scholars is very superstitious. This kind of superstition is still a little different from the superstition we know today, and the superstition we refer to today is mostly believing in religion or believing in some folk customs and customs handed down from the feudal period, but the superstition of the Great Qing Kingdom at that time was completely an empty spiritual sustenance, people were like souls smoking opium, not thinking of enterprising, not thinking of forging ahead, gambling, prostitution has become a very common and frequent thing in society, and the whole country has fallen into an absurd and absurd atmosphere.
The result of this absurdity is that the emptiness of the Great Qing Kingdom was completely recognized by the West, and the British took the lead in knocking on the door of the Great Qing State with strong ships and cannons, and in 1840, the Opium War began, since then, Chinese history has entered the modern era, and China has also begun a hundred years of humiliation.
Sadly, under the long-term colonial invasion, the Great Qing Kingdom still did not make up its mind, still maintained an absurd state, the most ridiculous thing is that when facing the cannons of foreign colonial invaders, the general of the Qing Dynasty actually thought that there was an evil man, would make such a frightening sound, would cause such a terrible casualty, so the general issued an order, ordered the soldiers to smear feces and urine on the weapon, it is said that this method comes from a certain high-ranking person, able to break the evil of foreigners...
The result is naturally self-evident, because this happened in the forties and fifties of the 19th century, when the industrial revolution in the West was about to come to an end; Because this happened in the middle of the 19th century, not in the middle of the 9th century, about a thousand years after gunpowder was invented in China.
It is sad not only that we, as inventors, did not study gunpowder and firearms well, but sadly that after a thousand years, we still have people who are so ignorant, so superstitious, so ignorant.
Was this general represented by a minority in the Great Qing Kingdom at that time? No, he represents the majority of the people, the majority of the Qing bureaucrats who eat and wait to die, the Qing Dynasty's decadent society, ignorant people, crippled systems, and lazy armies, and he represents an empire that has gone through prosperity and decline.
Of course, there were many reasons for the decline of the Qing Dynasty, but as mentioned earlier, superstition must have played an extremely important role in it. Not only because superstition destroys the development of productive forces, but also because it destroys the human spirit.
Therefore, the situation of the Qing Dynasty will take a sharp turn for the worse during the time of Jiaqing and Daoguang, and it will decline. This vast empire also eventually perished under the sound of Xinhai's cannon fire, ending a 296-year reign that began in the seventeenth century.