Miyazaki said that his view of history was "the historical view of economic changes." What is a climate change? Before the emergence of capitalism, in the process of establishing and maintaining ancient empires, the changes in the economy were reflected in cyclical changes in the number of money and the number of people. Population and economic growth, the growth of the quantity of money, coupled with relatively enlightened governance and military power that can maintain basic security, is the era of good economics; on the contrary, only with a strong military force, but not good at internal politics, a large outflow of money can only be called a bad economic era.
Using this historical view to look at the problem, sometimes we will draw unique conclusions, such as the money in the Western Han Dynasty was once too much to spend, and then what?
At the beginning of the founding of the Han Dynasty, the national strength withered, the number of household registrations in the capital was reduced to half of The Thai, the land was barren, and the materials were scarce. After a total of fifty-six years of recuperation by Emperor Wen and Emperor Jing, the economic situation has greatly improved, the rebellion of the divided kings has been basically quelled, and the rudiments of a unified empire have been formed, and the responsibility left to Emperor Wu of Han is nothing more than minor repairs and consolidation of the existing system.
He could have summoned Confucian students to talk about the world, make arguments, publish several anthologies, or hold endless meetings to discuss the need for solitaire once a few years, whether the year number needed to be solitaire, and which sentence of which book was better to start with, such trivial questions. But the truth is, he waged several wars. Does he love war? I am afraid that it cannot be said that everyone knows that the war that cannot win good land and population is a money-losing business in ancient times.
So what was he really for, to make these deals? The reason is simple: there is so much money in the treasury that it must be spent.
During the reign of Emperor Wu, the imperial court already had a surplus of finances, so much so that the warehouse was overflowing with rice and the copper coins were rusting. The Book of History and Equalization says: "All the people are full of contempt, and the treasury is surplus." The money of the Kyoshi is huge, and it is decaying and unschoolable. Taicang's millet Chen Chen Xiangyin, overflowing with dew, is so corrupt that it is inedible. "Is the wealth that has been accumulated so hard that it rots like this?" Everyone knows that a large amount of hoarded goods, under the natural economy, the result is a decline in liquidity, and if it continues to be hidden in this way, it will lead to a recession. But if war is waged at this time, consumption will flourish, money and goods withdrawn from circulation by hiding will enter society, and the economy will show a lively pomp, which in turn will stimulate production, make employment prevail, and thus relieve the unemployed.
This is the economic logic that must be fought. Let's see what Emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty achieved in several major wars in the west, east, and south. The war with the Huns achieved considerable success, and they were expelled to the depths of the desert. At the same time, the wars in the south and the east were also won, Zhao Tuo's grandson Jiande was captured, wei's Korea was destroyed, and each county was placed and incorporated into the territory of China. But these victories were undoubtedly crushing.
A large amount of resources and population were consumed, but the results of the battle were almost nothing, just take the destruction of Korea, two envoys died, one Taishou died, killed a general, abolished a general, killed tens of thousands of soldiers, and returned to four counties, of these four counties, only Lelang County persisted until the end of the Western Han Dynasty, and the land and population were not harvested. In other words, even if it is not fought, the fact that North Korea is a Chinese vassal state will not change, which is determined by the geopolitical pattern, so why fight? To spend money.
War is not the most expensive thing to spend, the most ruthless thing is trade. In the war with the Xiongnu, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty sent Zhang Qian as an envoy to occupy the Yue clan state of Ili, and when Zhang Qian arrived, he found that the Yue clan state had destroyed Bactria and established the Great Moon Clan, and he went through countless hardships from the north of the Tianshan Mountains to the Amu Darya River, and established contacts with the Great Moon Clan, the West Asian States, the Great Wan State on the Syr Darya River, and the RestIngheat State that occupied Persia and its surroundings.
Emperor Wu pushed the western end of the Great Wall northward, and set up jiuquan and Wuwei counties on the south side to protect the trade routes from the interior to the desert to dunhuang. From Dunhuang out of Yumen Pass, all the way to the west, you can reach the edge of the desert by the Iranian peoples established city-state, these countries are the middlemen to communicate the east-west traffic and material flow, the Silk Road opened.
What about the Silk Road? Miyazaki wrote: "What China wants to get from West Asia is precious stones, corals, glass, spices, etc., and the output is mainly gold and silk." Because the value of gold is relatively low in China in the east, the further west it goes, the higher it is. In most cases, when developed countries trade with backward countries, it is the developed countries that have black letters and the backward countries that have deficits. During the Han Dynasty, the rich gold that China possessed flowed to West Asia year after year, and after many years, it caused the serious consequences of The decline in China's monetary volume. ”
Well, there is not much money under this, Emperor Wu of Han has also issued his own edicts, the false fire has also been removed, and the whole person has stopped a lot. But the results of the outflow of money gradually became apparent over the next hundred years. The outflow of a large amount of gold led to a rapid rise in the actual price of gold, and the five-baht coin minted by Emperor Wu could not be maintained in the ratio of 10,000 copper coins to one catty (about 600 grams) of gold, resulting in de facto inflation and therefore having to implement the silver standard.
On the other hand, wealth was largely transferred to industrial monopolists, especially merchants specializing in iron, grain, salt and other necessities of war. After Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty announced the salt and iron monopoly, these people became the first batch of salt and iron monopoly officials in the people, and it was easy to spread wealth, and it was not simple to rely on the power in their hands to take it back. Relying only on the monopoly of salt and iron still could not solve the financial difficulties at that time, so Emperor Wu levied a commodity circulation tax on cars and ships, treated wine as a monopoly, and asked the princes to donate gold, and if the quality of the donated gold was bad, the territory would be confiscated. Most of these policies have also failed.
We can see in the Chronicle of History and The Chronicle of The Chronicle of Goods and the Chronicle of food and goods in Ban Gu that the prosperity of that time developed to 200,000 yuan per year, and the rich merchants and magnates enjoyed the same happiness as the princes, while there were as many as 800 to 1,000 slaves at the same time. The most important duty of these domestic slaves was undoubtedly farming, which meant that another phenomenon that inevitably occurred in the transfer of money appeared- land annexation. What are the consequences of land annexation, the social and economic development of the Eastern Han Dynasty has already told us.
Let's take a look at the idea, why did the good times when the national treasury was full of finally turn into bad times? The first is that there are too many materials and money in the national treasury, which leads to the slowdown in the efficiency of currency circulation, causes actual deflation, and makes it difficult for the people at the bottom, so they throw money, whether it is war or international trade without a reasonable price, the result is a large outflow of money, which is gold in the Han Dynasty and silver in the Ming Dynasty. The outflow of money causes the purchasing power of the coin to be lower than the actual nominal value, causing inflation, and inflation results in a large influx of hot money into the only property that preserves value, the land.
This cycle between good and bad times has been seen countless times in history. When the economy is good, he constantly throws money, and Zheng He will not mention it when he goes to the West, just give an example of a Japanese sword. According to the Japanese "Uji Collection of Relics", "If you take the ten waists (handles) of the etheric sword as a hostage, you can borrow six or seven thousand horses from the Tang Dynasty." The Ming Dynasty stipulated: "When the Siyi Dynasty pays tribute to Beijing, it will be paid if it has something, and if it is tribute, it will be rewarded." "This means that during the Song Dynasty, a Japanese sword could be exchanged for more than a thousand silks, and a Japanese sword with a market value of eight hundred to one thousand yuan in the Ming Dynasty could be taken from the hands of the Ming government.
The consequences of the outflow of silver money, Mr. Huang Renyu said very clearly. He calculated that the total number of Chinese in the late 16th century was close to 150 million. The government's annual income, in addition to the tax of twenty-five million two silver, there is still salt sold, the annual residual profit is two million two, and all other kinds of commercial taxes, profits from mining, fines, and income from donating and losing salt are added up, but only more than three million two, not more than four million two, all of which add up, the total income does not exceed thirty million two silver, on average, each person gets 0.2 two. In Venice at the same time, the population was only about 100,000 people, only similar to the number of people in one county in China, and the government's annual income has exceeded three million gold tocats, equal to 360,000 ounces of pure gold, and on average, each person occupies 3.6 ounces of pure gold.
What is the result of insufficient hard currency per capita? The most immediate consequence is the involution of agriculture, often referred to by social historians such as Huang Zongzhi. The so-called involution is the development trend that cannot expand the scale of production and can only improve productivity by continuously investing manpower. In China, it is intensive farming, but the problem is that once there is land annexation or a series of catastrophes, the involuted production will fail because it cannot resist the risk, so the peasant uprising will come.
Huang Yanpei asked: "The rise and fall of all dynasties and generations is also fast, what method is used to jump out of this cyclical law?" This cyclical law is the cyclical law of prosperity, the cyclical law of the amount of money occupied under natural economic conditions, that is, the cyclical law of the continuous rebalancing of land and population relations. From the Han to the Ming, why has this cyclical law never been broken?
The reason is that the great unification dynasties are usually less good at accounting, and they operate according to the principles that never take into account the "laws of commerce", that is, the "national debt" system that relies on the credit of the state has not been established. Credits that can be overdrawn at will often result in no cost.
For example, Mr. Huang Renyu calculated in "Finance and Taxation in China in the Sixteenth Century and Ming Dynasty" the freight cost of the South Grain And North Transport of the Grand Canal. There are more than 11,000 grain ships in the Grand Canal, and each ship has ten troops, so about 120,000 people participate in the transportation of grain. They have to pass through countless sluice gates, and when they go to the north, they often encounter frozen rivers, sometimes coming and going for ten months. With four million stones of grain per year, how much does the 120,000 people spend on food for ten months? It is estimated that it will cost eighteen stones of footwork to transport rice and one stone. It is also possible to calculate with one's toes that this is not economic, but the purpose of caoyun is not economic, but to make government officials and their families worthy of rice, in order to maintain the privileges of the bureaucratic grassroots of great unity.
Lenmu Catblade, a netizen who knows how to do this, said that the reason for China's cycle of chaos is that China is "rich and at the same time very closed" compared to the rest of the world." "The result? Only when we are strong can we have the opportunity to communicate directly with other civilizations, and after the exchange, it is often the national strength that turns from prosperity to decline. And when we declined, we cut off communication and tried to redistribute land through war. The bottom of this cycle happens to be what Miyazaki said is characterized by cyclical changes in money and population.