In the crawling and rolling at the bottom of society, the cultural spirit of the bottom has penetrated into Zhu Yuanzhang's body and mind in an all-round way. With the miraculous change of fate, Zhu Yuanzhang, who ascended to the throne, inevitably spread the poverty cultural factor in his character more widely and profoundly to the entire country and national spirit.
One
Among the emperors of ancient and modern China and foreign countries, the birth of the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty was probably the most hasty.
The poor rule of the Yuan Empire made Zhu Wusi, a poor peasant, no longer interested in childbearing. At the age of forty-seven, he has been tortured by life to look like an old man completely. He and forty-two-year-old Chen Erniang already had three boys and two girls at this time, and at this age, if they conceived a child, they would be laughed at, but by accident, they were still pregnant.
Mr. and Mrs. Zhu are accustomed to resigning themselves to fate. Since you are pregnant, you can carry it like carrying a pumpkin in your pocket. The problem is that the Zhu family's house is too cramped for this upcoming newborn. A family of seven is crammed into three low-rise thatched houses in Zhongli Dongxiang, Haozhou. The family works hard all year round, and the food is always not enough to eat, and there are always one or two months a year to live on wild vegetables, and the whole family has a blue face.
In the forty-ninth year after the Mongols conquered China, Zhu Yuanzhang came to the world on September 18 of the first year of the Yuan Wenzong Heavenly Calendar and at noon on October 21, 1328 in the solar calendar. No one noticed this newborn life. This child is like a grass in the field, not more than him, and no less than him. Don't even bother with the name, this child belongs to the "heavy" generation, ranking fourth. However, the traditional social habits are ranked, and the brothers and cousins are ranked in order, and they are exactly eighth, which is called "heavy eight".
Before the age of twenty-five, Zhu Yuanzhang's deepest feeling about life was: hunger.
Zhu Yuanzhang often had a dream in his life that a table of big fish and meat was placed in front of him, but when he reached out to grab it, he was interrupted by various accidents: the dining table suddenly disappeared, and the big fish and meat suddenly turned into a pile of dirt, or he was suddenly picked up by an adult and thrown out of the house. When he wakes up from his dream, he will hear the constant bowel sounds in his stomach, and the hunger pang will scrape his stomach over and over again like a knife.
The future Emperor Taizu's greatest ideal in life in his early years was to be able to eat a full meal happily.
Throughout the year, Zhu Wusi and his family filled their stomachs and intestines with the coarsest grain in the world. Moreover, even this coarsest grain is always insufficient. The broken iron pot can only be seen a little fishy during the New Year's holiday.
This is not the situation of a poor peasant Zhu Wusi and one family. This was the condition of most peasants in the Great Yuan Empire. This is not only the case with the Great Yuan, but during the dynastic period of thousands of years, this land has always been a huge empty stomach.
In 300 B.C., Meng Ke traveled to various countries and loudly appealed for his political ideas. And what he regarded as the perfect political goal was nothing more than "a happy life to be full, and a murderous year to avoid death", that is, everyone could eat enough in a good year, and no one would starve to death in a famine year. He used figurative language to exaggerate his political ideals: "A five-acre house is made of mulberry trees, fifty people can be clothed, chickens, guineas and dogs can be used for livestock, and seventy people can eat meat; and a hundred-acre field can be taken away from it, and a few families can be free from hunger." ”
This complacent boasting gives us a sour feeling, yet this poor ideal has rarely been realized in this land. Hunger and abject poverty have always followed our ancestors, along with wars and disasters, from the time of Mencius through the Han, Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties. In the past 2,000 years, the prosperity of abundant food and clothing has been far less than the tragic years of cooking with bones.
Two
In the late Warring States period, the Chinese already knew how to cultivate intensively, and the yield per mu in the Han Dynasty, according to scholars' calculations, had reached about 140 to 150 jin. This yield, which seems inconspicuous now, has not been caught up by the rest of the world for more than a thousand years, and in the case of England, for example, it was not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that their yield per mu reached 97 catties. It stands to reason that our ancestors should have been able to live comfortably in this land.
However, there are three factors that deprive them of their right to live comfortably.
The first factor is population pressure. In the pre-industrial era, the Chinese population grew faster than most countries and regions. The average annual population growth rate in Western Europe was 0.065 percent in the 1,700 years from 2 AD to the Industrial Revolution, while China's average annual population growth rate was about 1.11 percent between 2 AD and 1840, when the Opium War broke out, nearly twice as high as that of Western Europe. The frequency of population increase and decrease cycles and the number of growth cascades in ancient China were unique in the history of the world in the pre-industrial era.
As a result, China's population density has always been much greater than that of Europe, despite its vast land. According to the research of Zhao Gang and Chen Zhongyi, the per capita cultivated land area in China's feudal society was roughly maintained at about 10 mu before the Northern Song Dynasty. After the Northern Song Dynasty, the per capita cultivated land area dropped to less than 10 mu, and by the second half of the 19th century, the per capita cultivated land area dropped to less than 3 mu. By the thirteenth century, when the average arable land of the English peasant was less, a peasant still had more than 18 acres of arable land.
For thousands of years, as long as there is an acre of idle land in this vast land of China, a child will be born to occupy it. The simple goal of filling this mouth and regenerating as many mouths as possible attracts too much attention from the Chinese, making them unable to take care of other human needs. Therefore, although agricultural technology is constantly improving, and although Chinese farmers have always been so stoic and industrious, the vast majority of China's lower class society has been struggling with half hunger and half fullness.
Zhu Yuanzhang's family is a typical representative. The Zhu family has been a commoner for generations, and there has never been a person with a little status in the ancestors. In the sixteenth year of Yuan Zhizheng (1356), the twenty-nine-year-old Zhu Yuanzhang captured Jiqing (that is, today's Nanjing). He vaguely remembered that his father had said that his ancestors lived in Zhujia Lane near Nanjing. After sending people to look for a few days, they found that Zhujiaxiang was a small village forty miles away from Nanjing. At this time, there were still several destitute descendants of the Zhu family living in the village, and when they heard that the generalissimo of the Red Turban Army who captured this place was actually their distant family, they were overjoyed and came to Nanjing to meet together. Zhu Yuanzhang was very excited, and warmly "narrated the gift of the elder and the young, and practiced the way of friendship" with them, and everyone sat together and recalled the history of the old Zhu family together. According to the old people, the Zhu family seems to be from Pei County, Jiangsu Province at the earliest, and they are still the hometown of Liu Bang, the ancestor of the Han Dynasty. I don't know when, I was exiled to the vicinity of Nanjing.
It was the population pressure that caused Zhu Yuanzhang's ancestors to flee for generations and keep moving.
Zhu Yuanzhang heard his father tell him when he was a child, and they left Zhujiaxiang outside Nanjing City in his grandfather's generation. Because a few acres of thin fields near Nanjing could not support the growing children, his grandfather Zhu Chuyi fled to Xuyi, Jiangsu, when the Yuan Dynasty destroyed the Song Dynasty War not long ago, Xuyi was sparsely populated and there was a lot of barren land. My grandfather "cultivated the barren land after the army" here, worked hard to get married, and the family got up early and worked hard at night, and gradually had some family property, accumulating copper plates one by one, and married daughters-in-law to both sons.
Just as his grandfather had hoped, the family was prosperous, and together the two sons soon bore him five grandchildren. As soon as his grandfather died, the two sons had to sell their businesses and find a place with few people to make a living.
Zhu fled with his father from Nanjing to Xuyi, Jiangsu Province at the age of 558, married a wife and had children, and then moved to Wuhe, Anhui, then moved to Lingbi, moved to Hongxian County, Anhui Province within a few years, and moved to Zhongli Dongxiang at the age of 50. This time he lived the longest, lived there for ten years, and gave birth to Zhu Yuanzhang here. When Zhu Yuanzhang was eleven years old, he moved to Xixiang again, and after a year, he moved to Guzhuang Village, Taiping Township (now 20 camps about ten miles southwest of Fengyang County, Anhui Province). In total he was sixty-four years of his life, where seven migrations. In each place, the maximum is not more than ten years.
It's not that this honest farmer likes to wander, but it is really because of the vastness of the Jianghuai land, but it is difficult to find a few acres of land that can support him, a lowly and lowly grass farmer. Of course, sweat is definitely not in vain. Zhu Wusi has been a cow and a horse all his life, in exchange for his six children growing up one by one and starting a family. Yuanzhang's eldest brother married his daughter-in-law and gave birth to two grandsons on May Fourth. Although the second brother and the third brother are upside down, they have become a family. Both daughters are also married. Although the children are all illiterate and destined to spend their lives in semi-starvation, the bloodline of the Zhu family has finally further developed and grown on the land of China, and has stubbornly squeezed out a piece of their own living space in this land where the vast majority of people are struggling to eat. This cannot but be said to be a major victory in the biological sense of the competition for survival.
It's a pity that the ancestors of the Zhu family didn't see their filial sons and grandsons in person, and Zhu Yuanzhang later made amazing achievements in the birth competition. After Zhu Yuanzhang became emperor, he exerted all the potential fertility of the Zhu family to the limit. He himself had twenty-six sons and sixteen daughters. He also encouraged his offspring to have more children and not to have to do any work, but to pay according to the head of the family. So, in the fifth year of the reign of Ming Hongzhi (1492), we saw a surprising news reported by Yang Chengchou, the governor of Shanxi, in the history books: Zhu Zhongyi, the king of Qingcheng in the Jin Dynasty, once again refreshed the birth record of the old Zhu family, and by August of this year, he had 94 children and 163 grandchildren.
The population growth of the Qingcheng Wangyi Mansion is only a microcosm of the population explosion of the imperial family in the Ming Dynasty. According to Wang Shizhen's estimates, every ten years, the number of people in the Ming clan increased by 50 percent. According to Xu Guangqi's calculations, the number of people in the Ming clan will double in about 30 years. At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, Zhu Yuanzhang divided his descendants into various places, and "there were only forty-nine princes and generals at the beginning." The total number of members of the clan was 58, which increased to 127 in the Yongle period, 19,611 in the 32nd year of Jiajing (1553), and more than 80,000 in the 32nd year of Wanli (1604) (Chen Wutong, The Great Biography of the Hongwu Emperor). According to the estimation of population history experts such as An Jiesheng, by the end of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang's descendants had multiplied to nearly one million people. If the Ming Dynasty can "live for another five hundred years", then the descendants of the surname Zhu will collapse half the world sooner or later.
Three
Why did Chinese peasants in the traditional era have such a strong urge to have children?
In the old days, people could not live without their families. Families with large numbers often prevail and gain the upper hand, while weak families with lonely people are often in a position of abuse. In this case, the more the population is, the better. The need to compete for survival gave rise to an inherent impulse in the old family to expand the population indefinitely. The Chinese in the traditional era were locked as a link in the chain of inheritance, and the seal was engraved as a few Chinese characters on the ancestral tablet. In the traditional family, the head of the family is the absolute authority. Therefore, having more children and grandchildren is the most important way to achieve and expand this authority. As for whether the child can be educated after birth, and whether he can live happily in the future, it seems that he has not seriously thought about it. Therefore, although he has been in exile all his life, Zhu Wusi still spares no effort to be born in the east and west like a gourd throwing vines.
In other countries of the world, it is rare to find such a passion for fertility in China. Abortion and infanticide have been common methods of population control in Europe for thousands of years. When Europeans are old, they do not rely on their children to support themselves, and they do not know that after death, people have to rely on paper money as an economic source in the underworld. Therefore, from the beginning of civilization, Europeans have had a wary attitude towards childbearing. Ancient Greek thinkers have always emphasized birth control. According to Aristotle, population proliferation is closely related to the economic and political conditions of the city-state: "Unrestricted reproduction leads to poverty...... Poverty was followed by civil strife and thieves. He said: "All the city-states that are known for their political cultivation have a limit on their population. He argues that the state should control the population according to economic conditions such as the amount of real estate. In a city-state with relatively fixed wealth resources, the population should also remain relatively stable. "There shall be a certain limit on the number of children that can be reproduced, and if the number of new fetuses has already exceeded this limit, the proper solution should be to perform an abortion (abortion) before the embryo has no sensation and no life."
The young people of ancient Greece were more modern than the Chinese thousands of years later, focusing on personal achievement and unwilling to be prematurely trapped by marriage to affect their pursuits. Late marriage is popular in Greek society, and men generally marry around the age of 30. Although the government of the ancient Roman Empire strongly promoted childbearing, it had little effect. At that time, in order to avoid the shackles of marriage and avoid family responsibilities, many people chose to be celibate for life. According to the ancient Roman historian Svetonius, Augustus discovered that many men sought to create fraudulent marriages in order to escape the prohibition of celibacy. There are quite a few men who deliberately engage women well below the minimum age of marriage (betrothal is considered marriage and is not subject to the prohibition of celibacy). Wait until your fiancée reaches the age of marriage before giving up the engagement and pursuing engagement with a younger girl in favor of celibacy.
Although the barbarian invasion shocked the Greco-Roman civilization, birth control was inherited by the civilized barbarians. The English aristocracy of the Middle Ages also consciously exercised birth control. Due to the primogeniture system in England, the eldest sons who were waiting to inherit generally did not marry until after inheriting the family property, and those young sons who did not have property either pursued an heiress or simply became celibate. At that time, the average age of marriage for upper-class men in Britain was close to forty. This is why in classical English novels, the two parties in love are usually middle-aged men in their forties and teenage girls. Only in this way, when the previous generation dies or is incapacitated by old age, the next generation just establishes a family, inherits the estate, and succeeds the previous generation.
So, before the economic take-off, the population density of the West was lower than that of China. As a result, the per capita natural resources of Europe are much higher than those of China, and a good material foundation has been laid for the ideological enlightenment of Europeans.
Four
In addition to the impulse to procreate, another major cause of Chinese life misery in the traditional era is natural disasters. It is well known that the reason why Zhu Yuanzhang became a monk was because of a great drought in the fourth year of the Great Yuan Dynasty (1344).
In fact, even if they escaped this famine, the Zhu family was destined to be ruined in another famine. Because Zhu Yuanzhang's hometown Fengyang is a place with frequent disasters. The Huai River is a well-known harmful river. Based on a large number of historical materials, Professor Zhu Kezhen has sorted out the number of flood and drought disasters in various dynasties and regions from the beginning to the beginning of the soup and the end of Guangxu, and found that the Huaihe River basin is one of the areas with the most drought and flood disasters in the mainland. According to the statistics of drought and flood and other hydroclimatic historical data in Henan Province, in the 1,330 years from 620 A.D. to 1949, the number of drought years and the number of waterlogging years in eastern Henan Province were 453 and 448. As the saying goes, "there will be nine years of famine in ten years" in Fengyang County, a relatively serious drought and flood disaster will occur on average every four years.
Zhu Wusi moved around, and finally moved to a place where "there are nine years of famine in ten years". Of course, he can't be blamed for not having a vision. The simple reason is that places with fewer disasters tend to have higher population densities and cannot accommodate new arrivals. Only in places where disasters are frequent, the periodic decline in the population gives Zhu Wusi a chance to see the stitches. When Zhu Wusi moved to Guzhuang Village, it had not fully recovered from the war, and there were even tigers rampant among the villages. "Fengyang New Book" recorded that at that time, "the tiger gathered for trouble, the village was terrified, and martial law was imposed on the way." The general of the Later Yuan Dynasty, Ying Yier, was hunted and killed, and his troubles began to be extinguished." It can be seen that the local population is sparse.
In this way, we see another important cause of China's poverty: famine.
China's monsoon climate is an extremely unstable one. Just as we always hear about floods and droughts in the news today, in history, there have been few times when the vast land of China has been in good weather, and local disasters have occurred every year. Looking at the history of disasters and famines in China, from 206 B.C. to 1949 A.D., a total of 2,155 years, there are 1,056 droughts and 1,029 floods, and the total number of floods and droughts is almost once a year on average. Other natural disasters, such as locust plagues, hailstorms, wind disasters, epidemics, earthquakes, etc., are too numerous to mention. Such frequent natural disasters are, to some extent, man-made disasters: 3,000 years ago, the Yellow River basin was full of forests and swamps, with fertile water and grass, and good weather and rain. However, due to thousands of years of overexploitation, forests have been cut down, swamps have been drained, the Yellow River has become a hanging river, the soil's water storage capacity has been severely reduced, and small droughts have often turned into major droughts. For thousands of years, the life of the peasants in the north has become more and more difficult, which is not unrelated to the deterioration of the natural environment.
According to the "History of the Yuan Dynasty", in the past 100 years of the Yuan Dynasty, the whole country suffered 94 major floods, 62 major droughts, 49 great locust plagues, and 72 great famines. In other words, there are an average of two or three catastrophes per year. At its worst, cannibalism was recorded more than a dozen times. This is the direct consequence of environmental degradation. That is, taking the Huai River in Zhu Yuanzhang's hometown as an example, the reason why it frequently causes harm is mainly because human activities have changed its natural ecology and flow direction.
The climate in Europe is relatively stable, due to the regulation of the oceanic climate, the climate in Western Europe is much warmer than that of northern China at the same latitude, although its precipitation is not as good as that of southern China, but far better than that of the north, enough for agricultural irrigation. Therefore, in the history of Europe, there has never been a phenomenon of thousands of miles of red land in northern China. Comparing the two, as Deng Tuo said: "There are many disasters and famines on the mainland, which are rare in the world." Some Western scholars have even called China "the famine China."
Five
The third factor in China's impoverishment is China's vast bureaucracy. The development of the autocratic system made the precocious and complete Chinese bureaucracy unparalleled in the world. The enormity of the bureaucracy made it to a certain extent detached from the imperial power and become an independent interest group with an irrepressible impulse to expand frantically. After the establishment of each dynasty, the number of bureaucrats skyrocketed, and at the same time, the burden on the peasants naturally skyrocketed. There are few who live, and many who eat. In the first thirty or fifty years of the "rule of Qingming" at the beginning of the establishment of each dynasty, the burden on the peasants will be temporarily lightened, and some financial resources will be accumulated to improve their living conditions. After the first generation or two of emperors, the burden increased rapidly, and the lives of ordinary people were unsustainable.
Among the great unified dynasties, the Great Yuan established by the Mongols belonged to the category of relatively crude ruling technology. The Mongols did not understand agriculture, and when they went south, they wanted to "empty the Han land and think of it as pasture", that is, to wipe out the peasants and transform the fertile land into pasture, but they changed their minds only under the persuasion of Yelu Chucai. Yelu Chucai's main reason for impressing the Mongol rulers was that the benefits from changing to pastures were not as great as exploiting the Han peasants.
Based on this way of thinking, the Mongols exploited more bare than any other great unified dynasty in history. The Yuan Dynasty divided the people of the whole country into four categories: Mongols, Semu, Han Chinese, and Nanren, and openly implemented a policy of ethnic discrimination. In order to prevent the Han people from resisting, the Mongols stipulated that the Han people were not allowed to learn martial arts, the Han people were not allowed to go up the mountains to hunt, and even the Han people were forbidden to pass at night. "Yuan History: Criminal Law Chronicles" contains: "All nights are forbidden, one watch is three o'clock, the bell is absolutely ringing, and people are forbidden. At five or three o'clock, the bell moves, and people listen. Violators will be punished with twenty-seven lashes, and those who have officials will be redeemed. The urgency of his official duties, as well as illness, death, childbirth, and so on. In other words, from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. the next morning, people are not allowed to walk on the streets. In line with this rule, people are not allowed to light lamps during the above periods. The Han people live like slaves.
Economic exploitation is more unbearable than political discrimination. According to the report of the Central Political Yuan in the second year of Tianli (1329), "the queen's daily needs are 100,000 ingots, 50,000 horses of coins and silks, and 5,000 catties of cotton." They are even more unrestrained in their Buddhist work, and at most they do Buddhist things more than 500 times a year. According to the statistics of the fourth year of Yanxi (1317), every year the inner court used 439,500 catties of noodles, 79,000 catties of oil, 21,870 catties of ghee, and 27,300 catties of honey to do Buddhist work.
These costs are ultimately borne by the underclass. Or take Zhu Yuanzhang's family as an example: the Yuan Dynasty implemented a hereditary system of occupations, and some households were registered separately and undertook some professional servitude, such as station households (to undertake the forced labor of post stations), mining and metallurgical households (mining iron, silver and other mines), hunters (engaged in fishing), sailor households (serving as sailors for river transportation and shipping), stove households (boiling salt), kiln households (firing porcelain), etc. The ancestors of the Zhu family in Zhujiaxiang were originally gold diggers, and according to the regulations, they had to pay gold to the government every year. However, there was no gold production near Nanjing, so they had to rely on selling grain for money, and then buy gold from afar to make up the numbers. After tossing for a few years and losing all the only bit of family property, he had to cross the Yangtze River north. However, no one can escape the government's search anywhere. After Zhu Wusi fled to Huaibei, before he had a few days of stable life, the government began to collect taxes. According to the regulations of the Yuan Dynasty, peasants in the north and south of the Huai River had to pay a poll tax, an agricultural tax, and a branch tax. The poll tax is two stone valleys per person, which is about 360 catties today. Zhu Wusi's family has three Chengding, and they have to pay 1,080 catties of grain. According to the provisions of the state, the tax per stone tax is consumed by three liters, and four liters is divided into different cases, and the actual collection is far greater than this provision. Hu Yishu, an official in the early Yuan Dynasty, said: "In addition to rat consumption and sub-examples, two or three stones can be counted as one stone valley." "So multiply one thousand and eighty times one hundred and twenty-five percent, and it becomes one thousand three hundred and fifty pounds. The branch difference mainly includes silk material, silver, and official banknotes, which are paid according to households, and stipulate that each household has 1.4 catties of silk, 4 taels of silver banknotes (2 taels of silver banknotes, 1 tael of silver), and 5 taels of official banknotes to 1 tael. According to the purchasing power, one tael of silver in the Yuan Dynasty was worth four stone grains, and three taels of more silver were worth two thousand one hundred and sixty catties of grain. Therefore, the Sanding family has to bear the burden of 3,510 catties of grain a year. We estimate that the Zhu family could produce 2,000 catties of grain per laborer at that time, and more than half of the total output of 6,000 catties had to be handed over to the state. This is still a tax officially stipulated by the state, and the local governments are not in this case.
From the Warring States period to the Ming and Qing dynasties, for more than 2,000 years, China's peasants were able to have more than enough food and clothing only in the early days of the new dynasty established after the peasant uprising. For most of the rest of the year, they were in a situation where they could barely survive. According to Pang Zhuoheng in "Human Development and Historical Development", under normal circumstances, the annual surplus rate of Chinese peasants will not be greater than 5 percent. In the Middle Ages, the net surplus rate of an ordinary English serf household, who owned all the land, was 26 percent. They produced about 4,641 kilograms of grain a year, or about 1,224 kilograms of grain after taxes, seeds, and rations. Judging from this figure, the standard of living of Chinese peasants is much lower than that of European serfs.
It can be seen that the expropriation of the peasants by the Chinese bureaucracy was far more severe than that of the European manor owners. The Chinese peasants were forced to exhaust their full potential in simple reproduction, so that they could not have the surplus financial resources to develop their intellect and expand their space for maneuver, like the serfs of Western Europe, thus promoting one major historical change after another that led to the dissolution of the feudal system.
Six
Poverty is never a good thing. Poverty blinds man's eyes and prevents him from seeing anything other than food, and poverty imprisons man's body, making him like an animal tormented by primitive desires. Poverty deprives man of strength, dignity and rights, and makes him feel weak and grovel before nature, gods and power.
In the fifties of the twentieth century, the American scholar Lewis proposed the concept of "poverty culture". The characteristics of the culture of poverty, which he summarized, include higher mortality rates, lower life expectancy, lower levels of education, long struggles for survival, pawns, living a life of bondage, a lifetime of busyness without leisure, yearning for power, machismo, focusing only on the present, distrusting the government, weakness and incompetence, sensitivity to status differences and lack of class awareness, and so on. This culture of poverty gives people a strong sense of fatalism, helplessness, and inferiority. They are short-sighted and have no foresight, and they are narrow-minded and unable to recognize their difficulties in a wide range of socio-cultural contexts.
We have to redefine the relationship between civilization and wealth. Wealth gives people extra time and energy to care for their hearts, to care about the world beyond their horizons, and to think about extravagant issues that have nothing to do with the stomach. Wealth is the soil on which civilization grows.
The ancient Greek civilization was built on the rolling gold coins. Because the barren land could not support itself, the Greeks had to try to venture out. The huge Greek fleet was constantly exporting wine, olive oil, pottery, and bringing back grain and money. An economic historian asserts that "between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C., the Greek economy was booming...... If we fully estimate the specifics of the different eras, the Athenian economy gives the impression of being somewhat similar to that of Europe in the nineteenth century. ”
The affluent plebeians demanded political rights, which eventually led to the emergence of democracy.
After the Middle Ages, the fundamental reason why Europe was able to break through the darkness and usher in the Renaissance was that with the improvement of production technology, European serfs could become richer and richer, and they could bargain with feudal lords and obtain citizenship. Their level of education and spiritual strength continued to grow, which eventually drove the wave of commodity monetization and ushered in the development of capitalism.
As mentioned earlier, the average cultivated land of Chinese peasants never returned to the level of 10 mu per capita after the Song Dynasty. Thus, the Song Dynasty became the last glorious dynasty in the history of Chinese civilization. After that, in the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, the intensification of poverty increasingly consumed the Chinese spirit, causing Chinese culture to enter a long-term stagnation and regression. The consequences of poverty on human dignity and human degradation are immeasurable. After a family declines into poverty, its family members tend to become depressed and vulgar from the high-spirited spirit of the past, and the style of its parents will become increasingly short-sighted, authoritarian and rude. The changes in China are similar. Since the fall of the Song Dynasty, the noble temperament and humanistic atmosphere have become weaker and weaker in Chinese culture, and the self-confidence of the Tang Dynasty and the elegance of the Song Dynasty can no longer be reproduced.
Zhu Yuanzhang, who was born in extreme poverty, was an important driving force in the process of the deterioration of Chinese civilization.
Seven
Zhu Yuanzhang meets all the conditions of the bitter and bitter destitute class. Since he was a teenager, he went to herd cattle for landlords. The poor man's child is easy to feed, and although he eats the worst food in the world, it does not delay his growth into a burly figure, but his appearance is a little uglier: his head is very long, his chin is broad, and he has a donkey face. "History of the Ming Dynasty" implicitly called him "a majestic appearance and a strange bone through the top".
This future emperor's favorite game to play is "Be the Emperor". "You see, although he is barefoot, and his blue cloth shorts are full of holes and patches, and they are in tatters, he will tear the leaves of the palm tree into silks, tie them to his mouth as a beard, find a car spokes and put it on his head, and sit on the mound, let the children go in rows, row by row, respectfully, neatly kneel three times and kowtow nine times, and shout long live in unison" (Wu Han, "The Biography of Zhu Yuanzhang").
The only cultural activity is to listen to the storyteller from all over the neighborhood. What "Sui and Tang Dynasties", "Three Kingdoms", "Yang Jiajiang", "The Great Song Dynasty Xuanhe Legacy". In these commentaries, he knew that "the king told the minister to die, and the minister had to die", that there were "loyal ministers" and "traitorous ministers" above the court, and that "Song Taizu defeated 480 military states with a whistle". For the vast majority of Chinese up to this day, these commentaries, that is, the crude underlying cultural products in traditional culture, are the real spiritual cornerstone of their life, laying the foundation for their lifelong thinking mode.
In rural society, there are not only simple human feelings and idyllic scenery, but also ignorance, barbarism and blind obedience to power. In the midst of the crawling at the bottom of society, the cultural spirit of the bottom penetrated into Zhu Yuanzhang's body and mind in an all-round way. With the miraculous change of fate, Zhu Yuanzhang, who ascended to the throne, inevitably spread the poverty cultural factor in his character more widely and profoundly to the entire country and national spirit.
Throughout his life, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty was firmly constrained by the peasant's way of thinking, and we can clearly distinguish the spiritual imprint of the impoverished culture of the small village on the south bank of the Huai River in his great policy of governing the country.
Based on the experience of rural life, Emperor Hongwu's concept of statecraft showed a strong static orientation. His basic tendency in governing the country was to fix the way the state operated, so that the whole society would regress to the primitive state of "a small country and a widowed people, and the old and dead would not get along." Zhu Yuanzhang, who became the emperor, maintained a simple peasant morality and showed special respect to the elderly in the world. He promulgated the "Edict on the Preservation of Pensions", stipulating that "there is a division to carefully examine the elderly...... Eighty or ninety years old, the neighbors are called good, prepare their years, do real, and smell the facts. Those who are poor and have no property, and are over 80 years old, are given five buckets of rice, five catties of meat, and three buckets of wine per month; those who are over 90 years old are given one horse of silk and ten catties of silk; those whose fields are only sufficient for self-support are given wine, meat, wadding, and silk. ”
After the cancellation of the prime minister, Zhu Yuanzhang couldn't be busy alone. He was whimsical and believed that the folk Confucianism came from the fields, was simple and honest, and was rich in experience, so he directly promoted auxiliary political personnel from the bottom of the society. In September of the thirteenth year of Hongwu, he set up a system of four auxiliary officials, and in order to "assist in political affairs", he found a few ordinary old Confucian Wang Ben, Du Zhan, Gong Shu, etc. from the people to serve as spring officials, summer officials, autumn officials, and winter officials, to assist him in governance, and "pay attention to Tron". However, after a period of implementation, Zhu Yuanzhang found that his ideas were too naïve. "Everyone is an old Confucian, starting from the Tian family, and there is no other way to grow up", these old people are really difficult to make other contributions except for their grandsons, so in the fifteenth year of Hongwu, he had to abolish the four auxiliary officials.
The basic reaction of farmers to the outside world is rejection, fear and distrust. The closed state of life makes them feel safe and relaxed. They don't like to take risks, they just want to live in peace and stability by keeping the way of life passed down from their predecessors. Although the world relied on force, enterprising and adventurous spirit, once the world was stable, Zhu Yuanzhang immediately restored the conservative nature of the peasants. The Great Yuan Empire is a world empire, but the successor Zhu Yuanzhang has no interest in the outside world. He was content to drive the Mongols back into the desert, and did not go deep into the desert to completely annihilate them. The Japanese continued to create incidents and provoke him, and he also issued several edicts to reprimand him for a meal, and he never moved the idea of raising troops to fight far away. He was not interested in the overseas trade, which had brought great wealth to China, and not only banned overseas trade, but even forbade fishermen from going to the sea to fish, and moved all the inhabitants of the islands inward, "for a limit of three days, and the latter died." In the Emperor's Ancestral Teachings, he listed more than 20 neighboring countries as non-conscripted countries, saying that these countries "have not enough land to supply, and their people are not enough to make orders", and warned future generations to "remember not to" be tempted by them. Although there is not much property to protect, Chinese farmers have had an unwavering passion for protecting their home courtyard walls for generations. After Qin Shi Huang, Zhu Yuanzhang's Ming Dynasty once again spent huge manpower and material resources to rebuild the Great Wall, so that the Great Wall we see today is basically a relic of the Ming Dynasty.
The short-sighted concept of benefits is another profound mark on Zhu Yuanzhang's life in Guzhuang Village. The culture of the bottom is a product of hunger, and pragmatism is at its core, and the possession and preservation of that little subsistence resource attracts the full attention of the peasants. For a little food, a few thatched huts, people can use their physical and mental strength without hesitation, beat the abacus to the most refined, and make every grain of rice maximize the benefits. Farmers have few opportunities to exercise higher-level thinking skills such as classification, abstraction, and reasoning. In their minds, the world exists in a tangible physical form, the sum of mountains, rivers, land, trees, crops, pigs, cows, sheep, chickens, and so on. When they calculate numbers, they always have to have the image of these things flashing in front of their eyes, or imagining the appearance of their fingers and toes. They can't understand things that go beyond the physical level.
Zhu Yuanzhang, like any villager in Guzhuang Village, is a staunch heavy agricultural and light merchantist. In their eyes, businessmen are unearned. They toiled in the land in exchange for real food, and the merchants only exchanged the goods from place to place, and the total amount of goods did not increase, but they conjured up a lot of additional profits like magic. This makes them puzzled by any means. Therefore, Zhu Yuanzhang was the most light merchant emperor in Chinese history. In order to disparage the merchants, he deliberately stipulated that the peasants could wear four kinds of clothing: silk, yarn, silk, and cloth. The merchants, on the other hand, could only wear clothes made of silk and cloth. Businessmen who take the examination for education and become officials will be subject to all kinds of difficulties and restrictions.
Originally, in the Song Dynasty, China implemented a comprehensive monetization of taxes, but Zhu Yuanzhang degraded the tax system to the stage of the physical system. "The heralds and prison guards in the yamen are all sent by the villages in turn, and even the repair of stationery and paper, and even tables, chairs, benches, and public offices are also collected from the villagers in a sporadic manner." Mr. Huang said Mr. Zhu's design "was tantamount to announcing to China and the rest of the world that China is the world's largest rural group and that it can be satisfied without commerce."
The third influence is a strong sense of kinship. "Brothers in battle, fathers and sons in battle". In rural societies, blood ties are more reliable than any other relationship. Zhu Yuanzhang, who became the emperor, had a strong suspicion of anyone, and relied unconditionally on his blood relatives alone. He is mean to everyone, and he is not kind to his relatives.
Although there were lessons from the rebellion of the vassal kings of the past dynasties, Zhu Yuanzhang still turned a blind eye and stubbornly let his children share the power of the emperor. His children were all made princes, and they had a strong army, "80,000 with armor and 6,000 leather carts", so as to prevent the imperial power from falling into the hands of foreign surnames. The ministers pointed out the serious shortcomings of his feudal kings' policies, but he thought that it was a wedge between his flesh and blood, and he arrested and imprisoned those who spoke up, and this arrangement finally led to the rebellion. He stipulated the thinnest official salary in all dynasties, and at the same time stipulated the thickest royal family in all dynasties. He stipulated that his relatives and descendants should enjoy prosperity for generations to come, and that they would not have to engage in any occupation, so that the supply of the imperial family became the heaviest financial burden for the state after the middle of the Ming Dynasty.
Chinese farmers are the hardest working people in the world. They never take their own labor into account when calculating the cost of production. It's as if physical strength and energy are the least valuable things that can be spent at will. With the hard work of rural life, Zhu Yuanzhang was one of the most diligent emperors in Chinese history, and he was never afraid to increase his workload. From his accession to the throne until his death, he barely had a day off. In the edict, he said: "Thirty years for a year, worry about danger, and work hard every day. According to the records of historical books, from September 14 to 21 of the 18th year of Hongwu (1385), within eight days, Zhu Yuanzhang approved and read a total of 1,660 pieces of internal and external documents, and handled 3,391 pieces of state affairs, with an average of more than 200 pieces of notes and more than 400 pieces of state affairs every day. At this end alone, one can imagine how diligent he is.
The peasant is the harshest of egoists in his own enjoyment. Thousands of years of poverty have accumulated, and their desire for thrift has even become a blind instinct rather than a means. Zhu Yuanzhang's thrift is also the pinnacle among the emperors of previous dynasties. After becoming the emperor, he had breakfast every day, "only vegetables, plus a dish of tofu" (Chen Wutong's "The Biography of Zhu Yuanzhang"). The bed he used did not have a golden dragon on it, "no different from the couch of the Chinese family". He ordered the workers to build him a chariot and a sedan chair, and to replace it with copper wherever gold should be used. Zhu Yuanzhang also ordered someone to open a wasteland in the palace to grow vegetables to eat. One day in the first month of the third year of Hongwu (1370), Zhu Yuanzhang took out a sheet and gave it to the ministers. When you look at it, it is all a hundred orders sewn with small pieces of silk. Zhu Yuanzhang said: "The clothes left behind are used to be arrested, and it is better to abandon them." ”
Like every farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang has a strong sense of the countryside. Most of the heroes under him are his fellow countrymen. After ascending the throne, he felt that no place was as good as his hometown, and he missed the small village on the south bank of the Huai River more and more. "The holy mind misses the emperor's hometown and wants to live in Fengyang for a long time." Fengyang was originally a barren land, but at the beginning of the founding of the country, he insisted on setting the capital here. Although the ministers have repeatedly admonished, they will not waver. Farmers save money in their lives, but when they build a house, they give it away. Similarly, in order to run the capital of Fengyang, Zhu Yuanzhang, who has always insisted on lightly paying for the people, also wasted money and spared no manpower and material resources, and successively requisitioned hundreds of thousands of soldiers and craftsmen. Unexpectedly, the craftsmen were overwhelmed by the labor and expressed their anger with the "method of disgust with victory". The angry Zhu Yuanzhang killed a large number of craftsmen, and his plan to return to his hometown was also frustrated. Otherwise, the barren village on the south bank of the Huai River, where "there are nine years of famine in ten years", has really become the capital of the Ming Dynasty.