In 453 BC, the Han, Zhao, and Wei families destroyed the Zhi clan. The Zhi clan was the last major family of Shiqing besides the Han, Zhao, and Wei families; the destruction of the Zhi clan meant that the three branches of the Jin Dynasty had actually begun.
At that time, the three families of Han, Zhao, and Wei, the place of the Zhao clan was two thousand miles ("Warring States Policy, Zhao Ceyi, Su Qin from Yan's Zhao Began to Unite"), Wei's Place of Thousand Miles ("Warring States Policy, Wei Ceyi, Suzi for Zhao Hezhong said the King of Wei"), and Han's place of thousands of miles ("Warring States Policy, Han Ceyi, Su Qin for chu and the people of Han"). Although there are many lands of the Zhao clan, most of its territory is in the north of Shanxi and Hebei, close to the boundaries of the northern nomadic peoples, and the living environment is relatively harsh; although there are few lands in Han and Wei, most of the land is close to the Central Plains, and closer to the center of traditional agricultural civilization. Therefore, although the size of the land of the three families varied greatly after the division of the Jin Dynasty, they also took what they needed and were all very happy.
Although the division of jin is already a matter of course, after the three independent states are established, they must "bear their own profits and losses". Before the split, the strength of the Jin state was enough to dominate the crowd; but after the split, the strength of any of the three Jin dynasties was weaker than that of the traditional powers such as Qi, Qin, and Chu. Therefore, independent entrepreneurship has both opportunities and risks. If there is no ability to deal with the unknown risks after the promotion, then the road to independent entrepreneurship is bound to be dangerous.
Faced with the increasingly fierce competition in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, the local State of Wei became the earliest awakener of the Three Jin Dynasties, taking the lead in carrying out a far-reaching change that was ignored by Tai Shi Gong but had a considerable impact--this was the Kuī (Kuī) transformation.
Li Wu is usually considered by historians to be Li Ke; he was a disciple of Zixia and was born in the State of Wei. In the early days, Li Wu served as the sheriff of Shangdi County in the State of Wei, overseeing the military and political affairs of Shangdi. Shangdi included Yulin, Suide, and Fuxian counties in present-day Shaanxi Province, and was an important defensive area on the border between Qin and Wei. At the beginning of the Warring States period, the capital of the State of Wei was located in Anyi (安邑, in present-day Xia County, Shanxi), and once the Qin army broke through Shangdi, it could cross the Yellow River and directly threaten the capital of the State of Wei! Therefore, Shangdi became a key area of the Qin and Wei conflict.
Because of his repeated meritorious service as Punctual In Shangdi, Li Wu received great attention from Wei Wenhou. In 422 BC (the twenty-fifth year of Wei Wenhou), Wei Wenhou appointed Li Wu as his chancellor and put him in charge of the state of Wei; in 406 BC (the forty-first year of Wei Wenhou), Li Wu, with the support of Wei Wenhou, began a major change with little historical record but extremely far-reaching influence.
Still serving as the guardian of Shangdi, Li Wu showed his talent for reform and strengthening.
At that time, Shangdi was often attacked by the Qin state. In the course of many battles, Li Wu realized that bows and arrows were an important means of breaking the enemy and winning. In order to strengthen the archery of the Shangdi garrison, Li Wu publicly issued an order: "Whoever has a dispute over right and wrong, let them shoot arrows; those who shoot the target win the case, and those who cannot shoot lose the case!" ”
At this moment, the people on the upper ground all practiced archery day and night, and the archery skills of the shangdi garrison were greatly improved. Because everyone in Shangdi is good at shooting, whenever the Qin people invade, they will be killed and flee.
Li Wu's "Xi Shooting Order" obviously refers to Guan Zhong's strategy of "transferring the armor to the armored soldiers lightly": The Qi people committed minor crimes, and according to the severity of the crime, they could use armor and weapons to atone for their sins. Because of this policy, the problem of insufficient armor and soldiers in the Qi Army was easily solved in a very short period of time. Li Wu's promulgation of the "Xi Shooting Order" also had the same magic - prompting the Wei army to greatly improve its archery skills in the short term.
Li Wu's change in Shangdi was highly recognized by Wei Wenhou. Therefore, when he first entered the year of establishment, he was promoted to state minister by Wei Wenhou in one fell swoop.
After becoming prime minister, Li Wu's responsibility was even greater. At this time, he not only had to focus on the military, but also participated in presiding over many changes in politics, economics, and other fields.
In the political field, Li Wu's first move was to "seize the people's lu and come from all over the world." The so-called "adulterous people" refer to the nobles and their children who "have merit in their fathers and eat them without merit." Historically, the Jin Dynasty first reformed the patriarchal system at the office level and established the iron law of "no prince without a son". However, for qing doctors of different races and surnames, after experiencing many crises in the Jin dynasty, they actually formed a father-son hereditary heir system. Therefore, the Jin state changed the patriarchal system at the office level, but unexpectedly consolidated the patriarchal system at the level of Qing Dafu. The reason why the Jin state was divided into three was that the Siqing system made the Qing clan sit large and eventually replaced the office. Li Wu's "seizure of the people's lu" was not only to prevent the recurrence of the tragedy of the Jin dynasty, but also to promote the strategy of employing people with merit and reward and punishment, so as to attract people from all over the world to enter Wei and leave the army. After this reform initiative was introduced, Talents such as Wu Qi, Zhai Huang, Le Yang, Ximen Leopard, and so on arrived, once promoting the State of Wei to become the hegemon of Eastern Zhou.
Li Wu's "seizure of the people's lu" is a deepening reform of the patriarchal system after the "unpretentious prince" of the Jin Dynasty, which can be called a precedent-setting institutional change.
In 536 BC, Zheng Guo's ruling Qing Zichan introduced a new initiative: casting the Book of Punishment. The sub-property cast the criminal law on the big ding, and then made it public, thinking that it was the normal law of the country. However, the act of casting the book of punishment was strongly condemned by his contemporaries, Shu Xiang. Shu Xiang believes that after the criminal law is made public, the exclusive criminal adjudication power of scholars and doctors will be supervised by the people, which will easily trigger the people's desire for litigation and is not worth emulating. But twenty-three years later, Jin Qing Zhao Martin and Xun Yin also learned to produce their children, and cast the criminal book formulated by the old Qing Shi Shi Zao on an iron ding and made it public!
This shows that with the awakening of the people's consciousness, the practice of first legislating and then ruling the country according to law has become the trend of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty.
When the three families were divided into Jin, Wei Wenhou realized that the old laws could no longer adapt to the development of the situation, so he specially authorized Li Wu to formulate a completely new set of laws, the Book of Laws, with reference to the laws of the past dynasties.
There are six chapters in the Fa Jing, including "Theft Law", "Thief Law", "Prison Law", "Flutter Law", "Miscellaneous Law", "JuFa" and so on. The so-called "theft law" is the law punishing the theft and robbery of property; the "Thief Law" is the law punishing crimes such as rebellion and murder, murder, and so on; the "Prison Law" and the "Fighting Law" are the laws related to the impeachment of thieves; the "miscellaneous law" is the law on other criminal acts, including the prohibition of adultery (prohibiting the husband and wife from cheating), cunning (prohibiting the theft of the seal and the vain discussion of state decrees), the city ban (prohibiting crossing the city wall), the prohibition of playing (prohibiting the game), the golden prohibition (prohibiting the corruption of officials), and Prohibition of transgressions (prohibition of transgressions of etiquette) and so on; "jujutsu" is the law that aggravates or mitigates punishment according to special circumstances.
The Fa Jing is extremely extensive, far superior to the laws of the nations in the Spring and Autumn Period. What is even more rare is that when formulating the law, Li Wu also broke the bad rule of "not being a doctor on punishment", and there were corresponding punishment methods for violations of the law by civilians, up to qing doctors, and even princes. For example, there is a provision in the "Miscellaneous Law" that prohibits participation in gambling, and those who participate in the game are punished with fines. If the prince participates in the game, he will be punished with flogging (that is, bamboo whipping); if he commits another crime, the intensity of the flogging will be increased; if he does not change after two floggings, he will be changed to a prince!
The prince of the country cannot break the law, which shows that Li Wu has established the spirit of "law is not noble" when he legislated. This is another historically advanced step!
Although the Fa Jing did not survive, it had a great influence in the Warring States period. The New Book of Huan Tan records: "Marquis Wen of Wei's master Li Wu wrote the Book of Laws,...... Wei Martin received it and entered the Qin Dynasty, which was similar to the qin and wei kingdoms, and the deep text and the law were similar. It can be seen from this that when the Shang martingale changed the law, it also largely referred to the "Book of Laws" formulated by Li Wu.
The most important change in the Li Wu transformation method is still in the economic field.
In the pre-Qin era, the core foundation of a country's economy was agriculture.
In the middle and late Spring and Autumn period, the Various Qing clans of the Jin Dynasty reformed the agricultural production methods in their respective territories. At that time, the Fan and Zhonghang clans took eighty steps (one step of about 1.2 meters) as a qi and one hundred and sixty steps as a one (zhěn), which were jointly cultivated by five families and paid corresponding taxes; the Zhi clan took ninety steps as a qi and one hundred and eighty steps as a qi, and the five families jointly cultivated and paid corresponding taxes; the Han and Wei clans took one hundred steps as one, one hundred and sixty steps as one, and five families jointly cultivated and paid corresponding taxes; while the Zhao clan took one hundred and twenty steps as one and two hundred and forty steps as one, but adopted the traditional model of using the land system After the peasants paid the rent of servitude, they no longer paid additional taxes. (Yinqueshan Hanjian "Sun Tzu's Art of War, Wu Qing")
Although the field system adopted by the Six Qings of the Jin Dynasty was not the same, but limited to the level of productivity at that time, each family could only adopt a collective production model.
By the time of Li Wu, iron tools were gradually popularized in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, and the level of agricultural productivity was greatly improved. At this time, individual farming families have been able to independently undertake the heavy agricultural production work. Therefore, in order to adapt to the development of the situation, Li Wu resolutely privatized the land of the Wei state to a single peasant family.
Dong of the Ming Dynasty said in the "Seven Kingdoms Examination of Wei Food Goods": "Li Wu used the ditch as a ruin, and claimed to be too much of a Zhou Gong. "Zhou Gong was one of the founders of the Western Zhou Tian system, how could Li Wu He De dare to say that he surpassed Zhou Gong?
The so-called "ditch" is called "the ditch", "the nine husbands are the wells, and the wells are four feet wide and four feet deep; the square ten miles are formed, and the square is eight feet wide and eight feet deep is called the ditch." (Zhou Li Kao Gong Ji) Can be seen in the ditch, that is, the field boundary under the traditional field system. After the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period, although most of the countries changed the rent of servitude under the land system to rent in kind, the mode of collective large-scale production did not undergo a qualitative change. The peasants were passively produced under the organization of the nobility at all levels, lacking autonomy, and the ordinary peasants could not cross the boundaries of the fields to cultivate. This means that farmers can only work within the confines of the fields defined by the ditch, and rarely take the initiative to open up new fields.
This undoubtedly limits the further improvement of agricultural production efficiency.
The "Book of Han and Food Goods" mentions Li Wu's transformation method, and there is a record that "now a husband and wife carry five mouths, rule a hundred acres of land, and harvest one and a half stones per acre, which is one hundred and fifty stones for millet". It can be seen that the Li Wu transformation method has privatized the land of the Wei state to a single peasant household. Li Wu's "ditch as a ruin" conformed to the general trend of land privatization, abolished the restrictions on the boundaries of fields, and encouraged peasants to actively open up new land to improve agricultural production efficiency.
The privatization of land to individuals is yet another historic reform initiative.
With the privatization of land to individuals, agricultural production is smaller and the resilience of individual farmers to natural disasters is greatly reduced. Once a natural disaster occurs, the income of the vast majority of rural households will plummet, and a large-scale famine will occur. If we want to strengthen the resilience of farmers to natural disasters, we must raise food prices to increase peasants' incomes. However, the rise in food prices, which is unaffordable for urban dwellers who are not engaged in agricultural production, will cause another major social problem. Food prices, therefore, are a double-edged sword: too low for farmers to suffer, too expensive for other civilians to afford.
In order to balance this contradiction between food production and consumption, it is necessary to put the price of grain at an appropriate equilibrium point: neither to make the people in the cities unaffordable, nor to discourage the peasants from producing food because the price is too low.
After investigation, Li Wu calculated that an ordinary peasant family needed one hundred and fifty stones of grain per year to maintain a normal standard of living. On this basis, Li Wu created the Pingyi (dí) method: in the great harvest year, the peasants can harvest four hundred stones of grain, and the state will buy three hundred stones; in the medium harvest year, the peasants can harvest three hundred stones of grain, and the state will buy two hundred stones of grain; in the general good year, the peasants can harvest two hundred stones of grain, and the state will buy fifty stones of it; if there is a slight famine, the peasants can only harvest one hundred stones, and the state will sell the surplus grain purchased in the general harvest year; when the famine is slightly heavier, each peasant can only harvest seventy stones, and the state will buy the surplus grain in the medium harvest year In a year of severe famine, the peasant can only produce thirty stones, and then the state sells the grain it has hoarded in the year of the great harvest. In this way, in the year of the harvest, the people in urban and rural areas have enough affordable grain; in the year of famine, the price of grain is not expensive, and the people will not flee from the famine.
The essence of the "PingYi Law" is that the state stores grain at a reasonable price during the harvest and sells it at the same price at the time of the bad harvest to stabilize the price of grain. Although this measurement model is slightly idealistic, this approach of thinking of danger and actively responding to famine at the national level has undoubtedly once again set a precedent in history.
In addition, Li Wu also actively encouraged the peasants to "do their best", expand sideline production, and take the initiative to increase family income: "Wei Wenhou made Li Wu do his best to teach,...... If Li Tian is diligent, he will benefit from three buckets; if he is not diligent, he will lose the same. The increase and decrease of the place for a hundred miles is one hundred and eight hundred thousand stones. There will be five kinds of miscellaneous to prepare for disasters; cultivate and harvest like thieves; and also (ring) Lu tree mulberry, vegetable ru you qi, melon (hù) fruit (luǒ), and breed in the frontier. (Tongdian Food II, Water Conservancy Field)
The Li Wu Transformation Law was the first systematic social change method of the countries before and after the Warring States. This change of law was not recorded in the "Records of History", but its influence was extremely far-reaching: it not only inspired the Wu Qi change method that followed it, but also laid a solid foundation for the Shang martingale change method.
Li Wu's reform law set a precedent in four areas: First, it "seized the people's lustful deeds" and completely changed the patriarchal system; second, the spirit of the law when legislating broke the bad habit of "not being able to punish the doctor"; the third was to "take the ditch as a ruin" and completely privatize the land to individuals; the fourth was to create the "Pingyi Law," which enhanced the ability of society as a whole to resist natural disasters. Although the subsequent martingale transformation method is more comprehensive and more thorough, it deeply draws on the lessons of the Li Wu transformation method in these four aspects. From this point of view, the Li Wu transformation method has laid a solid foundation for the shang martingale transformation method.
After Li Wu changed the law, the State of Wei took the lead in becoming strong among the Seven Heroes of the Warring States, attacking Qin to the west and occupying the land of Hexi, so that "the King of Qin was afraid, he was restless, and he was not willing to eat", and "the Qin soldiers did not dare to go east". It can be seen from this that the effect of Li Wu's transformation method can be described as immediate.
Isn't it a pity that Li Wu, who had presided over such an important change, was it a pity that Tai Shi Gong was unable to establish a biography for him alone?
This article references the following articles:
"Li Wu's Transformation Law" by Zheng Hesheng and Zheng Yijun
"Also Talking about Li Wu's Transformation Law" by Shang Zhimai
"Li Wu's Transformation Method and Its < Law in the Early Years of the Warring States period > Exploring the Source" by Wang Zhongtian