Ancient China – the lost path of great power
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Donkey Rolling, Sharp Rolling, and The Deadly Weapon that Forced Dou E and Yang Bailao to Die
Introduction to The Lost Path of Great Powers
There may not be a single nation in the whole world that has such a strong dream of Chinese great power.
This dream of great power first came from the ideals of our ancestors.
From the self-proclaimed country of the central government to the title of the heavenly kingdom; from the pacification of the four yi to the ideal of the rule of the world, this dream of a great power has been done for thousands of years.
This dream of a big country is even more a disaster from the motherland.
Beginning in 1840 and more than a hundred years after that, ancient China was bullied.
More than a thousand unequal treaties, one hundred billion taels of silver, the people who cried in the invasion of the great powers, the tens of millions of unjust souls who died in the war...
This humiliation makes people cry out: read for the rise of China.
Perhaps, many people have the same question, why did ancient China not become a world power?
In the rise of great powers, why can't we see the figure of ancient China?
This question needs an accurate answer!
"Ancient China - The Lost Road to Great Powers" is continuously updated, so stay tuned.
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In addition to hoarding, the second means of making money for ancient Chinese merchants was to lend.
It is said that when Da Shun was doing business between Dunqiu and Chuanxu, he had already begun to borrow and lend money--"Dunqiu bought expensive, so he sold it to Dunqiu, and passed on the false and sold the cheap, so he was in debt to pass on the false, so as to save it all." ”
This means that Comrade Dayun always has a heart and eyes, and the price of the Dunqiu market is high, so he transports things to sell; when the price of this place is low, he lends money to the people and encourages consumption, which is a bit of the meaning of saving the market now.
Lü Simian's "General History of China and Property" said, "In the earlier times, only the feudal lords were rich, so only the feudal princes were able to lend money. Later, private people gradually had more and more money, and the poor also became more and more numerous, and the behavior of natural lending for profit gradually became common. ”
At that time, private debts were based on "Fu Bei". "FuBee" is equivalent to a bond, in duplicate, made of bamboo wood. The state resolutely protects creditor's rights, there is no limit on the interest rate for private lending, as long as there is a "Fu Bei", the interest rate is legal.
In fact, this kind of borrowing behavior is not a bad thing, it is an integral part of commodity economic activity, and it can even be said to be an indispensable economic behavior of a mature commodity economy and society.
But this kind of economic behavior, in a society dominated by a small-scale peasant economy, has become a means of harming the people.
The reason for its scourge is that this borrowing, which arose from the smallholder economy, is grossly unequal between both borrowing and lending. In a society dominated by the commodity economy, in most cases, both the borrower and the lender are merchants, and there is no essential difference in their status, and the interest rate of lending or borrowing should be an agreement agreed by both parties.
But in ancient China, as mentioned earlier, the lender was either the government or the official, and the worst was also the giant merchant at that time, and the borrower was often the small people. This difference in the status of borrowers and lenders makes the interest rate of borrowing remain high, and debt or lending often becomes usury.
Usury is commonly known as donkey rolling, profit rolling, easy to cause people to think of bad guys. Like the more famous literary figures Dou E and Yang Bailao, they all called usury to death.
It is not accurate to say that Dou E was forced to die by usury, but her death is indeed related to usury.
Dou E's father, Dou Tianzhang, was a scholar. Ancient Chinese scholars, in addition to participating in the imperial examination, generally had no ability to water (ability), and could only be a gentleman who was poor, that is, close to the cold.
But this Dou Tianzhang is not just poor, it is particularly poor, so poor that even the family can't afford to raise a family, and the daughter Dou E can't eat. What to do? Borrowing usurious loans.
In fact, according to Dou Tianzhang's degree of poverty and ability to repay debts, it is actually impossible for someone to lend him money. But someone borrowed it, and the person who lent him the money was called Cai Po, a person who lived exclusively by usury.
Cai Po lent Dou Tianzhang money, not a good heart. Like Huang Shiren, she has a crush on the daughter of others.
Sure enough, Dou Tianzhang borrowed a lot of money, but like Yang Bailao, he couldn't pay the money. So Cai Po, like Huang Shiren, asked him to pay off his debts with his daughter.
Dou'e's life was a little better than Yang Xi'er's, not to marry an old man as a little wife, but to be a proper wife to Cai Po's son, although she was a child bride. Therefore, Comrade Dou Tianzhang did not have as much resistance as Yang Bailao, so the tragedy did not occur at this time, and Dou E also became the daughter-in-law of Cai Po.
Later, Cai Po's son was killed, and Cai Po was framed and poisoned, and Comrade Dou E, according to the requirements of the post-Confucian filial piety, took the initiative to take the initiative to cover up for her mother-in-law's crime and was beheaded.
On the day of the beheading, the snow flew in June, and the snow was thick, so Dou E became the biggest injustice.
The ending of the story is traditional, the petty officials are bastards, the emperor and some of the big officials are wise and divine, turning the case over to Dou'e, giving people the comfort of their hearts, and promoting social stability and peace, but Dou'e's head, dead or alive, is not safe.
Tell this story because the most wronged (in fact, ancient China can not find the most wronged, only more wronged) Although Dou E did not die of usury, but if there was no usury, her father would not have to sell her daughter in a different way, and Comrade Dou E might also live a happy life.
In fact, the death of usury cannot be one or two people. In ancient China, too many people could not afford usury and exploitation, more people died, and there were quite a few things that rose up. It can be seen that usury is the most cruel capital and a virus that destroys the normal organism of society.
So Crofford said, "Debt looks ordinary and easy to understand, but historically, debt has had the power to take away people's freedom." He also cites the biblical warning of Solomon: "The rich rule over the poor, and those who borrow money are slaves to their creditors."
However, this kind of usury, which has a great harmful effect on society and the people, has always accompanied ancient China and has become one of the most important means of making money in ancient Chinese business behavior.
During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, records of money lending for profit abounded. The "Chinese" records that Luan Huanzi, the grand master of the Jin Dynasty, was "arrogant and extravagant, greedy and unskillful, slightly ambitious, and fake loans and bribes". "Fake loans and bribes" is to use usurious loans to accumulate wealth, which was considered to be a manifestation of the morality of scholars at that time.
King Qi's Xiangguo Meng TianWen was a large usurer who once lent usury to Xue Di in Fengyi and received "interest money of 100,000 yuan" at one time ("History of Meng Yujun Lie").
More specifically, the accounts of merchants lending usury may be due to the overall contempt for the merchant class, so there is no detailed record of how they earn money by usury. But in other accounts, we can clearly see the existence of this form of usury and its consequences.
In the xiangqi state, there are some "houses that call loans", with a large amount of capital "ten million" and "five thousand bells" of loans; all over the country, a total of "30 million springs, 30 million bells of millet, 30,000 families of people" ("Pipe • Light and Heavy").
In the "Xunzi Confucian Effect", there is such a sentence, "Lending and cannibalism". It means that lending has the same effect as cannibalism.
Xun Zi's reason for saying this is that the merchants took advantage of the poverty of the peasants and exploited them at usurious loans, which gradually aggravated the phenomenon of disparity between the rich and the poor in society, and those rich merchants and their families had huge property, while the ordinary poor people borrowed money to survive and lived in hardship.
Similarly, landlords and bureaucrats, on the one hand, levied high taxes on the peasants; on the other hand, they also took advantage of the peasants' poverty and loan sharks. When analyzing the drawbacks of the fixed-rent system (that is, the so-called "tribute") in the rent in kind, Meng Ke once said: At that time, the peasants encountered a famine year and did not even have enough fertilizer for reproduction, preferring to collect rent according to the quota amount, and the peasants were industrious all year round and even their parents could not support themselves. This is the case.
The rampant use of usury not only seriously exploited the poor peasants, but also caused the decomposition of the rural economy, resulting in the exile of a large number of peasants, the so-called "more interest, the more urgent is to flee" ("History of Meng Yujun Lie").
This kind of lending behavior of ancient Chinese merchants was not only unbearable for the common people, but also for the poor rulers.
There is an idiom related to the word "debt", "debt is high". This idiom speaks of a merchant who imposed a debt on the king.
It happened to the last king of Eastern Zhou, king Zhao of Zhou. At that time, King Zhao of Zhou was still wearing the false name of "Zhou Tianzi", in fact, he was only the monarch of a small country, and was suddenly moved by the princes of the Six Kingdoms, and he cobbled together more than 5,000 soldiers and horses to join forces with the princes to fight the Qin state.
However, he was too poor to even get enough food and weapons for these 5,000 people, so he had to borrow money from the rich households in the territory, gave them loan vouchers, and promised to repay the principal and interest with the spoils of war on the day of the Zhou Army's class.
Later, it was impossible for this group of rabble-rousers to fight with the Qin army and return without success. When the rich families saw Zhou Jun return, they all ran with bonds to collect debts from King Zhou Zhao.
Where did king Zhou Zhao have money to pay back? So the rich families started a group incident, gathering outside the palace gate from morning to night, and the noise was incessant. King Zhao of Zhou had a heart to die, so he had to hide on a high platform behind the palace to avoid debts. The Zhou people called this high platform "Evasion Of Responsibility Platform" (the old Chinese "debt" and "responsibility" are connected).
Therefore, the first person in China to issue a bond was Zhou Zhaowang, and the annual interest rate of this bond is estimated to be quite high.
"Zhao" means to be red in the face because of shame, so there is a "red" next to the word - it seems that the King of Zhou Zhao still has shame after all, and he has not paid money, and his face has been blushing for thousands of years!
This week, Hao Wang can't get the money and can hide, so what about the little people? It may be that they are selling their children and selling their daughters, and they are bankrupt.
The harm of using hoarding Juqi to earn money can be seen from Mr. Ye Shengtao's "Collecting Three or Five Buckets More". Whether it is a good year or a disaster year, as long as there is a hoarding of merchants, the peasants will not be able to earn money.
In addition, ancient China was a country with very frequent natural disasters, and the three-year disaster was not a fiction, and the peasants' living materials were not very much, even in a good year, it was only enough to fill their stomachs. In the year of disaster, it is impossible to even fill your stomach. In order to be able to plant the land, in order to survive, I had to borrow usurious loans.
There are too many such stories, and the generations have always been unable to escape this fate, for example, a landlord borrows money from a disaster-stricken peasant, and the collateral is land, then, when it is time to repay the money, in case the principal and high interest cannot be returned, the land has to be given to the landlord, and the peasant who has lost the land either goes to wander or become a farmer. As more and more peasants lose their land and their lives become more and more difficult, rebellion may become the only option they can survive.
This kind of thing has been frequently played out in previous dynasties, and it is precisely this, very inconspicuous event that began with merchants, that has shaken the seemingly indestructible foundation of the dynasties.
It is precisely because the ancient Chinese merchants used hoarding and lending as the main means of earning money, which produced a huge erosion of the small peasant economy and destroyed the foundation of the authoritarian and centralized rule in ancient China, so it triggered the rulers to suppress the merchants.
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