Author: Su Can, our special guest author
From the middle and late Ming Dynasty onwards, the power of the Three Guards of the Northeast Jurchen Jianzhou continued to expand, gradually marginalizing the Northeast Wei of the Ming Dynasty. Finally, Nurhaci established the Eight Flags System and established the Khanate in 1616, and soon after officially rebelled against the Ming Dynasty on the grounds of the "Seven Great Hates". The following year, the Battle of Salhu broke out, and the Eight Banners of Manchuria defeated the combined forces of Ming, Chao and Yehe commanded by Yang Ho, dealing a devastating blow to the elite of the Ming army in the north.
The Eight Banners of Manchuria and Yu Wei successively attacked and occupied the important cities of Shenyang, Liaoyang, and Fushun in Liaodong Province, and the Liaodong defense line of the Ming Empire collapsed, the weak military and political system was defeated, and the imperial capital was exposed to the northern iron horse. As a result, the salary and silver plus pie that had been brewing for a long time began to be implemented rapidly, and then it was implemented for the "three salaries". But this move deviated from the shell of the "one whip law" tax reform in the early years, which was mixed with top-down chaos, which made the already weak fiscal and tax system deteriorate rapidly and contributed to the collapse of the Ming Empire. The fiscal and tax reform system in the late Ming Dynasty became Huang Zongxi's "harm of accumulation and no return". What is the cause and effect of all this?
The war in Eastern Liaoning was tight, the border pass was in arrears, and the people in Guannei were in turmoil... The situation was already extremely urgent, at this time, the Wanli Dynasty had already lost the national treasury after three major conquests, and there was a slight surplus in internal accounting, but "Emperor Jin refused to send it." In desperation, the Ming courtiers had to turn to Zhang Taishi's legacy, a whip and a conversion of silver. Of course, there is an endorsement of the historical background at this time.
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, Taizu specifically delineated the fiscal and taxation system, issued "Daming Bao banknotes" and prohibited private silver transactions. This system was intended to completely flatten the entire empire and exclude the threat to the regime posed by the developed commodity economy since the Song and Yuan dynasties. Under such a system, the level of taxation in the final ming generation has always hovered too low ("thirty to one" or so), so that it is difficult to provide basic public goods for the operation of the bureaucracy. However, this setting became increasingly difficult to meet the needs of the empire, and with the massive import of American silver since the mid-to-late sixteenth century, the otherwise unsustainable imperial fiscal and tax system was in urgent need of a transition.
Silver inflows from overseas was first used as currency in southern Guangdong and other regions, and then spread to the lower Reaches of the Yangtze River in 1423 and became legal tax currency. Taxes from other provinces were also handed over to the treasury in the form of silver from 1465 onwards. Therefore, the silver tax reform that began in the Xuanzong Dynasty was not included in the right track until the Jiajing Dynasty, under the vigorous promotion of Gui Cai, and was implemented on a pilot basis. During the time of the Shenzong Sect, the social economy developed further, and the contradictions were also sharpened. So Zhang Juzheng forcefully established the "one whip law", and from then on "conscription returned to the ground", since the two tax laws of the Tang Dynasty, China's fiscal and taxation system has finally basically completed the transformation, escaping from the repeatedly complicated people's tax and employment system, inhibiting the bureaucratic profit brokerage system and increasing tax revenue.
Once this law was implemented, the results were remarkable, "Taicang millet can be supported for ten years, the accumulation of funds in the temple to more than four million", and "the collection of acres" and "the service to the ground", so that the burden of laborers can be reduced. However, at this time, the empire immediately fell into the "Huang Zongxi Trap": the taxation of various names was integrated and simplified through the tax reform, but the various types of taxes soon reappeared, so that the tax continued to rise, even more decaying and chaotic than the pre-reform tax system.
And the apportionment of "three salaries" is the beginning of the regurgitation of this trap black hole. The root cause seems to be the miserliness of the emperor, who has always "served one person with the whole world", completely disregarding the society of the people and the country and mountains of the ancestors. However, it is worth noting that this is not only attached to the Ming Empire, it seems that all the great unified empires are trapped in the dead cycle of maintaining the rule of this empire because they cannot effectively handle the relationship between the central and the local government and coordinate the relationship between the monarch and the subject.
However, after calmly analyzing, the three-rate apportionment is only 'nine percent' silver per mu, which is less than ten catties of rice according to the grain price at the end of the Ming Dynasty, which accounts for a negligible proportion of the mu yield at the end of the Ming Dynasty. Even in the face of the threat of the displaced people in Liaodong and northern Shaanxi outside Guanwai, they only successively "aided the conquest and sowed examples, adding three cents and five millimeters per mu, and increasing the endowment of the world by two million." Next year, three cents and five millimeters will be added, and next year, the second part of the military industry will be requested to add two cents. Nine percent before and after the transfer, an increase of 5.2 million yuan, and then the age amount..." And the sharp rise in fiscal and taxation that Huang Zongxi and others believe is actually very debatable. However, the cyclical fluctuations of the fiscal and taxation system of "miscellaneous taxes - parallel tax reform - miscellaneous taxes" are obvious. When the Qing Dynasty was in internal and external difficulties in the middle and late period, it inevitably slipped into the "Huang Zongxi Trap", and the apportionment of Lijin was not inferior to that of the "Three Allowances".
In general, this is a trap that the great unified Chinese Empire cannot escape, with a closed system under the domination of centralized politics, controlling the economy from top to bottom, and finally often falling into the interests of various forces, and the logical loopholes of the imperial system of "not giving in principle and not adhering to implementation" have also formed a delicate relationship between the "formal and informal" system, and the centralized empire that insists on the monarchy is doomed to be unable to jump out, and can only fall into the "Huang Zongxi Trap" in a cyclical manner.
References: Ming Shi And Food Commodities, Collected Essays on the Economic History of Liang Fangzhong, Finance and Taxation in the Ming Dynasty in the Sixteenth Century, From Huang Zongxi's Law to the Logic of Empire: Historical Clues to the Logic of Chinese State Governance
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