The five-volume General History of China of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences abandons the chronology or chapter style, adopts the method of combining biographies with major events, and uses 100 topics to narrate Chinese history from the origin of mankind in China to the late Qing Dynasty, and contains recent archaeological and research results.
In recent days, people have been talking about the upcoming seventh national census data, and the debate about the advantages and disadvantages of increasing or decreasing the population has been incessant. In the past, the large number of people in society was a sign of the prosperity of the country, so why did the evaluation criteria change again and again after the founding of the People's Republic of China? The "Seven Censuses" data will be left to chance, and the debate between the pros and cons of the large and small population in history will be judged.
The Chinese rioted
In 841 BC, the unbearable Zhou people launched a rebellion and expelled King Li of Zhou, who fled to Yandi (彘地, in modern Huozhou, Shanxi). This year is called the "First Year of the Republic" and is the beginning of a definite chronology in our country. Fourteen years later, King Li of Zhou, who was in exile, died, and Crown Prince Jing took the throne, that is, King Xuan of Zhou.
According to legend, King Xuan of Zhou loved cockfighting all his life, but because of the ups and downs since childhood, King Xuan of Zhou did not lose his mind after the reign, but worked hard to revitalize the Dynasty. He effectively mobilized various forces, first relying on the Qin people who were subordinate to the Zhou Dynasty to resist Rong Di, and after accumulating strength, he led an army to march personally, and finally forced Rong Di to go away, so the Western Zhou Dynasty was once known as Zhongxing.
In the later period of King Xuan of Zhou, he repeatedly lost in foreign wars, and was defeated by the "Rong of the Jiang Clan" and the "Division of the Fallen Southern Kingdom". After repeated routs, King Xuan of Zhou wanted to register the population— the earliest documented census in China— a move that shocked dynasty officials. The chancellor Zhongshan Father tried his best to dissuade him, because this move was not only inconsistent with the ancestral law, but also a weak move.
King Youwang of Zhou Played princes
During the Western Zhou Dynasty, soldiers and farmers were integrated, and the Zhou people cultivated and trained on time in peacetime, and became soldiers in wartime and were incorporated into the army to fight. Under the Western Zhou feudal system, the army subordinate to the King of Zhou could only be appointed by the people of the land under the direct control of the royal family. In the past, the royal family controlled a large number of lands and people, and had sufficient military resources, and the kings of zhou did not count the total number of households. In the late Western Zhou Dynasty, the royal family controlled too few people, and after the fall of the Southern Kingdom Division, the Zhou army was insufficient, and King Xuan broke the ancestral law, registered the total population he controlled, and replenished the troops. In the eyes of the dynasty ministers, this move was to show weakness to the princes, and they would lose their relatives.
King Xuan of Zhou finally did not heed the advice of his ministers. Because the weak strength of the army has made it impossible for him to hold the façade. The lord of ZTE, in his old age, was no longer able to stop the decline of the royal family. In the later years of King Xuan's life, a terrible rumor spread in the Wang Qi area.
Rumor has it that "Sangmu's bow, Miki's quiver, destroyed the Zhou Kingdom." Rumors reached King Xuan's ears, and he ordered the killing of a couple who sold the two things. The image of the decadence of the royal family is becoming more and more apparent, and the uneasy emotions are surging through the dynasty, and a few rumors make the supreme King of Zhou like a bird of fright. The next generation of King Zhou You, King Xuan of Zhou, became the king of the fallen kingdom.
With arable land largely fixed and no revolutionary changes in the mode of production, the population boom was a weight that no dynasty could bear.
When it comes to the demise of the Western Han Dynasty, we generally boil it down to political corruption. In fact, there are two important objective factors that are often overlooked. One is the variable of natural population growth. According to historical records, the population in the early years of the Western Han Dynasty was only more than 13 million, and by the time of emperor Ping of the Western Han Dynasty, it reached more than 60 million, and the densely populated Areas of Kwantung and Guanzhong averaged more than 1,000 people per square kilometer. This population peak was not surpassed until the Tang Dynasty, and this population density is not much different from that of modern times.
In an era when there was no innovation in the mode of production, the population grew dramatically, and the same land was overwhelmed and could not provide enough food to meet the needs of the hungry. The second is the variable of natural environmental changes. In the last years of the Western Han Dynasty, natural disasters continued, and the Yellow River changed course many times. When emperors became emperors and mourned emperors, there were millions of displaced people, and in the years of disasters, countless people were displaced and died in the gully.
Population surges, disasters continue, political darkness, and disorder bring disparities between the rich and the poor, slaves and cattle are sold in the market, and the exploitation of peasants by powerful landlords is aggravated, and many people work hard all year round and find it difficult to feed. From officials to ordinary people, there is a general dissatisfaction with reality, a loss of confidence in the future, and they all hope for change and social integration. In this case, Wang Mang appeared.
Sheng Tang Meteorology
During the reign of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, there was unprecedented social and economic prosperity. He ordered a nationwide large-scale household registration, that is, a comprehensive census of those peasants who were forced to flee due to war or heavy military service, and allowed the fleeing peasants to settle in situ, resulting in the inclusion of 800,000 fleeing households, so that the state-controlled household registration increased from 6.15 million in the first year of Shenlong (705) to 7060,000 households in the fourteenth year of the new century (726), and the population reached 41.41 million. Thirty years later, in the thirteenth year of Tianbao (754), the number of government-controlled households increased to 9.18 million.
In fact, according to du You, a famous scholar of the middle and late Tang Dynasties, there were 134 million actual households at that time. If you extrapolate from five or six households, the population of the whole country should be around 70 million, and the population of Chang'an should be more than one million. So, what was the situation with the population of the rest of the world at that time? The East Francotic kingdom had a population of two or three million from the Seine to the Rhine. Until the 16th century, the population of the Mediterranean was only 50 or 60 million, and the population of North Africa was 3 million. At that time, the total population of the world was about 200 million, and the Tang Dynasty alone accounted for one-third of the world's total population.
The development of agriculture is the foundation for the economic prosperity of Sheng Tang Dynasty. The history books record that at that time, "within the four seas, the mountains were absolutely barren, and the mountains were full", which means that there was a lot of arable land in the country at that time. According to statistics, the cultivated land in the country reached 660 million mu during the Kaiyuan Tianbao period, with more than 9 mu per capita, which is eight times the average cultivated land of the Chinese today. With the construction of water conservancy and irrigation facilities, the improvement of the farming system, the northward shift of rice planting, and the widespread use of advanced production tools such as curved ploughs and barrel trucks, the agricultural productivity of Sheng Tang has been improved, and a gratifying situation of "public and private warehouses are abundant" has emerged.
Chang'an exotic style
Professor of History at Peking University Wu Zongguo
According to scholars' calculations, during the Tang Dynasty, the country's annual grain output reached 600 million stones, which is equivalent to today's 25 billion kilograms, and the average person owned about 350 kilograms of grain. This cannot but be said to be a miracle. Due to the timing, geographical advantages, and people, the population of Shengtang, the area of cultivated land and the grain output per unit area have reached a good proportion, which is the unique feature of Shengtang.
As the capital of the Tang Empire and the most prosperous city in the world at that time, "there are millions of homes in Chang'an City, and I don't know who plays the night flute?" "The poems of the Sheng Tang poet Cen Shan outline for us the size of Chang'an's population. And Han Yu of the middle and late Tang Dynasties also pointed out: "The people of the present Beijing Division are worth a million." ”
There have been many debates in the historical circles about the specific population of Chang'an, and some scholars believe that even during the Tianbao period of the Tang Dynasty, Chang'an City was only 600,000 people, but according to the calculations of some scholars, its population reached 1.8 million people. To this day, the specific controversy continues.
Kaifeng in the Northern Song Dynasty
After more than a hundred years of construction in the Northern Song Dynasty, Kaifeng finally became the largest and most prosperous city in China from the 11th century to the beginning of the 12th century, with a population of more than one million, "ten times more than the Han and Tang Dynasties Jingyi Minshu". Kaifeng, where commercial trade was extremely prosperous and its popularity was rising all the way, also attracted the attention of the whole world at that time, and there was a grand situation of "eight wildernesses contending, all countries salty". International students from Koryo, India, Vietnam, Japan and other places continue to come to Kaifeng. Hundreds of Jews also migrated to integrate into the city life of Tokyo. The Jews were wandering and the most difficult to assimilate, and they were able to stay here and settle for a long time, which showed the attraction of the Song capital Kaifeng.
After more than a hundred years of development in the Southern Song Dynasty, the economy and culture reached unprecedented prosperity, and Lin'an also became the most prosperous world metropolis in the 12th to 13th centuries. Polozan is "the most beautiful and magnificent city in the world". According to the Xianchun Lin'an Zhi, during the reign of Emperor Duzong of Song, the population of Lin'an Province reached more than 1.24 million.
According to the research of the famous economic historian Mr. Quan Hansheng, the number of households and population in the Song Dynasty are according to the "History of the Song Dynasty". According to the Geographical Chronicle, in the fourth year of Daguan (1110), there were about 20 million households and about 46 million mouths. The former figure is not much of a problem, and the latter figure is likely to be excessively low due to the under-declaration of the number of mouths by the people in order to evade the burden of the Ding tax. If you calculate according to the "family of five", China has a population of about 100 million in the early 12th century, which should be no problem.
Kangqian flourished
Judging from the Process of rectifying the system of conscription in the Shunzhi Dynasty to the kangxi and Yongzheng Dynasties' attempts to adapt and promote the process of dividing the land into acres, although it failed to fundamentally change the accumulated shortcomings of history, it somewhat alleviated the social injustices of the levy of Ding grain, the unevenness of Ding servitude, and the release of the rich and the poor, so that the heavy burden of the common people was somewhat reduced, and the personal dependence was relatively relaxed. Generally speaking, the widespread practice of dividing the land into acres has achieved the effect of suppressing the rich, benefiting the poor, and benefiting the country. The reason why the Qing Dynasty was able to reach the peak of development during the Qianlong period had a lot to do with the widespread implementation of the spread of land into acres.
In addition, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, tomatoes, peppers, broad beans, especially corn and potatoes, were all imported from the Americas through foreign trade in the Ming and Qing dynasties. It is no exaggeration to say that no crop is as important to Chinese as these exotic crops. In the Chinese mainland of frequent disasters, these high-yielding and drought-resistant grains have saved the lives of many Chinese.
In the five years before the Opium War in Daoguang (1825), China's actual population had exceeded 400 million, but the urban population accounted for only 6%-7%. According to the American historian G. William Skinner, until the late Qing Dynasty, the urban population in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River accounted for only 7.4%. This shows that rural society was still the absolute dominance of China at that time.
During this period, the area of arable land in the country did not increase, and even decreased due to disasters and other reasons. While the per capita land area has fallen sharply, the land is still concentrated in a small number of rich people, flag bearers and official estates. By the middle of the Qing Dynasty, about 60 to 90 percent of the country's total population was landless. Landless peasants have to leave their homes, flow into the cities as coolies, and even go to the sea to seek a livelihood, and there is a serious social crisis lurking beneath the prosperity of the past. This was China before the Opium War.