Text | Jiang Yinlong
Relatively speaking, the Southern Song Dynasty paid more attention to commerce, and its management of the local area was relatively lax. All this was seen as a lesson because the Southern Song Dynasty died in Mongolia, so the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, carried out a drastic reform. The distinguishing feature of this reform is the extreme centralization and conservative tendency. Zhu Yuanzhang imposed a reign of terror at home, executing a large number of officials and abolishing the most powerful official position of prime minister; externally, he forbade the expansion of territory and listed a series of surrounding countries as areas that were not allowed to be requisitioned, because in his eyes, the territory of the Ming Dynasty had reached a saturation point.
Fiscal reforms are even more surprising. Zhu Yuanzhang formulated a trivial system: manpower and materials were accurate to the county, and the people of the whole country were organized into shifts to serve; warehouse management was more accurate to every stone grain and every candle. The resources of the whole country were to be submitted to the emperor for review in every detail. In Huang Renyu's view, Zhu Yuanzhang's top-level design is equivalent to declaring that the whole of China is a huge rural area: it does not need business, it has no intention of diversifying the national economy, and it is even more unnecessary to enrich government organizations to cope with future development.
Zhu Yuanzhang's de facto heir, Zhu Di, partially changed Zhu Yuanzhang's reform intentions. He began Zheng He's feat of going to the West and sent troops to attack Vietnam. Personally, Zhu Di can be described as a great martial artist, but his actions have exceeded the scope of the Ming Dynasty, so after his death, the successive monarchs had to shrink in all directions to avoid the demise of the dynasty.
Zhu Yuanzhang's reform of fiscal taxation is too accommodating to the habit of rural areas, but once it is linked to the national tax network, it will cause great computational costs. For example, paying taxes in kind, the Ming Dynasty was therefore full of complex and chaotic supply lines, and because of the lack of financial institutions such as banks, the circulation and conversion of these taxes themselves were accompanied by consumption. And because this rigid system is difficult to reorganize, the state's financial apparatus is often in trouble when faced with numbers that far exceed its computing power, and in fact there is a crisis of collapse. It can be said that Zhu Yuanzhang's reforms, which are used to govern a rural area or even a town, may not be a problem. But governing a country? This joke is big.
What is the end result? It was the Ming Dynasty, which was not poor, but eventually died of the bankruptcy of the government. Obviously, there are enough potential sources of taxation, but they cannot withstand the mobilization of taxes, and even if taxes are collected, they are distributed to the army that does not need it. These basic shortcomings of the system, combined with the huge differences in the economies of the North and the South and the increasing complexity of the silver market, eventually made it impossible for the Ming Dynasty to truly use manpower and material resources to resist foreign invasion. So in 1644, the Manchurians entered Shanhaiguan and finally destroyed the Ming Empire step by step.
Several emperors in the early Qing Dynasty worked hard and opened a rare and long-lasting Kangqian prosperous era in Chinese history. However, the Qing Dynasty, which inherited the Ming system, was also unable to reform the various shortcomings of the Ming government. The emperors of the Qing Dynasty still did not establish a central treasury, and the revenue and expenditure of the whole country were still sporadically handed over by tax collectors, and all statistics could not be verified. In the end, the Qing Empire, like the Ming Empire, although larger territory and more population, is still a huge rural area.
Technically, "number word management" cannot be realized, and the larger the empire, the more difficult it is to govern geometrically. Peasants can only manage and command collectively, and bureaucrats will not compete with each other for technological progress – the lessons of the Song Dynasty's reforms are still there! This Third Reich wanted to stabilize society only with an eye on ideological harmony, so such a state lacked the structural strength to transform into a modern state; it was also doomed to lack the necessary resilience in the face of the impending shock.
This cannot all be blamed on the Ming and Qing dynasties. Again, China has entered the great unification too early, and many grass-roots social systems and technologies have lost the opportunity for development, and it is not easy for the central government to bring together millions of rural areas. In such an environment, ideology is more important than technology, culture is more important than economy, and the negativity of officials is more important than their ability to adapt to the environment. Therefore, the Third Empire of the Ming and Qing Dynasties can indeed be called a stagnant empire.
Such an empire, when confronted with the challenge of western colonial empires, its failure can certainly be imagined. After the three major imperial periods, China still has not entered the stage of "number and word management", China is just a huge group composed of countless rural areas, and no matter how much wealth, population, and resources such a country has, it is difficult to resist the aggression of an advanced enemy. As a result, a series of events such as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Penghu Reform finally pushed the Third Reich to a dead end. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the emperor was ignorant and lacked self-confidence, and the bottom became an uncontrollable mob, which ushered in the establishment of the Republic of China, but entered the chaotic situation of warlords. Of course, the turmoil is not so simple, but the "number word management" has still not been realized, and China is still one step away from its real reform.