Chapter 81 The Situation of the Fields and Acres in the South of the Yangtze River

It seems that Kou Shen didn't give Zhu Jianjun any preferential treatment, he took Zhang Mao to find a room in the yamen and started working.

The work is quite simple, but the amount of work is huge.

That is, to sort out and compile the yellow books compiled by the following townships and counties, and to check whether there are any obvious errors and omissions.

If you will, hit back and let the following redo.

Zhu Jianjun quickly understood the first profound meaning of Kou Shen's actions.

Zhu Jianjun's location seems to be unimportant, but he can observe the whole picture of the land situation in the entire Jiangnan region as a whole.

First of all, although Jiangnan is rich, but there are not no really big families, but there are very few, even if there are any big families, as long as they are pulled out, they are prominent figures who have done at least six books in the court since the founding of this dynasty.

Of course, this is not absolute.

Because many of them, even if they have produced six Shangshu families, they may not become local families.

In the past few decades, that is, during the Taizu period, he almost spared no effort to suppress large households, and among all kinds of major cases, the population was also migrated from Jiangnan, and all the people who moved were large households.

As a result, the large landlords who had more than 3,000 acres of land in the area ceased to exist.

At that time, there was no obvious gap between the rich and the poor among the common people.

It seems that this is in line with Emperor Taizu's aesthetics, Emperor Taizu regards governing the country as a crop, and those weeds naturally have to be removed, but for those crops that grow too well and emerge, they don't like it too much.

Emperor Taizu liked the neat and tidy Mailong. For the entire Ming Dynasty, we also want to build a big countryside.

It's just that when Emperor Taizu was there, these policies could still be implemented, but Emperor Taizu was gone, after all, the agricultural era was not a very fast accumulation of wealth in later generations.

In many cases, thousands of acres of family property can only be accumulated by several generations.

In addition, although Emperor Taizu is gone, his political ideology is still there, and the Ming court still implements Emperor Taizu's laws many times.

As a result, unless someone in your family is an official, or a small official, you can be qualified to annex land.

Otherwise, many people will only expand their family property to dozens or hundreds of acres of land under decades of operation, and it is unlikely that it will be higher.

The entire Jiangnan ownership structure is roughly like this.

Large tracts of yeoman farmers, plus a few small and medium-sized landlords, and a very small number of gentry landlords.

Generally speaking, many policies in Zhuqi Town have also slowed down the trend of centralized land annexation, that is, to relocate people to the northeast, Yizhou and other places.

It seems that the land structure in the south of the Yangtze River is basically healthy, but it is really much worse than in the Hongwu period.

Because during the Hongwu period, almost all of them were homesteaders. Nowadays, the big landlords are all politically connected, while the small and medium-sized landlords are developing rapidly.

With the development process of small and medium-sized landlords, there is a system that is not in the Daming Law, but a system that is customary among the people, which also meets Zhu Jianjun's eyes.

That is the perpetual tenant system.

This system makes it more difficult to determine the land situation, and increases the workload that Zhu Jianjun does not know.

What is the perpetual tenant system, that is, the ownership of the land is separated from the right to use the land, and the landlord no longer collects a share of the rent from the land, but makes the tenant pay a fixed annual rent.

In this way, the landlord is protected from operational risks.

After all, it is normal to lose money when farming meets bad times. In this way, the system shifts the risk to the tenants.

Of course, tenants are not without benefits.

The benefit for tenants is stability.

What is stable? That is, the landlord cannot take the tenant.

That is, the landlord does not interfere in anything in the operation of the land. It is not even possible to take back the right of tenants to rent seeds.

This has formed a model of one field and two masters.

In the north, because of the problem of field production, such a model has not yet appeared, but this is in the south of the Yangtze River, which can be said to be the most developed agriculture in the whole Ming Dynasty, and the most prosperous place for intensive cultivation.

will make this system universal.

This system did not begin today, in fact, it already existed during the Tang and Song dynasties. But it was also in the middle of the Ming Dynasty that it spread, and by the late Ming Dynasty, almost all the world was in this pattern.

Until the Republic of China period.

The proliferation of any economic activity is driven by profits.

No one wants to do anything good.

The reason why this mode of exploitation, which was criticized in later generations, was able to spread throughout the country was because this mode of production was adapted to the productive forces of the time.

Because in the south of the Ming Dynasty, decades of Taiping population breeding have formed a problem that has not been solved, that is, less land and more people.

When there is little land and many people. If you want to have high yields, you can't choose to expand the cultivated area, and you can only choose another mode, that is, intensive farming.

However, intensive cultivation requires several times more energy, manpower, and material resources than ordinary farming. Naturally, the tenants were reluctant to share the rent with the landlords.

And many landlords may have made a fortune for one reason or another, and after changing their courts, they will not directly preside over the cultivation of the land.

Therefore, if it is a shared land rent, it will be a trouble for them who do not operate the land, especially for many scholarly families.

It is said that it is a farmer, but how many of them are really cultivated?

Therefore, this fixed amount of ground rent is also convenient for them.

But it may not be convenient for the imperial court.

One field and two masters, but on the yellow book of the imperial court, there can only be one name. If you think about it, there are many things to do.

In addition to this, there is also the problem of Guantian.

It is even said that Guantian was the first to use the permanent tenant system, the reason is very simple, where did the civil and military officials of the imperial court have the energy to pay attention to the land harvest, and directly regarded the rent of Guantian as a special tax, added to Guantian, and handed over to the yamen along with the tax.

This also constitutes the reason for the re-endowment of Jiangnan Guantian.

The official fields are all good fields, and even buying and selling are strictly prohibited, but there are still people who sell them, and even if they are sold, they are sold as perpetual tenants. However, the government rarely directly administers the official fields.

He let Guantian have two landlords, that is, he sold the permanent tenant rights to the peasants, and took another 10% from the middle.

This is also the problem with the perpetual tenant system.

In the Ming Dynasty, the permanent tenant system was probably one field and two masters, but in the Qing Dynasty, there were even one field and three masters, and one field with multiple owners.

The production attribute of the landlord has become weaker and weaker, but the financial attribute, that is, the rentier attribute, has become more and more obvious.

This is also the reason why the dynasty wants land reform.

Do not clean up this stratum. The peasants' output will be exploited layer by layer, and in the end, the state will not be able to collect taxes, the peasants will be overwhelmed, and the situation of the country's poverty and weakness will not be changed.

Of course, this was the end of the perpetual tenant system.

Nowadays, the perpetual tenant system is the first time to be born, exuding vigorous vitality, especially since the founding of the Ming Dynasty, it has always encouraged the reclamation of wasteland. Many peasants reclaimed the wasteland themselves, gave the landlord the ownership of the bottom of the land, that is, the land, and blessed the land for themselves, that is, the right to cultivate the land.

This is done for many reasons, such as cost.

There is a cost to open up wasteland, but the people who really work have no capital. For example, in the affairs of the official, after all, sometimes, whether it is a wasteland or not, it is not you who have the final say, but the person who says it on the official face.

Whether it can be cultivated or not also requires someone to come forward.

This system has also greatly stimulated the development of wasteland.

At least although Zhu Jianjun felt troubled, he was not very disgusted with this system.

In this way, Zhu Jianjun can't finish the things every day, even if Zhang Mao and others share some of them, but he is still very busy, and while he is busy, he can see the general situation of Jiangnan from the documents.

Kou Shen naturally wouldn't really regard Zhu Jianjun as an ordinary official.

After Zhu Jianjun worked hard for more than a month, Kou Shen sent someone to invite Zhu Jianjun.

Zhu Jianjun naturally understands this, he can't stay here all the time.

When Kou Shen saw Zhu Jianjun, he retreated left and right, saluted each other, and naturally greeted Zhu Jianjun with the etiquette of treating the prince, the two exchanged a few words, Kou Shen looked at the documents on the desk that had been sorted out by Zhu Jianjun, and said with a light smile: "The prince's arithmetic is very good." ”