Chapter 103: Gains and Losses of People's Hearts

The specific practice of the well field system is to divide the cultivated land into a number of square fields of a certain area, surrounded by land boundaries, with water ditches in the middle, and longitudinal and horizontal. 100 acres is a square, called "a field", a well is divided into 9 squares, and the surrounding 8 fields are cultivated by 8 households, which is called private land, and the harvest of private land is all owned by farmers; In the middle is the public land, which is cultivated by 8 households, and all the income goes to the nobles of the feudal province. But in fact, not every well field is 900 acres, and there are special situations such as 800 acres and 1,000 acres.

The well field system can be roughly divided into two types, namely, "eight families have public land for wells" and "nine husbands have public fields for wells but no public fields". The first is recorded in "Mencius Tengwen Gong Shang": "The square is a well, and the well is 900 acres." Among them, it is public land, and the eight families are all private 100 acres, and they raise public land together. After finishing business, then dare to deal with private affairs. That is to say, in the well fields that are divided into nine fields, one in the middle is a public field, and the eight surrounding fields are private fields, and the cultivators first cultivate the public fields and then manage the private fields. The second is that the nine plots of land are all private land and no public land, but this is a later matter.

The rulers of the Western Zhou Dynasty divided the fields into three categories according to their quality. They keep the best part of it for themselves, called "public fields". Because of the large size of the public land, it was also called "Datian", which drove slaves to cultivate it collectively. The land in the suburbs, which was closer to the city, was divided among ordinary laborers of the same clan as the ruler to cultivate. Because these people live in the "country", they are called "countrymen". The people of the country do not pay taxes, but only military levies and military service.

The countrymen served as soldiers in wartime, preparing their own weapons, food, and military supplies; Chinese people have the right to be soldiers and receive education, so they are also called "martial artists" or "scholars". This part of the population is ordinary civilians. They were ostensibly unexploited and self-reliant laborers, but at that time there were frequent wars, and they were often conscripted to fight, and when they won the war, the plundered land and wealth went to the rulers, and if they lost the war, they were in danger of being captured and reduced to slavery.

The fields that were far away from the city and had poor soil were distributed to the people who lived in the wilderness. The Shu people live in the wild, so they are also called "wild people", and they are also called "hooligans". The Shu people did not have any rights, only the obligation to cultivate the well fields and perform miscellaneous labor for the lord. They had to work in the lord's field each year before they were allowed to cultivate the small plot of land on which they were the minimum subsistence.

In the late autumn, due to the use of iron tools and the spread of cattle farming, the level of productivity at that time increased, and the well field system gradually collapsed.

Iron tools were first used in the Shang Dynasty, and probably by the end of the Western Zhou Dynasty, iron tools began to increase. At the beginning of autumn, there were more formal iron farming tools. "Guanzi Sea King Chapter" records: "The number of iron officials today says: A woman must have a needle and a knife...... The cultivator will plow and plow." Ox farming also originated in the Shang Dynasty and developed in the autumn. For example, Sima Geng, one of the 72 sages among the disciples of Confucius, is also known as "plow", the word ox. There was also a strong man in the Jin Kingdom called Niu Geng. Ox is associated with ploughing and is used as a human name, reflecting the widespread spread of ox ploughing methods during the autumn period.

The use of iron tools and the popularization of cattle ploughing have brought convenience to people to open up mountains and forests and build water conservancy. In this way, the area of arable land and agricultural output have increased substantially. The development of agriculture has made it possible to produce small production per household and to develop a small-scale peasant economy characterized by self-employment. In this way, the form of collective labor based on the well field system became obsolete, and the decentralized, individual form of labor began to emerge.

Against this backdrop, the number of private farms in various regions has increased dramatically. The princes and doctors began to get rich, and as soon as they had wealth, their waists straightened, and the king of Zhou could no longer despise them, and he could no longer arbitrarily encroach on their fields. In addition, wars and lawsuits between the princes over the fields also began to appear.

Cultivating and cultivating large quantities of private land certainly requires a large number of laborers. The use of slavery could no longer mobilize the enthusiasm of the working people. As a result, some aristocrats who adapted to the new situation began to change their exploitation methods in order to attract laborers, such as the Qi Guotian clan used small buckets to collect taxes from the common people, and used large buckets when lending grain to the common people; The Han family, the Wei family, and the Zhao family of the Jin State adopted the method of expanding the acres of land without increasing the amount of taxes to buy the hearts of the people. In this way, slaves fled from the public land to the private land. The flight of slaves turned the public land of some countries into a wasteland. The Ida system can no longer be maintained.

Why did the collapse of Lile first appear in Confucius's hometown of Lu?

It is said that the formulator of the ritual music system is the Duke of Zhou, and the feudal state of the descendants of the Duke of Zhou is the State of Lu, and the State of Lu has the backing of the ancestor of the Duke of Zhou, so it has always been called "Zongbang surnamed Ji", and it is the most prestigious and appealing country among the vassal states. Lu Guo's respect for etiquette and music is also the most prominent, and the people of the time called "Zhou Rites are all in Lu". Lu has become the most typical state of etiquette, but why did etiquette collapse in the first place?

On the one hand, due to the application and popularization of oxen ploughing and iron farming tools, the level of agricultural productivity in Lu increased rapidly, and a large amount of wasteland was reclaimed, concealed in private hands, and became private property, and the "civil" power of Lu became powerful. On the other hand, for the Lu court, the swelling aristocratic consumption and frequent wars led to a fiscal deficit, especially the private land of the people did not pay taxes to the princes, and the proportion of fiscal revenue in total agricultural output continued to decline. Therefore, in order to increase fiscal revenue, Lu took the lead in carrying out reforms.

In 594 B.C., in the fifteenth year of Lu Xuangong, he began to implement the famous "initial tax mu" system in history. That is, it is stipulated that regardless of public land or private land, all taxes shall be levied according to the acreage of land. At the beginning, that is, the beginning; Tax per mu refers to the taxation of land according to the number of acres of land. The specific method is: "The law of the public field is completely one; Now I will take the rest of the acres, and take one out of ten." Originally, the well field system was to take 100 mu out of 900 mu, but after the "initial tax per mu", a tax of one-tenth was collected outside the public land, which became about two-tenths of the tax. In this way, Lu's fiscal revenue increased, but at the same time it also officially recognized the legalization of private ownership of land in law.

"Zuo Biography" said: "The initial tax is mu, it is not rude, the valley is not borrowed, and the wealth is also abundant", which directly hit the point, so "Lile" took the lead in "collapsing" in Lu State! So Confucius was anxious.

Since Lu was the leader of the rule of law in Lile among the vassal states of the world, Chu, Zheng, Jin, Qi and other countries saw that Lu was doing well, so everyone rushed to follow suit, and also successively carried out the tax system, and the well field system finally collapsed. So the country of Lu "collapsed", and everyone "collapsed".

So in 359 B.C., a generation of reformers Shang Ying appeared on the stage, and carried out a thorough epoch-making change in the Qin State, "abandoning the well field" and "opening the Qianmo", and history moved towards a new era......

From the late autumn period to the early Warring States period, the Ida system completely collapsed.

The Jingtian system embodies the basic political and economic system of the Chinese Xia, Shang and Third Dynasties society, and can be defined as follows: the Jingtian system is a general description of the agricultural production mode and its institutional structure arrangement of the Chinese Xia, Shang and Third Dynasties based on the Jingtian as an effective property rights supply system; At the same time, it can also be explained as a socio-political and economic relationship of how microeconomic activities are combined with macro-value construction to maximize the realization rate of resources, including natural resources and social resources. As a result, with the loss of the effectiveness of this property rights system, it loses its relevance and withdraws from the stage of history.

Fifty years ago, during the reign of King Zhao of Qin, Fan Ju had put forward a "Decree of the Enlightened People": the land of Qin was vast, but the population was small, and it was impossible to fully develop the fields and resources, so it was necessary to recruit immigrants from the east of the Kunshan Mountains.

Han Wei is located in the Central Plains, the city is next to each other, densely populated, and the population and land conditions of the Qin State are just the opposite, they are more people and less land. In the "Laimin Order", it is said that Han Wei and other countries have narrow land and people, and their houses live side by side. Because of the lack of sufficient fields, a large number of people poured into the mountains, swamps, and developed wasteland, and even so, each family could only be like Chen Ping's family, divided into twenty or thirty acres to barely survive, so that there were still a large number of people who had no land, and could only go to be tenant farmers, or to do business, and to be slaves.

This soil is not enough to give birth to its people, and it seems that there has been a Qin people's lack of land!

Therefore, in the Han and Wei dynasties, the problem of land annexation had already arisen, and local village tycoons often occupied half of the local Thai land, and a large number of landless people were reduced to mediocre tenant farmers.

"The rich have no place to stand, and the poor have no place to stand" is not the situation of Qin itself, but the status quo of Han, Wei, and Qi.

"Farming is the business of the people, and the reason why the Holy King guides his people is to do agriculture first. However, since the decline of the Zhou Dynasty, the etiquette has collapsed, the princes and tyrants have invaded each other's tombs, the local filthy officials have been forced to do unbridled labor, the government decrees have not been believed, the upper and lower levels have been deceitful, the public land has not been treated, and the famine is frequent...... Until two hundred years ago, Li Kui of Wei presided over the reform of the law, and he wrote "The Teaching of the Greatest Strength" for Wei Wenhou. Li Kui calculated that within a radius of 100 miles, there are 90,000 hectares of land, and in addition to the mountain settlements, which account for one-third, 60,000 hectares of land can be cultivated. If the farmer is diligent in managing the field, the yield per mu will be increased by three buckets, and if he is not diligent, the yield will be reduced by three buckets. That is to say, in the land of a hundred miles, the annual output will either increase by 1.8 million stone or decrease by 1.8 million stone due to diligence or industriousness. From this, it can be seen that farmers must be encouraged to produce, and this so-called teaching of doing the best of the land! The stone system of the Wei State is slightly different from that of the Qin, and there are many mountains and forests in the Heze Mountains and Forests in Nanjun, and the fields owned by the Wei State are not as good as those in Hedong. As the saying goes, nine people eat 100 acres in the upper field, eight people eat last time, seven people eat in the middle of the field, and five people eat in the lower field. Nanjun County Warden Han Teng sighed.

"Guanzi Herdsman" has a saying: Cangqiao knows etiquette and knows honor and disgrace when he has enough food and clothing. The Qin State reduced the power and land of the meritorious clans, and also freed up the land and population in disguise, so as to mobilize the Qin people's enthusiasm for farming and warfare. Meng Yi also echoed approvingly.

"Cang Liao is honest and knows etiquette, and he knows honor and disgrace when he has enough food and clothing" comes from the mouth of Guan Zhong, who assisted Qi Huan Gong to become the first overlord in the autumn period.

The state of Qi weakened halfway, and after the Duke of Qi Huan reused Guan Zhong, Guan Zhong revised the policy of the Taigong and set up nine mansions to regulate prices and cashier currency. Duke Huan of Qi took advantage of this to dominate and met with the princes many times, so that everything in the world was corrected, so Guan Zhong also collected market rent extravagantly. Although he was a vassal, he was richer than the kings of the nations. Therefore, the prosperity and strength of the Qi State continued until the era of King Qi Wei and King Xuan of Qi.

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