After inspecting the shipyard, Li Ji returned to the four-star Fulaishun Hotel under the name of Chenji Group to rest in the Sipin Suite. "I didn't know the true meaning of the word customer until today! Lao Li, you are really right to come to Fuzhou with me this time, what you can understand in the field research and the masses on the front line is the real truth. Those second-generation students who can afford to study and those who are lucky enough to be recommended by their families are unlikely to tell us the truth. Even if they were the landlords of Fujian Road, there were few middle-level and lower-level households. The rich and prosperous coastal areas that we originally had in the impression were so poor that except for a few wealthy landlords and businessmen who planted cash crops, there were basically few large landowners in the countryside with more than 100 hectares of land.

Before we came, we had a little psychological preparation, the poorer we were, the poorer we were, and the poorer we were, and the poorer we were, and it is indeed a catastrophic law after the agricultural society reaches the saturation of the land. No matter how big the landlord's property is, it will be divided and ruined because of the excessive number of children. You say how do you survive with less than three acres of land per capita? No matter how intensive cultivation is, it is impossible to produce food or output value that can feed one person. Without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, improved seeds, deep processing technology and sales markets, the things produced in the barren land cannot fatten people, so everyone is skinny and skinny. The hardcover men with muscles are all the children of the landlord's family. The customers and the poor families are basically on the subsistence line, no, on the death line.

In the event of severe disasters such as droughts and typhoons, at least one in five of the poor could starve to death due to the soaring food prices caused by the reduced production alone. There is no land to open the mountain, spend countless manpower to build terraces, the mountain is scarce, the land is poor, even dig hundreds of deep wells up to tens of meters deep to lift water for irrigation, use all means to transport soil up the mountain to thicken the soil layer. This environment, in which human resources are treated as free resources, is a price distortion caused by the deformed accumulation of human resources in agriculture.

I can't believe that an adult man earns less than 50 buckets of surplus food for a year's hard work, and the labor support rate is only 0.9 to 1.05. In other words, one person can only feed 0.9 people, 10 people can only feed 9 people after a year of hard work, and the rest of the people need to face difficult choices such as starvation, being relieved by the state or wealthy households, escaping famine, and going to sea to earn a living. No wonder Fujian people have the tradition and habit of migrating overseas. Presumably, it was a habit formed in this dynasty when the population density reached the upper limit of environmental carrying capacity for the first time. ”

Li Fei took out the population data compiled by Wenquan and said: "The entire Fujian Road and Liangzhejiang Road have a very serious population decline, and the data we see that the large population can't support themselves, the data is completely opposite, there are ghosts eating people!" ”

Li Fei handed over a summary table of the number of household registrations and population on Fujian Road to Li Ji for comparison.

It took Li Ji a few minutes to read it, and asked with a frown, "What do you mean?" ”

"I just think that the total tax revenue of Liangzhejiang Road and Fujian Road is not in line with our sales ratio, which is too low. How is it possible for a household with a population of only two and less than three people? You must know that since the Western Han Dynasty compiled the household Qi people, the data of all dynasties has not been less than four. The average is between five and six people. In the household statistics, the number of households is extremely disproportionate to the number of households. This is the legendary pseudonym, this game of hide and seek missed a large number of people, and naturally also missed countless poll taxes. ”

"It's not just a pseudonym, is it? Although the data of Liangzhejiang Road shows that there are only 15 people in 10 households, the data of Chengdu Fulu shows that 1 household of 3 is not caused by a false name. Pseudonymous households are a common phenomenon, but the perverted data in the southeast region is certainly not just caused by pseudonymous households. I don't think it's a big reason why women aren't counted. Pseudonymous households are just some tax avoidance procedures done by large landlords to shelter small families who are unwilling to bear heavy labor. It is normal to have an average of a dozen small households under a large household. But this kind of trick can't explain the problem of such a low per capita population. Moreover, the number of registered households of large landowners is extremely low, less than 3/1000 of the total population, and even if one household shelters 30 small households, it will not lead to the spectacle of only half the actual population of the registered population. ”

"The population of large landlords is certainly larger than that of small households, and they have five or six small households, but the proportion of registered households is ten times lower than that of small households. If there are 100 people in the big landlord's family, there will be 100 people in 10 small households. Then there are 20 adult males in ten small households who have to do poor labor, while only two people in large landlords' families may have to do it. Li Fei argued.

On the other hand, those small and medium-sized landlords who want to ensure their economic status cannot be given the rank of middle- and upper-class landlords to develop themselves in the face of increasingly drastic land annexation, so they can only adopt the method of birth control to maintain their economic status as small landlords. If children are not allowed to have children without restrictions, they will inherit less and less property, and they will fall from the economic position of the landlord class. From this point of view, the feudal system had an impact on the population of small and medium-sized landlord families, but the impact was obviously not significant.

For example, customers who make up more than 35% of the population have to bear the burden of paying rent to landlords, as well as state labor and poll taxes, and homesteaders also have to bear land taxes. Under such heavy pressure, in order to find a way to live, they had to attach themselves to the families of the big landlords and pay taxes to them. ”