In general, the settlement of arrears in Songjiang and Suzhou has come to an end, and the amount of taxes paid from the arrears is staggering, which must have been a considerable amount of income in the past, enough to alleviate the current financial crisis of the Dingwu court. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 However, these are troubled times, and it is clear that gold and silver are not more important than food. Hiding gold in troubled times, hiding jade in prosperous times, this is the philosophy of the ancients to avoid chaos and protect themselves, but at the turn of the Ming and Qing dynasties, this principle is inevitably a little inapplicable.

After Wanli, border troubles were not the main reason for the collapse of the Ming Dynasty, but the troubles of the Liukou peasants. The peasants fought because natural disasters left them without enough food to eat. In order to survive, they uncovered the pole and created a rebellion against the Ming Dynasty, until the Ming Dynasty was overthrown to the ground. The peasants of the Han people, which can be said to be the most industrious and obedient group in the world, are not in a desperate situation, even if they eat bran vegetables every day and can barely die, they will not rebel. Obedience can be said to be the most typical portrayal of Han farmers. However, they still rose up and rebelled, because they really couldn't live, and they couldn't live by selling their sons and daughters.

The peasant rebellion, the Ming Dynasty naturally had to suppress it, but in addition to suppression, there was another means that could disintegrate the crisis of the empire, that is, effective disaster relief. It's a pity that there is no food in the Ming Dynasty, and there is no money to buy food, and the money cannot be collected. After the Qing Dynasty entered the customs, the large-scale massacre of the city was not only to intimidate the Han people and make them not resist, but more importantly, because they had no food. If you want to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Ming Dynasty, reducing the population is the only and most effective means.

Where did the food go, Zhou Shixiang has been thinking about this question, and natural disasters are definitely not the most critical reason. In fact, the natural disasters in the late Ming Dynasty have been concentrated in the northwest region, and the Central Plains and Jiangnan have hardly been affected, or the severe cold climate is not enough to destroy the production in these places, so they can only reduce production, and the local people can still survive. But why the Central Plains has become so dilapidated and has become a hard-hit area, in Zhou Shixiang's view, this is because the peasant army and the Ming army continue to go back and forth.

The peasant army without a base area had to live and demand food, but it had to take it from other people. If they want to grow their ranks, they must be surrounded by young and strong, and if the people do not have young and strong people in their homes, production will be stagnant, and they will go back and forth several times, and no matter how rich and stable the place is, it will become a disaster area, and the result will be a cycle of evil consequences, one after another. As an official army, the Ming army is not as good as bandits, and it is naturally the driving force behind the disaster.

The inefficient Ming government and the large gentry class were also the key reasons for the destruction of the Ming Dynasty, the former did not go to the countryside, resulting in a very low government function, and the taxes collected and the amount that could be used were very small, and the problem could not be solved at all. The situation faced by Emperor Chongzhen also corresponds to the saying - it is difficult for a clever daughter-in-law to cook without rice. If you want to make a difference, you have to compete with the people for profit, and ask the officials to donate, but no one responds, and this thing cannot be done. The gentry class sat on fertile land, but refused to give up the money and grain, and in the end could only be swallowed up by the tide of peasant uprisings. What's even more ridiculous is that some officials can actually say why you don't honestly wait for death at home, but want to come out and rebel against the court. Is this a human word?

Don't be an An An starvation, especially a praying mantis!

......

Jiangnan, the economy is extremely developed, but it is difficult for the Ming Dynasty to benefit from it, and Jiangnan itself has a big fatal shortcoming, that is, the more developed the economy, the less food there is. As a result, when the north was in turmoil, the money bags of the Ming Dynasty could not play a role for the imperial court. It is the gentry in the south of the Yangtze River who know the general situation, taking into account the overall situation, and the money that should be paid to the imperial court is a lot, and Emperor Chongzhen can't solve the northern land where the bees are raging. Because silver buys things, it is called money, and you can't buy things, but it's just a piece of metal. In the midst of the flood, can the people with nests survive on the trees, or the rich people can survive?

Zhou Shixiang has never been a person who sits at home and decides things, he needs money to solve the current financial problems, but he sees it more clearly than the officials in the court, and also grasps the essence of the problem in the late Ming Dynasty, that is, food can decide everything. In order to obtain food, since the army was raised, Zhou Shixiang has been working to restore production, and even sent troops to Annan.

With food, people can't starve to death, so they can talk about other things. What's the use of having no food and a pile of gold and silver?

After recovering the southern capital and occupying the south of the Yangtze River, Zhou Shixiang was under pressure to pay off his debts, naturally not because he was obsessed with money, but because he wanted to solve a big problem that had accumulated for 200 years -- if you have money, you must also have food. As those gentry said, the thief Xiucai is poor and crazy, and wants to learn from Li Zicheng, in fact, it is true, but the purpose of the two is different. The essence of the debt settlement was to attack the Jiangnan gentry, disintegrate their privileges, and weaken their influence on the locality, not for the silver and copper coins in their pockets.

Debt settlement is only the beginning, not the end. When the goal of settling debts is achieved, it is inevitable to "build villages and townships." Solving the inefficient administrative operation system, allowing the imperial power to go to the countryside, and effectively mobilizing the localities are undoubtedly the essence of "building villages and setting up townships." Zhou Shixiang came to Songjiang to sit in the town for "building villages and townships" and personally supervised them. Songjiang is the first government in the south of the Yangtze River to carry out "building villages and townships".

The next step in "building villages and setting up townships" is naturally to vigorously produce, use the methods of Guangdong to integrate the fields, and carry out centralized and effective farming, similar to the "tuntian" model, except that it is not done by the army, but by the villages themselves that have thoroughly mastered the local administrative power. In the middle, the gentry class was cast aside and replaced by the disabled and retired personnel of the Taiping Army, and these township and village chiefs from the Taiping Army carried out every order issued from the Qi Palace, and carried out and supervised it. Layers of rings, put everyone in a collective, moving is all moving, static is all quiet.

On the first day of coming to Songjiang, Zhou Shixiang still adhered to the idea before he came, which was to weaken Songjiang's textile industry, restore arable land, and become a big granary. He drew a red line, food is more important than everything. Just like in his previous life, even though the economy is already huge, the red line of arable land cannot be touched at all. No matter how society develops and how civilization progresses, it is not law or morality that sustains this system, but food. Without food, no matter how rich a place is, it is just a castle in the air; Without food, the people who keep to themselves will become outlaws who take risks.

Jiangnan is good, but outside Jiangnan is not good. Zhou Shixiang fought a large territory, but like Emperor Chongzhen back then, it was actually a rotten beach. Liangguang is dilapidated, Jiangxi is dilapidated, Hunan is dilapidated, Anhui is dilapidated, and Jiangnan and Zhejiang are slightly better. After several years of governance, Guangdong is slightly better, but it has to bear the burden of Guangxi and Yunnan-Guizhou in the future, and the grain from Annam is continuously imported into Guangdong, and then continuously transported from Liujiang to Guangxi, and then consumed little by little. Because of the lack of sea routes, Zhou Shixiang could not have expected that Annan's grain could be transported all the way to the north, and if he took the land route, it would be a huge and bottomless investment, and the gains outweighed the losses. Therefore, Zhou Shixiang must have a new granary, so as to connect Jiangxi, Anhui, and Jiangbei, and ensure that wherever the Northern Expedition goes in the future, there will be a steady stream of grain to keep up.

It's just that after visiting many places in Songjiang, Zhou Shixiang changed his mind. He found that the war disaster in the past two decades has not damaged the local commercial ecology, and the farmers are not very enthusiastic about growing rice. When the profits from farming and the profits from mulberry and cotton are not at the same level or are too different, farmers will consciously choose to plant cash crops instead of continuing to grow rice and wheat. Because they only consider their immediate interests, their own interests, not the interests of the government and the interests of the imperial court. Nor do they think about how many people outside their homeland are dying of starvation. They just think about how much money they can make this year.

Driven by direct interests, the farmers in Songjiang do not want to grow grain, and the merchants and workshop owners do not want to "change mulberry to farmland". Zhou Shixiang is very strange, under the war for many years, how can these textiles in Jiangnan still be sold. Wang Shirong reported one thing, that is, these textiles in Jiangnan have their own sales. Songjiang has an outlet to the sea, and Jinshanwei is the largest port. According to Wang Shirong, a large number of textiles were loaded onto ships at Jinshan Port, and then sold to Jinxia, which then resold them overseas. In addition to this sea route, there is the Northland. The Qing court once set up the Jiangning Weaving Bureau in the southern capital, and the Weaving Bureau purchased a large number of textiles from the south of the Yangtze River and shipped them to the north. Jing, and then sold by those imperial merchants of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to various places. There is no shortage of poor people in this world, but there is no shortage of rich people. The rich have food and shelter, and naturally have money to spend on clothing. In addition, silk may not be a necessity for the people, after all, there are very few that can afford it, but cotton cloth is needed. No matter how poor you are, the family must always have a set of clothes to wear, no matter how worn and old, you can always wrap your body. With this rigid demand, the textile workshop is not worried about running out of work.

Farmers who grow cotton, mulberry and silkworms, weavers who work in workshops, merchants who buy and sell, and gangs who run goods constitute a huge interest group. If the sales of these textiles continue and they want to force the cultivation of food in Songjiang, I am afraid that not only will the people not be grateful, but will make them resentful. But if you really want to forcibly destroy the textile industry in Songjiang, the disadvantages are also very great. The scope of debt settlement is very wide, but it is only limited to the gentry class, and it has not touched the merchants and the people, and if you really want to let the merchants and the people resist and be hostile to the Taiping army, even if the Taiping army's knife is fast, I am afraid it will be killed.

And killing people is definitely not Zhou Shixiang's original intention.

There are not many people left, and he is not anti-Qing to make the small population any less.

How to solve this problem, so that the farmers in Songjiang are willing to farm, and so that the textile industry can survive in an orderly manner, Zhou Shiquite really racked his brains.