readx; Ignoring the opposition of the ministers, Zhu Youzhen still formally issued a decree to confiscate half of the land that was donated to the name of the emperor, and to recover the land that had been missed for ten years. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

The decree struck, and the world shook. In particular, the eight prefectures of Beizhili, where Huangzhuang is more concentrated, are also the hardest hit areas of donation, and many of those who rely on donation to evade taxes are big landlords like Wang Zhifa who have more than 1,000 hectares of fertile land. This time it's good, directly stop the waist and cut off half of the fan, these guys all beat their chests, and they are distressed to death!

But "to die" is better than to die. Zhu Youzhen's holy decree is not just to say it, but to let the officials and households jointly send personnel to each prefecture to supervise the supervision, and it will be supervised by the Metropolitan Procuratorate, the Secretariat and the Jinyi Guard.

The imperial history of the Metropolitan Procuratorate is good to say, those brocade guards are all Zhu Youzhen's henchmen. Many of them are Qin soldiers' old backgrounds, they have never participated in the imperial examination, they don't understand the world's feelings in the officialdom, and they don't know any local people, and they have a black face wherever they go.

As for the secretariat, it is the core link of this supervision. Originally, the secretariat only assisted the emperor in the Forbidden City, and would not interfere in the affairs of the court. But this time it was Huangzhuang who had an accident, which was considered the emperor's private property, so Zhu Youzhen could naturally let the secretariat handle it openly.

He intended to train the four Meilan Zhuju sisters, so he asked each of them to be in charge of the two prefectures, working with the ministry members and local officials. There are three main tasks, one is to hand over the land deeds of all the confiscated land, the second is to resettle the original personnel of Huangzhuang, and the third is to collect evidence of bribery and various illegal and criminal acts of the former eunuchs in charge of the village.

With the secretariat and Jinyiwei following, even if someone wants to make trouble, they can't do it. It is clearly written in the holy decree that tax evasion is a crime of deception and should be punished severely, and half of the fine is already considered leniency.

The crime of bullying the king is already a capital crime, and if the crime is added to the first degree, then it will be Ling Chi or extermination, who would dare to take this risk? In fact, Zhu Youzhen is just alarmist, scaring and scaring those bold landlords, he has long wanted to abolish the cruel punishments such as Ling Chi and Zhu Lian, but the time is not yet ripe.

Taking this as an opportunity, Zhu Youzhen finally began the first step of the "land reform" he had been planning for a long time.

Long before the crossing, Zhu Youzhen probably knew that there were four main reasons for the death of the Ming Dynasty and the prosperity of the Qing Dynasty in history. After the crossing, especially after ascending the throne, he saw it more clearly.

In terms of politics, the ruling class of the Ming Dynasty was extremely corrupt, and in order to compete for power and profit, the struggle between the three forces of the emperor, the official group, and the eunuch group was extremely fierce, and the struggle between the Donglin Party and the Eunuch Party developed this struggle to the peak. National strength is wasted in this struggle, and it is impossible to form a joint force against foreign enemies.

In terms of economy, when the tide of capitalism has already been set off in the world and the germ of capitalism has also appeared in the rich areas south of the Yangtze River, most landlords are not aware of the profound changes that are taking place in the times, and they still cling to their land. Moreover, due to insatiable greed, a large number of land annexations, and tax evasion, the peasants had no livelihood, the imperial court had no money to use, and even a large country with a population of hundreds of millions of people appeared.

On the military side, the Ming army relied too much on immature firearms on the one hand, and on the other hand, the disadvantages of the guard post system led to the low combat effectiveness of the soldiers, and they were simply unable to compete with the skilled Manchu cavalry. Coupled with the rise of thieves, the Ming army was trapped in a two-sided battle, and the strength was seriously insufficient, and its demise was inevitable, it was only a matter of time.

In other aspects, the Ming Dynasty was also unlucky, just in time for the "Xiaoice River" period, grain production was greatly reduced, drought and locust plagues continued, and malignant infectious diseases such as plague and smallpox were raging. These many factors are combined, and it is difficult for the Ming Dynasty to not die!

And what Zhu Youzhen wants to do is to change history, then he must first break and then stand. Politics and the military are all dependent on the economy, so the most important reform is economic reform, otherwise all reform will be a castle in the air. At this stage, the center of economic reform is naturally land reform.

Why land reform? The reason is also very simple, in this era, the peasants, who make up the vast majority of the population, are dependent on the land. If the peasants lost their land, or the output of the land was not enough to survive, they were left with only two options: starvation and rebellion.

The current land situation in the Ming Dynasty has reached the point where it is extremely dangerous and must be changed, because after more than 200 years of annexation, most of the land has been highly concentrated in the hands of a few landlords. When Zhu Youzhen was a vassal king in Shaanxi, he already had an intuitive understanding of this situation; After ascending the throne, he reviewed the concertans of various places every day, and found that the situation in other places was even more shocking. As Gu Yanwu mentioned in an instrument: "Among the people of Wu, those who have land are tithes, and those who are tenants are tithes!" ”

Of course, the landlords tried their best to exploit the tenants, and the most important means was rent. Compared with the land endowment, the land rent is too high, and the lowest is more than 50%, and the most even reaches **%. In good times, tenants can barely make ends meet; Once the year is bad, the tenants will not even be able to eat, so they can only flee the famine, or simply "unreasonably" go to "eat the big households", and the thieves are born in this background.

The reason why Zhu Youzhen chose the issue of Huangzhuang and the donation as the first step of reform was naturally after careful consideration. This is not the 20th century, and it is obviously neither possible nor realistic to solve the land problem by the method of "fighting local tyrants and dividing up the land." After all, the vast majority of the resources of this empire are still in the hands of the landlord class, and if we want to save the Chinese nation from the catastrophe we have seen, we must rely on them so that these resources can be smoothly integrated and used. If he really did that, this emperor would not be able to do it for a day, and everything behind him would be impossible to talk about.

Moreover, Zhu Youzhen's thinking is not simply to give land to the peasants. Because even if the land is given to the peasants, he is still a farmer, and he still has to dig in the soil. And now that the industrial age is approaching, sooner or later it will have to be abandoned by history.

Although the landlords annexed the land subjectively to satisfy their own greed, objectively, they created a large number of laborers who could not survive on the land. With this workforce, large-scale industry is possible. Otherwise, everyone has a field to plant, and they don't have to worry about eating and drinking, so who will go to work in the factory?

In other words, the land is like a chain that holds the peasants together. And what Zhu Youzhen has to do now is to break this chain!

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