In the spring of 1864, although something happened for the Chinese Empire, it generally continued the calm of the previous two years, and there were fewer external conflicts and contradictions, and even if there were, it could not affect the overall situation, and the core of the country was still centered on industrial construction.

At the same time, it is also the beginning of a gradual and tentative reform of the rural economy and the land issue!

Unlike Guo Longyun and other industrialists who insisted on large-scale farm production, Jiang Daoquan and others still stubbornly and even strongly demanded that the existing small-scale peasant economic system should be adhered to and avoid further annexation of rural land.

Of course, even the small-scale peasant economy cannot maintain the original model, because the old small-scale peasant economic system is also unreasonable, the most obvious of which is that a large number of peasants do not actually have their own land, or only have a small amount of land, they can only rent the landlord's land, and the tenant rent of the rented land is very high, so that the peasants do not even have enough to eat after a year of work.

In response, Jiang Daoquan et al. submitted a number of reform proposals for the existing smallholder system.

Among the many proposals, the most important are agricultural taxes and land rent restrictions.

The first is the agricultural tax, which in the past was basically a one-size-fits-all tax, and the amount of land was paid as much as the tax.

However, this one-size-fits-all agricultural tax model has no obvious suppressive effect on domestic land annexation, which is a very fatal problem for any dynasty.

The Chinese Empire is different from ancient dynasties, and most of the ancient dynasties went through large-scale wars in the early days of their founding. The population has been greatly reduced due to wars, disasters and other factors. To a certain extent, there were fewer people and more land, so there would not have been serious land annexation in the early years of the dynasty. It was generally only in the middle and late dynasties that serious land annexations occurred.

However, in the process of the rise of the Chinese Empire, although the people's livelihood in China was still damaged to a certain extent, even if the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom factor was counted, the loss of population was only tens of millions at most, which is nothing for a huge country with hundreds of millions of people.

Moreover, the previous population losses were mainly concentrated in the four provinces of Anhui, Jiangsu, Hubei, and Jiangxi, to be precise, the areas on both sides of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, and the impact of the war on other provinces was actually very limited.

The original provinces with more people and less land are still more populous, such as Shandong, Shanxi, Zhili and other provinces, whose populations are still huge. And the amount of land is limited.

What's more, the phenomenon of land annexation across the country is still very serious!

In order to change the serious problem of land annexation, the empire prepared a variety of measures, one of which was to guide the landlords and wealthy people in the country to invest their main assets in industry and commerce, instead of buying land as soon as they had money.

The second, and most important, means of adopting a tiered agricultural tax, implementing the principle that the more land you own, the more you pay.

At the heart of this measure is the tiered division of the number of fields. The measure stipulates that each household shall not own more than 50 acres of land, and that if the standard is exceeded, a high agricultural tax will be levied on all the land under its name, rather than only the excess part. In addition, for the bitter cold borderland, where the land produces less. For example, the newly occupied areas such as the Outer Xing'an Mountains and Central Asia on the north bank of the Heilongjiang River are not uniformly planned, and the subsequent detailed plans are formulated according to the different differences of each locality. After all, these places are still vast and sparsely populated, and they still have to emigrate from the mainland. It has nothing to do with land annexation.

If the excess is less than 50 percent, the rated tax of 120 percent will be levied. If the high tax cannot be paid, the excess land will be directly confiscated by the government and sold at auction, and the proceeds will be used to pay the high tax arrears.

This regulation almost forces those big landlords to sell their land, and if you own more than 100 to 200 acres of land, you can still bear the tax rate of more than one or two times, but if you own a few hundred acres, the annual land output is not enough to pay taxes, and those super large landlords who own thousands of acres or even tens of thousands of acres of land, not to mention the land output, even the value of the land itself is not enough to pay a year's tax.

At the same time, the threshold of the stepped agricultural tax stipulated in this regulation is relatively high, the starting point is 50 mu, and 50 mu is basically the limit of rich peasants and small landlords, and only those big landlords will be affected.

This measure was implemented from 1863, and in order to give the big landlords a certain buffer time, the time limit for selling was more relaxed, from 1864 to 1867, for a total of three years, and during these six years a relatively small excess tax was levied on the excess, which generally ranged from 10 percent to 100 percent.

But after 1867, the stepped agricultural tax was officially implemented!

Of course, in order to avoid a large-scale backlash, and also to avoid the loss of those landlords, the empire will also make some corresponding policies in other areas.

No matter how the landlords' land came from, it was their private property, and the empire, as an absolute monarchy capitalist state that protected the private property of individuals, could not have allowed the landlords to lose so much for no reason.

In order to prevent a large amount of land from being sold off and causing the price of land to fall, the Imperial Government would make a guaranteed purchase based on a 7% discount on the land price in 1863, and the funds required for the acquisition of land would be supported by loans from the Royal Bank.

The acquired land will be auctioned off and sold to farmers who have little or no land, and special loans will be introduced to prevent these farmers from having limited funds.

It is worth mentioning that whether it is a government loan to buy land, or a farmer's loan to buy land, it represents a huge profit, and the Royal Bank will receive a huge interest income from the loan business.

As soon as the stepped agricultural tax was issued, it caused a huge backlash in the country, especially for landlords who owned large amounts of land. In particular, the super landlords are even more angry, and they are connected to resist through various channels.

Even some of the empire's mid-level and high-ranking officials were critical of this policy. However, Lin Zhe has always remained silent, and has not issued many excerpts against the stepped agricultural tax. Lin Zhe's attitude on this matter is very obvious, as the emperor, he will never personally intervene in this matter, this matter can be achieved is the credit of him Lin Zhe, if there is any accident in the middle of the failure, then naturally there is Jiang Daoquan to carry the black pot.

As the biggest conservative bigwig in China, in addition to education, Jiang Daoquan's focus has always been on the rural economy, and he regards rural economic reform as the greatest achievement in his life.

So he was very tough. Even put on the show that no matter what, he forcibly pushed down this reform, and if the reform failed, then he Jiang Daoquan would thank the world with his death.

Along with the stepped agricultural tax, there is also a rent restriction policy also presided over by Jiang Daoquan!

Because the stepped agricultural tax is only aimed at those medium and large landlords, especially those who are super large, and in the vast rural areas, there are actually a large number of small and medium-sized landlords, but the rent restriction policy is mainly standardized, and it will not be said that the forced rent must be only 20%. Sancheng or something.

Instead, the government adopted a unified land lease contract, which limited the rent to 50 percent of the land output.

Compared with the stepped agricultural tax, the role of rent restriction is not large, because once the stepped agricultural tax is implemented. Then there will be a large amount of land flowing from the big landlords to the market, and then there will be a large number of landless or landless peasants who will buy this land without worrying about running out of money. Because the bank will provide a loan for the purchase of land, it is similar to a loan for the purchase of a house in the future.

Once the issue of land annexation is weakened somewhat. At that time, it will be a question whether the small landlords, who still have a hundred acres of land in their hands, will be able to find enough tenants to cultivate them.

Then the above-mentioned tiered agricultural tax will also bring a side effect, that is, it will greatly weaken the extended family. Forcing large families with large populations to take the initiative to divide up.

Because the imperial stepped agricultural tax was on a household basis!

In the Chinese tradition, when forced to do so, there are often no separate families, and in some places, the big families are casually dozens of people, or even hundreds of people, and these big families are the core of the clan, which is a great obstacle and resistance to the grassroots rule of the empire, and it is something that the empire is committed to eliminating.

After the implementation of the stepped agricultural tax, if those big families do not want to sell the land in their hands, then there is only one way to solve it, and that is to divide the family.

In extreme terms, each member of a large family has an independent household, so that according to the calculation that one person has 50 acres of land, it can easily digest hundreds or even thousands of acres of land. Those large families are legally separated, but they still live together.

But even so, it is a victory for the empire, because once they are legally separated, maybe they will be able to continue to live in the same way as a large clan in the first few years, but the more they will later, the more contradictions will be, and after the property is divided, it will go to the most important connecting link, although there will be connections in the future, but it is absolutely impossible to continue to become a family as before.

Whether it's selling the land or splitting up, it's a good thing for the empire!

Unfortunately, these measures can even be said to be able to shake the current rural economic model, which has aroused the opposition of many people.

At first, it was only opposition at the level of officialdom, but after it was actually implemented, the big landlords in many areas began to oppose and resist the stepped agricultural tax, and there was a large-scale underreporting of the amount of land and concealment of the amount of land.

In March 1864, a large-scale armed anti-tax incident occurred in Xiangtan, Hunan Province, when large local landowners banded together to gather families and deceived ordinary farmers to attack the officials who went to collect agricultural taxes, resulting in the death of a clerk of the local county property department.

At this time, it quickly attracted the attention of the local patrol department, and the patrol police were immediately dispatched to arrest the murderer, but surprisingly, only five of the more than ten patrol officers dispatched returned, and the others were arrested by local villagers and even killed.

And the local magistrate is also an official who issued a tiered agricultural tax, saying that he was afraid of causing a greater backlash, did not dare to carry out measures, and even said that he would negotiate with the local gentry, and chose to give in.

But within a few days, he was directly dismissed, and then the local officials withdrew the patrol reinforcements from several neighboring counties, and finally a total of nearly 100 patrol officers rushed to the county to suppress it!

However, seeing that the government came to suppress it, those who armed to resist taxes were not idle, and they had already gathered landlords from many neighboring towns and towns and ordinary peasants who did not know the truth, and in the end, in less than half a month, they actually raised an insurrectionary army of more than 3,000 people.

This officially led to the armed tax resistance incident in Xiangtan, Hunan, well, in the words of later generations, it was a peasant uprising! (To be continued.) )