"If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed that this village was so empty."

Zhu Youzhen couldn't help but ask Bai Yunming to call the local Lizheng, but Bai Yunming ran back and forth:

"Your Majesty, according to the old man who stayed in the village, Li Zheng has moved to live in Nanjing, and he usually goes to the countryside to count his household registration in summer and autumn every year."

"Li Zheng moved into the city to live, so what else should Li Zheng be, will the servants of Ying Tianfu come here?"

Zhu Youzhen asked Bai Yunming.

"Since the southern provinces have exempted the field tax and the poll tax, they will basically not come, Weichen does not dare to deceive Your Majesty, and the servants can't get any oil and water when they come here, at most they can pick a few melons and fruits, it is better to go to the city to extort merchants quickly, not to mention the errands, now even the bandits are not willing to come to these villages, there is really no place to rob."

When Bai Yunming said this, Zhu Youzhen couldn't help laughing: "According to this, the way of the world has really changed, and the countryside has really become a quiet place, but these lands are so vacant, where does the food consumption in Nanjing City come from?" ”

"Back to Your Majesty, part of it was transported from Huguang, and some of it was shipped from outside the customs and overseas, and the nearby farmers can only be self-sufficient, which is not enough to meet the needs of the entire Nanjing City, and this is the case in several prefectures under the jurisdiction of Weichen, a large number of people live in the city to work, and the land is barren a lot, which is even more serious than the war."

After listening to Bai Yunming's words, Zhu Youzhen couldn't help but be more convinced that with the development of industry and commerce, the Ming Dynasty had begun to rapidly urbanize, and a large number of peasants had turned into citizens.

But to what extent this has changed, Zhu Youzhen is not completely sure, maybe it is more prominent like the south of the Yangtze River, especially near Nanjing, but if it is the southwest and northwest regions, has there been such obvious urbanization?

All of these need to be investigated in detail by the East Factory after Zhu Youzhen returns to Beijing.

At the same time, combined with Zhu Youzhen's own experience in Beizhili and Henan, he has to admit that the current Ming Dynasty, the north and the south are different.

There is no such obvious commodity economy in the north, and it is still a small-scale peasant economy and society with a large number of homesteaders, but it is more dependent on the Huangzhuang.

Needless to say, in the south, especially in the south of the Yangtze River, because it was not sacked by Jianjiao, the original highly developed commodity economy was retained, and with Zhu Youzhen's encouragement, there has now been a phenomenon of "village famine".

Even the servants and bandits no longer cared for the villages.

This made Zhu Youzhen have to admit that Daming is still an era of coexistence of a small-scale peasant economy and a commodity economy.

"Let's go, go back to Beijing!"

Zhu Youzhen decided to return to Beijing immediately and negotiate a better system with the court officials, even if there were no major changes, but to improve it as much as possible, at least not to allow the bureaucracy to exploit the citizens in the same way that it had exploited yeoman farmers in the past.

But just as Zhu Youzhen was about to get up and return to Beijing, the people who commanded the envoy from Jiangxi found Zhu Youzhen:

"Your Majesty, there has been a rebellion in Huichang County, Ganzhou Prefecture, and now Ruijin, Changning, Anyuan, Xinfeng and other counties have been captured, and Jiangxi has commanded the envoy and Jiangxi Governor Ding Chukui has sent troops to suppress, but there are less than 10,000 soldiers in Jiangxi, and the chaotic people have now gathered 100,000, so I asked the Generalissimo's Office to transfer the main force of the Standing Guards to suppress."

Zhu Youzhen was stunned.

"What's going on, how could there be a rebellion of the people in Jiangxi, I have already issued an edict after the victory of the Northern Expedition, in order to commend the common people of the south for helping the Northern Expedition, permanently exempt them from land taxes, so that there are no officials to go to the countryside to urge the levy, the people should live and work in peace and contentment, why is there a rebellion of the people."

Zhu Youzhen slapped the table angrily as he spoke, pointed to the people in the East Factory and questioned.

"Your Majesty, Gannan has always been out of trouble, although Your Majesty's policy is good governance, but once they are idle to cause trouble, it is inevitable that their gangsterism will be difficult to change."

As soon as the people from the East Factory said this, Zhu Youzhen slapped the table on the spot: "Fart!" Don't give me anything to make trouble, since you are a people, your nature is difficult to change, why did you start to make trouble now, there must be something wrong here, go and investigate it carefully, I can't find out, I want your head! ”

Zhu Youzhen threw off his sleeves and entered the steam locomotive after speaking.

Now Zhu Youzhen is very irritable, he doesn't want to smash tons of steel on the people who are causing chaos in the country, and his original intention is not to let the powerful infantry artillery cooperate with the troops to deal with and maintain the stability of his rule.

He prefers to choose to maintain stability at the expense of royal interests.

Therefore, on the grounds that the common people of the central and southern provinces of the Northern Expedition had contributed a lot, he exempted the common people of the southern provinces from the land tax.

In this way, the common people of the southern provinces will not only have no poll tax but also no land tax, which is equivalent to no agricultural tax, which can greatly reduce the economic burden of the yeoman farmers.

At the same time, it can better free the common people from the land.

At that time, this edict was unanimously approved and praised by the bureaucratic gentry clique, and Zhu Youzhen was quite proud of his great initiative, after all, his good government of exempting the common people from agricultural taxes had not appeared until more than 500 years later in history.

However, Zhu Youzhen didn't expect that there were still people in Jiangxi who rebelled, which was simply a slap in the face.

When Zhu Youzhen returned to the capital, he got a secret report from Dongchang, it turned out that the rebellion of the people was not exploited by the government, because of the exemption of agricultural tax, the government had no reason to collect taxes from them.

But the South is not the same as the North.

During the Northern Expedition that year, Zhu Youzhen used the reason that the northern gentry betrayed the country to eradicate most of the northern gentry.

However, the gentry in the south were not eradicated, and even because before the Northern Expedition and even in the following years, because of the war in the north, and the south had always been peaceful, most of the court officials were southerners.

Naturally, these southern gentry also had more power to annex land.

In addition, with the accumulation of land annexation in the Ming Dynasty for more than 200 years, most of the land in today's southern provinces is owned by the gentry.

There are few yeoman farmers.

Zhu Youzhen's original intention was to let these yeoman farmers, who had not yet become tenant farmers, not sell their land because they were exempt from taxes, and would become tenant farmers of the landlord's family.

However, what Zhu Youzhen overlooked was that in the current south, most of the land cultivators were tenant farmers, and although the tax exemption of the imperial court reduced the burden on the farmers, the landlords took advantage of this to increase the rent.

Most of the land in the south was owned by the gentry and landlords, and once the landlords raised the rent, the tenant farmers had no choice but to accept it.

Fortunately, the land fertilizer in the south was acceptable at first, but with the activity of the capital market, more and more squire landlords, that is, vested interests, wanted to get more money to invest in the capital market, resulting in higher and higher land rents.

As a result, a large number of tenant farmers finally could not bear this oppression and rebelled, at first they only robbed the rich households, and later developed into a trend of rebellion and rebellion because of the government's attack.

Zhu Youzhen fell into deep thought, and the civil unrest in Jiangxi made him realize that there were not only two economic methods in the Ming Dynasty, but three economic methods.

In Jiangnan, there is a commodity economy and society, and the huge citizen class is staging a battle of wits and courage with the government.

In the north and outside the Guan, it was the general economic recovery period of small farmers in the early days of the founding of the country, and there was no land annexation, so that a large amount of land was in the hands of yeoman farmers, bearing the food needs of the entire Ming Dynasty.

However, in the south, except for the south of the Yangtze River, it was a period of general collapse of the small peasant economy at the end of the dynasty, and land annexation was serious.

(End of chapter)