New Shun 1730

Rumors that are closely related to everyone's personal interests always spread quickly.

Overseas trade leads to the flow of trade routes, and the towns along the trade routes are precisely where industry and commerce are more developed, and the urban class in the towns is precisely the most afraid that this rumor will come true, so the speed at which this rumor spreads is almost catching up with the speed of the imperial post station.

The panic of the petty bourgeoisie in Jiangsu about the reactionary regression stems from the many reforms in southern Jiangsu over the years.

These reforms were approved by the emperor after weighing the pros and cons and believing that they could strengthen his own rule.

And these various reforms, in the past, stemmed from the influx of a large amount of overseas silver since the Ming Dynasty and the development of the commodity economy.

This is the foundation.

The more recent foundation is the development of maritime transport, the abandonment of the canal, the commodity grain base brought about by overseas expansion, and the many reforms carried out by Liu Yu in southern Jiangsu based on this.

To give the simplest example, the collection of physical grain will not fly directly to the capital, and someone has to transport it.

And Songjiang Prefecture cannot fly a large amount of physical cotton cloth to the capital by itself, and someone has to transport it.

Taxes, levies, and labor service should be separated.

And national taxes and local levies should also be separated.

The theoretical levy and labor service system and the implementation at the grassroots level should still be separated.

Liu Yu's reform direction is also very simple.

Collect money.

Make sure that money can buy things.

It looks very simple, but in fact, without the accumulation of the previous twenty years, this is pure fantasy.

Take the land dispute in Jiangnan that lasted from the Longqing period to the end of the Chongzhen period. What is the root cause of the development to the point where two county-level governments attacked each other?

Huang Zongxi also said this problem regardless of Yanwu. The reason is that "originally the field is the mother and the Ding is the son; but now the Ding is the mother and the field is the son."

Going back further, why did this reason occur?

Because it involves feudal corvée and labor service.

It must be tied to the household registration land.

Going back further, it is the difference between official fields and private fields at the beginning, and the tax rates of various counties are completely inconsistent after the official fields are greatly reduced under inertia.

Going further back, the capital was set in the north, and Jiangnan was the economic center. These materials could not be sent directly to the north through the portal, and someone had to do corvée to send them there.

Even if there was no need for the capital, the local area would have to levy labor to build a river embankment, a breakwater, etc.

In other words, the simplest way was to make the field the mother and the Ding the son, or even to abolish the existence value of Ding and only tax the field, which required many prerequisites.

First, money had to be collected, not grain.

Second, money could ensure that things could be bought, and prices were basically stable. The premise of this was that Dashun needed a navy, a maritime transport team, and commercial grain bases such as Ezo, Liaodong and Southeast Asia to ensure stable grain prices, and to transport materials from Jiangnan to the capital to maintain the operation of the court.

Then, there had to be a large number of "unemployed vagrants". If there was any corvée in the local area, they could be hired to do it.

Then, the local area had to have money.

And if the local area wanted to have money, it had to reform the tax system.

Carrying out tax reform, in turn, required the above as a prerequisite.

It should be said that the commercial grain in Liaodong, the rice plantations in Nanyang, the navy, and the silver from sea trade, these four things barely supported the reform of southern Jiangsu alone.

It was not until Dashun completely abandoned the canal and the emperor realized that money could really buy things that the reform of southern Jiangsu was basically completed.

A series of disputes from the Longqing period to the previous few years, such as land taxes, land tax, labor service, which county the cultivated land belonged to, etc., were finally resolved.

Only after all the above foundations were established, can we achieve "taking the land as the mother".

Many great scholars realized this before, but the reform plans they thought of were all backwards - to do well-field, which was actually empty talk.

When this reform was completed, it was actually the real relief of the hard soil that was pressing on the head of the capital sprouts in southern Jiangsu.

The tax reforms on industry and commerce triggered by this, the reverse promotion of the development of handicrafts by the court's cotton cloth orders in silver currency, the abolition of many feudal corvee services in industry and commerce, and the reform of the silk weaving industry under the official system of the imperial power to occupy the labor value for free, etc.

Take the cloth tax of Songjiang Prefecture as an example.

The previous dynasty had to collect cotton cloth first, then send people to perform corvée and send these cotton cloth to the capital. The capital would deduct some of the tax, and deduct some of the tax on the way. The village head at the grassroots level also had the power to decide on the dispatch of labor, and in addition, the officials who passed the imperial examinations were exempted from the government... In theory, the government could also pay for the labor service in the later period. But in reality, firstly, there was no money, and secondly, only fools would go for the few dollars given.

So in theory, it was necessary to share the tax according to the rich and poor, and to ask the grain chief to collect the tax, which seemed to be fair.

But things that were fair in theory, at the grassroots level, were a carnival for the clerks.

Liu Yu changed the past method. According to the needs of the court, Songjiang Prefecture only collected 170,000 pieces of cloth a year.

Not much.

After the tax system reform, taxes were collected, orders were placed directly, textile factories produced, goods were inspected and loaded, and they went north to Tianjin for delivery, and the job was done.

It seemed simple, but without the many preparations in the past, it was really impossible to do it. Java cotton alone, without Nanyang plantations, can get stuck at the first step.

This change, as well as overseas trade, Nanyang Songjiang cloth driving out Indian Surat cloth, European smuggling, etc., greatly promoted the development of industry and commerce.

At the same time, because the large steam-era factories had not yet affected the textile industry.

Therefore, at this time, for small producers and small handicraftsmen, they were in a stage of "all previous disadvantages were eliminated and the later disadvantages had not yet arrived".

It can basically be regarded as the golden age of the petty bourgeoisie in southern Jiangsu in Dashun.

It even created a batch of beautiful fantasy legends of small producers who "got rich through labor, completed class crossing, and went from machine workers to machine households".

Of course, the reform has only been carried out in a small part now, and the textile industry is just a microcosm of many reforms.

At this time, such rumors were thrown out because these small producers felt the improvement of their lives and the reduction of their burdens, but their own anxiety made them full of panic about everything in the past.

And this rumor and anxiety will inevitably be magnified in the debate on salt policy reform.

Because, under the inducement of Liu Yu, the group of people on the opposite side who used Huainan salt households as a cover can only come up with two plans.

Conservative.

Reactionary.

And both of these will be extremely opposed by these small producers and cause great panic.

Conservative is the interest of those salt merchants.

That is to maintain the current status quo and not toss.

Neither reclaim wasteland.

Nor redistribute the land by household.

Merchants can still enter the market and control the salt households.

And this conservative policy is also strongly opposed by the petty citizens who are disturbed by rumors.

Because they oppose the exploitation of commercial capital such as market merchants and the control of big capital, just as they oppose the exploitation of them by the package purchase merchants.

And reaction is the only way that those Confucian scholars who really have ideals can think of.

This point, such as Wang Gen, the founder of the Taizhou School and a disciple of Wang Yangming, has imagined. After all, he was born as a private salt dealer and has a better understanding of the situation of salt households.

The so-called [dividing the land and enfeoffment is the work of the king; dividing the grass and wasteland equally is the work of dividing the land. The upper has the book, the lower gives the ticket, the upper has the map, the lower keeps the business... Even if it has been thousands of years, there will be no more disorder]

In essence, it is still the son inheriting the father's business and the identity is fixed.

And this is what the petty citizens of Jiangsu are extremely opposed to now.

The demands of small producers are anti-feudal and anti-capital.

If the big factory system and big capital continue to erode their interests, they will think of retreating.

But now Jiangsu is full of vitality with the reform, and the whip of big factories and big capital on the salt households cannot be whipped on them for the time being, so they are naturally afraid of the fixed identity.

In short, the mentality of small producers is very interesting: they want the benefits of commodity economic development and market, and they want to abandon all the disadvantages of capitalist development.

They have always tried to imagine capitalist development as an ideal picture without a dark side.

The current situation of Dashun is that the "dark side" of small production such as these textile industries has not been revealed, so they are more worried about the evil dragons of the past.

They will not panic about the bloodthirsty demons of the future.

The fixed identity of salt households is a system, a system that may fall on every small producer.

Moreover, after the salt is abandoned and reclaimed, cotton is planted, which is the raw material urgently needed by small producers in the textile industry.

Liu Yu hoped to wipe out the deep-rooted thought of "reactionary retreat once no way is found" in Jiangsu through the chaos of this salt reform and the debate between the two sides.

In other words, to solve the weird situation that began in the middle of the Ming Dynasty: "many people found that the old ruling order could no longer be ruled as usual, but after trying a circle, they all chose reactionary retreat."

At least some intellectuals realized through this debate that retreating would not solve the problem. In addition to retreating, there is another way to move forward that seems to be really feasible.

It was Liu Yu who forcibly tied the salt household issue to reactionary retreat. In other words, it was he who forcibly established the salt household issue as a "reactionary totem pole."

Because this was one of the few reforms that he could make immediately effective, the emperor was satisfied with the salt tax and control of salt production, the people were satisfied with the lower salt price, and it was the least side effect of moving forward.

Creating something out of nothing will not affect old industries such as glass manufacturing. It is not reform and will not cause controversy. Drawing something new on a blank sheet of paper is not the same as altering an old painting.

Sometimes, reform itself is not important, but the controversy caused by reform is important.

…………

Liu Yu, the mastermind behind all this, was leisurely accompanied by some local prominent families to visit the Fan Wencheng Temple in the county town, which had temporarily restored peace but was brewing greater disputes.

Local big families such as the Mao family and the Jiang family followed.

After taking advantage of Fan Wencheng's famous saying of "worrying before the world worries and rejoicing after the world rejoices", and patting the court on the management of the Huaihe River and the elimination of the threat of flood discharge from Hongze Lake, these local big families finally asked Liu Yu tentatively how to solve the Caodang problem.