Chapter 35 Laxity and Prohibition Simultaneously

Because of such a political system arrangement, the Song regime had a dramatic duality in its economic system. On the one hand, the Zhao Song Dynasty was very lenient towards the people, and Zhao Kuangyin was even a person who was so lenient that he had no principles.The Tang Dynasty did not allow the establishment of bazaars below the county level. The Song Dynasty abolished this restriction from a policy for the first time. The future market model in China was finalized after the Song Dynasty.The industrial and commercial taxes in the Song Dynasty were very low, and the tax types were very clear. There was a list posted at all the city gates, telling the people what taxes the government collected and what the tax rates were.

Cheng Yichuan, a Dali scholar in the Song Dynasty, once summed up "five things in this dynasty that surpass the past and the present": One is "no civil strife in a hundred years", that is, there has been no local rebellion in more than a hundred years; The second is "four sages and one hundred years", the four emperors after the founding of the country were relatively enlightened; The third is "on the day you are ordered, the city will not be easy to mess up", when the dynasty changes, there will be no bloodshed and no disturbance to the people; Fourth, "a minister has never been punished for a hundred years", and no minister has been punished for more than a hundred years;

The fifth is to "treat the barbarians with sincerity" and adopt a soft policy towards the surrounding barbarians. These five things may be exaggerated, but they are not far from the truth, especially the first and fourth things are the most rare. It can be seen that the Song Dynasty is indeed unique.The Song Dynasty lasted for three hundred years, which has a lot to do with its moderate governance. It was peaceful internally and externally. But at the same time, the state-owned monopoly system in the Song Dynasty was harsher than that in the Han and Tang Dynasties, with a wider field of monopoly and a stricter punishment system.Judging from the existing data, there are many types of state-owned franchises in the Song Dynasty, the scope is wide, and the amount of capital is large, all of which surpass the previous generations. Almost all major commodities are included in the list of state-owned franchises, including tea, salt, wine, and vinegar. , alum, and spices obtained from foreign trade, ivory, etc.These commodities have three distinctive common features - resource, necessity and profiteering.The government has adopted very cruel policies against private capital that illegally enters the prohibited areas.On the one hand, Zhao Kuangyin greatly reduced taxes and taxes, and at the same time issued a decree. Businessmen who traffic more than one or two jin of alum or sell more than three catties of alum without permission will be executed; Those who smuggle bootleg wine into the city for three buckets shall be executed; those who dump ten catties of salt without permission shall be executed.As for the tea tax, it is stipulated that every penny must be turned over to the central government - "tea profits from one penny or more will go to the capital".

After controlling key industries, the government allowed non-government businesses to include needlework, clothing, meat, children's toys, etc. These commodities also had three distinctive features in common—scattered operations, difficult control, and meager profits.That is to say, state-owned capital and private capital form a scene of "Chu River-Han Boundary" in the industry. State-owned enterprise groups gather in a few upstream industries and gradually form an oligopoly position. The number of them is gradually decreasing, but their profitability is rapidly increasing. Increase.This pattern was fully formed in the Song Dynasty, and as a tradition, it has tenaciously continued to this day.

Because of this, a strange phenomenon appeared in the economy of the Song Dynasty: private production and trade developed unprecedentedly, but free merchants were active in the middle and downstream industries, and their wealth was not large.Wang Shengduo, who wrote "Financial History of the Two Song Dynasties", once searched the historical records to find a few famous businessmen, but he couldn't find any. The few people he could find were either corrupt officials or few records. Either have a name or no surname.