Chapter 43 Dispersing sand technique: men plowing and women weaving inside

On the first day of every ruler's ascension to the throne, he will think about a question: "How can I get out of the cycle of dynastic change?" The methods of each generation are different.Although Zhu Yuanzhang was born as a beggar with low education, he is also a very thoughtful person. His method is to break the country into a mess.When the people of this country become particles, there will be no cohesive power, and if people cannot cohere, it will be impossible to rebel. This is the "scattering technique" to maintain internal rule.Zhu Yuanzhang also found an ideological basis in Lao Tzu's book. Lao Tzu said that the most ideal state in the world is "the chickens and dogs hear each other, and they don't communicate with each other when they grow old and die."Everyone lives in their own small village, watching and helping each other. Men get up in the morning to plant the fields and return home at sunset, women cook at home and spin yarn to take care of the children, and men and women never leave the village. In this way, the world will naturally be peaceful and the dynasty will be natural. For generations to come.According to history books, Zhu Yuanzhang's favorite book in his life is.

To break the world into loose sand, economically, the best model is that men farm and women weave. In the economic history of China, there are two plants that completely changed the destiny of the country, one is rice in the Song Dynasty, and the other is cotton in the Ming Dynasty. Rice is native to the tropical regions of Asia. During the Five Dynasties and the early Song Dynasty, the Champa rice of the Xiangpa Kingdom (now northern Vietnam) was widely introduced to the Yangtze River Basin. It can be harvested twice or even three times a year, and its yield is higher than that of one crop a year. Wheat is twice as high, thus triggering a "rice revolution".The sharp increase in grain production has turned "China's huge hourglass upside down."The population of the Song Dynasty grew rapidly, becoming the first huge empire with a population of over 100 million in human history.Since then, the ruler has lost the "rigid demand" to plunder foreign land and population.

And Zhu Yuanzhang launched a "cotton revolution".Like rice, cotton is also an exotic plant, native to India, and it first appeared in Chinese characters in the Song Shu of the Southern Dynasties.At the end of the Song Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, it had been popularized in a certain area in the south.In the Yuan Dynasty, Huang Daopo, a woman from Songjiang Prefecture (now Shanghai), improved the textile technology, which greatly increased the production efficiency.After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Zhu Yuanzhang vigorously promoted cotton planting. He ordered that farmers with five to ten acres of land should be ordered to plant half an acre of mulberry, hemp, and cotton, which is more than 10 acres. Compared with the end of the Yuan Dynasty, it has increased by more than 4 times, and the increase of cotton fields is the most significant.The innovation of cotton planting and cotton textile technology completely changed the Chinese people's traditional clothing of silk and linen, which greatly increased the output of clothing, and cotton textile quickly became the largest handicraft manufacturing industry in the country.According to Wu Chengming’s research, in the Ming and Qing dynasties, China produced about 600 million cotton cloths per year, about two per capita weaving cloth per year, and the commodity value was nearly 100 million taels of silver, of which 52.8% were sold in the market in the form of commodities. The total output Six times that of Britain in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

These two revolutions, the "Rice Revolution" and the "Cotton Revolution", have had a major and irreversible impact on China's economic structure, social structure, political governance concepts, and even national character. There is still a world-class question to be answered here: as we all know, the industrial revolution in the UK actually started with the textile industry, and it finally detonated the revolutionary innovation of mechanical technology, and at the same time brought about subversive changes in social organization , eventually gave birth to capitalism and changed the direction of human civilization.So, why did the innovation of the same industry not only fail to cause the same revolutionary effect as in the UK in China, but instead created the conditions for autism?

Scholars concluded that in the 14th century in the Jiangnan countryside of China, every farmer had a loom. After farming, women and children, old and young, all engaged in weaving.Although the amount of cloth woven by each household is very small, after aggregation, it becomes hundreds of millions.Zhao Gang and Chen Zhongyi pointed out a surprising fact in their research; from the 14th century until the 1880s, there was no handicraft cotton textile factory in China!They wrote in "History of China's Economic System": "There have been records of factories employing manual operations in all major sectors of traditional Chinese handicraft industry, but there is no definite report of any handicraft workshops in the cotton textile industry." Compared with large-scale factory production, the biggest feature or advantage of Yizhi's home textile is that the former practitioners have almost no labor costs, and time is almost free. Anyone can use their spare time operate alone.Under the competition of this kind of production mode, of course there is no room for large-scale handicraft workshops to survive.

In modern economic research, the early rural handicraft industry is often referred to as the "prototype of industrialization", which provided the market and technological prerequisites for the birth of the industrial revolution; It is a historical tragedy to prevent the rise of the factory and the process of industrialization through the resistance of the country.