It was published in 2003, and it has been five years since then, and I am still groping forward along this line of thought.Three months ago, I found a more complete formulation of this law.The law of blood reward has three main points: 1. Blood pay is the income from violent plunder at the cost of life. Second, when the blood reward is greater than the cost, violent plunder occurs. 3. Violent plunder does not create wealth. Per the first bullet point, rewards from adventurous hunting or coal digging do not count as blood rewards.Violent depredation specifically refers to acts that target humans and the wealth they possess.

According to the second point, when violent plunder occurs, human beings must weigh costs and benefits.There are at least four categories of costs: 1. Conscience.Compassion and a sense of justice. 2. Opportunity cost.In the trade-off, there are options such as working hard, selling one's body and selling things side by side with working one's life. People will compare the payment and income of blood, sweat, body and money. 3. Consumption of labor and materials. 4. The risk of violent confrontation.Whether it is violent suppression, violent resistance, or competition among violent predators, violent plundering must face a certain risk of casualties.The trade-offs between the above four types of costs and benefits, each of which can lead to a series of historical stories.

According to the third point, violent plunder does not create wealth, it can only transfer wealth, which leads to a long story of the interaction between violent plunderers and wealth creators. Five years ago, the law of blood rewards I formulated included the first and third points: blood rewards are the rewards for violence; violent plunder does not create value, and the value of blood rewards depends on the value of the goal of struggle.I also talked about the fourth type of trade-off in the second point: in the process of violent contention, the core calculation of the parties is how much casualty risk they can take in order to obtain a certain amount of survival resources, and how much they can hurt themselves, the resource demanders. to what extent.

The subsequent progress is: I found a way to calculate conscience, and calculated the substitution relationship between bloodshed and sweat, and added the first and second types of trade-offs in the second point.The law of blood reward then has a more complete definition.At the same time, I continue to explain some historical phenomena from the perspective of the relationship between violent groups and production groups, and use the competitive relationship between violent groups to explain some major institutional changes. These topics generate many articles.I am groping and writing, and the accumulation is the main content of my next book.I try to clarify the internal and external relations of the survival strategy of violence and plunder, and at the same time examine the interaction and evolution of various survival strategies, and describe the basic outline of the evolved social order.This kind of view of history—let’s call it the view of blood reward history—may be able to construct a relatively useful analytical framework for Chinese history.

On the occasion of the reprint, I would like to briefly introduce the author's further thoughts, and hope that readers, like me, can tolerate and surpass this book.