Chapter 41 Section 5 Land reform in disguise, attacking landlords

Zhu Yuanzhang's dislike of the landlord class is based on two factors. As the son of a poor peasant, hatred for the landlord class naturally flowed in Zhu Yuanzhang's blood. Zhu Yuanzhang will never forget the pain of his family's continuous escape under the oppression of landlords. He will never forget the humiliation of Liu De's refusal to bury his father after his father died.Impressions in childhood often affect a person's life.In Zhu Yuanzhang's mind, the image of the big landlords is always the same as the posters of later generations, full of fat, cold-faced and black-hearted.

And sitting on the dragon chair, from the perspective of an emperor, the image of the landlord class in Zhu Yuanzhang's eyes is not pleasing.Although Zhu Yuanzhang saw that "those who have property have perseverance", he was more aware of the serious threats to his rule posed by the greed, cunning, and unkindness of the landlord class. On the one hand, the rich and powerful families are too powerful, which can easily destroy the local social order and pose a serious threat to the state power; collapse. The first thing Zhu Yuanzhang did, who was pushed to the throne by the uprising peasants, was to crack down on the landlord class in the new empire.

During the war, wherever the army passed, the landlords fled one after another.When the new dynasty was established, they ran back to their hometown excitedly from the poor mountains and valleys where they hid, only to find that part of their land had been cultivated by the poor.They showed the title deeds and arrogantly demanded that the farmers return the land to the original owners, but the farmers did not agree with them.Landlords do not know, the world has changed color.Zhu Yuanzhang issued an edict in the first year of Hongwu: "Landlords everywhere, in the past because of the wilderness of the war, abandoned the land and it has been cultivated by others. The property rights of this land belong to the current cultivators." A hard blow.Many rich and powerful families before the war came back after traveling thousands of miles, only to find that they had been reduced from the family of the gentry to the poor peasants who went to the mountains to open up wasteland.

Even for landlords with intact land, Zhu Yuanzhang did not allow them to restore their old homes.At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, barren land was everywhere, and Zhu Yuanzhang encouraged the people to open up barren land.So the big landlords took advantage of their strong financial resources to take the opportunity to plow more and occupy more land, annexing land.Linhao is particularly prominent.Zhu Yuanzhang was keenly aware of this sign, and in the fourth year of Hongwu, he instructed Zhongshu Sheng: "There are a lot of vacant land in Linhao today. You should investigate the identities of those pioneers and let them farm roughly equally, so that the poor can have industries and the rich can't merge. If any big family occupies more land and transfers it to the poor for farming, he will be punished. It is a crime for those who consider the fields to be their own property and transfer them to the poor to farm.)”

In May of the fifth year of Hongwu, he issued another edict: "During the war, many people left their properties and fled to other places. Now the world is peaceful, and they all come back. If the families who came back had a lot of land, but now the population They are not allowed to occupy as much land as they used to be. How many people are given how many lands. Those who used to have little land but now have a large population can reclaim unowned land by themselves. In short, everyone should be equal. If they occupy too much land, they must be punished !" This is undoubtedly a land reform in disguise.

However, the scope of these measures can only be limited to those landowners who fled and returned.There are also many landlords who have not fled. Their huge industries have been baptized by the war, and they are still connected to the fields and their houses are still majestic.More importantly, these people have been operating in the local area for many generations and are deeply rooted, which is the main obstacle for Zhu Yuanzhang to equalize the world. In the era of natural economy, depriving these people of their property out of thin air is obviously not in line with the "law of heaven and people's hearts", and lacks the support of theoretical and moral resources.However, this did not trouble Zhu Yuanzhang.As long as the purpose is clear, the means are never a problem for him.For the remaining big landlords, his basic strategy is "the straw sandals don't look like one, and they look like them while beating."Adapt measures to local conditions and use various excuses to destroy them one by one.

The first excuse is to "relocate the rich to the real capital".This is a method that has been used throughout the ages.Not long after the founding of the People's Republic of China, Zhu Yuanzhang forcibly moved a large number of wealthy families in the south of the Yangtze River to Nanjing, the capital, which quickly developed Nanjing into a huge city with a population of about 1 million.Zhu Yuanzhang later said to the ministers: "In the past, Liu Bang, the great ancestor of the Han Dynasty, moved the rich and powerful families to Guanzhong. I didn't think so at first. Now that I think about it, the capital is the fundamental place in the world. It is natural to move them here. It has to be done. "The so-called thing is of course, I have to, Gein these powerful households are powerful forces in the local area, pulling them out of the local area can weaken their power, put them under the eyes of the emperor, and prevent them from doing things for them. Second, they brought a lot of wealth, which can activate the capital's economy.

There is no doubt that the rich and powerful are not willing to abandon their huge properties and move away from their homeland.Even after moving to Nanjing, many people still try their best to escape back to their hometown.In order to prevent these wealthy households from escaping back, Zhu Yuanzhang enacted a strict decree prohibiting escape, stipulating that "those rich people who return privately will be punished with serious crimes", so that the gentry from all over the country had to be the residents of the capital of the new dynasty. The second method is to create unjust cases and mobilize the people to falsely accuse and frame the landlords, so as to confiscate their property.

A well-known legend is that Shen Wansan, the richest man in the south of the Yangtze River, paid a huge sum of money to build a third of the Nanjing city wall in order to please Zhu Yuanzhang. Unexpectedly, Zhu Yuanzhang saw that Shen Wansan was so rich, and he was afraid that Shen Wansan was "rich enough to rival the country" and wanted to kill him. After persuading him, he found an excuse to exile in Yunnan.Shen Wansan finally died in Yunnan, and his property was nationalized by Zhu Yuanzhang.Although this legend was proved to be fabricated by historians, it vividly expressed Zhu Yuanzhang's hatred of the rich.

Zhu Yuanzhang's hooligan character was vividly reflected in the incident of Luo Zhi's crime of destroying rich people.In order to achieve his goals, he does whatever means, is ruthless, black and white, is not afraid of being cursed by others, and is not afraid of comments from later generations. Not only is he not benevolent to women, but he is not even bound by basic moral principles.During the Hongwu period, in order to punish corruption and eliminate political dissidents, Zhu Yuanzhang created four major unjust cases, namely the Kongyin case, Guo Huan case, Hu Weiyong case and Lan Yu case.The four cases together killed tens of thousands of people.

With power in hand, Zhu Yuanzhang started a political struggle, he was good at dancing with long sleeves, and he had both ways.While eliminating political opponents, he also wiped out all the surviving landlords in the south of the Yangtze River by "herding cattle to collect firewood-carrying hands". The method is to arbitrarily use cases to link landlords and wealthy households, and instigate people to falsely accuse them of having stolen money entrusted by corrupt officials in order to confiscate their property.The vast majority of cases are unjust cases that are known at a glance.People also speculated that the emperor's real intention was to confiscate property, so they were happy to report. "History of the Ming Dynasty" said that the Guo Huan case "checked the houses where the stolen money was deposited, all over the world, and most of the wealthy families above the middle level among the people were all broken."Wu Kuan said that in his hometown Changzhou (now Suzhou) during the Hongwu era, "most people in the village were relocated or died of punishment, and the neighbors were almost empty." In the case of Hu and Landang, almost all the well-known powerful landlords in the south of the Yangtze River were implicated. In Wujiang County alone, Zhang Tao, Mo Li, Zhang Jin, Li Ding, Cui Ling, Xu Yan and others are "no less than a thousand families".This move "washed all the people in the rich land and wiped out their houses." In addition, in the 30th year of Hongwu (1397 A.D.), the "North and South List" incident occurred (because the admitted candidates were all southerners, causing northern candidates to question the unfairness of the examiners, Zhu Yuanzhang killed some examiners and candidates.), Zhu Yuanzhang "based Jiangnan Everyone is the 'house owner', Xu Xiang criticized", and many landlords in the south of the Yangtze River suffered disaster because of this.As a large number of landowners' private land was confiscated and turned into official land, the land tax revenue of the Ming government increased by leaps and bounds.At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, the Suzhou government should receive 882,100 shi of autumn grain, which jumped to more than 2.9 million shi by the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, more than tripled.Songjiang Mansion also jumped from 660,000 shi to 1.4 million shi, an increase of more than two times. Zhu Yuanzhang's measures were very effective.Many people in the Ming Dynasty said that under the attack of Emperor Zhu's rogue methods, all the rich and powerful families in the local area had been wiped out, and there was not a single one left.Wu Kuan said that "for a while, the rich families moved or died, and disappeared without a trace".Bei Qiong also said that at that time, the large households in the Sanwu area "recovered from profit, died or moved, and none survived."Of course, this statement has been questioned in recent years. Some scholars have proved that Emperor Zhu’s purge was not so thorough, and a very small number of landlords survived by distributing their wealth and fleeing.For example, the Huazong Shou family in Wuxi has a lot of land, and in the rich Jiayi, "at the beginning of the country, all the accumulated land was scattered to avoid disaster."Zhu Shiqing from Changzhou married Zhao Huiqing, the surname of Wuxi, as his son-in-law.However, such survivors are very few after all. Since it is impossible to change the private ownership of land, it is impossible for Zhu Yuanzhang to prevent the regeneration of the landlord class.No matter what method he adopted, Zhu Yuanzhang could not achieve absolute equality. There were no big landlords, but small and medium landlords were still everywhere.However, throughout his reign, he never forgot to beat the small and middle landlord class. In February of the third year of Hongwu (AD 1370), he specially summoned rich people from all over the country and warned them: You live in the fields and enjoy the official tax, do you know it?The ancients said: "The people's livelihood has desires, and there is chaos without a master." If there is no master in the world for a day, the strong will bully the weak, the many will be violent and the few will be violent, the rich will not be able to live in peace, and the poor will not be able to survive on their own.Now I am your lord, legislating and customizing, so that the rich can keep their wealth and the poor can live their lives.You should abide by the law, and if you can abide by the law, you can protect yourself.Don't bully the weak, don't swallow the poor, don't abuse the young, don't bully the old, honor your father and brother, live in harmony with your relatives, live in poverty, and be disobedient to the village, then you are a good citizen.If you imitate what you did in the past, you will not be a good citizen. Of course, he also knew that small and medium-sized landlords would not all follow his highest instructions, so if these people were not careful, he would use heavy hands and destroy them until their families were destroyed.In order to prevent large families from transferring taxes to the poor through other means, Zhu Yuanzhang vigorously conducted land surveys across the country and established fish scale atlases to determine taxes.Through meticulous and rigorous land measurement, a large amount of land concealed by landlords has been found out nationwide. Zhu Yuanzhang clearly stipulated that if the landlords "scattered the fields, used tricks to give fame, and relied on harming the common people, etc.... the victim's household and the countryside are straight heroes, the meeting will rely on the hero's family, arrest them and go to Beijing. The family has been relocated, and the previous item of land will be rewarded to the disturbed people."Once he finds that the treacherous rich man has committed illegal acts, he will be punished with severe punishment.Songjiang Haomin Prince Xin made friends with officials, "violated the villagers and oppressed the good", and was "captured to the government, ordered by the local town, his family wealth was taken to the government, the land property was lost, and the population was transferred." The food chief Zhang Shijie and other 160 people Zhu Yuanzhang ordered all of them to be executed because of the private distribution of taxes and food and the extension of the deadline. Under the influence of Zhu Yuanzhang's policies, local officials also took advantage of humiliating landlords.For example, Xue Yan guarded Zhenjiang and enforced the law extremely strictly.Wang Guan, the prefect of Suzhou Prefecture, called all the wealthy households in the prefecture to the government office because the local people owed a lot of taxes and grains, and ordered them to take out their family savings to compensate for the common people.

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