Chapter 118 Section 5 Ming Dynasty: A Regressive Dynasty

Just like returning the sacrificial burial system to the ancestors, from the perspective of world history, the appearance of Zhu Yuanzhang caused a major degradation of China's social system and political civilization, causing China to go against the mainstream of world civilization since the Ming Dynasty, and forever lost its place in human civilization. leading position. The Ming Dynasty in the fourteenth century, compared with Europe, was much brighter on the surface.Europe in the 14th century was particularly unfortunate: the Black Death wiped out more than one-third of the population of Europe, and the "Hundred Years War" that turmoiled Northern Europe also began in this century, so people call it the "Dark Age" of Europe.In China, however, Zhu Yuanzhang created a very long period of peace, "Huazhou regained light", production resumed, and the eastern land was peaceful.

However, under the surface of one order and one chaos, there are two historical undercurrents in opposite directions. On the Continent, from the fourteenth century onwards, the long period of dormant medieval rule began to fragment.Because the popes and kings were busy fighting for power and fighting for power, they had no time to manage local affairs, many cities broke away from feudal rule and gained independence.The citizens of these cities raised money to buy self-government from the kings, to organize their own town halls and courts, and to establish their own laws.As a saying of the time goes, "the air of a city makes a man free."

In cities, people no longer bow down to kings and nobles. They devote themselves to business and enterprises, use their hands and minds to create wealth for themselves, and use wealth to build self-confidence. “From the very beginning, the freedmen of the borough displayed a self-confidence and an independence unheard of anywhere in Eurasia.” The essence of these cities was one big corporation. "All commercial laws are civil laws; all commercial ships are navy." These cities showed strong vitality as soon as they appeared. In 1380, 12 years after the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, Venice defeated Genoa and became the European sea city. overlord.

Since then, capitalist factors have gradually grown like mold in the crevices of feudal society, quickly destroying the decaying old system and making European society burst out with unprecedented energy. On the other side of Eurasia, the opposite was going on.Zhu Yuanzhang's social ideal has the essence of utopia.The principle of his rule is comprehensive social control, strictly controlling every move of every member of society within the power of the government, so as to completely eliminate any unstable factors.Zhu Yuanzhang turned the whole country into a big village, canceled the possibility of pluralistic and hierarchical development, and let bureaucrats do everything.Under his rule, Ming society became a big prison, officials at all levels were jailers, and all the people were prisoners.If the people overstepped a little, punishments would come immediately: "discharge", "beheading", "beating to death with sticks"... If the Yuan Dynasty established by a foreign race is regarded as an accident in the development of Chinese history, then as a Han regime, Zhu Yuanzhang directly The successor was the Song Dynasty, and Zhu Yuanzhang himself declared that his goal of struggle was "the mountains and rivers are dying to the land of China, and the sun and the moon reopen the Great Song Dynasty."However, the basic trends of the Ming and Song dynasties were exactly the opposite.

The Song Dynasty was a dynasty rich in "modern" factors. Most people think that China's heyday occurred in the Tang Dynasty, while the Song Dynasty is usually regarded as a declining dynasty.However, from an economic point of view, the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty are not on the same order of magnitude at all.Taking the national fiscal revenue as a comparison, the national fiscal revenue of the Song Dynasty was three times the highest amount of the Tang Dynasty. More convincing is the composition of fiscal revenue.In most periods of Chinese history, agricultural tax was the main source of national revenue, but in the Song Dynasty, industrial and commercial tax accounted for 70% of fiscal revenue, and agricultural tax accounted for only 30%.This shows that the financial revenue of the Song Dynasty did not rely on increasing the exploitation of farmers, but was the result of the prosperity of industry and commerce and the improvement of productivity.

Sun Jilong said in "A Bird's Eye View of China's Millennium History" that the steel industry in the Song Dynasty was highly developed, and large enterprises usually employed hundreds of full-time industrial workers, while the government's two military factories employed as many as 8,000 workers.Taking 1078 as an example, the iron and steel industry in North China reached an annual output of 1.25 million tons, while Britain's annual output was only 76,000 tons in 1788, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The mining industry was developed in the Song Dynasty, and there were more than 100,000 miners in a copper mine in Qianshan, Xinzhou.Coal has become the capital's main source of energy. "There are millions of households in Biandu, all of whom rely on coal, and no one burns their salary." In addition, mining and metallurgy, paper making, porcelain making, silk weaving, and navigation industries were also highly developed in the Song Dynasty. There were many warehouses on both sides of the Yangtze River. Merchant ships from Guangzhou, Quanzhou and Fuzhou sailed to Arabia, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan.As a sign of economic development, the number of copper coins minted in the Song Dynasty was more than ten times that of the Tang Dynasty.Song Shenzong's annual coinage was 5 million guan, while the Tang Dynasty's Xuanzong Dynasty minted only 320,000 guan.The Song Dynasty also invented paper money, and very "modern" financial instruments such as banks and checks appeared.

The Internet author "Jiangpub" said in a widely circulated article "China's Great Song Dynasty, the World's America", that in a sense, the Song Dynasty was the first in the world to adopt a macroeconomic control method similar to Keynesianism Wang Anshi was the first economic expert in the world to try to carry out macro-control on the national economy. Due to its strong economic strength, the Song Dynasty was also the only dynasty in Chinese history that insisted on the recruitment system for a long time.The Song Dynasty supported a large number of soldiers with huge fiscal revenue, which was largely in the nature of transfer payments or social security. It was the government that paid the price for the country's transformation from an agricultural society to an industrial and commercial society.Western "modernization" standards, such as the development of market economy and currency economy, urbanization, civilized politics, new breakthroughs in science and technology, secularization of thought and culture, etc., have already appeared in China in the Song Dynasty, earlier than in the West At least five hundred years.

American comparative historian McNeil said in The Pursuit of Power: "The assumptions of this book are: China's move to market regulation around the millennium upended a crucial balance of world history. I believe the Chinese example kicked off a millennium quest by humanity to discover what can be achieved in terms of coordinating large-scale behavior in terms of prices and private or small groups (partnerships or corporations) regarding self-interest. " On the basis of the "modern" economic and social structure, the humanistic spirit of the Song Dynasty also achieved a breakthrough.

The Song Dynasty is one of the rare dynasties in Chinese history that "do not kill ministers" and share the world with scholar-bureaucrats.The literary and artistic works of the Song Dynasty are filled with an unprecedented sense of life and personal dignity. However, the Ming Dynasty created by Zhu Yuanzhang achieved a comprehensive great leap forward under the coordinates of the Song Dynasty.Huang Renyu, a historian of the Ming Dynasty, said, "The Ming Dynasty's attitude of restraint and retreat can also be said to be a long-term reaction after the failure of Wang Anshi's new law."The economic development of the Ming Dynasty was far behind that of the Song Dynasty.During Song Zhenzong’s era, the state’s fiscal revenue was 160 million taels of silver. According to Huang Renyu’s calculations, the average annual fiscal revenue of the Ming Dynasty during 1570-1580 was 30.78 million taels, which was only 19% of that of the Song Dynasty.More importantly, agricultural tax accounted for 81% of the total revenue of the Ming government, while industrial and commercial miscellaneous taxes only accounted for 12% of total revenue.This figure tells us how backward the economic structure of the Ming Dynasty was compared to that of the Song Dynasty.

The emergence of the economic miracle in the Song Dynasty was mainly due to the highly developed commodity economy.After becoming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang was keenly aware of the challenges that the growth of businessmen's wealth might bring to the regime. Therefore, under his rule, China's tradition of suppressing business for thousands of years was further carried forward. He repeatedly said: "Farming and mulberry are the foundation of food and clothing." In his opinion, only activities that actually produce food and cotton are labor.He said: "In ancient times, every man plowed the land and every woman weaved cloth, so there was no danger of floods and droughts, and no hunger or cold. Since people learned to do business and enjoy themselves, the industry of farming and mulberry was useless... Therefore, we must The key to feeding everyone in the world is to prohibit commerce."

He stipulated that when businessmen go out to do business, they must be strictly examined by the government and issued a pass.If you go out casually without a pass, anyone can take the businessman to the government and punish him with the crime of "swimming and eating".He also explicitly eliminated all commercial brokers and middlemen in the country, allowing only a minimum of commercial activities to exist.Businessmen are listed as the bottom class in society, and they will face all kinds of difficulties and restrictions if they want to take the exam or become an official. The fiscal revenue of the Song Dynasty had been monetized long ago, but Zhu Yuanzhang reversed the taxation system for hundreds of years and restored the inefficient system of expropriation in kind and labor service. "The orders and prison guards in the yamen are all sent by the villages in rotation. Even stationery, paper, and even repairs such as tables, chairs, benches, and office buildings are also sporadically collected from the villagers." The supply line, a military town for frontier defense, may receive aid from ten or twenty counties; a county can also pay property to more than a dozen institutions." "In the 20th year of Wanli, Shen Bang, the magistrate of Wanping County in Beijing, claimed that he To pay to twenty-seven different institutions, the total amount is not more than two thousand taels of silver." In Huang Renyu's words, the characteristics of the Hongwu type of finance are "lack of vision, no imagination, blindly saving, focusing on the economy in the countryside, focusing only on primitive production...disregarding investment for the sake of the future." "This practice of maintaining a backward agricultural economy and unwillingness to develop commerce and finance is the main reason why China has evolved from the advanced Han and Tang Dynasties to the backward Ming and Qing Dynasties in the world." In the Song Dynasty, local economic development was uneven, and the economy of some areas was highly developed. The south of the Yangtze River was ahead of the North China, and the east was more developed than the west. This drove the national economic growth.Zhu Yuanzhang always advocated egalitarianism, prevented some areas from taking the lead in economic development, and forced the leading areas to catch up with the backward areas. Currency was highly developed in the Song Dynasty, while the minting industry was suppressed in the Ming Dynasty, and sometimes even the trading of gold, silver and copper coins was banned.It is estimated that the amount of coins minted in the entire Ming Dynasty did not exceed tens of millions of coins, which is only equivalent to the amount of coins minted in the Northern Song Dynasty in two years.Because of the lack of currency and the inability to trade, many small merchants and hawkers were unemployed. "In 1544, people died in Beijing because of 'lack of money law'." Both the Song and Yuan Dynasties were world empires that gained enormous wealth from overseas trade.However, the Ming Dynasty implemented strict measures to close the country. Not only did Chinese people not be allowed to go to sea, but the number of "tributary trade" conducted by foreign countries was also extremely low.Sun Jilong said: "China's escape from the Mongolian world system in the Ming Dynasty ... inevitably made a natural reaction against the general trend of the world. China has begun to move towards the sea since the end of the Tang Dynasty, but now this new trend has become 'deviant' and is considered On the head of the 'foreign race' Mongolia, and the newly emerged state-locked mentality is said to be 'Hua Zhou Chongguang'." The humanistic spirit of the Ming Dynasty was greatly degraded, returning to the ancestors three generations ago.In the Ming Dynasty founded by Zhu Yuanzhang, the degree of contempt for ministers was the highest in history.As soon as the emperor was upset, he pushed the minister to the ground, took off his pants and beat him with a stick. Whereas the Tang and Song dynasties presented themselves to the world as a vibrant, outward-looking competitive society, the Ming dynasty under Zhu Yuanzhang was inward-looking, anti-competitive, and unimaginative.The three-hundred-year-old Ming Dynasty founded by Zhu Yuanzhang was one of the most stable dynasties in Chinese history.These three hundred years were the most turbulent period in European history.But it was in these turmoil that modern Western civilization was born.Huang Renyu said, "When Cromwell defeated Charles I at Marston Moor, it was 1644 AD, which was also the year when the so-called Emperor Chongzhen went to Meishan in China, which was also the year when the Ming Dynasty died."The three hundred years of the Ming Dynasty was an era in which China and the West passed by while retreating sharply and making great strides forward.