Chapter 1239: Deep Contradictions

In the controversy between the government and the opposition about the racecourse, Zhao Yu found that the arguments in it would eventually be attributed to one point, that is, 'fighting for land with the people', and any reasons such as wasting the country and increasing the burden on the people were all paved for this, anyway, it was necessary to change the current land policy, not to suppress buying and selling, and to restore the ancestral system. In short, it is to oppose the practice of retaining official land that has been implemented since the time of Qiongzhou, and instead push the land to the market.

The current land policy was formulated by Zhao Yu in order to solve the food self-sufficiency and financial difficulties when he entered Qiongzhou, turning the original abandoned official land and abandoned private land into official ownership, and then calling the displaced people to cultivate through preferential policies, and the imperial court collected a share of the land rent to obtain a fixed income. Later, after recovering Jiangnan, he continued this practice, confiscating the land occupied by the Mongols, traitors and traitors, except for a part of the landless people, the rest was divided into official land, and handed over to the displaced people to cultivate under the same policy, so as to solve the financial shortage of the local government and obtain a stable source of military food.

This land policy can be said to have a very significant effect on how to establish a foothold in Qiongzhou and the financial difficulties in the early stage of entering the south of the Yangtze River and the military expenditure of the Northern Expedition. Therefore, Zhao Yu continued this land policy in dealing with the newly collected Lianghuai and other areas, implemented the 'equalization system' to realize that everyone has their own land, and still classified a large amount of abandoned land as official land.

Zhao Yu combed through the list of sparse people, and found an interesting phenomenon, in addition to the court officials, the so-called common people are the village gentry and scholars. The common people have no opinion on the land-first policy, and according to the reaction of the bureau, they are still very supportive, and it is clear that they are all represented in this debate. From this and that, he suddenly realized that he had touched the interests of some people.

Everyone knows that land was the most important means of production in ancient times, and for a centralized bureaucratic system that ruled the agricultural civilization, ensuring that the grassroots producers, who account for the vast majority of the population, would not "flee to the mountains and forests and become thieves" was undoubtedly a life-and-death and overriding political task.

The key to the implementation of this task lies in the fact that "the tiller has his land". As a result, from the Han Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty, the "Famous Land System", "Land Grant System", "Land Occupation and Teaching Field System", "Uniform Land System" and so on continued to appear, the core goal of which was to suppress mergers and restrict or even prohibit land sales, so as to ensure that the majority of the population had the minimum means of production. But land annexation is a difficult problem to solve.

Because in the feudal society, at the beginning, the politics were clear and the land was relatively average, but with the change of time, the successors of the emperor of the Kai Dynasty gradually became mediocre or even mediocre, resulting in the landlord class and the bureaucratic class using wealth and rights to oppress the peasants, resulting in serious land annexation. After the contradictions intensified to a certain extent, an uprising broke out, a new dynasty was established, and then the cycle continued, as was the case in the Song Dynasty.

After the founding of the Song Dynasty, in order to appease the Wuxun group and the landlord class, when recovering the military power of the founding fathers such as Shi Shouxin and Gao Huaide, Zhao Kuangyin encouraged them to return to their hometowns to retire, spend their old age in peace, and benefit their children and grandchildren. For this reason, he acquiesced in the buying and selling of land by the landlord class, and connived at the wanton annexation of land by the powerful landlords. Although this economic policy created favorable conditions for the social and economic development of the time and maintained the stability of the regime, it left hidden dangers for future generations.

After Zhao Yu came to this world, he involuntarily got involved in the political struggle, and he also understood Zhao Kuangyin's distress in his heart. He may not have known what the consequences of conniving at land annexation would be, but in the political environment of the time, he had to make compromises in order to maintain his position, and the price he made to appease and buy off the scholar class was not small - officials enjoyed tax exemption and exemption privileges in exchange for the support of the scholar and landlord class, and suppressed the Wuxun group.

However, Zhao Yu thought that this cheap ancestor was wrong for not adjusting the land policy in time when the Shidafu group had just risen and had not yet controlled the entire court after the power was consolidated, so that the tail could not be lost. It may also have a plan, but it died before it could be implemented, and the successor Emperor Taizong had doubts about 'improper position' from the beginning, so he naturally did not dare to offend those scholars and doctors who grasped the guidance of public opinion, and continued to choose to compromise and maintain the existing preferential treatment policy.

Later successors to the throne also maintained the preferential treatment policy, which gradually formed a practice and consolidated it at the legal level. Under the Song Dynasty's policy of 'respecting Confucianism', the status of scholars was improved, and the imperial examination system also allowed more people to advance to the bureaucratic class, forming a huge group capable of controlling the government and politics, and then giving rise to a new class, the gentry.

According to Zhao Yu's understanding, the so-called gentry are people who have made meritorious contributions to the imperial examination, not nobles in the traditional sense. They can be divided into two groups, one group of alternate bureaucrats who have not yet officially become officials after they have gained fame, and the other group of bureaucrats who have retired home after becoming officials, that is, bureaucrats who have become officials. This part of the people have the right to tax exemption because of their fame in the imperial examination, and they have become a privileged class. Of course, they can also be classified as a category of people, because they are originally people in the bureaucratic system, and they have a very close relationship with the imperial court, and they are basically the front and back of the bureaucracy.

The gentry were most likely to accumulate land when the government was expropriating, because the rich were reluctant to hold land as long as they were not privileged. Because of the ownership of land, the land rent is not collected much, but the tax is extremely high, and sometimes the tax is higher than the ground rent, so what is the use of the land? The government's expropriation can make the cost of owning land unacceptably high.

So in this case, it is particularly important to have preferential exemptions. In order to escape the heavy taxes and servitude, some small and medium-sized landlords and wealthier yeoman farmers preferred to take refuge in the gentry and the families of the powerful and made false contracts, falsely claiming that the land had been pawned and sold, and became tenants, but in fact they still cultivated the original land, but they still gave part of the harvest to the gentry and the families of the powerful and powerful.

The gentry's wanton annexation of land will inevitably directly affect the country's tax revenue, and Zhao Yu also thought that this was something that Zhao Kuangyin did not expect at the beginning, but it also gave rise to new contradictions. The increased pressure on the country's finances has led to an increase in taxes and social unrest. The bankruptcy of yeoman farmers and common landlords has led to the intensification of contradictions between the government and the people, and there have been constant incidents of officials forcing the people to rebel.

However, Zhao Yu found a very interesting phenomenon, that is, many 'grass coles' played the banner like Song Jiang in "Water Margin", anti-court but not anti-emperor, such an interesting thing He only understood the reason after researching it.

Because the land annexation is becoming more and more serious, those gentry and landlords enjoy the privilege of tax exemption and exemption from labor, so the imperial court can only pass on the taxes to those civilian landlords and yeoman farmers, so if the government oppresses the common people, generally speaking, it will not oppress the tenants, basically they are bullying people who are directly related to the government, and they are mainly these two people.

The gentry, who enjoyed the right of preferential exemption, were also the most disgusted group among all social strata. Not because they are rich, but because they are privileged. It's hard to say whether they were the richest people in society at that time, but if they didn't pay taxes, taxes fell on other people's heads. It is precisely because the gentry class is a class that relies most closely on the government and the court that anti-gentry is almost equivalent to anti-court.

In addition, the Song Dynasty had the most occurrences in addition to the popular rebellion, which was the so-called 'tenant rebellion' and 'slave rebellion'. Let's watch "Water Margin" to know that if the owner and the owner have a good relationship, they can rebel, if the owner and the owner themselves are in a mess, how can they rebel? If the dealer wants to rebel against the owner, generally speaking, he will not get along with the court, and even many slaves and tenants are willing to go to the government to sue their masters, saying that their masters want to rebel, but they are like supporters of the court.

Zhao Yu found from many cases that wherever tenant rebellion is most likely to occur, there are very few civil uprisings. He pondered for a long time before he figured out the relationship, because the key point of the popular uprising was that the people wanted to join together. However, most of the tenant peasants have no land and no other means of production, so they can only rely on the landlord and rely on their only labor force to cultivate for the landlord.

Therefore, if the tenant farmers rebelled at that time, they basically rebelled with the landlords. To put it simply, it was the landlord who led the tenants to rebel together. It was not the tenants who fought against the landlords, but the landlords who led the tenants to fight against the imperial court. If the landlord does not rebel, generally speaking, the tenant will not rebel, and if he rebels, he will harass the owner. Therefore, the so-called contradiction between the lord and the tenant will not lead to the rebellion of the tenant peasants against the court, and all the rebellion against the court is related to the rebellion of the officials and the people, and it is related to the contradiction between the government and the people.

In this way, in the contradiction between the government and the people, there are basically no tenant farmers, but homesteaders. The reason why these small landlords rebelled was that they had no privileges, they had to bear the imperial grain and state taxes, and they had to divide the duties of different levels of government according to their households. But the tenant farmers did not bear the money and grain, but only the land rent. And they are often extorted by privileged people, so they will rebel. And they have a lot of tenants, they have a lot of power in the locality, and even have their own soil fences, but the land can't be taken away, and the tenants can't be taken away, so they don't want to move, so they occupy the mountains as kings, rob houses, kill officials and rebel, and become so-called bandits.

Another contradiction that Zhao Hao understands is the contradiction between the emperor and the imperial court, and this contradiction runs through the Song Dynasty, which is also the deepest problem among all kinds of contradictions, which leads to continuous open and secret battles between the two sides, and finally everyone ends up together. And the outbreak of this incident, he thought that it was nothing more than that, and the horse farm was just an introduction......

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