If the current Ming Dynasty was the Wanli era, Chongzhen might be able to identify with Huang Liji's political ideas. Compared with the Ming Dynasty, Dongyu was just a local ethnic rebellion with a population of less than one million.

If it weren't for the three major expeditions of Wanli, which led to the exhaustion of the elite soldiers in Liaodong, Nurhachi would have no chance to cause trouble.

And even if Nurhachi rebelled against the Ming, the blow to the prestige of the Ming Dynasty at this time was greater than the actual influence on the Ming society. Nurhachi's rebellion only affected the 2 or 3 million people in Liaodong, while the rebellion involved tens of millions of people in Guizhou, Sichuan, and Yunnan.

Those who paid attention to the rebellion were all officials in the court, because Liaodong was close to Jingshi. Once Liaodong is lost, the capital will have to directly face the army of the Later Jin, which will directly threaten the safety of the officials themselves, and they can't help but pay little attention to it.

On the other hand, the Lu'an Rebellion was at the junction of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan, and it was difficult for the rebel army to break out of Sichuan, which was surrounded by mountains. As long as the Houjin army broke through the Great Wall, it was a flat North China Plain, and in the face of the Houjin army, which was dominated by cavalry, the Ming Dynasty had no danger to defend.

But as long as Houjin is dragged out of the customs, so that Daming has time to quell the rebellion of luxury, recuperate for a few more years, and let Daming recover some vitality, then Houjin will not be able to do anything.

At that time, the Tumubao Incident was also so heroic, and he even knocked down the city of Beijing. But to this day, the Ming Dynasty is still there, but there is no such tribe as a tile thorn on the grassland. Therefore, although Huang Liji attaches great importance to the Donglu outside the Guan, but now that he is told that the Donglu will enter the customs to replace the Ming Dynasty, he must think that the person who said this is a madman who does not know the so-called.

With the population and size of the Ming Dynasty, the best way to deal with the barbarians of these grassland peoples is to wait for change. Because nomads may produce one or two genius leaders, but it is not possible to produce such genius leaders in every generation.

The nomadic people's habit of living in a fixed place leads to the rapid growth of these peoples due to the favorable weather, but also the decline of the entire tribe due to the sudden change of weather, because the nomadic people's ability to resist natural disasters is far less than that of agricultural people.

Maintaining the status quo and waiting for the enemy to decline by themselves, although this conservative political concept cannot allow the Ming Dynasty to eliminate the stubborn enemy on the grassland, is undoubtedly the most effective strategy to continue the Ming regime.

Moreover, this conservative political strategy is also the one that consumes the least resources. Because nothing has changed, there will naturally be no additional expenditure. And in today's Ming Dynasty, the world's land arrears have reached 30 percent, and in the past, the largest source of wealth in the Ming Dynasty, the Jiangnan region, some places have reached 5 percent.

Although there are more than seventy percent of the counties in arrears in other places in the Ming Dynasty, such as Shaanxi, these places are originally barren and account for a low proportion of the Ming Dynasty's tax revenue. The tax revenue of a county in Shaanxi is not as good as that of a county in the south of the Yangtze River.

But when Jiangnan, a place that accounts for 7 or 8 percent of Daming's wealth, defaults on nearly half of its taxes, it makes Daming's finances in crisis. In order to cope with this situation, on the one hand, the officials in charge have to cut various expenditures, such as disaster relief and water control. On the other hand, they had to suppress the magistrates to recover the debts.

However, in this era, those who dared to default on the national tax on imperial grain were either peasants who were bankrupt and could not pay taxes, or powerful local gentry and wealthy families. In the Jiangnan area, some small and medium-sized landlords simply threw themselves into the Donglin Party in order to evade taxes.

The Donglin Party members constantly fought against taxes in the local area in order to gain their own reputation, regardless of whether these taxes were justified or not. They didn't even care about what the imperial court would do to pay the soldiers' salaries, the relief of the victims of the disaster, the construction of basic roads, the investment in farmland and water conservancy facilities, and so on.

As long as the imperial court ran out of money, the Donglin Party either demanded that the emperor take out the money from the inner treasury or increase the land endowment, but they firmly opposed the emperor's collection of taxes from scholars and merchants, and the opening of the sea ban.

In the eyes of the Donglin Party, the emperor's inner treasury is a cash cow, as long as it is shaken, money will appear out of thin air. In this situation, those officials who were not Donglin Party members naturally sided with the emperor and carried out political suppression of the Donglin Party.

Because any official with a sense of crisis will find that what the Donglin Party has done is actually similar to the Liangshan thieves who are acting for the sky. Their slogans are extremely righteous, but what they do is the criminal act of robbing pedestrians and selling human flesh buns.

Huang Liji, as the first assistant of the cabinet, had to join forces with Wei Zhongxian to fight the Donglin Party in the DPRK in order to maintain the crumbling situation of the Ming Dynasty. But all he wants is to reduce some of Jiangnan's debts, so that Jiangnan's gentry can spit out a little fur to maintain the situation.

Huang Liji didn't want to risk the world's disapproval, learn from Zhang Jiangling's new policy reforms, offend everyone in the world, and finally end up in disrepute. As long as Da Ming can maintain it in his hands, his political ideals have been accomplished.

What Huang Liji wants is to maintain the status quo, so he will resolutely oppose any attempt by Zhu Youzhen to change intentionally. Because this is not only related to his personal net worth, but more importantly, it will also affect his posthumous name.

When Huang Liji's current status comes, there are only two things he cares about, one is to maintain the status quo of the Ming Dynasty and not to get worse; The other is to protect his political reputation and not end up being reviled by others.

And the key to these two things is that the Donglin Party cannot be allowed to return to power in the DPRK and China. Because after the Donglin Party members came to power, they would inevitably change the status quo and set off party struggle again. As the first assistant Huang Liji, who joined forces with Wei Zhongxian, it would definitely be impossible to maintain his political prestige.

So when Chongzhen agreed to recall the Donglin party, Huang Liji was completely restless. Because of this, when Chongzhen wanted to see him in private, Huang Liji also silently followed the eunuch.

He hoped to have a good talk with Chongzhen, if he couldn't stop the momentum of Donglin's resurgence, he would rather go to the office as soon as possible, so as not to be liquidated by the Donglin Party and finally suppressed as a member of the so-called eunuch party.

However, as a latecomer, although Chongzhen did not know much about the specific affairs of this era, he still knew about the fact that the end of the Ming Dynasty was in the Xiaoice River period. The time for Huang Liji to recuperate was completely impossible in the Chongzhen era.

The seventh year of the Apocalypse is considered a normal year, but after 17 years, natural disasters have continued, from droughts, floods, and locust plagues, which can be said to alternate rotations, and the affected places are all over the country. When they were finally starved to death due to natural disasters and killed by war, these unburied corpses piled up too much, leading to the great plague that swept through northern China. The Ming Dynasty was finally defeated by the combination of the Later Jin, the peasant rebel army, natural disasters and plagues.

For Zhu Youzhen, the most painful thing is that he knows the history of the last years of the Ming Dynasty, but what he wants to persuade is a Confucian scholar who believes: "Zi Bu is silent, strange and chaotic". If Zhu Youzhen told the truth, it is estimated that the first reaction of Lord Shoufu was to contact the officials and take care of him, the emperor who had lost his mind, and treat his illness.

For the civil officials of the Ming Dynasty, they would not let an emperor who seemed to be delirious come into contact with any political affairs, and even the Donglin Party members, who were inseparable from the eunuch party, would acquiesce in this way of disposing of it.

Therefore, Zhu Youzhen knew that when Huang Liji was talking about the future of the Ming Dynasty, many things would not be realized, and Huang Liji could not predict that natural disasters would occur frequently for many years. But he was the emperor of the Ming Dynasty and not a god, so he could not use what had not yet happened as a prophecy to warn Huang Liji's political considerations.

Regarding the psychology of civil officials such as Huang Liji, Zhu Youzhen actually still has some understanding. It's like a resident living on the edge of a hillside who is told by the government to leave their house because of the mudslide coming down soon.

But these residents think that the weather is very fine, how can there be a mudslide, and hide in their homes to survive. For Huang Liji, the death of Da Ming in Houjin is as unbelievable as hearing a mudslide on a sunny day.

Zhu Youzhen had to try to persuade the first assistant of the Ming Dynasty, and after he was silent for a long time, he replied to Huang Liji: "Mr. Huang is looking at my young age, so he doesn't want to tell me the true situation of the Ming Dynasty?" ”

"Your Majesty, where did you start here, what the old minister just said is the truth, and there is absolutely no false words." Huang Liji was suddenly frightened and defended himself. Although he concealed a lot of things, such as the bankruptcy of the lower-class civilians, the number of displaced people in the world is constantly increasing.

But in Huang Liji's view, these displaced people just came out to escape the famine because of the bad year. As long as the wind and rain are good for a year or two, these conditions will improve. There is no need for him to exaggerate, but it makes Chongzhen feel that Daming is in danger and must be reformed.

When Huang Liji was trying his best to defend himself, Zhu Youzhen waved his hand to interrupt his defense, and then said very calmly: "If this is Da Ming in the eyes of Shou Fu, then I have to say that Shou Fu You don't know enough about Da Ming's current situation." ”

Zhu Youzhen thought about it while organizing the language and said: "Shoufu, please listen to me first, when I was in the palace of the king, I once read an article called: Population Theory..."

Zhu Youzhen started with a family on the outskirts of Beijing, which was requisitioned by the government when Chengzu built Beijing City. The first generation was only a husband and wife, but after 30 years, it became a big family of 10 people, 60 years later it became a small family of more than 20 people, and today it is a large family of several villages and thousands of people.

From a family, it can be seen that in the more than 200 years of Chengping in the Ming Dynasty, the population has increased nearly 100 times. However, in the 26th year of Hongwu, the household department cleared up the world's acres of land, totaling 8,57,623 hectares. In the thirtieth year of Wanli, the fields under the world were clear, totaling 11,618,948 hectares of land.