Daming Yuanfu

Chapter 1916
"There are more than a thousand taels of silver and 30 taels of gold." At that time, the West had not yet entered the era of great navigation, and the profits of maritime trade were already so amazing.Precisely because of the huge profits from overseas trade since the Tang and Song Dynasties, after Zhu Di succeeded to the throne, he rebuilt the Shipbuilding Department, which had been abolished by Japanese pirates, and established a relatively complete overseas trade management system.

After everything was ready, the Ming court used Zheng He as an envoy to lead the fleet to shuttle between countries, and carried out official trade under the banner of offering rewards, opening up an economic blood transfusion artery for the Ming Dynasty, which was waiting for prosperity after the "Jing Nan" .By selling high-end Chinese products such as porcelain and silk overseas, Daming made a huge profit from the difference in commodity prices.

The main goods purchased by Zheng He's fleet and brought back home were pepper and sumu. According to the records in "Yingya Shenglan", the price of pepper in Sumatra, where it was produced, was only 0.01 taels per catty.According to the "Minghuidian", the domestic market value of pepper in the Hongwu period reached 0.2 taels/jin, and the price difference was ten times that of the place of origin!

Peppers don’t take up much space, so even with shipping, the margins are huge.Who can say that the upper echelon of Ming Dynasty is simply thinking about "satisfied extravagance and extreme desire" and ignores this huge profit margin?It is precisely because of Zheng He's voyages that this profit-making idea can be realized.

It can be seen from this that Zheng He's voyages to the West not only did not intend to "make ends meet", but instead brought huge wealth to the Ming Dynasty.

Yan Congjian expressed the "win-win" effect of going to the West in his "Zhouyu Zhouzhilu": "Since Yongle was changed to the Yuan Dynasty, envoys have been sent out to recruit Haifan, and the contributions have been completed. Rare goods and treasures, the previous generation It is hoped that the stock market will be flooded. The poor will be ordered to buy more, or they will become rich, and the state will also be envied." The benefits of the voyage to the economy and the country's finances can be seen here.

More importantly, Zheng He's voyages not only directly brought huge benefits to the imperial court, but also brought considerable economic spillover effects to the localities, driving the development of many local economies.

Take Taicang Prefecture, Suzhou Prefecture, the starting place of Zheng He's voyages to the West as an example—"He and others have been envoys from the beginning of Yongle, and they have passed by seven times. Each commanded tens of thousands of officers and soldiers, and more than a hundred seagoing ships, and sailed from Taicang."

According to Zheng Heqin's "Tongfan Deeds Records" stele, all of Zheng He's seven voyages to the West started from Liujiagang in Taicang, and each time he returned to Liujiagang.

Zheng He's mission not only brought back rare treasures and special products from Western countries, but also sent batches of foreign missions there, exporting a large amount of Chinese products to countries all over the world.

In this way, Liujiagang in Taicang was not only an important port on the southeast coast, but also became the shore of the Ming court's foreign exchanges.The people of the Ming Dynasty praised its grand occasion and said: "At the age of Yongle and Taiping, the people at home and abroad dare not accept it. Nine barbarians and hundreds of people pay tribute to the local things. The roads and roads belong to each other. The big ships come in order. Taicang restores the old rules."

Later, the Qing people traced back to its prosperity and said: "At that time, there was an endless stream of Western tribute ships, and Xian liked the convenience, so it was called the first wharf in the world, and all the rare treasures from all over the world were collected."

It was not Taicang that benefited from the voyages to the West. In fact, within the territory of the Ming Dynasty, the economies of many places in the south of the Yangtze River and even Lingnan were quickly affected by the driving effect of the voyages to the West.

For example, Foshan at that time changed from an "isolated village of cast iron" to a commodity in operation.The price of some daily necessities that need to be imported from abroad has been reduced from luxury goods to daily necessities.From the Yongle Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty, which adhered to the maritime embargo policy during the Zhu Yuanzhang period, economic prosperity in the southeast quickly appeared in just ten years. Zheng He's voyages to the West obviously contributed a lot.

From all these, Gao Yushi came to a very clear conclusion: Daming obtained a huge amount of wealth through Zheng He's voyages of official trade.

So here comes the question, since a lot of wealth has been obtained and the development of related regions and related industries has been driven, how did it become unsustainable in the end?
In fact, it is not difficult to answer this question, especially for Gao Pragmatic, who has experienced the era of state-owned enterprise restructuring in the Red Dynasty, this question is simply a bonus question.

Zheng He's voyages to the West belonged to official monopoly activities, which did not respect economic laws at all, and the royal family monopolized the income from overseas trade, and did not give private maritime merchants and powerful nobles a chance to share the pie.

Coupled with the inability to correctly deal with the surplus of goods brought about by overseas trade, the emperor simply and rudely adopted the method of "discounting salaries", which caused court officials not only to not benefit from overseas trade, but to lose their interests.In this way, the uneven distribution among interest groups of different classes finally led to Zheng He's voyages being vilified as "a labor of money and waste of money" until the flag died down.

Gao Pragmatism believes that there are three important points about this issue:
In particular, the trade income brought by Zheng He's voyages mainly benefited the royal family, but had more influence on folk calculations.

Judging from the goods brought back by Zheng He's fleet, most of them are luxury goods such as sumac and pepper. These materials can basically only be consumed and played by the upper class, and it is difficult to have direct output.

This is why Liu Daxia, who was still working as a driver during Xuanzong's time, dared to openly question Zheng He's voyages to the West: "Three guarantees to the West cost hundreds of thousands of money and food, and tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians died. Even if you get a rare treasure, it will benefit the country." ?”

In addition, Zheng He's voyages had a great social impact.Since a large amount of silver and gold flowed to Daming through trade surplus, it not only solved the shortage of precious metals in China since Tang and Song Dynasties, but also caused the currency to depreciate by nearly 30% during the Yongle period.

At the same time, due to heavy shipbuilding tasks, a large number of craftsmen in the southern shipbuilding area fled, and the number of shipbuilding households in the Nanjing area dropped by more than three quarters, which affected the social economy to a certain extent. The expenditure is much higher than that of Zhu Di, which can also be proved from here.

Similarly, this is also the reason why the imperial court issued an edict that "all purchases, comprador objects, and construction materials such as sea boats, wood, and plant materials should be stopped" at the same time as Xuanzong's period. Oppression and hurt a lot.

In particular, the official overseas trade system of the Ming Dynasty greatly inhibited and affected the opportunities for private maritime merchants and powerful aristocrats to profit from overseas trade, making them resolutely oppose voyages to the West due to uneven distribution.

At that time, the official monopoly policy of overseas trade adopted by the Ming court was very disrespectful of economic laws. Not only was it incompatible with the encouragement of private overseas trade in the Song Dynasty, but it was also inferior to the "official-owned ship" system of official-private partnerships in the Yuan Dynasty that was criticized by later generations. .

In any case, the "official ship" is better than a public-private joint state monopoly and mixed management system. The government pays the capital and ships, hires private maritime agents to operate, and after the profit is divided between the government and the private, it is more or less a bit There are traces of "market economy" in it.

However, the Ming court's monopoly management system is tantamount to "eating independence". While making a lot of money, it harms the interests of the vast number of maritime merchants and powerful aristocrats who are trying to share the pie. Resolutely resist, but also spread the private wind among the people.

Of course, these social classes whose interests have been damaged will not sit still, so they use various means to oppose the voyage to the West, and thus form a solid community of interests. As mentioned in the first volume of this book, Xu Jie once directed his family to directly participate in the maritime private.

At that time, the coastal frontier defense, facing the private team with the central government as the umbrella, had reached the sensational point of "the guards dare not ask, the guards cannot stop, and the public law has been deceived for hundreds of years." As a result, the court lost a lot of customs duties. .

It was under such circumstances that Gao Gong felt at the time that instead of doing so, it would be better to announce the liberalization of overseas trade management rights, the so-called "listen to maritime trade, and levy its own taxes", so that at least tariffs can be guaranteed.

Under such a collusion of interests, even if the emperor made repeated orders to request a sea ban, what he could only face was the yin and yang violations of the civil servants.Therefore, Zheng He's voyage to the Western Seas was actually an act of protecting the official maritime foreign trade from being obstructed by other forces. Of course, it would also be strongly opposed by the civil official group and the interest groups behind it.

In the third case, in order to deal with the decline in commodity prices brought about by excess imports, the imperial court adopted internal dumping and "discounting salaries" as a loss method, which aggravated the imperial court officials' resentment and disgust for voyages to the West.

Since Saiyang is a government-run trade, its planned business model and inefficiency brought about by bureaucratic management inevitably lead to a dead end of economic law.

For example, pepper prices continue to be low as a large number of peppers flood the market.In just two years, by the fifth year of Yongle, the price of pepper in Daming had dropped by 0.1 taels per catty, down to half of what it was during the Hongwu period.As a result, the profit margin has shrunk significantly, and the market has become saturated, and the pepper and sumac in the royal warehouse have piled up like mountains.

In order to solve the problem of pepper backlog, they did not want to reduce profits. Therefore, starting from the fifth year of Yongle, the Ming court used the method of "discount reward" and "discount salary" to distribute sumac and pepper as bonuses or assets to lower-level officials, especially the upper-level officials. civil and military officials.What's more, during the distribution process, the imperial court refused to sell it to officials and officials at all levels at a low price.

In the 0.1th year of Yongle, when the market value of pepper was already lower than 0.2 taels/jin, the price of [-] taels/jin in the Hongwu period was still used for the discount.This is too ruthless. You must know that the salary of the Ming court was the lowest in history.The big officials dared to be angry but did not dare, so they all regarded Zheng He's voyages as a way to cut their salaries.

In this way, Zheng He's voyage to the Western Seas instantly became an act of "wasting people and money" under the condemnation of officials.In the first year of Zhengtong, the cabinet, in the name of the young Emperor Yingzong, ordered the Nanjing garrison eunuch Wang Jinghong to stop purchasing and building, and the Western trade in the early Ming Dynasty officially ended.

However, something "funny" happened right away.To the surprise of the imperial court officials, before the voyages to the west, which were "laboring the people and costing money", the imperial court did not have any financial pressure even though they spent a lot of money. However, during the Xuande period when the Western voyages were stopped, the minister Huang Fu complained repeatedly: the treasury was empty. , "How will the recruitment be helped" everywhere.This also shows from one aspect that voyages to the West can bring huge benefits to the treasury.

Speaking of this, I can fully explain why Gao Yushi insists on bringing together a large number of people to engage in maritime trade. On the surface, Jinghua’s main "partner" is the Xungui Group, but secretly there are many high-pragmatists. Officials of the Real School of "holding shares on behalf of others" have been involved for many years.

According to a highly pragmatic point of view, the more important people involved, not only the less pressure he will face in the DPRK, but even if these people do not run factories or farms, but only purchase goods in their hometowns or spheres of influence, they will not be able to Can strongly stimulate the local economic development.

Therefore, Gao Wu never eats alone when it comes to maritime trade, and even Jiangnan dignitaries, chaebols, and maritime merchants can also join Jinghua's caravans to sail together (but as I said before, Jinghua charges a certain percentage of escort fees).

What is his purpose in doing this?It is natural to allow maritime trade to benefit a wider range of people, so that more people can see the benefits of maritime trade and be benignly affected by maritime trade, thereby stimulating trade and invigorating the economy.

This method is very familiar with high pragmatism.The Hongchao economy has developed from the hard-working "three to one supplement" in the early stage of the reform to a global manufacturing center in the later stage. There are 41 industrial categories, 207 industrial categories, and 666 industrial subcategories listed in the United Nations Industrial Classification. Among them, only Hongchao owns all industrial categories and is truly the only industrial overlord of the "full industrial chain" in the world.

The development process throughout his previous life obviously had a huge impact on him, so he also engaged in various industries in Daming according to the resource endowments of various places.

why?
Because from Gao Pragmatism's point of view, the title of "Industrial Overlord" is naturally tailor-made for China!
Regardless of the innate conditions such as geomorphology and resource endowment, or the acquired conditions such as the tradition of big government, the influence of Confucian authoritative political ideology, and the people's highly secular thinking (that is, despise gods and people, compared with the influence of religious thinking)... You are welcome to put it bluntly. If China is not an industrial hegemon, then history has gone astray.

But when we get here, we have to come back to the story: if the emperor wants to recruit the inner court to engage in the Royal Fleet again, and not to engage in the navy, but to engage in maritime trade, then this matter is very debatable.

The Ming royal family has a criminal record in this matter. If Gao Wushi does not object clearly, then as he said just now, it is better to resolutely resign immediately and go home to retire.

Going home for the elderly can at least rely on the achievements of "the first half of his life" to keep his fame for the first time, but if he helps the emperor to set up a monopoly of the royal sea trade, then the four words "smell for thousands of years" are basically booked in advance by someone Gao.

It doesn't matter if it has a bad reputation for thousands of years. The problem is that it will definitely not work out like this, and it will do great harm to the people.This is like Chongzhen's layoffs in order to save some civil servants' wages, and Li Zicheng was laid off in the end.

Seeing Gao Wushi's solemn and determined expression, Liu Ping knew that this matter was in serious trouble.But he also knew that the emperor had high hopes for this matter, if he went back to report like this, his future would be very bad.

There was no other way, Liu Ping got up with a bitter face, bowed down again and said: "Ge Lao, save me! Ge Lao, if the slaves go back and talk to the emperor like this, I'm afraid it won't even save Uncle Yao's face... Ge Lao , Ge Lao, please always point out the slaves in the face of your uncle Yao, and the slaves will also repay the favor of the elders if they tie grass titles in the next life!"
-
Thank you book friend "Cao Mianzi" for your support, thank you!
Thanks to book friends "Cao Mianzi" and "milan123" for their monthly ticket support, thank you!
Thank you book friends and "iron" for their support of 6 monthly tickets, thank you!

(End of this chapter)