At the end of Qin, I became a son of the plane

Chapter 491: Difficulty in Managing the State-Owned Economy and Pleading for Mercy
On the 17th day of the fourth month of the 20th year of the Han calendar, in Chang'an City, Zhangtai Palace.

Except for the Imperial Censor Wu Guang and the Chief Justice Wu Jun who were on patrol outside, all the other officials of the Three Dukes and Nine Ministers of the Han Dynasty court held a grand court meeting here.

The attendant distributed a thick file of data on the changes in Chen County during the two months of the pilot program to the nine ministers of the Han Dynasty. Everyone looked at the data quietly.

The Han Dynasty was quite pragmatic, and with the habits brought by Xu Fan from later generations, officials of the Han Dynasty could submit memorials without flowerbeds and brocade, but they could not do without groups of data and comparative lists. After the high-level officials of the Han Dynasty got used to it, they also liked this method of expressing development with numbers very much, for no other reason, it was simple and efficient.

After entering the industrialization stage, the government affairs of the Han Dynasty increased exponentially. The government affairs of the three dukes and nine ministers of the Han Dynasty were very busy and did not have much time to read all those flowery nonsense. Numbers allowed them to grasp information efficiently.

Prime Minister Ye Teng said: "After Chen County began to carry out the government-run reform, various economic data improved rapidly. Closed workshops reopened and recruited craftsmen. Unemployed craftsmen got stable jobs. Taxes are also rising. It's just that it has not recovered to the level before the crisis due to external drag, but the current effect is very good. Especially when other major industrial counties are still in the quagmire of crisis, Chen County can be said to have performed very well."

"This official economic model, in which the imperial court holds a major share of the economy, only requires accountants to compile local economic data and arrange the profits that each industry deserves. In this way, the imperial court can adjust the production capacity of an industry to prevent overcapacity, which will eventually lead to a crisis. This is an unprecedented breakthrough for the imperial court."

"Kuaiji County Governor Wang Ling, Sanchuan County Governor Cao Sheng, Nanyang County Governor Chen Rui, Handan County Governor Xiahou Ying and other high-ranking officials also wrote to the emperor to request official reforms in their counties to deal with the economic crisis."

Zhou Bo's reforms were very likely to attract the attention of the Han court. In fact, the Han court had already anticipated this economic crisis. After all, the court announced every year how many textile factories, steam looms, spinning spindles, and cloth had been added throughout the country. Since the beginning of last year, the textile industry had been in a situation of oversupply.

This made the Han Dynasty's top leaders very helpless. They had issued warnings more than a year in advance, hoping that textile factories would reduce production and invest funds in other industries to mitigate the outbreak of the economic crisis. However, there was no effect at all. Not to mention that the imperial court failed to control private textile factories, it even failed to control workshops at the local county and prefecture levels.

Although the number of textile factories did not increase in the statistical table, the number of small-scale textile factories in the private sector was still increasing. In order to obtain tax revenue, local counties took the initiative to conceal the facts from the officials who were conducting the investigation, resulting in a large number of unreported textile factories not being counted. Ultimately, this crisis caught the Han court off guard. According to their estimates, the crisis should have occurred this year or early next year, but the actual crisis occurred more than a year in advance.

Officials pursue stability. An industrial model like this that is prone to crises at any time is disliked by Han officials from top to bottom in the entire Han Dynasty. More importantly, the official-run model of reform can greatly increase the power of local Han officials. Therefore, Zhou Bo and the Legalists' official-run model are highly praised by many officials. Zhou Bo and his team have received attention from all levels of the Han Dynasty since the beginning of the reform.

When Zhou Bo and his colleagues' reforms had begun to show results, the prefects of the Han Dynasty, especially those in the large industrial counties, could not wait to carry out reforms. This was because the more industrialized the counties were, the more damage they suffered from the economic crisis. On the contrary, the agricultural counties did not suffer much damage.

Shusun Tong, the chief of the imperial clan, immediately stepped forward and said, "I oppose expanding the pilot program. Legalist reforms have always been effective quickly, but the consequences are also extremely serious. Now it has only been two months, and neither the results nor the consequences have been apparent. I oppose expanding the reform at this time."

Fu Shengye, the education officer, stepped out and said, "I object, too. Two years ago, the court asked the Shaofu to sell off its textile factories because it was difficult to manage too many workshops. Now the government-run reform has not only added hundreds of Han officials, but also hundreds of workshops. The workshops added in this county are more than those managed by the entire Shaofu. If this model is promoted in the 50 counties of the Han Dynasty, the court will have to add tens of thousands of workshops, a hundred times more. How can the Shaofu manage it?"

"Moreover, there will be hundreds of Han officials in each county, and tens of thousands of Han officials in fifty counties of the Han Dynasty. The already large number of Han officials in the court will increase again, increasing the pressure on the court's finances. I am worried that the money earned by the court will be eaten up by these increased workshops, craftsmen, and Han officials, just like the tyrannical Qin Dynasty. The huge financial income of the tyrannical Qin Dynasty was all used to feed hundreds of thousands of Qin officials, but they were still not satisfied and had to make good people in the world into prisoners to support them. During the tyrannical Qin Dynasty, there were as many as three million prisoners in the world, accounting for one-tenth of the people in the world. The Qin officials were so violent that even God could not stand it. That's why Your Majesty made a call, and the people of the world supported Your Majesty and destroyed the tyrannical Qin Dynasty. If we continue to increase the number of Han officials, the future of the tyrannical Qin Dynasty will be the fate of the Han Dynasty."

Shaofu Ling Chen Chui said calmly: "Don't always bring up the tyrannical Qin. My Great Han has far more territory, population, and tax revenue than the tyrannical Qin. Now everyone is just trying to find a way to solve the economic crisis. If you can't do anything about it, don't stop others who want to solve the problem. Raising questions is what the monthly reporter and Chang'an gossipmongers like to do. The emperor asked us to become the Nine Ministers to solve the problems encountered by the Great Han."

What Chen Chui despises most are these Confucians, who always like to sit back and talk, and always use the tyrannical Qin Dynasty to scare people, but they can't come up with solutions to the problems, and they don't even realize what era it is now.

Fu Sheng snorted coldly: "This is obviously a dead end that the tyrannical Qin has taken, and there are still people who want to take it. This official reminds you if there are any problems."

Cao Shen saw that the two were getting angry, so he stopped them from arguing and said, "Don't be impatient. The main purpose of holding a meeting now is to solve the current economic crisis, not to argue for the sake of arguing. I think we should take a closer look at this official-run model, not only its advantages, but also its flaws. At least now the flaws are obvious. Chen County alone is going to increase 400 Han officials. If this official-run model is fully promoted, the plan will expand to a level larger than that of the Shaofu. Adding 2 to 3 Han officials is not a small matter."

"There is also the problem of management. Local counties have problems managing dozens of workshops. Now they are asked to manage hundreds of workshops. Do they have the ability to do so? Can the court supervise these Han officials? These are all big problems. My opinion is to wait and see. When the advantages and disadvantages of the official reform are exposed, the court will make the decision and use them."

At this time, Zhang Cang, the chief accountant, said, "Let me tell you my opinion on the official reform. Prime Minister Cao said that he wanted to increase the number of accountants by 2 to 3. In my opinion, this number is far from enough, and even doubling it may not be enough."

"Hundreds of people report to the accounting officials to calculate how much food, eggs, meat, cloth, salt, sugar and fuel a city needs to consume, and how many people are needed to transport these goods, how many warehouses are needed to store the goods, the efficiency of local production, how much external goods are needed, and how to reasonably distribute these daily necessities. This process is not only very complicated, but the accounting officials must not have any selfish motives, because this is a very sophisticated system, and the lack of any link will cause the system to jam."

After listening to Zhang Cang's words, most of the Nine Ministers became even more confused, because in their view, solving the problem through government-run operations was nothing more than them holding the power and waving their hands to allocate supplies. What could be so difficult about that?
Only Xu Fan knew the difficulty of this management system. This system was like a delicate machine that required all parts to work together. As long as one part had a problem, the system would have problems, causing a chain reaction. Workers who could not buy food would make mistakes at work, and the efficiency of the workshop would decline, affecting output. This would then affect a series of downstream chains, eventually forming a vicious cycle and leading to system collapse. This had already been practiced by later generations.

This system is so advanced that some parts of it are beyond the times and can even be said to be the pinnacle of human management. No one has ever been able to fully unleash the power of this system. On the Internet in later generations, countless keyboard warriors said that this can only be done in the AI ​​era. It's a pity that the AI ​​era has come, but there is no such system for AI to manage. AI can't do the things that it should do most.

Zhang Cang could only smile bitterly and said, "Now the emperor only asks me and other accountants to compile statistics for the Han Dynasty, but thousands of accountants have to use abacuses day and night. At the same time, we have to recruit three times as many students from the arithmetic academy to help with the calculations. The mechanical abacus was invented some time ago to relieve a lot of pressure for us, but it only reduces some pressure. If the material needs of the whole world have to be calculated and distributed by accountants, 6 to 7 accountants may not be enough."

Chen Chui was surprised and said, "How can it be so difficult? Chen County has a few thousand Han officials who can manage a county with a population of one million well."

Zhang Cang said helplessly: "The current management model of the court is different from the official economic management model. Previously, most of the Han officials were used to collect taxes. The daily people still managed themselves according to the moral norms formed over thousands of years. Most of the daily affairs of the people were governed by themselves. The court was not under much pressure. There were only infrastructure construction, handling the daily conflicts of the people, and some military disputes on the border. In fact, there were not many things." "And now in the official model, the people's eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, sleeping, birth, aging, illness and death have to be managed, and the affairs have increased dozens of times. It is equivalent to the court managing the millions of people in Chenjun in the way of the army.

Managing an army of one million is extremely tedious and complicated. Over thousands of years, the maximum number of troops that famous ministers and generals could command was no more than 60. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to manage an army of 5000 million?

The nine ministers of the Han Dynasty present had either personally commanded the army or provided logistics for the Han army. They naturally understood the difficulty of supporting an army of 600,000. It almost required the entire court to give up all other government affairs to support this army. Now the number had to be nearly 100 times higher, and they all felt terrified just thinking about it.

After Zhang Cang's statement, the Han high-ranking officials gave up the idea of ​​promoting the state-run economy and decided to continue to see how Zhou Bo's pilot project in Chen County went.

After the meeting, Chen Lin, the Grand Coachman, Chen Chui, the Junior Treasurer, Wu Sheng, the Military General, Deng Zong, the Military Supervisor, and other elders of Chen County found Xu Fan.

Then Chen Lin said with some embarrassment: "We are entrusted by those old brothers. Please show some leniency and let those boys at home go."

Xu Fan arranged a large number of meritorious descendants of the Han Dynasty in the four major money bank systems. What happened in Chen County also happened to a greater or lesser extent in other counties. After all, those who possessed huge amounts of wealth and yet could abide by the law could almost become saints. Ordinary money bank clerks could be restrained by the system, but these meritorious descendants were either sons of marquises or earls, and each of them held high positions of power in the Han Dynasty and had connections everywhere. The money bank system had little restraint on them at all.

But among this group of people, as long as one person suddenly came up with a financial innovation and came up with the bridge loan model, everyone in this group would learn it. In their eyes, the Han Dynasty was conquered by their fathers, so it was nothing to fleece the Han Dynasty. In their minds, this might not even be considered fleecing. The Han Dynasty was already theirs, and it was not a matter of fleecing if their family members took their own things.

Not to mention, they were only fleecing the merchants. They did not swallow up the loans from the court, but also paid 10% interest. This can be said to be without interfering with either public or private interests. No one thought there was anything wrong with this, and they were even complacent about their own cleverness.

But they have not thought about how to repay these debts during the economic crisis. These people thought that with their power, no businessman would dare to owe them money. However, during the economic crisis, merchants just could not come up with the money, and then the perfect business model had problems. These merchants went bankrupt one by one, and they could not get back the money they loaned out.

This time, after hearing the case in Chen County, Wu Guang and Wu Jun split into two groups. Wu Guang headed north while Wu Jun headed south. Various problems in the money house system of the Han Dynasty, which had existed for more than a decade, broke out, and most of them were related to these descendants of meritorious service.

Xu Fan was helpless about this. There are gains and losses in everything. He wanted to use the government-run money houses to regulate the finances of the Han Dynasty, so he would have to bear the losses of embezzlement and the consequences of the resurgence of loan sharking among the people.

In just over a decade, the four major banks of the Han Dynasty began to show signs of big corporate disease. There was nothing that could be done about it, because the four major banks had in fact monopolized the finance of the Han Dynasty. Without sufficient competitors, they naturally had no sense of urgency.

Not to mention that these banks belonged to the imperial court. They did not get much of the money earned, but they would be punished if something went wrong. Under such circumstances, it was inevitable that the four major banks of the Han Dynasty would be run conservatively.

But the demand for private financing will not disappear. When money cannot be obtained through formal channels, people have to resort to some crooked ways. This creates fertile ground for the second generation of corruption among the Han people. Since they can make more than 20% profit by reselling, and they don’t even need to pay the capital themselves, this kind of no-cost business naturally has many people jealous.

With the interference of these nobles, it was even difficult for the money houses to carry out their regular lending business, because since everyone went to the money houses to borrow money, who would come to them? This would affect their income. Even Xu Fan did not notice the changes in the Han Dynasty Money House, which led to Wu Guang discovering a large number of cases of harming the public interest and enriching himself.

Now Xu Fan is thinking about whether to open up certain financial markets, invite back those private money houses, strengthen supervision over them, and allow them to lend to those micro-enterprises.

But when Xu Fan thought about what the private workshop owners did in later generations, he was afraid that if these loopholes were really opened to them, they would use the people's money to pay for themselves.

He has experienced the power and speed of financial harvesting. If you open a workshop, you have to exploit your craftsmen and earn only a few dollars a year. The leeks are like rice, and you have to harvest them slowly with a sickle.

When the financial printing press is turned on, it is like using a combine harvester to harvest leeks. That is why so many workshop owners in later generations want to go public. How much money can you make by opening a workshop? If you put it on the stock market, you can sell the workshop and get back the money you earned over 100 years. Who would be willing to work hard to harvest leeks with a sickle? And when the stock price drops, they can use the money to buy back the workshop. After getting the money, the workshop is still theirs. The key is that the whole process is still legal.

Neither side is a good thing, and now Xu Fan is caught in a dilemma. At first, he was complacent about his approach, thinking that he had solved a major hidden danger of the Han Dynasty, but in the end, he created a bigger hidden danger. If he continues to Anxi nobles in the money house system, future emperors will definitely learn from his approach.

By then, it will be like the Jinyiwei of the Ming Dynasty, a spy organization that everyone was afraid of in the early Ming Dynasty, because the emperors of the Ming Dynasty inserted nobles into the Jinyiwei, one emperor appointed a thousand households, another emperor appointed a commander, and the top positions were all occupied by the second generation, so this spy organization was abolished. In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, there were no more achievements, so that the emperors after that only used the eunuch organizations such as the East Factory and the West Factory.

However, the more the industrial system develops, the more important the financial system will become. If these nobles really occupy the money bank system and control the economic lifeline of the Han Dynasty, it is hard to say which harm is more serious, this or entering the Han Dynasty court.

Of course, people have different perspectives and different opinions. In the eyes of Chen Lin and others, these nobles entered the money house system as a compensation from the emperor for their political frustration. After all, no matter how much money one had in the Han Dynasty, it was not as good as becoming a Han official. Now Wu Guang was holding them so tightly, which was a bit too much.

(End of this chapter)