I open a history tutorial class in Daming

Chapter 156 Giving up treatment
Song Shen remained silent, his eyes scanning the faces of the people below several times.

All the students looked at him expectantly. Obviously, the question Zhu Yuanzhang had just asked was something they were very concerned about.

After a while, Song Shen sighed and asked:

"So we're not going to talk about the test paper today, but this?"

Zhu Yuanzhang immediately said:

"It's not that I won't talk about it. Since you have such a high opinion of Emperor Yongzheng, and he lived in a later era, you can let him talk about it during the discussion later."

"The class has just begun, who said there's no end to it? After he finishes talking about the land tax and so on, it's the same if we look at the test paper again!"

Old Zhu’s calculations were making a loud noise.

He had to first listen to Song Shen talk about what kind of reforms Yongzheng had made and how he had done them, which would show how capable this person was.

If you don't have the ability, then what's the point of discussing the test paper later? Get out of here right away!

And if this is a good emperor with real talent...

Hehe, the era is relatively later, and it happens to be the dynasty after their Ming Dynasty. Even if they are Tartars, it doesn't hurt to listen to his opinions on national policies. Song Shen is in charge here, so there will be no pitfalls. Who knows, there may be some unexpected gains.

"That's fine."

Seeing that no one opposed Zhu Yuanzhang's words, and many even expressed agreement and excitement, Song Shen was speechless for a moment.

These people are really optimistic.

How could they think that Yongzheng’s story could be told in just a few words?
"You all have information on your desk, take a look?"

Song Shen worked quickly on his office computer, sorted out the three policies of the Yongzheng period, and then directly put them on paper, giving each student a copy.

He also arranged:
"My new classmate, I will call you classmate Yinzhen from now on. Please find a seat and sit down. After you sit down, you will also have a copy of the information they have."

Yinzhen sat down as instructed, feeling confused.

Then, he saw with his own eyes a piece of paper slowly emerging from the void in front of him.

Moreover, the fonts on the paper are extremely neat, with each word being horizontally and vertically straight and of uniform size, which is simply impossible to achieve with human power.

He widened his eyes and read the contents of the paper carefully.

It was indeed something he promoted personally.

But even Yinzhen himself did not think that the content above would have such a great impact.

Zhu Yuanzhang also looked at her with eyes wide open. His body was faster than his brain and he raised his hand to ask:

"Sir, could you tell me more about this land tax?"

All the emperors, generals and ministers sat up straight, looking at Song Shen with burning eyes, and also at Yinzhen who had just sat down.

Of course Song Shen guessed their reaction.

There should be no emperor who can resist the temptation of equalizing the land tax...

He smiled and said:

"If we want to talk about the land tax, we have to talk about the prerequisites first."

"In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, either out of the emperor's own needs or for the collective interests of the civil servants, they wanted to win over the gentry, that is, officials in office or retired, and scholars who had achieved fame but had not yet become officials, and grant them various privileges and tax exemptions."

"Later, the gentry used various means to achieve the point where they did not have to serve or pay taxes, and all these obligations and taxes were borne by the common people."

"In addition to various miscellaneous items, the people also had to pay Dingyin, or head tax, which further led to the growing gap between the rich and the poor. When famine years came, the poor either sold their land at a low price or borrowed high-interest loans. The final result was land annexation."

"Since the candidates, officials and their families, including their slaves, were exempt from taxes and corvée service, many common people offered their land to the gentry in order to avoid taxes, or simply sold their land and willingly became tenants of the gentry."

"Others simply fled famine and found a place to live in seclusion to avoid the supervision of the imperial court."

"The exact data is of course no longer verifiable, but later scholars believe that at least half of the population was missing from government records during the peak period of the Ming Dynasty, and therefore taxes could not be collected."

“It’s a vicious cycle.”

"Don't raise taxes? The government has no money. Raise taxes? It will increase the burden on the people and cause all kinds of problems, causing a large number of farmers to go bankrupt and hide away from paying taxes, further damaging the country's fiscal structure. Want to reform? There will be resistance again, and in the end the court can only drink poison to quench thirst. Under such circumstances, the gentry became extremely fat, but many originally normal farmers became tenants, slaves, or became refugees and hungry people."

"It's not just the Ming Dynasty. If we consider it from an economic perspective, most dynasties in history were destroyed by land annexation."

"You can think about it carefully, is this true?"

The classroom was very quiet, and all the students had a thoughtful look on their faces.

Li Shimin thought for a while in silence - although there were no so-called gentry in the Tang Dynasty, there were aristocratic families. He had previously heard Mr. Song talk about the An-Shi Rebellion and the Huang Chao Uprising. If the people did not hate the Five Surnames and Seven Families and other second- and third-class aristocratic families, how could Huang Chao massacre all the wealthy families in the city of Chang'an?

Huang Chao was not from a wealthy family, and most of the people who followed him in the rebellion were refugees. It can be said that they ended up without a home to return to and no land to farm because the powerful took all the land into their own pockets, forcing the people to rebel.

Zhu Yuanzhang's face was even more exciting.

He himself was born into a peasant family and had herded cattle for a landlord when he was a child. He knew only too well the hardships of the lower-class people.

No one present understood the importance of the land issue better than he did.

But the problem is that no one has been able to solve this problem from ancient times to the present. Zhu Yuanzhang was just diligent and capable, not a genius selected from thousands of people and touched by an immortal. He could not think of any good way to solve such a specific and inevitable problem as land annexation.

So Zhu could only issue a series of decrees to reduce the burden on the people.

He knew that this thing was only a temporary solution, but what else could he do? This had been the case for thousands of years and many dynasties.

Song Shen coughed twice to draw everyone's attention back before continuing speaking.

"The Qing dynasty inherited the Ming system."

"Before Yongzheng, the Qing Dynasty collected taxes just like the Ming Dynasty before it, collecting taxes and capitation taxes. The capitation tax is a head tax. The amount of money per person multiplied by the number of people in your family is the capitation tax. Whether you are rich or poor, you have to pay the same capitation tax. This seems fair, but it has a lot of drawbacks."

"The rich and the poor pay the same tax, but the poor are obviously burdened more, while the rich do not feel anything. Small families, with limited wealth and too many people and little land, will gradually be unable to pay the tax, and will be willing to sell their land to become tenants for the landlords, or even be forced to sell their land and bodies, or drown their babies."

"Gentlemen did not have to pay taxes and had money, so they naturally bought land desperately. The rich thus annexed land. By the reign of Emperor Kangxi, the main land of the Qing Dynasty was gradually concentrated in the hands of bureaucrats. The problem of land annexation began to become serious. Land was annexed every year, the gap between the rich and the poor became increasingly uneven, and the peasant population grew, but they had no land."

"In a county, eleven people have land, and nineteen people have no land."

"Farmers bear heavy taxes, but because they have no land and cannot produce, they are unable to afford it, which leads to an increase in refugees. Feudal landlords monopolize land but do not pay taxes, continue to expand farms and conceal the truth. The land subject to taxation decreases year by year, and the taxes that the Qing court can receive naturally decrease year by year. When the country encounters financial difficulties and needs a large amount of money, it can only increase taxes on the poor, which will cause the poor to be overwhelmed and a new round of peasant uprisings will break out."

"In order to avoid taxes, some people began to make larger donations, flee famine, or hide, making it impossible for the state to collect taxes. In order to pay taxes, bureaucrats constantly made up excuses to shift this part of the tax to other farmers, creating a vicious cycle and causing the court's finances to continue to decline. In addition, in order to enrich themselves, local officials would impose heavy taxes on the people below and underreport the population to the higher authorities, causing corruption in the government and another sharp drop in the court's income."

"By the end of Kangxi's reign and before Yongzheng's, the Qing court's finances and administration were already in jeopardy. If no changes were made, the history of the Ming Dynasty would repeat itself in the Qing Dynasty."

"This is the problem that Yongzheng, or our classmate Yinzhen, faced when he took over the throne."

"Of course, the problems he faced back then were not limited to this one, but the reform of equalizing the land tax is the most praised by later generations, so I will focus on discussing it."

"It can be said that Yinzhen only needed to come up with the reform of equalizing the land tax to be called a good emperor."

Song Shen pointed at Yongzheng, who looked serious but actually had his ears red from all the praise:

"If it weren't for him, the Qing Dynasty might have been destroyed long ago. He was the one who really prolonged the life of the Qing Dynasty for a hundred years."

He single-handedly extended the dynasty's life...

Ying Zheng, Liu Che, Li Shimin, and Zhu Yuanzhang all looked at him sideways, and other descendants of the Zhu family also looked at Yinzhen in astonishment.

With the achievements of the Qin Emperor, Han Wu, Tang Zong and Ming Zu, they naturally don't have to be jealous of the achievements of other emperors. If we really compare them, who can compare with them?
But this did not prevent them from being jealous of the Qing Dynasty for having such a leader who could revive it.

Ying Zheng's eyes were dark and unclear. If his will had not been tampered with in history, and Fusu had still ascended the throne, Fusu would have been better off with more experience, at least he would not have died in the second generation. But he also knew very well that according to Fusu's original temperament, he would never do anything too cruel, because this was not something a benevolent monarch could or dare to do.

Liu Che narrowed his eyes. He now knew that the Han Dynasty had actually perished once. If it weren't for the good fortune of Emperor Guangwu Liu Xiu, there would be no such thing as the former and latter Han dynasties. He also turned the tide with his own strength... Could it be that the contribution of Yinzhen in front of him to the Qing Dynasty could be comparable to the contribution of Emperor Guangwu to the revival of the Han Dynasty? Not really!

As for Li Shimin...

Li Shimin closed his eyes, his mind full of the immortal half-emperor Li Longji, who was kicked out of the tutoring class by him.

He felt that he had added fuel to the fire a little too early.

If Li Longji could see Yongzheng, maybe he would be ashamed and turn over a new leaf. They were both rulers who created the prosperous times, and Yongzheng was not much younger than Li Longji. Damn it, why couldn't Li Longji be as ambitious as him? !

Finally, there is Zhu Yuanzhang.

Zhu Yuanzhang's face turned as red as pig liver. His eyes passed over Zhu Biao and Zhu Di, his two sons who were quite capable, and fell directly on the faces of Zhu Qizhen and Zhu Youjian.

He clenched his hands into fists, the muscles on his cheeks were bitten hard, and his fists became stiff too.

Why?

Why is it that the Aisin-Gioro Tartar family could produce someone like Yongzheng, who was capable and resourceful, dared to think and fight, and dared to offend the literati and gentry all over the world, while the Zhu family only has such troublesome people?
God, do you think this is fair?
Song Shen, who took everything in, said: …

Even if they didn't say anything, cursing with their faces was already dirty enough.

Song Shen roughly guessed what these people were thinking, so he took the initiative to explain:
"Don't think that the Qing Dynasty was lucky to have an emperor like Yongzheng."

"This classmate Yinzhen's experience of ascending the throne was also thrilling. Although it was not as exciting as the Xuanwu Gate Incident of classmate Li Shimin or the Jingnan Campaign of classmate Zhu Di, he also survived the struggle of nine brothers for decades to the end."

"Please think carefully, everyone. The good emperors in history may be the founders of a country, may have had a rough fate, or may have been gifted. Most of those who can stand out from a crowd of people have outstanding abilities."

"Student Yinzhen can be cruel to his brothers, but he is even crueler to himself."

"The reason why I said earlier that he was very similar to Zhu Yuanzhang was because he was determined to be a dictator. He dared to kill anyone who stood in his way. Not only did he dare to kill his brothers, he also killed the meritorious officials who supported him to ascend the throne. When he killed corrupt officials, he did not even show mercy to his own relatives."

"When officials went to court during the Yongzheng reign, it was probably similar to the Hongwu reign. If you were not careful, your black hat and your head would fall off together."

"As an ordinary person, Yinzhen might be cruel and ruthless, but as an emperor, he was calm and ruthless."

"Because he grew up in a ruthless and cruel environment. Politics is supposed to be like this."

The classroom fell silent again.

Extremely quiet.

After an unknown amount of time, Zhu Di suddenly raised his hand.

he asks:

"In that case, I would like to ask you, sir, do you think there are any problems with the points about training the princes and royal family in the national policy I set before?"

Thinking of Zhu Di's strategy of raising Gu, Song Shen's mouth twitched.

Although many emperors would raise Gu when training their heirs... but it was still a bit too much for Zhu Di to write it directly into the national policy.

He was silent for a moment, then looked at Yinzhen:
"Student Yinzhen, regarding your father, Emperor Kangxi, allowing the nine of you to fight among yourselves for the throne, what do you think...?"

Upon hearing this, Yinzhen's face changed and he spoke without hesitation:
"I will never let my son make the same mistake again!"

Zhu Di:?
(End of this chapter)