late Qing Dynasty arrest

After the naval exercise in Yantai, Li Guolou followed Li Hongzhang to carry out inspections in the Zhili area, held a meeting of thousands of people in each provincial capital, and brought the spring breeze of the Qing Dynasty reform to all places.Generally, Li Hongzhang will make the main report, Li Guolou will make the deputy report, and local officials will make the concluding remarks. A conference will last for half a day.At the reception banquet in the evening, Li Guolou brought only one wife to attend, which not only maintained his dignity, but also made the singer with ulterior motives retreat in spite of difficulties.

More than a month of meeting and discussing government affairs made Li Guolou miserable. Not to mention the busy work, he couldn't take care of his own business.Being an official meant a lot of meetings. Li Hongzhang received documents from the court every day and had to consult Li Guolou for his opinions. He was almost used as a book office.

Li Guolou complained a few words, wanting to return to Beijing sooner, not wanting to deal with local officials.He was severely criticized by Li Hongzhang, and he was warned about the principle of restraint and patience.If you want to have a smooth government order, you need to deal with the relationship with your subordinates. Face-to-face communication is the most effective. Administrative orders are not only based on a piece of paper, but communication with people and proper resolution of various problems are the way to be an official.Li Hongzhang also spoke a lot of long speeches about the suffering of the local people, which made Li Guolou stand for a long time.

Li Guolou sincerely made a thousand-character written inspection, which was forgiven by Li Hongzhang.Taking advantage of the gap between meeting the sea, Li Guolou also inspected the local people's conditions, sympathized with the difficulties of the officials below, and took the four wives to do warm-up activities.

Most of the official roads along the way are tile-roofed houses, but as long as they are trails, most of them are thatched houses. Beggars gather in lively towns, and the people of the Qing Dynasty struggled on the poverty line.Wearing rags in the cold wind, holding a broken bowl and a dog-beating stick, the beggar immediately regained his spirit when he saw the horse team, and knelt on the ground begging for money. [

Li Guolou watched this scene all the way, and his heart became heavy.He did not make much contribution to rural construction, and only carried out land reform in disguise, but he did not shake the roots of the rural gentry class. The rural areas are still poor and backward, and the poor are still poor.His road of industrial restructuring in the Qing Dynasty did not benefit the majority of farmers, and it also made the urban and rural areas more divided. This is a bad omen, and it will cause more people to develop a hatred of the rich.

How to improve the living standards of the majority of farmers?It was the first time Li Guolou had such an idea.During the subsequent inspections, Li Guolou appeared in the countryside, discussing this issue of people's livelihood with local officials.

The domains of nobles and nobles in the Qing Dynasty shrunk compared with the previous dynasty, and the annexation of land by bureaucrats and gentry increased.The activities of merchants annexing land have become quite prominent.After the Qing Dynasty entered the customs, some aristocratic farms in the Ming Dynasty were changed to renamed fields, which was a measure to convert Huangzhuang into civilian farms.Although large-scale enclosures were carried out in the Gyeonggi area in the early Qing Dynasty and a large number of Huangzhuang banner lands were established, they were gradually transformed into private lands later.Therefore, compared with the Ming Dynasty, the territory of Zhuangtian, the territory of nobles and nobles, has actually shrunk.However, bureaucrats and gentry other than the royal family and nobles still occupy a large amount of land, and with the passage of time, the strength of this part of the landlord class has developed, at least there is no sign of weakening.

The reason why bureaucrats can quickly annex a large amount of land does not rely solely on his salary.The official salaries of bureaucrats in the Qing Dynasty were quite low.For a first- and second-rank official, the annual salary is only a little over 100 taels.During the Yongzheng period, in addition to the regular salary, the so-called Yanglian was added, but on average, the Yanglian was only six times the regular salary, and it could not be fully guaranteed.Obviously, it is impossible to satisfy the bureaucrats' huge desire for land by relying solely on regular salaries and maintaining integrity.The reason why bureaucrats are able to concentrate a large amount of land is mainly due to their privileged status, corruption and bribery, and plundering.

Officialdom has always been a place for corruption and bribery, regular salary income can be calculated, and income from corruption and bribery can be calculated according to the law.A governor's annual salary is no more than one hundred taels, while a governor's office receives more than 11 taels of rites from his subordinates every year in Guizhou, and more than 90 taels in Shandong.If we say that, on average, Yanglian is equivalent to six times the regular salary, then, in terms of etiquette alone, it is equivalent to more than [-] times the regular salary.As for illegal income other than rituals, it is even worse.

Relying on their privileged status, the feudal bureaucrats plundered the land.The land annexed by bureaucrats is often in his office.

Another characteristic of the distribution of land rights is that the activities of merchants annexing land are prominent and eye-catching.

The merger of land by merchants is closely related to the activity of commercial capital.Bureaucratic landlords annexed land to a large extent by relying on political power, while businessmen annexed land mainly relied on economic power.

When political power plays a leading role in the merger of land, the transfer of commercial capital to land lacks necessary guarantees, and thus lacks corresponding motivation.

At this time, nobles, bureaucrats, and gentry were still privileged landlords.However, their privileged status has been weakened in the Ming Dynasty, and the influence of merchants has increased with the expansion of the commodity and currency economy.Ticket merchants in Shanxi, salt merchants in Huaihe River, Guangdong merchants, Fujian maritime merchants, Huizhou merchants in Anhui, Dongting merchants in Jiangsu, etc., have all formed merchant groups with a capital of tens of thousands.These big businessmen took advantage of their strong economic strength to carry out a large number of mergers and acquisitions of land.

Merchant annexation of land seems to be inferior to bureaucrats in terms of quantity.But they are very active. The funds in their hands have relatively high liquidity. Wherever there is an opportunity to annex land, they will come upon hearing the news.Shanxi merchants went as far as Henan to acquire land, Huizhou merchants went to northern Jiangsu to buy land, and Guangdong merchants went to Guangxi to buy land.In the thirteen provinces including Shandong and Shanxi, there are a lot of facts about "purchasing acres of land in this city with the people of that city".In Shandong province alone, there are as many as 61 counties.

Due to the greater mobility of merchant capital, merchants who annex land can buy land at lower prices when farmers suffer from famine and hunger.Droughts occurred in Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui, Hubei and other provinces. Salt merchants gathered in Yangzhou, Hankou, and Huizhou planned to cross the border to buy production for profit.There is no doubt that this way of annexing land has brought double disasters to farmers.

In the process of merchants annexing land, usury is a powerful tool.Merchants who annex land, or when the crops are scarce and the price of grain is high, discount the loan to the farmers who are short of food, charge high interest, exploit the farmers to the point of bankruptcy, and then "return the land and houses" to achieve the purpose of annexing the farmers' land .Or accept peasants to pawn their land, and through pawning, looking for a piece of land, and finally selling it out, the usury will play a huge role.Shanxi merchants are typical examples of annexing land through usury.In the land sales in the rural areas of Fujian, there are a large number of cases of pawning land.In Jiangsu, there is even a kind of landlord who "mortgages more than land", and the interest on pawns is not only his main income, but also his main means of annexing land.

Annexation of land through usury is not limited to merchants.Bureaucratic landlords and even ordinary landlords are often usurers who exploit peasants.Great bureaucrats such as Gao Shiqi, Xu Qianxue, and He Shen all owned many pawnshops or bank accounts at the same time.It is said that "scholar-bureaucrats carry money in their pockets and ask for homes and fields, and they are the best", and "lending money for the benefit of the mother and son", in terms of "Fish and Meat Country Song", it is "a competition between knives and cones".Merchants still played an important role in the activities of usury annexing land, and there is no doubt that this way of annexation brought double suffering to farmers.

Li Guolou once made a fortune in the country. Taking advantage of a wave of rushing into Shandong, he cooperated with the big landlord Wang of Qilitun to enclose land in Shandong, occupying nearly ten thousand mu of land without showing mountains or dew.Although he set an example later, he donated all the enclosed land, built ten thousand mu of land enclosed in Shandong into a large farm, and recruited refugees in the form of state ownership, so as to invite fame and try out his land reform.But he didn't want to serve the country and the people at the beginning, but used despicable means to make ill-gotten gains by relying on his uncle Li Hongzhang's brand.

But now Li Guolou's ideological realm has made a great leap forward, and he has long stopped doing things to compete with the people for profit, but instead feeds back the chicks, trying to find a way out for the [-] million farmers.

At this time, the population of the Qing Dynasty exploded. In order to solve the people's livelihood, the Qing government introduced many high-yielding crops, including corn, sweet potatoes, and potatoes from South America, and spread them everywhere.He also published a number of agricultural books to teach farmers how to grow corn, sweet potatoes and potatoes.It is precisely because of the outstanding contributions of high-yield crops such as sweet potatoes and potatoes that the people were not starved to death, and the Qing Dynasty survived the most dangerous era of wars and chaos in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

However, high-yielding crops such as sweet potatoes also have great weaknesses, that is, single nutrition, deviation in taste, and little value for further processing. It will inevitably affect the normal intellectual development of the human body.

High-yielding crops flourished from the early Qing Dynasty to the Qianlong period, and the "sweet potato prosperity" has already tasted bad results.The people became weak, and the quality of the race declined sharply. Adults in the Qing Dynasty were less than 1.7 meters tall and thin. Rickets was prevalent in rural areas, and disabled people with crooked melons and jujubes could be seen everywhere in cities and towns.This also caused the combat effectiveness of the Qing army to decline. The Qing army could not defeat the Eight-Power Allied Forces, and it also had racial weaknesses. [

The quality of race is also the key to victory or defeat. The Han people fought against the southern barbarians just by relying on their strength.Li Guolou's road to a prosperous country and a strong army, of course, must consider the combat effectiveness of soldiers. At this time, the gap between the yellow race and the white race is very large. It is related to facial expressions. Similarly, a normal Qing person and a foreigner stand together, and the comparison between the two immediately distinguishes the advantages and disadvantages.

Ordinary people eat two meals a day, half of which is rice, and they are considered rich peasants. Most farmers eat sweet potatoes and potatoes as their staple food.When Li Guolou was in the countryside, he looked at the rice tanks of farmers and cared about the yield per mu. He saw the big tank at the door of the farmhouse. poor.

Li Guolou lit up the night and wrote an article "The Urgency of Building a Chemical Fertilizer Plant in the Qing Dynasty", which discussed the reason why the yellow race became an inferior nation, not by victory on the battlefield, but by the improvement of race, to change the people The staple food structure of the country can make a country look brand new.It is necessary to apply chemical fertilizers on a large area to increase crop yields. As for the advantages and disadvantages of chemical fertilizers, we must also analyze them. We must let people abandon the idea of ​​fear, and rational fertilization will not produce adverse consequences.In the end, he denounced the evil results of land annexation by government and businessmen, and expressed the ideal of land to the tiller, but did not talk about a practical plan. The ideal society governed by people is the central idea of ​​his exposition.Li Guolou didn't dare to mention the idea of ​​"equalizing the rich and the poor". Wouldn't that cause a civil war? Knowing that it wouldn't work, he advocated an idealized society, and used high-sounding empty words as the conclusion.

Knowing that Li Hongzhang had the habit of reading books in the morning, Li Guolou left the post office early in the morning and went to Li Hongzhang's Baoding Zhili Governor's Mansion, where Li Hongzhang lived in the backyard.Li Guolou didn't need to report, but directly handed the paper to Li Hongzhang.

He yelled, "Uncle, Aunt, I'll do it myself." Li Guolou sat down to drink porridge, and said, "Uncle, I haven't slept all night, so you just look ahead. I can only contract to build a fertilizer plant." In the slave area, the main raw materials are phosphorus and potassium and the manufacture of some pesticides, which can increase the yield per mu by [-] to [-] percent, or even double it. The transportation cost will go up any further, and the common people cannot afford it, so they have to build in various places The fertilizer factory is beyond my reach, don't let me do it, I don't want to earn this money, it's for the benefit of the people."

Li Hongzhang was only interested in industry. After reading Li Guolou's brochure, he closed the brochure halfway through, and said, "Xiaolou, I am a layman with regard to agricultural issues. I have no right to speak in court. You can Discuss the gains and losses with Zuo Zongtang, first hand over the papers to the Ministry of Accounting, and let Shangzhen of the Ministry of Accounting study it. But don't be discouraged, Zhili and Liangjiang areas are up to you to try it out, I will blow the wind and use administrative means to let the common people use chemical fertilizers Yes, just do not lose money and be worthy of your conscience."

"Master Fu Xiang, the chemical fertilizer factory is related to people's livelihood. I operate it exclusively. I will withdraw the capital when the investment is recovered. In the future, I will let Jingshu operate it. This industry is a thousand times better than the silk and satin factory. The money I make can buy a Baoding mansion." Li Guolou told the truth. To be honest, he is not a Nezha with three heads and six arms, he always has a limit.If he is familiar with the introduction of foreign capital, he can find the French Minister Luo Shuya in the Tianjin Concession, or even the British Minister Wade, and he can compare the price difference.In the future, the trust will monopolize the chemical fertilizer industry and earn [-] million farmers' money. It is better to give Li Hongzhang a big gift, so that Li Hongzhang will take care of it and will not shirk the blame, and people's lives can be significantly improved.

Sure enough, Li Hongzhang took the bait immediately, picked up the brochure again, looked at it carefully this time, nodded frequently and said: "Well, building a chemical fertilizer plant with an annual output of 40 tons is better than me! Xiaolou, I can rest assured that you can do things before the end of the year." Go to Tianjin and talk business with foreigners, you are the most reliable."

Li Hongzhang was most at ease with Li Guolou, because only this grandson would not accept kickbacks from foreigners and harm the interests of the Qing Dynasty. The "Yantai Treaty" was signed. Although Li Guolou accepted a bribe from the British and took a garden house in Yantai. This was an unspoken rule in official diplomatic negotiations. He could not turn it over to the treasury, but Li Guolou truthfully reported to Li Hongzhang , doing things openly and aboveboard, worthy of the conscience of heaven and earth.As for Li Hongzhang letting him take it in, he followed the trend. Everyone was in the same silt pond, so the silt would come out and not be stained.