warring states careerist

Chapter 725 Similarities and Differences
Once the caravan passed Linwu Pass, they gradually saw the village community.

The caravan does not stay in the village commune, nor does it retail in the village commune, but will choose to sell in large quantities to local merchants in the center of the city, and then resold by local merchants in Chu State.

As the upper reaches of the Xiangjiang River and the upper reaches of the Pearl River, Nanling area is an important watershed. Caravans need to transport goods to the upper reaches of the Xiangjiang River in Linwu, and then transport them along the river to the farthest Dongting area. The fleet also has a duty-free festival.

When passing by the village community, many local residents stopped on the road to watch.

There are not many real Chu people here, and most of them are barbarians from Cangwu and other places.

Linwu can be regarded as a typical frontier city of the Chu State. Although Linwu was established only a dozen years ago and is a new city, when it comes to the way of governance it is very old.

After the king of Chu compiled and trained the new army, on the one hand, he gathered the central power;

The king of Chu can't move the fiefdoms of some deep-rooted big families lightly, and can only adopt a compromise method.

On the one hand, it recognizes the hereditary power of the fiefdoms of those big families, and on the other hand, it builds counties on the basis of the fiefdoms, in an attempt to extend the central government's hand into the fiefdoms of those big nobles.

However, some soft persimmons rushed directly to the border areas at the beginning of the reform. It was impossible to implement effective direct rule in the border areas, so they had to delegate power, so that they had the power of governance, legal power, taxation power, and the right to start war in the border areas. It is also a country within a country.

Because of the powerful power of the aristocrats, the centralization reform of the king of Chu was very compromised, forming a three-level organization.

In the central directly-administered region, military meritorious honors are rewarded to the obvious non-hereditary military aristocrats such as Tonghou, Zhigui, and Zhuguo; the county dukes of the big aristocratic families are similar to the feudal states of the Han Dynasty, and sand is constantly added to them; the border areas are similar to the early Western Zhou Dynasty You can't control the closure of the country and don't care about it.

Linwu is an area where the Mohists became officials more than ten years ago to help the Chu State organize and train the new army and then set up troops after the reform. With the dual advantages of Chu State's military and culture, it is still using stones for the Cangwu Dongting in the border area. Barbarians of wood and bronze are crushing advantages.

Lord Linwu is also the new lord of Chu State. His original fief was in the Jianghan Plain, and he was not originally a lord, but he still had food.

In the process of capturing Cangwu and other places, Lord Linwu made great contributions and was able to become a feudal monarch. He took back the original Shiyi and entrusted Linwu to him.

Exchanging bad land for good land in the centrally administered area can not only strengthen the centralization of power, but also expand the frontiers. Receive his title".

However, in the early stage of reform, he could only do "reward for meritorious service" first, and not "receive nobles for no merit". If he dared to do this, the Qu, Jing, and Zhao clans would immediately rebel against the Qing emperor. There was such a big event as Qu Yijiu's defection to the Three Jin Dynasties.

Linwu Lord is the Zhuang family of Chu State, named Qi, a distant branch of the royal family, with the surname Mi.The De family originated from King Zhuang of Chu, and it is normal for the posthumous title to be a surname of a collateral branch.

When Linwu Lord Zhuang Qi came to Linwu, three thousand families of Chu people migrated together, forming the main body of Linwu City.

Relying on theocratic sacrifices as the basic structure of grassroots organizations, fifty households in the city make up one mile, and each mile has its own temple of the earth, the so-called sacrificial society.

In the affluent areas of Chu State, Li has a larger jurisdiction, so the sacrifices for sacrifices in each Li are also different.

Cows are used in large areas, pigs are used in middle areas, and pigs are used in small areas if they can be used.

And there is a large "Ji" altar in the city, which is the god of the five grains. All the ri come to offer tribute together and then the nobles preside over the sacrifice.

Fifty households make up one mile, and the original organizational structure is still followed to form a system similar to that of a village commune. Public land must be cultivated before private land can be cultivated.

In wartime, you need to join the army, and you also need to perform feudal obligations for the lord, including hunting, building cities, repairing, and so on.

Outside the city, the rule of Xiajun and Yimin was still adopted to maintain the originally backward clan communes, but the original village leaders were bought, economic privileges were given to them, and they were allowed to occupy more village land, so as to maintain local rule.

Lord Linwu's main ruling power lies within the city. Outside the city, his orders cannot reach the lowest level, but he can carry out activities such as taxation, conscription, and labor through the bribed village leaders.

In some more remote areas, there are even cases where local rulers "lead the crowd to vote" and are directly conferred the title of feudal monarch.

Linwu City can also be regarded as a standard classical colonial city, which is similar to the situation when the Western Zhou Dynasty divided the world. In the long run, this is the best way to assimilate, but it may take too long.

It has only been ten years since he was sealed in Linwu. With the introduction of technologies such as iron, ox farming, and gunpowder, the situation of land annexation has become quite serious in ten years.

The speed of this kind of land annexation was negligible in the Bronze Age, but with the promotion of iron tools such as ox farming, the speed of annexation increased significantly.

Because as an aristocrat, what you need is not labor rent, a controllable population serving in the military, not local wealth.

Therefore, it is impossible to loosen the shackles on the farmers. There is plenty of wasteland, but they can be allowed to flee, and the people survived. However, the strength of the nobles has been weakened. As nobles, this is an intolerable situation.

It is the most perfect aristocratic rule to maintain the peasants in a situation where they cannot buy more production tools, flee without money and tools, and flee without surplus food.

However, with the premature appearance of standard iron farm tools and cattle farming technology, Lord Linwu is not only an aristocrat, but also has another identity.

He has money, the income from the fiefdom, the ownership of the fiefdom land, and various goods that are continuously sent from Sishang.

So he used the power of the nobility to expropriate the people to reclaim wasteland, buy iron tools to cultivate cattle, go deep into remote mountainous areas to plunder the population, and constantly expand his land, and then he either managed the land, leased it, or divided it into his subordinates, and continued to expand. own power.

Opening land, mining, panning for gold, monopolizing income from the fiefdom's salt industry, and buying weapons have formed a development mode that is completely different from the South China Sea controlled by the Mohists.

The Mohism in the South China Sea region exists as a "regime". Once the situation in the north is settled down, through immigration and relocation, adopting the development method of Sishang's joint and direct governance of the village community, lending cattle and iron, and eliminating the local cultural class nobles, the development method will be The people are regarded as a part of the nation, relying on the huge bureaucratic system and the number of cadres, they quickly completed the land reform, integration and regime construction in the South China Sea.While building the South China Sea as a raw material production place, it also exists as a huge market. If the people have no surplus food and wealth, industry and commerce will lack a market.

Linwu, on the other hand, is completely dependent: farmers are attached to Lord Linwu and his subordinates, merchants spend money to obtain the franchise of the salt industry and rely on Lord Linwu's power to maintain high prices; villages outside the city rely on the original The chieftains now exercise indirect rule from the wealthy class that has emerged due to the polarization between the rich and the poor.

The organizational capabilities of these two models are naturally incomparable. The aristocratic model is outdated, but they cannot and dare not learn the new regime, let alone have the ability and enough cadres to learn it.

Neither want nor can.

The special location of the Linwu area also predestined that Lord Linwu could only adopt this method, and it was impossible to adopt the centralized commercialization model of the nobles in the Song Dynasty—there was a lack of urgently needed raw materials and The grain industrial and commercial city circle also lacks the excellent transportation environment such as the good canal, Sishui, and Heshui between Sishang and Song Dynasty.

In order to maintain the rule, in order to increase power, from the standpoint of his status as an aristocrat, Linwu's model is the most suitable for him: he binds the peasants so that they cannot escape, and under his rule he can obtain labor rent, They can also be recruited when needed. Without enough cadres, there is not enough grassroots control ability, which makes him only use this serf-feudal method to maintain the system.

This is also an important reason why emerging industrialists and businessmen in Sishang support the Mohist slogan of "benefiting the world".

Without land reform and the overthrow of the nobility, the peasants would be tied to the land and pay labor rent, and they would not be able to leave much surplus food for a year of hard work.

If I don't have any surplus food left, I can't afford to buy iron oxen.

If you can't afford iron oxen, you won't have much surplus food left.

If there is no surplus food, there will be no money, and they will not be able to buy all kinds of handicrafts.

I couldn't afford handicraft products, so I had to continue farming and weaving, plant some hemp in the fields, and weave cloth by myself.

This is even more unsellable.

If you can't sell things, you can't make money.

This is an endless loop.

Five years ago, before Sishang got Huaibei, Jucheng and other places, the sales volume of cloth on one Sishang was more than seven times that sold to Chu State. The nobles did have enough spending power, but the problem was that they only had one body. One mouth cannot buy much.

Some things cannot be solved by taking a step back.

If the noble takes a step back, then he will not be able to control the fief, and he will die.An aristocracy without labor rent and the enfeoffment system is not an aristocracy, and it will either die from centralization or revolution.It is not only industrialists and landless peasants who want to kill the nobles, but also their monarchs.

If the industrial and commercial people take a step back, there will be financial problems in Sishang, which will cause a large number of people to lose their jobs, and there will be civil strife in Sishang.

The conflict of interests is life and death. This is no longer just a group of idealists who "aspire to be the best for the world" to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the world, but a matter of a new class killing another conservative class. The Mohists are just the spokesperson of that new class.

Many people in the caravan are not coming to Wu for the first time. There is only a mountain separating them, and the land systems on both sides are completely different, so it is inevitable that they will have many ideas.

It is said that the cicadas feel the autumn wind before it arrives, but not many nobles in the world can see this.

Even if some people saw it, they were helpless.

With the Sishang Great Dispute four years ago and the Heze League four years ago, the Mohists almost made it clear that they wanted to overthrow the old world.

But all countries have no choice.

(End of this chapter)