sweeping the world

Chapter 540 The people are the foundation of the country
For some dynasties that are unable to expand outward, having too many people is a kind of trouble, and it is also a burden that detonates domestic turmoil.After all, for such a dynasty, the land is so big, and after repeated annexations, the land is concentrated in the hands of a few people. Most people can't live without land. What other options do they have besides fighting to earn a living? ?
The dynasties in the Central Plains were not destroyed by foreign enemies many times, even if they were destroyed by foreign races a few times, except for the Song Dynasty, most of the dynasties were destroyed because of their own internal disintegration, which allowed the foreign races to take advantage.The most exaggerated one is the "My Great Qing Dynasty" of wild boar skin, which wiped out the Ming Dynasty with a population of 10 million with a few hundred thousand people, and ruled the absolute majority with an absolute minority.

The Han Congress under the rule of Liu Yan is an offensive country, and the population can only be large but not small. To put it bluntly, the population will never be a burden on the country. No matter how vast a territory is conquered without the people of the tribe to live in it, it will not be able to be defended for long.

Throughout the long history of China, many aggressive dynasties are constantly expanding outwards. They all face a common problem, that is, the people of their own countries are unwilling to emigrate after conquering the territory.

After the former Qin Empire and Han Empire opened up new territories, they used compulsory measures to relocate people to the newly occupied areas to settle down, and the location was also in the Hetao area.Immigrant filling certainly has a role to play, but the forced immigration has caused a lot of complaints from the people, and because of some improper handling, the loss of people on the Hetao side is too alarming, and there is even a phenomenon of being integrated by the Hulu.

The Qin Empire immigrated to the south of the Yin Mountains. Because they still had herding skills at that time, the Qin people who immigrated there had actually gained a firm foothold, but it was the internal strife in the empire that led to the demise of Qin.The living environment of this group of Qin people in Hetao was very bad. Not to mention the continuous attack by the Hulu, the Han Empire was also hostile. Their situation changed during the reign of Liu Che in the Western Han Dynasty. Wei Qing had their help in attacking Hetao .

The Han Empire ruled the Hetao area for a long time, but due to the central policy, the Han people in the Hetao had already been transformed into Huns at a certain stage. It was accepted by various tribes of the Huns.

When the rule of the Sima family in the Central Plains was ended by the Huns Liu Yuan, it was true that Liu Yuan had the blood of the descendants of the Han family royal family. The origin was that the Han Empire had married the Huns many times. Han princesses, but those princesses were just clan girls or palace maids.Another reason why he named the country he established Han was that many Huns did indeed have Han ancestry.

Many Hu people around the Central Plains, in fact, most of them also have Han blood in their veins.The reason for this phenomenon is quite simple. The Han family lost their border land, and the people in the border area were forced to merge with the Hu people, or the Han family women were robbed to give birth to offspring.If it is really pursued, not only are most of the Huns of Han family blood, but most of the Xianbei people are actually of Han family blood.This theory was the incentive for Xianbei's independent Sinicization in the Northern Wei Dynasty, but it wasn't just that Xianbei's brain was damaged by studying Han culture.

It is also Liu Yan's wish to integrate the Hu people, the difference is that what he wants is to take the initiative to integrate the Hu people, not to be led by the Hu people.Originally, he also wanted to melt the Hu people, make the Hu people identify with Han culture and have Han blood, and use this group of people to enrich the frontier.

Liu Yan had this idea because he encountered difficulties encountered in all dynasties. The people of the Han family have a deep rejection of migratory frontier life, and even have a deep-rooted thought of "born here and raised here".Even if the same hinterland is unwilling to move, how can they expect to move to a new occupied area?
Before the Han Dynasty was also short of people, the recovery of one state after another was not only to regain the lost land, but also to compete for the population?
Nowadays, Youzhou, Liangzhou, Bingzhou, and Liaodong are left in the north of the old land of the Han family. If they are all taken back, it is estimated that there will be an additional 300 million Han family descendants, but it will only make the huge Han family The total population of the country increased to about [-] million.

Taking four households as one household, a population of 800 million is 450 million households.In fact, there are seven or eight people in a household, or even hundreds of people in a household. Similar phenomena are very common. Taking the current 300 million registered households in Han Dynasty as an example, there are actually about 150 million households.

A family often has several or even more than a dozen "houses", and one "house" consists of dozens of people, not counting the servants under the name, but this family is a "household" in official records.

In view of the fact that it is impossible to accurately calculate the national population by "household", the Han Dynasty adopted head counts instead of "households". Many dynasties that used "households" to calculate the number of people in their country could only rely on guesswork.

The Han State is very strict on the population register, and every living person will be recorded, and a new round of verification will be carried out by the local area every quarter.What was verified was how many children died in infancy, how many old people died, and how many people died in accidents.The amount of such a project is huge. Without a large number of grassroots personnel who have retired from the military to the localities, it would actually be impossible to do it at all.

Knowing the size of the country's population is very important. There is no poll tax in the Han Dynasty. Naturally, it is not purely for tax collection. It is related to more important strategic significance, such as how many suitable sources of soldiers there are in the country's population.

The population of 300 million is the current official statistics of the Han Dynasty. There must be missing population, and the number may be quite large, mainly because too many people hid in the deep mountains and old forests during the war.For the Han Dynasty, the risk of hidden population of wealthy families is very high, so even if there is a hidden population, it will only account for a minority.

Liu Yan remembered that in the early Han Dynasty... or every new period when the country was founded, there would be a policy to attract the people who hid in the deep mountains and old forests to come out.That policy is the land equalization system led by the government, that is, the announcement of how many acres of land a person can get, which really attracted a lot of hidden people.

The Prime Minister's Mansion had made relevant suggestions, but Liu Yan himself was hesitant, and the Taiwei Office delayed it because the country was currently at war.

"The big man is always in a state of war." Ji Chang has achieved one of his goals, and said while the iron is hot: "At an extraordinary time, take an extraordinary strategy."

The worries of the Taiwei Department are very real. The military officers and soldiers work hard to get land rewards. The implementation of the old policy of dividing land will make the soldiers lose their enthusiasm for fighting.Because it is an "old practice" that has existed for a long time, of course the military cannot oppose it confidently, so it can only be delayed, and even wants to postpone it indefinitely.

Liu Yan was extremely in favor of getting land rewards for having children, and even thought about which area of ​​land rewards to give away.According to his idea, the accessories of the incentive policy are very important. For example, the rewarded land is on the border land, and then the family's original land can be replaced, and the replacement will be increased on the basis of the original holding.

The Han State is destined to be an offensive and pioneering country, and the population must not be concentrated in the Central Plains as it was in the past dynasties, and it should be more reasonably distributed.Considering that the difficulty of leaving home is a deep-rooted idea, it is impossible to do it with gentle means, and complete coercion will go back to the same mistakes as the Han Empire, so it can only be half temptation and half coercion.

"Prime Minister..." Liu Yan said earnestly, "It's not that I am stingy and unwilling to share the land with the people, but I have to do this."

Ji Chang was stunned.

It's not that Liu Yan is stingy, but that once the land equalization strategy similar to that of the early Han Dynasty is adopted, everyone will have land, and the people will be even more reluctant to move out.

The most important thing for Liu Yan is that obtaining land with military exploits will continue to lure the courage to maintain a strong enough enterprising spirit, which is in line with his goal of at least becoming the island owner of the world.

Now about [-]% of the landless people in the Han state are renting the country’s land for farming. Even so, the country still has a lot of wasteland, and they can only use slaves to open up the wasteland and turn it into good land.

To tell the truth, most of the slaves in the Han Dynasty were prisoners of war, and the Hu people accounted for the vast majority, and the Hu people didn't understand farming at all, and their labor efficiency was astonishingly low.

There is no way to use slaves for large-scale farming, which has forced the Prime Minister's Mansion to select an area to plan pastures, with the main purpose of cultivating war horses, and herding cattle and sheep can only be said to be incidental.

Didn't the Han army go south to destroy the small court of the Eastern Jin Dynasty?After the surrender of the Jin army, apart from the navy soldiers in the recruitment plan, the army in the Jin army became the largest source of labor for the state-owned farms. In addition, those big clans, powerful, and aristocratic families who persisted in resistance were also one of the labor forces for the state-owned farms.

In terms of dealing with rebellious big families, powerful families, and aristocratic families, the Han Dynasty only punished the first villains, and demoted the rest to slaves.The immediate family members of the rebels have been slaves for three generations, slaves for the first life, and civilians for the rest of the country, and cannot be officials within six generations.

The main purpose of being harsh against those who resisted Han rule was to intimidate, and the subsequent effects were very useful, at least that's what Huan Wen, who presided over the Qing Dynasty campaign in the south, reported.

Six days after Ji Chang deliberately sought out Liu Yan, another court meeting was held as scheduled.

"The Northern Expedition Sequence has arrived at the foot of Jinyang City. Fu Hong's troops on the North Road, they plundered wantonly and fled to the north. Li Tan sent the Second Cavalry Corps to follow and pursue." Xu Zheng, the Taiwei, spoke very loudly. Hong Liang: "Your Majesty, there is another news that Shi Hu shows signs of giving up Dingxiang."

There are many officials participating in the Great Court Meeting, and many important events are reported at the Great Court Meeting, so high-ranking nobles who are in the center and do not hold official positions must also participate.It's just that in the founding stage of the Han Dynasty, there were no idlers among the nobles, and all of them had official positions.

The national policy of Shi Jie Zhao State has long been known by the Han State, that is, Shi Hu speaks publicly and doesn't care about the gains and losses of the territory.

For Shi Hu's possible continued escape, Han has already made sufficient psychological preparations.They knew that after Shihu rebuilt the capital in Dingxiang, he recruited manpower and started to build palaces extensively, but they didn't expect Shihu to really say he was going to leave so decisively.

Shihu wanted to escape again, and Han had complicated thoughts. On the one hand, he was happy that it might not take much effort to regain the old land, and on the other hand, he was annoyed that he hadn't wiped out enough of Shijie's vital forces.

In fact, Liu Yan felt that he didn't understand Shihu. He was a man who once ruled the Central Plains. The Central Plains gave up when they said they would give up. Since they didn't plan to stick to Dingxiang, why did they build palaces?

"The flow of people and motorcades from Shijie to the north stretches for thousands of miles, and the communication has never been interrupted." Xu Zheng held the jade wat in his hand and shook it as he spoke, his tone full of indignation: "Those supplies are the people's fat and people's anointing, and the driven slaves are the big man's." Common people, I ask you to increase the number of troops going north to join the war, and attack Dingxiang as soon as possible, and enter Heshuo as soon as possible!"

At that moment, Ji Chang and other civil servants belonging to the Prime Minister's Mansion all frowned.

Han currently has too many troops on all fronts, and it is a test of food and fodder support. If there is no harvest from the Southwest Peninsula, in fact, this Northern Expedition will not be able to be fought at all.

Even if there is a harvest from the southwest peninsula, the military rations to support the various fronts must also be provided domestically. If Liu Yan's attitude is not firm, the normal choice of a country should be to stop the war and enter the stage of recuperation.

The existing food supply could hardly meet the consumption of each army. When Ji Chang heard that Xu Zheng was going to increase the number of troops participating in the war, Ji Chang's first impulse was to stand up and stop it.

However, Ji Chang had no choice but to hold back, just because Shi Jie was really transferring supplies and people wantonly. It was right to stop it, but righteousness would be lost.

"Stopping must be stopped." Liu Yan saw the reaction of Ji Chang and other civil officials, and knew that at this time the civil officials were suffering and couldn't tell.He said: "Let the Hussar General do things cheaply."

Hussar General Ran Min is currently in Zhongshan County in Jizhou, and his previous duty was to target the Murong Yan army in Youzhou.Zhongshan County is next door to Dingxiang County, and the capitals of the two counties are really far apart, and the middle area is deserted and uninhabited.

Xu Zhengcai doesn't care about food and fodder, he only needs to pay attention to the trend of the war. The logistics is the responsibility of the Prime Minister's Office. It is the Prime Minister's office's business to use any means to obtain food if the Taiwei Office needs it.He moved his lips and caught Ji Chang's murderous gaze from the corner of his eyes, but he still didn't say anything, he could only salute and return to the train.

Ji Chang and Liu Yan had already communicated with each other about the theme of this meeting. They waited for Xu Zheng to go back and sit down. Then he stood up and came to the center with a jade tablet in hand.

"Your Majesty!" Ji Chang saluted, and said in a loud voice, "Since ancient times, the prosperity of a country lies in military affairs and economics, and the people are the foundation of both. The country has a large number of people, and the source of soldiers is inexhaustible. The same is true for production..."

Ji Chang talked a lot. According to the usual practice, it is a series of big truths, and then he pointed out why he said those big truths. The core is that the population of Han is too small. Encouraging childbearing is imperative. In order to make the people happy to have children, and also to allow the people to feed after the population increases, rewards and so on should be given...

(End of this chapter)