New Shun 1730

As the saying goes, a person's reputation is like a tree's shadow.

Liu Yu came to Huainan not to inspect the reclamation, but to investigate the illegal salt case. Once the news came out, the merchants who had disputes with the reclamation company panicked.

Because... Funing is also south of the Yellow River, not far from here.

They knew that Liu Yu really dared to kill people, and would "collect charges" to kill people.

Although the salt cookers and cooks were still fighting outside, these merchants were ready to surrender.

As long as they surrender, the rest will be easy to handle.

In other words, the rest can be regarded as "handling the case according to law" at least in theory.

In other words, as long as these merchants choose to surrender, Liu Yu can theoretically dispatch troops.

The entanglement here started from the removal of the Yellow River embankment in the second year of Jianyan in the Song Dynasty, to Zhu Yuanzhang's establishment of the Ming Dynasty and the establishment of a strict system of cooks, and then to the development of the commodity economy. This strict personal control system could not hold up.

When Fan Zhongyan built the Fangong Dike, he would not be idle, and he built it more than 100 miles away from the sea.

The Yellow River moved southward, and the coastline continued to move eastward. This is the overall geographical background.

Then we need to know two more backgrounds.

First: Huainan boiled salt, not with seawater, but with salt from silt. It relied on the rising tide of the sea, the salt moistened the land, and then the salt in the land was enriched with grass ash, dissolved with water and boiled.

Second: These grass marshes are not arable land, and all the stove households only have the right to use, not the ownership.

Under these two backgrounds, the occurrence of some things is almost inevitable.

In the early Ming Dynasty, the control was pretty good, and the stove households boiled salt as the "tenant" of the country.

Each stove household had its own grassland - they only had the right to use, not the ownership, which was different from arable land. The ownership of these salt-boiling lands belonged to the court.

The coastline is constantly moving eastward, and the silt that can be used to boil salt is also constantly moving eastward. The tide that soaked the mudflats could reach Fangong Dike when the Ming Dynasty was founded. Now, unless there is a storm surge disaster, how much strength would it take to reach more than a hundred miles?

Therefore, under the stove household system of the Ming Dynasty, we don’t talk about small producers being low in productivity, but only the most basic things.

The coast is constantly moving eastward, and a strong government is needed to inspect the situation of the eastward migration of the coast every once in a while, and then move the stove households eastward together and redistribute the fuel grassland for boiling salt.

For example, stove household A has found in recent years that the silt in his field can no longer be used to boil salt. As the coast continues to move eastward, weeds and reeds have grown in the east.

It should be noted that if stove household A goes to the east to boil salt without the permission of the court at this time, this is called "private frying", which is private salt and a crime.

Then, this requires a very strong central government and a very strong grassroots bureaucracy. Through statistics every few years, the accounting department of the court will re-define the migration of each salt household.

So... so, this system is bound to collapse.

If the Ming Dynasty had such administrative capabilities, let alone one Sarhu, it could afford to fight twenty Sarhus.

Because there is no such administrative capability, and salt is a must for the operation of the country.

In this case, the merchant class will inevitably appear, and the merchants will organize the production of salt.

In other words, the capital of the merchants will eliminate the small production system of small salt households. Although there is no innovative technology in productivity, the adjusted production relations can maintain the output of salt.

The profit-seeking nature of the merchants has overcome the lag of the court's statistics and distribution.

As a result, a special group of "actually illegal, but in fact everyone acquiesces to its legality" has emerged.

For example, the coast moves eastward, and some grasslands outside the scope of the court's salt households are actually more suitable for boiling salt than the original salt fields left behind by the coastline.

Then, the merchants invested money and contracted this piece of grass marsh, and then they boiled salt to produce it.

Every once in a while, when the imperial court inspected the salt field and needed to "upgrade the marsh" - that is, to upgrade the marsh that was originally not a salt household and had no owner to a marsh with salt boiling value and tax value - the salt merchants would be very proactive in paying taxes.

Because if they don't pay taxes, then they are engaged in private salt.

And if they pay taxes... if they want to engage in private salt, they must not engage in private salt, that is looking for trouble. There must be an official salt production license. As for how much private salt is engaged in private, this is called mixing it up and fishing in troubled waters, which is the most difficult to investigate.

In fact, local officials and the higher-ups have acquiesced to this kind of thing.

Because small salt households are too easy to go bankrupt, and their production capacity is really too low, there are escapees every year, and they have to find people everywhere to make up for it every year.

On the one hand, it is a natural disaster.

On the other hand, it is the salt permit system that leads to the exploitation of these small households by salt merchants.

Finally, it was the inaction of the imperial court. In theory, the imperial court had the obligation to provide these salt households with production materials and loans. However, after Wanli's 45-year reform of the salt permit system, even the iron plates for boiling salt were actually made by merchants...

Some things are like this. Once a hole is opened, the follow-up is almost a collapse.

This model can basically be understood as a replica of the salt permit system:

The original transportation model was the imperial court and small salt merchants. The original production model was the imperial court and small salt households.

The emergence of the salt-introduction system was accompanied by the court - the monopoly privileged large contractor. The production model in which merchants intervened was the court - the salt transportation and sales contractor - the manufacturer - the employees under the manufacturer or the original salt household small producers who depended on them.

It can be understood as the serious degeneration of the court's administrative capacity, or as the gradual disintegration of the court's grassroots control.

Of course, it can also be understood as the development of industry and commerce.

For example, the women who are now fighting against the reclamation company, the real organizers behind the stove households, and the owner of the field who is now afraid of Liu Yu's killing and is ready to surrender, are very typical.

Rich merchants. Rich.

The court was rising and could not recruit salt households, so he took the initiative to rent the field, pay taxes, and produce salt.

If, according to the formal laws of the Ming Dynasty and the Dashun, this was illegal and not allowed.

However, because everyone knew that the original stove household model had collapsed, this was tacitly approved by the upper and lower levels.

Local officials could no longer control it.

If merchants were not allowed to enter the field, the salt would collapse directly, and it might degenerate into the situation of having a salt-introduction but no salt in the 45th year of Wanli.

Everyone knows that if merchants are allowed to enter, the next step will inevitably be to annex the grass-roots, lend money to the stove households, and create a de facto personal dependence relationship.

In fact, long before Liu Yu changed the salt policy, the court had quarreled countless times over the issue of salt production.

The faction that strictly prohibits merchants from entering the market and the faction that allows merchants to enter the market quarrel every day, and it is not news.

Liu Yu is a technical crushing faction that is powerful and powerful, because he knows that as long as the productivity is still the same as the salt boiling method, then the quarrel is meaningless.

The large-scale salt drying method is a dimensionality reduction attack.

Before this dimensionality reduction attack, officials were discussing the matter based on the existing productivity level in Huainan. Whether it was the faction that merchants were allowed to enter the market or the faction that merchants were not allowed to enter the market, they all had their own reasons.

The most similar thing in later generations was the 1861 serf reform in Russia.

Populists and traditionalists opposed the reform because [the ownership of village land was destroyed, and personal selfishness took the lead. Under private ownership and land transactions, landlords began to annex land, and the brutal egoism of rich peasants flourished].

[The peasants gained personal freedom to trade land and became "free men", but they lost the right to use the land and became tenants and poor hired workers...]

This reactionary trend of thought was so tenacious that even Solzhenitsyn, the conscience of Russia, insisted on it and wrote to the Soviet Communist Party, hoping to abandon industrial development, restore the benevolence of the village community and the countryside, find the real Russia, and keep the village community with the saintly king and maintain tradition.

Similar trends of thought here are not much different, and their vitality is extremely tenacious.

As for the specific issue of salt administration, it is very similar from an economic point of view, but because it is a sideline rather than an agricultural business, it lacks the fantasy of the saintly king of the well field.

From an economic point of view, it is somewhat similar to the liberation of Russian serfs. The salt households only have the right to use the grass marshes, but not the ownership, so there is no possibility of annexation. In theory, annexation is illegal.

Salt households are actually state serfs of the Ming Dynasty. In the early stage, the court also demarcated the grass marshes and issued production tools. Salt households could not migrate. After receiving the production tools, they had to fulfill the obligation to sell salt at the designated venues and could not go out to sell privately.

After the Dashun relaxed personal control, it was the same situation: salt households were free, but the fucking grass marshes were gone.

This typical market merchant did the same old three things after entering the market.

When the salt households could not hold on, he lent money, and then the salt households could not pay back the money, so he took the salt households' grass marshes: I pay the tax, you depend on me, and you pay the rent for the salt you produce to me.

Salt households did not want to continue doing this business, so they fled, renounced their citizenship, went to those unowned wastelands to cut grass, and sold them to market merchants to boil salt.

Obviously, according to the court's plan, each salt household was allocated several hundred mu of grass marshes, and the amount of salt boiled each year was fixed and controllable. Therefore, the grass cut from these unowned wastelands was sold to the market merchants to boil private salt outside the plan. Merchants were happy to buy grass to boil private salt.

In theory, only in theory, these grass marshes, the salt households only had the right to use, not the ownership, and could not be sold, nor were they qualified to sell.

However, this was the same problem as the confirmation of land rights at the grassroots level in rural areas in later generations. Before, the land was not allowed to be sold, but there were many private sales. After agricultural subsidies were given, there were many people who went to the grassroots governments in various places to ask for explanations every year.

There were local officials and salt officials before, especially those who opposed the entry of merchants into the market who hoped to solve this problem.

But how to solve it?

All contracts were not recognized, and the violent machine forced the market merchants to return the annexed grass marshes?

Liu Yu might dare to play this way because he was already second to none, and the emperor supported him. A small local official dared to do this and directly refused to recognize the contract. Isn't this courting death?

Besides, the court could not handle the tricks of the small salt households. If the salt industry did not want to collapse, it could only acquiesce to the merchants to enter the market.

After entering the market, this typical market merchant obtained a large amount of "illegal" but court-recognized grass through lending, bribery, etc.

However, the relationship between salt households and market merchants was not a pure employment relationship, nor was it a complete tenancy relationship.

This is a bit like a special form of the British enclosure movement: the landlords rented the land to the capitalists who offered a higher price, what should the tenants do?

In the UK, the capitalists offered high rents and the landlords took the initiative to sell the land.

This is a private salt business, and the reclamation company cannot afford the price. How much money do they make from private salt business in a year? How high a price do you have to offer to sell the land? Moreover, the unowned land occupied by the reclamation company is to cut off their foundation for private salt frying. This price is not affordable no matter what.

Liu Yu used magic against magic. Aren’t you not going to sell it? Okay, let’s not talk about the contract issue, let’s talk about the private salt issue. Since you know my name, you should also know that I am the best at framing charges. How serious a crime do you think I can charge you for your previous private salt business? Do you know the local officials? Do you think the local officials are on your side or on my side?

In theory, it doesn’t have to be so troublesome.

The legal ownership of the grass land belongs to the court, and the salt households have always only the right to use it. Even selling the grass land privately is illegal.

This is also why officials oppose merchants to enter the market and propose that the market merchants return the grass land to the salt households.

In theory, this is also considered as nationalization of land. If it can really be handled according to the law, it would be simple: handle it according to the law, auction the land use rights, and the reclamation company will get it. The salt households' pots and pans, salt pits and houses, and then compensate them according to the annual tax amount, and the number of salt fryings will be reversed. Get out.

But, this is only in theory.

Liu Yu, the Duke, did not dare to play like this, and he did not dare to disrespect these contracts at all.

Therefore, the market merchants were afraid. As long as they handed over the contracts, Liu Yu could theoretically use violence directly.

The contract is to stop the world's gossip. In other words, it is to save face for the emperor and find a way out. Otherwise, from local officials to Jiedushi, to Liu Yu, and then to the emperor, they would be criticized to death.

The economic base determines the superstructure. The morality, right and wrong standards of the small-scale peasant and small-scale production era, and the utopian system of permanent property for the people are incompatible with the industrial era. Even the first few steps are the evil and dirty evil deeds under the morality of this time.

The fundamental contradiction of this matter is not whether to enclose land or not, but the struggle between the production model of the Huaibei salt field and the small production model of Huainan.

If Liu Yu does not enclose land, these salt households will also be unemployed, as long as the Huaibei salt field model is not demolished.

Enclosure is just an accessory to this struggle. The only difference is that Liu Yu wants to race against time and can't wait for the process of these salt households going bankrupt.

Because Liu Yu can clearly say that Huaibei salt plus taxes can also force Huainan salt to death, then the fate of these small salt households has been doomed at the moment when the Haizhou salt field is built.

The direction of the struggle of these small salt households and petty bourgeoisie is wrong.

They should not make trouble here with the enclosure, but should directly launch an armed uprising, rush to Haizhou, destroy the steam engine and destroy the large salt field.

This is also one of the reasons why Liu Yu firmly opposes the construction of the large salt field in Huainan, in addition to natural conditions, rain and heat conditions, seawater concentration conditions, and coal production area conditions.

He is afraid that these small producers will really find the right direction of struggle that best suits their interests and dismantle machines and smash chimneys.