When Zhou Huaian set foot on the road to Guangfu again, his mood was still quite complicated; because it was the first spring of the second year in the blink of an eye.
And compared to the two or three kittens who followed him at the beginning, the team he is following has grown by more than dozens of times. Everyone wore a helmet, a crossbow and a knives, and on the carriages or horses that were being pulled, they were also equipped with shields, spears, axes, hammers, and yokes, all surrounded by his carriage. There are at least dozens of large and small flags on the barrel of the gun next to the week.
However, he prefers the cool and dry Lingnan winter compared to the lazy and sleepy weather nowadays. The faint fragrance of young crops from the sun and the smell of muddy soil in the paddy field are mixed in the warm and melting air. The biggest change and touch on this road is a kind of atmosphere and environment called orderly.
After pre-cleaning and rectification, as well as the painful killings of many wild wanderers who had gathered and dispersed as bandits, they lost most of the rural areas that originally existed in the upper strata, and had to be led by the newly elected leader to pass through the nearby cities. Negotiations and interactions between the rebels garrisoned in the town have initially established a basic order and order of money and grain collection and distribution, regular transactions and reporting.
In particular, in addition to the self-sufficient parts such as food rations, most of the related things needed for people's livelihood, as well as the economic lifeline of foreign products that can be supplemented through market transactions, are all mastered in disguised form through the traffic hurdles controlled and controlled by the rebels. The so-called series and group confrontation have become a joke in a certain sense. If you have the ability to stop eating salt for a month, you will become soft and swollen all over your body and then say this.
Although this is still quite extensive and crude, it can be said that there are still many problems and loopholes; but even a flawed order can always achieve better results than continuous chaos and disorder.
Therefore, when the spring plowing and planting of the new year begin, the paddy fields on the roadside and the terraced fields on the hillsides, the figures of all kinds of work have become intensive and frequent; although the proportion of the old and the weak, women and children is still relatively large, but At least it is much better than when I first came here, there are not many people in dozens of miles, all kinds of sparse and deserted appearances;
And most of them don't avoid people much anymore. Facing the teams that have driven on the road, they can only look up a few more times before returning to their busy schedules. Only those who are close to the road will stop their work and respectfully retreat to the side until they watch the team leave.
With Zhou Huaian's eyesight, they couldn't even see their panic and embarrassed expressions. According to the new order under the rule of the rebel army today, without the traditional subordinates and big family tycoons, which are constantly doubling down, the remaining part is still enough for most people to pay a lower price as long as they pay most of the output at once. The burden of living in peace and security;
After all, you must know that all the original taxation and corvee system in the Tang Dynasty were based on the “rental adjustment” based on the “land equalization system”; Each household loses two feet of silk and three catties of hemp; Yong, each household has 20 days of labor per year, plus two days in a leap year. If they are not active, they need to fold the silk cloth to replace the labor. It doesn't seem to be much, but this is only the standard in the early Tang Dynasty.
As the country develops land acquisitions, more and more people are fleeing from bankruptcy. In fact, the land equalization system based on small farmers has already collapsed. At the same time, all kinds of taxpayers who evade tax payment have already collapsed. With the expansion of the bureaucratic system and the size of the army, the country’s expenditures from various aspects have become more and more onerous; and these needs are concentrated on the books of the local government and become more and more expensive. On top of fewer and fewer tax accounts. As a result, in addition to all kinds of orthodox taxation, a variety of complicated taxation items came into being.
(The standard for class exemption is: officials above grade nine, men under 20, old, abandoned, wives and concubines, tribal slaves and maidservants, and monks and Taoists also enjoy class exemption treatment. So it is natural to bring up A very large special group that does not pay taxes and is not counted in the official household registration.)
After the Anshi Rebellion, the country lost its ability to effectively control household registration and field registration. Land mergers became even more acute. In addition to the urgent need for military expenditures, military and political chiefs in various regions could arbitrarily allocate various names without the approval of the central government. Therefore, miscellaneous taxes were rampant and the central government could not. Check the envoys, the envoys cannot inspect the states, and the taxation system is very confusing. The people are miserable, and even in the relatively prosperous Jiangnan area, armed uprisings by Yuan Chao, Fang Qing, Chen Zhuang and others have also occurred, and people who are suffering from wealth have participated.
then. As the country’s financial budget became increasingly constrained, Prime Minister Yang Yan suggested the enactment of the “Two Tax Law” for reform in the first year of the founding of China. The new tax law was formulated based on the original land tax and household tax, and unified various taxes. Since it is levied in two seasons, summer and autumn, it is called the "two taxes law." The main content is "means within your means", that is, the total tax set by the central government based on fiscal expenditures is levied on local households in accordance with the number allocated by the central government; the "rental adjustment" and all miscellaneous contributions and taxes are abolished. Tax) is not abolished; the two taxes are paid according to households, etc., according to the field of nano millet;
Although later generations agreed and praised the advanced meanings and concepts of "budgeting", "nine-level distribution", and "tax payment by household" of the Two Tax Laws, in the real history, because they seriously violated the interests of the wealthy class, they only implemented the three methods. For more than ten years, I was forced to order many times to change the "money-based" currency levy to be discounted in kind, in order to avoid the discount and shrinkage of price fluctuations.
Moreover, over time, the insatiable feudal officials cleverly set up names for extortion in addition to the two tax quotas, such as "inter-frame tax", "except money", "green crop fees" and so on. In order to get promotion and promotion, many officials have levied extravagance for their performance in addition to the regular tax.
The "Two Tax Law", known as the exemption of "rental adjustment" and all miscellaneous taxes and taxes, actually no longer exists. However, the fixed amount of taxes formulated and distributed under the two tax laws is the result of only a lot more and increasing day by day. Heavy taxes and taxes have caused the toiling people to fall into a miserable situation where life is worse than death;
In addition, the imperial court can only divide the wealth collected from the world into three parts, one is for the court (the court), the second is for the army (town), and the third is for staying. However, in order to obtain sufficient expenses, these three parties have increased and expanded the taxation layer by layer without exception; and the local wealthy and powerful households and subordinates who dealt with at the grassroots level must also profit and self-fertilize. .
This level of apportionment increases, in fact, it takes away all the hard work of the peasants, which is still insufficient, and forces them to sell their children and daughters to make up. Therefore, it must be implemented thoroughly until there is no famine in the locality. This is a vicious circle of fierce competition and fleeing. Moreover, when the poorest households with the heaviest burden have almost escaped, it will be the turn of the Yinshi households above the sixth class. Unlucky; the Yinshi households who have waited until the sixth grade have also gone bankrupt seven or eighty-eight, those who lack sufficient backing and background. The small and medium-sized landlords had to break their homes and provide them with all their strength;
When the families of these poor scholars began to desperately join the peasant uprising that swarmed all over the world, which led to a transformation from quantitative to qualitative, this meant that the death knell of a dynasty was truly sounded. stand up
So in the end, the biggest beneficiaries of all this are those rich and powerful households who have colluded with the local government; anyway, when the court has not received much tax, they rely on merging land and collecting the exiles who sell themselves for refuge. The trilogy of slaves and maidservants have been able to annex each other in wave after wave of peasant riots, and become more and more influential and privately armed existences in the locality. It is also a potential preparatory force for the final outcome of the peasant uprising in the process of seizing and stealing political power and changing dynasties in the future.
Therefore, the current small half of the output that the rebels can leave to local farmers is enough to surprise them and be grateful; although this kind of gratitude is only short-term, and will be worried about the uncertainty of the official army’s counterattack. And gradually faded cleanly. At this time, Zhou Huaian left another magic weapon for the rebels. Compared with the tax that can only be harvested and fulfilled until the summer, this is a plan that can quickly see results and reverse in a short period of time;
It is through the personnel, carts and horses drawn by the major teams, which formed dozens of mobile merchant teams, which gradually penetrated into more than 100 cities, towns and villages along the road, selling rice cloth, oil, salt, wine, sauce, agricultural tools, iron, etc. Various basic materials needed for people's livelihood, together with the purchase of relatively cheap local products such as rattan, hemp, pottery, porcelain, poultry, etc., serve as an original commercial circulation system that regularly exchanges needs between urban and rural areas and adjusts market supply and demand.
Coupled with the previous control of the city by the rebels, it is tantamount to disguisedly binding these new rural autonomous organizations to a certain indispensable temporary interest system. Perhaps over time, this temporary interaction will become a habitual result of continuous force.
Although in these semi-autonomous villages that are temporarily left unchecked, they may re-differentiate over time and produce new exploitative and profitable classes and individuals, but the current benefits and benefits are actually used to some extent. This is just an external arrangement.
Before he left, he had reorganized the direct forces under his command. The exploratory team, the census team, and the task force were all expanded. Then, in addition to the five patrol team that maintains order and basic laws in the city, another team was established. A correction team with only more than a hundred people; it is specifically responsible for supervising the discipline and atmosphere of the army, and it also has the responsibility of investigating and preventing spies.
And this last point and concurrent responsibility is his real intention and playfulness in setting up the relevant team this time. The main reason is that there are justifiable reasons to gradually eliminate the old forces in the army and the influence from the Cantonese side, and even some decisive and extraordinary measures can be taken when necessary.
Therefore, this team is actually made up of diehard loyalists from Lingnan—generals Xu Si and Xu Yi concurrently, and the deputy is former officer Zhong Yi; the specific personnel are also the bitter and hated generations who choose places to gather. Priority is given to having little connection and involvement with Stormrage Laoying. And the boss who goes with him to Canton also has four candidates:
One is the horse team officer Sun Liumao, and the other is the reconstructed former battalion deputy Wu Xingchen. The former was Wang Pan’s guard captain, and the latter was Wang Pan’s hand-picked newcomer; it was also a death in the Chaoyang Incident. An important witness to escape.
There is also Lin Ming from Qingzhou who served as the deputy lieutenant of the directly subordinate (team promotion) regiment, who is truly responsible for his overall safety and security work; the last one is the new brigade coach Ge Guomei and Ge Guomei, whom Zhou Huaian has always been optimistic about. Cong Zhou also gave him a chance to show his face and broaden his horizons among the upper ranks of the rebels.
As for the silk and silk he bestowed this time, he also unsurprisingly distributed part of it to human rights around him as additional clothing, and part of it was used as a subsidy for the additional shelter of the orphans in the army.
Anyway, in addition to his daily food needs, he has no more need to accumulate personal property for the time being. If he really needs to use power to allocate it directly; therefore, in all aspects, he has always been able to withdraw income and share. The gains obtained quickly turned into various experimental materials and finished products, or subsidies and assistance to the people around them, and basically did not stay around for long.
And some of the new things or experimental products he produced from this will also be immediately shared with everyone around him (acting as an experiment), which is a kind of potential welfare and closeness that is not costly. But the effect is quite good, because everyone knows that he can always invent some good things out of the ordinary, and the first trial opportunity is regarded as a unique reward and praise.
This is more meaningful and stimulating than direct rewards and gifts of money.
However, along this road, accompanied by Zhou Huaian was Xiaowei Chai Ping, who was acting as a messenger and investigator. It seems that because of the change in status and the level of familiarity, he has become more discoursed compared to the cold appearance of cherishing words like gold; he almost asked a lot about Stormrage camp in detail. In addition to the details of Chaoyang Incident, he was also very interested in many changes and actions that took place in Stormrage Camp, and seemed to be inquisitive.
For this week, Huai'an didn't have much thoughts to conceal, but only chose and filtered to inform some things; on the one hand, it was a return to his original support.
On the other hand, it is the overall consideration. Some content such as sanitation and epidemic prevention, housekeeping, logistics distribution, and some experience and methods. If the other party can earnestly learn from the past, it will also improve the overall strength of the rebels. Something good.
Compared with the value of the knowledge itself, it is more important to cultivate groups that can disseminate and promote this knowledge. (End of this chapter)