Buried Alive in the Qing Dynasty

Internationally, there is an academic trend called "New Qing History". There is a big difference between New Qing History and traditional Chinese Qing History. Look at how Western scholars understand the financial foundation of the Qing Dynasty. The tax system of the Qing Dynasty reflected both the strength and weakness of the entire dynasty's political structure. This tax system also exhibited certain changes that paralleled changes in the court and other aspects of society. After the crisis of the mid-19th century, the structural changes in the fiscal system were greater and more important than changes in every other aspect of the imperial court, and foreshadowed the fiscal reforms of the 20th century. The principles that underlie the tax system have been followed almost continuously throughout the 2,000-year history of the monarchy; the imperial court recognized the free private possession of land and derived a major portion of the annual revenue from agricultural products. The state has a monopoly on the production and sale of goods, and the revenue extracted from it ranks second. The salt tax was particularly important in the Qing Dynasty, providing an average of 10% to 15% of the country's annual revenue. Taxes on commerce, including import duties and domestic duties, were relatively inconsequential until the mid-19th century. Donations, especially in the form of "selling official posts" with the support of the court, can account for up to 1/3 of fiscal revenue in a short period of time under certain conditions. For example, in the first half of the 19th century, military emergencies forced the country to adopt this ancient but always criticized method of amassing money. Income from other sources can be ignored. Land tax includes two types: "tax" and "service". Fu is a tax on agricultural products, which is usually levied based on the amount of land and the quality of the harvest; servitude is the expropriation of adult male services. Because both taxes and servitude are converted into silver taels and combined into a unified payment record, they can be collectively called "land service tax" or, more simply, "land tax." But in fact, none of this tax is distributed proportionally to the taxing units (landowners and adult men) according to the prescribed rational principles. The Lijia agency that registers land and heads for tax purposes serves as an aspect of local government. In the Qing Dynasty, the magistrate at the county level was the main tax collecting official. He was responsible for registering accounts and the members of each household, keeping records about land owners, and responsible for collecting taxes listed in various statutes (especially the Complete Book of Taxes and Services, which recorded every Detailed data for a county and revised every 10 years) taxes were assessed according to the standards and methods established by the imperial court in the capital, collected taxes and issued receipts in triplicate, punished defaulters, and was responsible for storing and transporting collected goods. The assistance and supervision work is undertaken by the government at the prefectural and provincial levels above the county level. Responsible for registration and collection work under the county government is the so-called grassroots organization composed of every 10 households, namely Lijia. Lijia partially overlaps with another administrative organization composed of every 10 households, the Baojia system. The government agencies below the county level may have degenerated or evolved throughout the Qing Dynasty's rule, but they never lost their function of collecting normal taxes from social producers, and the Qing court attached great importance to this. But the ideal of establishing such a tax system will never be realized. The Ming Dynasty made concessions to expenditures that were nominally required for taxation. Such concessions were accepted by the early Qing court and were eventually recognized in Qing decrees. First of all, the labor tax was permanently fixed at the amount set during the Kangxi era in 1711, which made the provision of a detailed count of all taxpayers every 10 years meaningless. In most cases, the 10-year statistics degenerate into a routine copying of existing data. Secondly, the system was restored to the early Ming Dynasty. In 1723, the first year of Yongzheng's reign, labor was merged into the land tax and became a unified tax. Finally, the long-defunct cadastral survey procedure for registering changes in land owners was abandoned in 1772, and direct proportional apportionment was replaced by fixed amounts, thereby rendering meaningless another basis on which the tax system relied. In other words, the rational principle of apportioning taxes according to the amount of land held disappeared. The Qing Dynasty did not conduct a thorough land survey, nor did they attempt to do so. Indeed, as new farmland is opened, the land is registered and taxed, and all land possessions are logically required to be registered and taxed. However, the amount of taxes collected from the 10 or 100 households registered in Lijia is determined by tax officials based on their records. These tax officials are increasingly inclined to regard taxes as their private wealth and inevitably take into account local interests. From a national perspective, this change in taxation methods is quite reasonable in a sense. They are practical and the administrative expenses of administering the tax are quite low, whereas the tax system as originally devised would have been incredibly clumsy and costly to implement at all. As long as the supervisory function of the Beijing imperial court maintained the kind of efficiency required by the system-conscious Emperor Yongzheng (1723-1735), and as long as the local social elites basically took a responsible attitude toward the interests of the imperial court, the worst ills could be avoided or cured. Emperors of the Qing Dynasty paid great attention to the tax system, but due to restrictions and strict insistence on low tax rates, they confused their own purposes. The state sought moral credibility from this low tax rate, and the emperor often boasted to his subjects that the Qing Dynasty did better than all previous feudal dynasties in the classical ideals of frugality and taking from the people. At the same time, the imperial court allowed most of the local wealth to be retained locally rather than sent to the national treasury, which may win some favor from the scholar-bureaucrat group. However, these ideals have been seriously distorted by reality. Low taxes cannot provide enough fiscal revenue to pay for court expenses, and the tax amount is not allowed to be increased, so additional assessments are added to the grain tax. Part of it will become a statutory additional tax, and the rest will be used flexibly depending on the situation. Together, these add about 30% to the burden on taxpayers. There are similar increases in labor taxes, usually in the name of special circumstances. Where grain taxes were low, such as in the poorer northern regions, labor taxes tended to increase. Any sudden event or unforeseen difficulty, from suppressing bandits to rebuilding city walls and public facilities to preparing for an imperial inspection tour, could be an appropriate or inappropriate excuse for the collection of additional labor, regardless of whether the corvee was converted into silver coins or directly labor. In years of disaster, the court would often make a big show of it and agree to exempt agricultural taxes from agricultural taxes, but rarely exempted them from labor. Therefore, the anomalies often seen in the fiscal system of the Qing Dynasty are not only reflected in the imperfect implementation agencies and the inability to realize the ideal of light corvee and low taxes, but also in the contradiction between this ideal and the country's need for more fiscal revenue. Land tax and statutory surcharges provided 70% to 80% of national fiscal revenue in the mid-18th century. This was a typical percentage for the entire 500 years from the 14th to 19th centuries. By the time of the fall of the Qing Dynasty, this number had dropped to about 35%, indicating the impact of structural changes in the financial system after the Taiping Rebellion. From the mid-18th century to 1911, the absolute value of land tax revenue doubled, from about 50 million taels of silver to about 100 million taels of silver, while the population more than doubled during the same period. Various taxes, namely levies and customs duties, levied on domestic and treaty port commerce became a new and rapidly increasing source of fiscal revenue from the 1850s onwards. But even with these incomes, the Qing Dynasty still absorbed only a small part of social wealth for its own use. Professor Wang Yejian talked about the fiscal policies and systems of the Qing Dynasty in "Land Tax in the Chinese Empire". Professor Wang believes that by the end of the Qing Dynasty, the entire tax burden accounted for only about 2.4% Of the gross national product, which is estimated to be lower than the ratio reached during the empire's most powerful period in the mid-18th century. He wrote in the book: "In retrospect, the biggest problem with land taxation management in the Qing Dynasty was that... It failed to increase the court's fiscal revenue while growing the economy, and its decentralized nature prevented the Beijing court from directly intervening in the management of the most important source of national fiscal revenue. As a result, in the late Qing Dynasty, The proportion of land tax in the funds raised by the government is on a downward trend, and this comes at a time when the country's fiscal expenditures have increased significantly, and the demand for additional fiscal revenue has also greatly increased. If land tax can play a key role in China's fiscal system in the late Qing Dynasty like Japan did in the Meiji era, then modern China will not only have financial constraints. " The fiscal structure of the Qing Dynasty shifted from relying mainly on land tax to relying heavily on taxes levied on circulating goods (lijin was regulated by law in some areas after 1853) and customs duties levied on imported goods by the newly established customs in 1853, which were managed by foreigners. Both aspects not only mark the shift in taxation from labor on the agricultural production line to business at transportation hubs, but also mark a shift from traditional political management that relies extensively on grassroots society to more easily controllable business circulation levels. The new commercial tax was also under the control of the regional governors and governors, rather than under the management of the imperial household department. Although the imperial court appointed local officials and could replace them due to their failure to perform their duties. But this cannot offset the consequences of the transfer of control from the capital to the local areas. In fact, it cannot prevent local governments from irregularly and unfairly imposing large increases in lijin for their own benefit. In addition, although excessive tax increases are restricted due to the fear of causing anti-tax riots, and although there are factors such as the consensus between local elites and local officials, and the common standards of what constitutes excessive taxation, which limits unwarranted additional assessments and other irregular tax increases, local tax officials after all represent the interests of local social elites. While changes in other aspects of society tilted the balance between capital and local interests in favor of the localities, structural reorganization of the fiscal base also contributed in this direction, anticipating the decentralization of the early 20th century. Finally, because so little tax revenue was raised from local governments to the imperial treasury in Beijing, it created a breeding ground for regionalism, at the expense of destroying the country's ability to integrate. Professor Wang Yejian once calculated that even in the most prosperous years of the mid-Qing Dynasty, the total fiscal revenue of the Qing Dynasty did not exceed 5.6% Of the national grain output value. The income of the gentry comes from official salaries and business operations, which is higher than their income from land. If the Qing court was relatively poor compared to other pre-modern societies, it was not because of the poverty of Chinese society. In the early 19th century, "the fiscal revenue of the Beijing court was barely higher than the level in the late 14th century, while China's population increased 5 to 6 times during the same period." Someone has calculated that the fiscal revenue of the Qing Dynasty in the mid-to-late 18th century, when it was still prosperous, was approximately 45 million taels to 50 million taels of silver (excluding additional surcharges retained by local and provincial governments). Among them, 10 million taels are used to maintain the expenses of the imperial court in the capital (3/4 is military expenses), and about 25 million taels are used for local government expenses (3/5 is used for military expenses). The surplus accumulated by the imperial court in the capital is normally 7 to 8 million taels per year. Although military expenditures accounted for a large part of fiscal revenue, they were not used to actively develop military strength to support expansionist activities after the mid-18th century. Instead, most of them were used to subsidize the Manchu and Mongolian Eight Banners Army, which was hereditary but had little military value. The Manchurian Bannermen were a conquering nation that gradually became poor and downtrodden. They received generous material rewards from the Chinese people and were gradually assimilated by the Chinese. The tax balances of the 18th century masked financial difficulties that were not brought to the attention of the court until the 19th century. The real rulers of the imperial court knew that a large amount of wealth was stranded in various places, and they also knew that the upper class elites had embezzled a large amount of the remaining wealth through overpayment and through all secret channels to seek power for personal gain. These rulers probably saw this behavior as a suitable way for them to reward the elite group, buying their service for a small amount of money. They may naively feel that by emphasizing the use of Confucian standards to constrain the behavior of elite groups, they are actually arranging most of this money for local operations, thus benefiting the country. But once the Confucian standard of customary control ceased to be effective, as it was during the last century of Qing rule, the ruler lost practical administrative means of regaining control. This structural change in the fiscal system both reflected and influenced the political weakness of the late Qing Dynasty.

Yang Ziyun

This book has failed since the Zhuxian Town section, so I decided to delete the book!

Which one is better?

Well written

As the saying goes, Tang poetry, Song poetry, Ming novels, Qing treaties, some people say legal basis, how can I remember that there was another dynasty between the Manchu and Qing Dynasties and the present, and the legal basis, how can it be traced back to the previous dynasty? To put it this way, the North Sea was still ours during the Ming Dynasty, and the entire Southeast Asia was ours during the Tang Dynasty. By the way, during Zheng He's voyages to the West during the Ming Dynasty, the entire Southeast Asia was also ours. Why is Saigon called Saigon? The Ming Dynasty sent troops to manage Southeast Asia. This can be proved by the records of Portuguese missionaries, and the management period was not short, from Zheng He's voyages to the Western Seas to the Wanli period. Some people take maps. The Manchu and Qing dynasties were in their heyday, and the maps were from the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. Even the maps of the Ming Dynasty were from the late Ming Dynasty. Even the maps of the Han Dynasty were cut off a large part, including Hetao, Jiuyuan, Shuofang, Liaodong, Xuantu and Lelang. The only thing left in the Western Regions was a single line. If it weren't for state suppression, they would have cut it off for you! This does not even mention the Eastern and Western Han Dynasties. The Southern Huns surrendered and the Northern Huns fled. All the tribes in the grassland needed to be canonized by the Han court, so the grassland was not included in the territory! The same thing counts as territory in the Manchu and Qing dynasties, but not in the Han Dynasty! Those who were cut off in the Tang Dynasty were even worse! Some people really cut off the land during their lifetime and the map after their death. Today, our territory was brought back one by one by our ancestors. Some people are greedy for the merits of heaven through tricks like increasing or decreasing the territory. This is really shameless to the extreme! By the way, those people still stole the credit of Mr. Yuan and Mr. Sun. Mr. Yuan was the president. Which dynasty was he? Let's take a look, this is the real map of the late Qing Dynasty, it is in the textbooks

🙂Why so many people like the "Qing Dynasty" except that their ancestors may be from the "Eight Banners"... The more reason is that the film and television dramas in recent years have done a lot of credit (beautifying that era, surrounding wealthy businessmen, high-ranking officials, and the royal family, beautifying the clothes, hairstyles, and finding a bunch of handsome men and beautiful women to act. A small group of men and most of the women immediately fell on their knees and licked them). There are also those Qing Dynasty articles at a certain point... Why are there so many girls who "call themselves new era women" who want to travel back to that extremely bad dynasty? You have lived through a dynasty where civil servants could not achieve military success. If you did not have a matching family background, you would not be able to enter the rich family of the Manchu nobles. Maybe ordinary wealthy businessmen would not be able to be wives... I sincerely hope that those female channel authors who write "Qing Dynasty essays" can have a clear mind and a conscience before writing, and be more in line with the social environment at that time.

The fake prosperous age of Kangxi and Qianlong, and the old man who was perfect. Qianlong is a joke, eating the capital left by Yongzheng. Among the 12 emperors of the Qing Dynasty, Yongzheng was the only one who did some human affairs, but touched the interests of some intellectuals and nobles. How was he criticized 😜

Da Luo's books may seem absurd, but in fact they are full of laughter and scolding, and they are all made into articles, with many essential social issues embedded in them. Very good. Come on✊

It's not Zhu Yuanzhang. We in the north are probably even more barbaric. It is impossible to say that the country is already divided. After all, the north has been ruled by alien influences for hundreds of years, so from this point of view, Zhu Yuanzhang is ranked among the top three emperors. Don't tell me that there are other rebel armies. The Yuan Dynasty still has strength, and most of the north is still in their hands. And how can other rebel armies compare with Zhu Yuanzhang? Zhu Yuanzhang has been studying hard, but he has certain limitations in thinking, but his role and influence on China is comparable to that of Qin Shihuang. Some people are so shady, I am also drunk. The Ming Dynasty spent decades changing customs and shaping its roots, otherwise we would still be doing shit here.

I suddenly discovered. Many people actually think that the Treaty of Nerchinsk is a very fair and equal treaty 😥 Do you think this treaty is equal? Where is the equality? Equality exists, it's not him forcing you to give up your life. But you take the initiative to send it. Equality is where you think it's a backwater. Did you take advantage of it by sending it out?

Some people have always boasted about the so-called prosperous age of Kangxi and Qianlong, but why have they been deleted from history books? 😏The prosperous age of shamelessness will not last forever

The author writes well 👍 Encouragement from a Manchu, (sincerely) I don't know why I hate the Qing Dynasty even though I am a Manchu.

I hope Da Luoluo's next book can try to change the background. I started reading your book from "Dream of the Heavenly Dynasty". At that time, I thought it was really good. After reading it three times, I still felt that it was not enough. I've also finished reading "The World's Rich Businessmen" and thought it was pretty good. But I only finished most of "Saving the Ming Dynasty", and I only read the beginning of this book "Buried Alive the Qing Dynasty". There is no other reason than that the plot (colonization and industrialization) and background (both Chinese and Chinese) are the same. Except for the beginnings of these books, the subsequent plots are basically the same. For example, the deduction of "Saving the Ming Dynasty" after arriving in Nanjing is basically the same as the deduction of "Chinese Dream" after arriving in Nanjing, and the difference is not big. Of course, I'm not saying that Da Luoluo's deduction is wrong. On the contrary, I also think that only this method (colonization and industrialization) can make China truly prosperous and strong. But the problem is that every book is similar, and no matter how good it is, I can't read it. The next book is to at least change the background and make some countries that have declined in modern times (Tsarist Russia, France, Austria, Spain, etc.), Or simply write an imaginary fantasy background and use magic and technology to industrialize in the fantasy world. At least get a new map and don't repeat it endlessly. I also hope that the protagonists can be more flesh-and-blood, that is, add more life-like content. The protagonist can be more like a real person instead of a political machine (even Yongzheng has his own little hobby of cosplay). You can refer to "Flowers, Swords and France". I don't mean it must be romantic, but at least the protagonist should have more interactions and dialogues with the characters around him, and more details. These books can barely do this at the beginning, but they all become tool-like in the later stages. If it doesn't work, you can make the pattern smaller, which is better than being too broad.

Zhu Youjian: After the city is broken, let the thieves cut the corpses into pieces without harming any of the people; Puyi: It's not about how many people died in the Northeast, or how the Japanese want to rule this colony; I don't care how many soldiers it will station or what mines it will mine. All I care about is restoration and asking them to recognize me as an emperor. Making judgments

Haha, the Ming Dynasty was all about rescuing people, but the Qing Dynasty was all about burying them alive 🙂

It's hard to write braids, especially since it's the Kangxi Dynasty, and the current environment is such that the intense points you write about may not be given to 404 at any time. Moreover, the Qing Dynasty slaughtered tens of millions of Han people. According to Shuangwen, you must retaliate in kind. That does not mean annihilation. The general environment restricts the influence too much. If you restrain yourself from writing, you will not be happy. If you are not happy, you will not be popular. If you are not popular, you will not make money. It's fun and easy to write 404. It's too difficult to write about the Qing Dynasty. Writers should work hard. It's best to communicate with the editor 😅

The sketch, clothing and equipment refer to the partial restoration picture of a restored up "Xiangyang Chucai" at Station B. In the picture, the Ming Dynasty infantry is equipped with sleeve bayonets, flintlock guns, grenade hammers and waist knives. The soldier on the left is equipped with a crucible steel breastplate, and the rest of the equipment of the two soldiers is basically the same. The upper center is the spear head equipped by the pikemen, and the lower left is the paper-packed ammunition, primer barrel and grenade hammer.

Setting the capital in Nanjing was a mistake. The founding spirit of a country should go against the trend, not follow the trend. Just like an individual, one should work hard and not slide down. The central government is in Nanjing, and the country's intellectual and economic forces are concentrated in the southeast. The northwest is already deserted, and with the temptation of the southeast, there will be no solution. At first, he was paralyzed. If not cured, he would eventually become paralyzed. If Xi'an is established as the capital, under the leadership of the central government, intellectuals and economic forces can pull it to that side and gradually move it back part way, so that the two sides can gradually be balanced. The founding of the Han and Tang Dynasties was like this from east to west, but now it is time to reverse from south to north. "Setting Nanjing as the capital will only allow the south to develop well, while the north will develop worse. In the end, there will be a gap between the north and the south. The widening gap between the north and the south will cause the hearts of the north to become alienated. In ancient times, Beijing's political influence was too deep. Making Nanjing the capital was completely thankless. Most people in ancient times took it for granted. Some people would be surprised to have Nanjing as the capital, but most people would disagree.

Just because of this title, no matter how bad your writing is, I won't scold you 😁

I have a question, why are there no books about the Manchus to rebel against themselves? Everyone assumes that the Manchu ruling class is monolithic?

The Chinese-style five-tooth battleship has five masts and five sails, 80 meters long, 16 meters wide, and a draft of about 8 meters. The bottom layer is equipped with 34 32-pound guns, the second layer at the bottom is equipped with 34 24-pound guns, and the upper two layers are equipped with 32 12-pound guns. The bow is equipped with 3 48-pound guns, with a total of 103 guns. It has a regular crew of 850 people, a maximum crew of 1,000, and a speed of about 6 to 8 knots. The new steam-sail hybrid treasure ship is 100 meters long, 20 meters wide, and has a draft of 10 meters. It is equipped with 34 48-pound guns in the bottom layer, 34 32-pound guns in the second layer at the bottom, 22 24-pound guns in the upper layer, and 3 68-pound guns in the bow. It has a total of 93 guns. It can carry 1,000 people and has a speed of 12 knots. Are the authors interested in adoption? I really hope to see the collision scene between Chinese sailing battleships and Western battleships. The following is a column I wrote about Chinese sailing boats. If you are interested, you can read it.

Luo Luo's new book "Buried Alive in the Qing Dynasty" has been released. Please collect and follow it. Now the new books of the same batch in Qidian's new book issue are arranged for follow-up recommendation of the works based on the follow-up data. Staying on the latest chapter for 30 seconds every day is considered a follow-up read. Number, book friends who like Luo Luo's works, please [follow up]. If you want to gain weight, please also click on the latest chapter every day and stay for 30 seconds. Thank you 🤝🙏

There was no food left, the peasants wanted to rebel, the Manchus wanted to go south to seek a living, and all of them were in danger of dying. Chongzhen was good, but if he had been the Emperor of the Tang Dynasty and Song Dynasty, he would probably have perished. At that time, sweet potatoes and potatoes had been planted, but they still could not withstand the small glacier. Chongzhen's killing of those generals and civilian officials was nothing. The killed generals and civilian officials could not save the country. The only one who could save the country was Wei Zhongxian, the traitor and traitor. There was roughly a half chance. The only way to save the country is to wipe out the world with blood, kill 60% to 70% of the people, and drastically reduce the population. Which emperor of the Central Plains dares to do this? Whoever does this will most likely end up dead.

Da Luoluo's reasoning and reasoning were very practical and reasonable, just like the most reasonable, humane and feasible method at that time!

The author doesn't know what war is, right? Ordinary people without any training can easily defeat other people's hundreds of battle armies with a few grenades? Nonsense

Luo Luo's "Buried Alive in the Qing Dynasty" will be on the shelves on November 1st. The first paid VlP chapter uploaded, book friends who subscribe within 24 hours will be deemed as the first subscriber. If you like it, please remember to support the first subscriber! Afraid of forgetting! It is recommended that you turn on [automatic subscription] if you don't like Luo Luo's new book! I hope that because I have liked one of Luo Luo's books, I will spend 2 cents 💰 starting point and subscribe to support my first order! Please! Thank you everyone🤝🙏

There should be more than just these people at this time, there should be more than 120 million people in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, hundreds of millions people in the late Ming Dynasty, and there should be 50 million people massacred by natural disasters and man-made disasters.

Wulu·Full Order Life is like a dream, and things in the world are like clouds. One hundred and thirty coins, five updates every day. I don't know where to go, but I feel this body shape. Luo Shu is all set, nothing more than the spirit.

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