Li Xiao pondered for a long time and decided to first adopt a similar approach to Shandong for the land annexation situation in the Jiangnan area.

That is, landlords or self-cultivated farmers in various places will review and report their own land by themselves, and then the government will verify and compare them. In this way, land acres will be measured and counted first.

When he was in Shandong, Li Xiao implemented such a policy, which was unique. At that time, local landlords in Shandong thought that Li Xiao did this to facilitate tax collection in the future, so they tried to pay less land, so they could greatly reduce the amount of tax paid by then.

Unexpectedly, Li Xiao sent someone to check and confiscate all the lands that the landlords concealed as a landlord's unbroken land, causing the landlords in Shandong to suffer a huge loss. It can be said that they are so regretful.

Therefore, with the precedent of Shandong, the landlords and gentry in the Jiangnan area are now smart, and they all review reports according to real numbers and dare not make any false claims. They thought that in this way, Li Xiao would have no choice but to do anything to them, and he would eventually have to default on the status quo.

In the end, after the staff arranged by Li Xiao personally checked it, he found that the amount of land reported was similar to the actual number of land acres. It can be seen that with the painful lessons learned by Shandong landlords, these landlords in Jiangnan were all very well-behaved.

But, in this way, is it completely fine?

They completely underestimated Li Xiao's ruthlessness and skills.

At the end of December of that year, a few days before the New Year, there were a long new notice in the entire Jiangnan area occupied by Li Xiao and the streets and alleys of various prefectures and towns.

In the notice, Li Xiao stipulated a brand new policy.

That is, the local landlords, wealthy gentry and self-cultivated farmers in Jiangnan can only retain a maximum of 200 mu of land per household. This regulation is called the basic fields of land households. The tax amount paid for these basic fields is the same as in Shandong, while the land south of the Huai River is twice as expensive per mu compared with the land in Shandong.

The reason why the land in Jiangnan is twice as much as the northern land like Shandong is not because of Li Xiao’s intentional oppression, but he made a careful decision after carefully considering the local land acre output.

Because the so-called "recent tax" in Jiangnan is actually in line with its economic development level. In the late Ming Dynasty, the innovation of production technology, the introduction of new varieties, and the superior natural conditions made the Jiangnan region far exceed that in the northern region in terms of agricultural output.

"Suhu is ripe, and the world is full of people." This common saying fully reflects the important position of agricultural production in this region in the country.

As early as the Northern Song Dynasty, Fan Zhongyan said: "I am the governor of Suzhou. I checked and recorded books every day. The land in a state is 34,000 hectares. The profit of the middle-earth harvest is that I get two to three stones of rice per mu, and the amount of rice is more than seven million stones."

When it came to the Southern Song Dynasty, Gao Side said: "In the east and west Zhejiang, one mu of land was collected from five or six stones. Therefore, the proverb said, "Su Lake is ripe for the world."

During the Ming Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty, Xie Zhaoyu, a native of the Ming Dynasty, also pointed out: "The people of the northerners do not like to treat the country and accumulate more land, but the veins are not enough to enter the country. They look at it in the south of the Yangtze River and cannot match one ten."

Even in the Qing Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty man Yin Huiyi said: "The land in the north is vast, and the farming of a man from seven to eighty acres to hundreds of acres, and the effort is scattered and the work is thin."

Therefore, if it is considered to be a heavy tax just because Su Song’s land tax is higher than that in the northern region, it is considered a heavy tax, and obviously the huge differences in economic levels between regions are not taken into account.

The reason why Li Xiao stipulated a basic land of 200 acres, but did not attack the local tyrants as cruelly and resolutely as in later generations was actually because the maximum improvement and compromise made when the country was not yet completely unified and the people's thoughts had not yet reached the modern level.

Because of the 200 acres of land, most self-cultivated farmers and small and medium-sized landlords have been included in the Jiangnan area where the population is densely populated and less land. You should know that in the late Ming Dynasty, having more than 30 acres of land was enough to be called local wealthy households and landlords. Ordinary self-cultivated farmers generally only have two or three acres of land, or even only a few bits of land.

In this way, Li Xiao greatly reduced his opposition through appropriate compromises and concessions. Now he has to deal with only the landlords and gentry, whose population is only a small number.

This is the basic land situation formulated by Li Xiao. The landlords and gentry who had more land and had more land and had more than tens of thousands of acres of land had more than 200 acres of land, which was called surplus land for land households. The government did not force confiscation. However, in this way, the surplus land households had to pay more per mu, which was ten times more land tax than the basic land.

Ten times the land tax is not a small amount.

In this way, the interests of those landlords and gentry will naturally be greatly damaged. It can even be said that Li Xiao's actions are equivalent to forcing them to do the right thing with the official household.

It sounds like an official is forcing the people to rebel, or shooting himself in the foot.

But is Li Xiao so stupid?

Of course not, because while he was putting pressure, he was also giving them a way out.

That is, he clearly pointed out in the notice that if these big landlords and gentry felt that they could not afford such a large amount of land tax, they could mortgage the surplus land to the government to discount them.

When the government acquires these extra land, it will not lower the price. Instead, it will send notary staff to supervise the government to purchase land at a price of 10% higher than the market price.

Now Li Xiao has a lot of money and a lot of gold and silver. It is no problem to acquire the financial resources of these lands.

This practice of giving a specific way out can be greatly reduced, so that they will not resist the government to the end.

Moreover, Li Xiao designed such a high land tax, which actually blocked these big landlords and another path of cold and violent confrontation with the government.

That is, if Li Xiao sets the tax amount for these fields to only two or three times the basic fields, then these big landlords and gentry can of course convert all the surplus fields into mulberry trees or cotton to offset the large amount of land tax added by Li Xiao through the high profits of such economic crops.

Because now, the handicraft industry in the Jiangnan region has developed vigorously, driving extremely strong demand for raw silk and materials for weaving cloth. The income from growing mulberry and cotton is far higher than the income from growing rice. In the entire Jiangnan region, various lands have long been gradually transformed from growing rice to growing mulberry silkworms.

The grain production areas in Jiangnan in the Ming Dynasty were concentrated in the Wusong area, and this area was also the production area of ​​silk, which led to the contradiction between mulberry and rice fighting for fields. The mulberry and silkworm industry promoted the textile industry, and the development of the textile industry eventually evolved into urbanization and the germination of capitalism.

Silkworm and silk weaving industry centers are basically concentrated in the Jiangnan area and are widely distributed. Silk weaving markets have begun to appear in large numbers in places such as the Taihu Lake Basin and Hangzhou, Jiaxing, Huzhou, etc.

The most obvious example is that Shengze Town, Wujiang County, Suzhou Prefecture, was originally a deserted village. In the early years of Hongzhi, there were only 50 or 60 residents, which was desolate and ordinary. It was from this period that local residents began to engage in silk weaving in large quantities. By the Jiajing period, they had developed into a market. By the Wanli and Tianqi period, they became a nationally famous silk industry town.

According to European missionaries at that time, there were 200,000 weavers and 600,000 spinning workers in Songjiang alone (now Shanghai and Suzhou). This huge number is almost comparable to that of the early British industrialization.

Such a transformation is actually easy to understand from the perspective of human profit-seeking.

If a farmer planted a mu of land, if he planted rice, he would get three or four stones of rice, but only three or four taels of silver. If he planted mulberry trees and raised silkworms, he would get a load of silk, which would be more than thirty taels of silver. Even if the court collected rice as tax and bought rice and paid for it, his income would be much higher than that of planting rice. In this way, naturally, he would turn to planting mulberry trees.

Such urbanization led to the increase in grain in Jiangnan year by year in the Ming Dynasty. Of course, compared with farming, the income of people in Jiangnan area also increased accordingly, so at the beginning, it did not cause too much harm.

However, the increase in the price of grain was getting faster and faster, and eventually reached an unbearable level for the people.

In the national rice price list studied by Ming history, the average rice price in the 1720s had reached 1.6 times that in the 1710s, showing a sharp upward trend. The growth of people's income is far lower than this.

People are iron and rice are steel. If the income does not increase, the food still has to be eaten. So, if you don’t have money and can’t afford it, what should you do?

Then grab it.

During the Chongzhen period, a trend of robbing rice in Suzhou and Songjiang Prefecture broke out many times, suppressing or resisting rents, and some people rebelled and rebelled.

According to the records of the Ming Dynasty, in August 11, the thieves in Dongting East Mountain planned to uprising, but were suppressed by the governor, the censor Zhang Guowei. Later, the remnants of the party raised the matter again and were still subdued.

In November of the same year, a traitor took advantage of locust plagues to make rumors, and falsely rumored that people would resist rent. People from all over the country responded one after another. More than a thousand people gathered to burn the hut and rob the capital, and were eventually suppressed by the prefect Niu Ruolin.

In June of the 13th year of Chongzhen, a riot broke out in Suzhou Prefecture City.

In the first month of the 14th year of Chongzhen, citizens in Suzhou Fucheng rioted and robbed rice.

...

Such records of the Ming Dynasty are truly sighing.

So, how expensive was the rice in Suzhou in 1640? 100 copper coins per kilogram, which is about 50-100 yuan per kilogram.

Think about it, a family of three costs RMB 3,000 a month to buy rice, and the monthly food cost is more than RMB 4,000. What is that? It is not an exaggeration to say that it is to live just for the sake of eating.

Therefore, the essence of the food crisis is insufficient food production, which leads to excessive marketization of grain and soaring grain prices under the influence of marketization.

In the Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Pearl River Delta regions of China, both in the late Ming and now, grain is highly market-oriented. Basically, everyone needs to buy grain from outside. The Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions were originally the main producing areas for grain, but now they have become grain purchase areas due to changes in arable land. In the end, due to insufficient grain supply, it has become a food crisis.

In modern times, the most typical example is the Arab Spring in 2011.

The root cause of this revolution aimed at overthrowing dictatorial governments in the Middle East is the expansion of food prices.

You should know that most Middle Eastern countries have harsh geographical environments, and 50% or more of their food depends on imports, which makes them very fragile in the face of fluctuations in commodity prices.

For example, in Egypt, the inflation rate of food prices reached an astonishing 19% at the beginning of 2011. The cost of living for Egyptians suddenly increased to an unbearable level. The country and society immediately began to experience large-scale unrest, which eventually led to uprisings and mutinies, forcing the current President Mubarak to step down.

Earlier, there were actually many examples. For example, France's continuous grain failure in 1788 and 1789 caused the price of bread to soar. The French people, who were already struggling to survive, accounted for 50% of the average income of ordinary workers, daily food expenses soared to 88%. The entire French society quickly fell into crisis, and eventually, the Great Revolution broke out.

Of course, under Li Xiao's rule, because of the large amount of grain production in Taiwan, Southeast Asia and Australia, especially the existence of cash crops such as sweet potatoes and potatoes, even if the entire Jiangnan region has become mulberry fields and cotton fields, Li Xiao's grain supply is sufficient and there is no problem at all. It can ensure stable grain prices and make it affordable for most ordinary people.

Therefore, in order to prevent the landlords and gentry from using the profits of mulberry fields and cotton fields to purchase grain and then offset the land tax. Li Xiao decided to use such a large amount of land tax to scare them back so that they could no longer make bad ideas, and in the end they could only buy all the surplus fields to the government on the premise of willingness.

The reason why Li Xiao made up his mind to regain this large amount of land from these landlords and gentry was mainly due to the following three considerations.

The first point is to greatly reduce the power of these landlords and gentry, which are extremely powerful in the local area, so that they can pay taxes and pay taxes and spit out their fields. They can no longer rely on their land advantages to roam the countryside and act as powerful as before. In this way, the number of tenants in the landlord family is reduced and personal exploitation can be reduced as much as possible.

The second point is to distribute the land that has been redeemed to tenants who have lost their land and foreign refugees in the form of two or three acres per household, so that they can survive on this land.

Because in Jiangnan, although there are a large number of unemployed people and refugees who can settle in workshops, there are too many refugees in various provinces, and the number of refugees is too large, workshops in Jiangnan still find it difficult to absorb the entire population. The streets and alleys of these prefectures, counties, towns and towns are still full of refugees. Therefore, for social stability, a large amount of land is still needed to resettle them.

The third point is that after Li Xiao mastered these surplus fields, he could convert all of these surplus fields into mulberry fields and cotton fields in the form of a national plan. In this way, because of the sufficient source of materials, he could not only continue to expand the scale of the workshop, but also have absolute pricing power in raw silk and cotton balls because he had mastered the vast majority of the land. This would prevent those landlords and gentry from disrupting the market and raising prices at will. Therefore, in this way, the silk and cotton market in Jiangnan should be effectively controlled to ensure that it is stable and orderly.
Chapter completed!