Now Zhou Zuoding was spared the fate of being killed by the Qing army. Instead, his officials prospered and he was promoted to the governor of Shaanxi Province. He assumed the important task of presiding over the economic revitalization plan of the entire province of Shaanxi.
Zhou Zuoding was a poor scholar from a middle peasant family. He had personally worked in the fields for many years, so his main focus was on agricultural issues.
At that time, Shaanxi's industries were in decline and its population was sparse. Although many people gradually moved in from Sichuan and Hubei provinces, and some refugees who had previously been exiled to Henan also returned to their hometown in Shaanxi, this caused land disputes.
Many people randomly referred to fertile land as their old property, and many good lands suddenly had dozens of owners. Therefore, the yamen spent all day settling these lawsuits and had little spare time to deal with other issues.
Zhou Zuoding then ordered that all cases of "recognition of old property" should be settled at one time. No one should come to identify the old property again. All unowned land should be included in the camp, waiting for the land distribution by the camp when the camp field division is equalizing the land.
This approach was quite crude, and it aroused the dissatisfaction of many people at the time. After all, many gentry families took great risks to follow the Shun army to retreat from Henan, and now they finally returned to their hometown in Shaanxi, but you, Zhou Zuoding, gave the order,
Just give my family's ancestral property to equal land?
It’s not like there was no one in my family who was an official in the new dynasty, so the voice of impeachment immediately spread throughout the government and the public.
However, Zhou Zuoding was a member of the Juren Party, and he had a very harmonious relationship with Fang Yiren, the Grand Master. His son also worshiped Fang Yizhi, the Imperial Master's Jiu Jiu, as his teacher. The backers of those gentry were mostly members of the Jinshi Party in the DPRK, and it was difficult to communicate with Fang Yizhi.
The party's countermeasures naturally could not shake Zhou Zuoding's position.
After resolving the lawsuit over the illegal recognition of old businesses, Zhou Zuoding began to seize the opportunity to allocate land according to population and began to implement agricultural reforms. He believed that without agricultural administration, Shaanxi would not be able to survive on its own, and the first key to running Guanzhong must be to organize agriculture.
For a long time, agriculture in the northwest region has been in the state of small-scale farmer production, with little emphasis on crop varieties and production and processing technologies. This is a big gap with Jiangnan and Huguang regions.
Zhou Zuoding emphasized that if this situation is not changed, "the products will become increasingly thin and the financial resources will become increasingly poor." Zhou Zuoding once presided over the work of the rural official school in Tai'an Prefecture, so when he arrived in Chang'an, the capital of Xingjing Prefecture, he was completely destitute.
A rural official school was first built in the provincial capital.
The school takes veteran farmers as its teachers and has set up a special farm to study "the analysis of soil quality, the analysis of seeds, the manufacture of fertilizers, the prediction of climate", etc., and they devote themselves to studying and striving to make progress.
Zhou Zuoding's approach was undoubtedly greatly influenced by his son's teacher Fang Yizhi. This truth-seeking and pragmatic style of study of the Tongcheng School was deeply rooted in the bones of Shaanxi scholars.
More than a year after opening the township official school, Zhou Zuoding set up "fields" in various places in Weinan, that is, he opened government-run farms in the name of camps to promote new crop seeds and agricultural production technologies.
There are many people, so I know that farming requires learning, and new knowledge of grains is needed. Agricultural courses flourished in Qin."
Shaanxi is the hometown of many of the founding fathers of the Shun Dynasty, so it often receives preferential treatment in financial rates. Many surrounding provinces have to bear the responsibility of paying Shaanxi. For example, Hubei Province needs to pay 1.5 million yuan every year.
A lot of silver dollars.
However, due to Zhou Zuoding's improvements in Shaanxi's agriculture, forestry, fishery and animal husbandry, by the sixth year of Tianfa, Hubei's payment to Shaanxi was reduced to 200,000 silver dollars per year.
In order to solve the problem of soil erosion, Zhou Zuoding also established the Shaanxi Forestry Supervision Bureau in Chang'an to specialize in tree planting technology. He also invited many epigraphers from Jiangnan who like to study flowers and trees to study their knowledge that was not beneficial to state affairs.
The knowledge of strange flowers and rocks was all applied to the study of planting trees.
In the eighth year of Tianfa, Ningxia and Hetao were merged into Shuofang Province. Zhou Zuoding was promoted from the Shaanxi Jiedushi Envoy to the Northwest Economic and Strategic Envoy, with jurisdiction over the three provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu and Shuofang.
He founded a government-run ranch in Ningxia, established breeding cattle and horse breeding ranches, and "researched endlessly on various methods of management and breeding in order to reproduce them." The animal husbandry in the northwest has greatly developed.
Zhou Zuoding realized that in order to realize the revival and progress of Shaanxi's economy, it was necessary to develop agriculture-related education. After many years of war in the late Ming Dynasty, there were many scholars like Zhou Zuoding who valued practical matters.
Therefore, he planned to build an agricultural school in Chang'an to popularize agricultural knowledge. "If you want to improve agricultural politics, you must first develop agricultural science." Within a few years, he attracted a large number of scholars from the economic school to teach in Shaanxi.
It can be said that Zhou Zuoding spent about five years of hard work. Although he failed to promote a fundamental revolution in northwest agriculture, these improvements based on traditional agriculture greatly restored the northwest economy, and he himself prospered as a result.
, later relying on the strong economic foundation established at this time, he repeatedly made outstanding achievements in the Junggar War, and was able to obtain the title of Ping Zhang of the Political Affairs Hall.
The restrictions on mineral development in the Ming Dynasty were mainly due to the fear that unruly people would gather in the name of mining and cause chaos. Later, during the Wanli period, mining supervision was widely established, and problems with officialdom caused a lot of adverse social impacts, making the situation even worse.
But at the beginning of Shun's reign, politics was still relatively clear, and the court was not stingy about killing people, nor was it afraid of provoking so-called popular uprisings.
Therefore, Zhou Zuoding adopted a completely liberal attitude towards mining in Shaanxi, but this also caused the problem of endless private mining in Shaanxi.
In order to rectify the mining industry, Zhou Zuoding had to vigorously rectify the mining industry at the request of Cai Shi, who was the northwest economic envoy at that time (Shuofang had not yet established a province at this time).
For this reason, Zhou Zuoding set up a mining administration supervisor, and also set up many sub-supervisors in areas rich in mineral deposits such as northern Shaanxi to investigate minerals, formulate mining seals, and collect mineral taxes, which led to the rapid revitalization of the mining and metallurgical industry in Shaanxi Province.
Under the leadership of Zhou Zuoding, Shaanxi's agriculture recovered rapidly, industry and commerce also developed, and the population surged at the same time, laying a solid material foundation for the subsequent turbulent Junggar War and the important task of regulating the upper reaches of the Yellow River.
Shaanxi Province is only a corner of Dashun, but from the Shun Dynasty's governance of Shaanxi, we can see a group of good officials under the political clarity of the early Shun Dynasty. Although most of them were from the previous dynasty, their lives were often frugal and difficult.
And because he had experienced the troubled times in the late Ming Dynasty, he disliked idle talk and advocated practical learning.
The Tongcheng School, which emphasizes practical management of the world, became popular, while the Luwang Xinxue and Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, which had flourished in the past, suffered heavy blows from the imperial court.
King Lu Xinxue was responsible for the demise of the Ming Dynasty, while Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism was because it had long been rumored in society that the Zhu family royal family was the successor of Zhu Xi, so the emperors and ministers of the Shun Dynasty suppressed Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism in a silent tacit understanding.
Most of the local gentry believed that Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism had a close relationship with the previous dynasty, but few established themselves in this school. Therefore, the academic style of Shizu's dynasty changed drastically.