The one-whip method was first tried out in Shandong province.
Gui E got the reform booklet and was immediately surprised. Wang Yuan had changed one of his whipping techniques!
"Why should the quota remain unchanged? The longer it goes, the more rigid it becomes!" Gui E frowned.
Shi Dao thought carefully: "Jian Monkey (Gui Cai), you have a very serious problem in formulating this whipping law. Although it can circumvent the exploitation of the common people by the Lijia Chief and the Grain Chief, it concentrates the power of collection and administration on the
States and counties, and state and county officials can also set their own tax amounts. What consequences will this bring?"
Gui E said: "The quota set by the state and county officials every year is calculated based on the acres of land, population and disaster situations. It cannot be added at will."
Shi Dao shook his head: "Seeing that the monkey's move can only guard against gentlemen, not villains. The power of tax collection and administration is concentrated in the governors of prefectures and counties, and they can set their own quotas every year. In this way, it is slightly disadvantageous for the governor and the censor to take charge of both.
, the prefecture and county officials can make two sets of accounts. One with low tax amounts for the court to see, and one with high tax amounts for themselves. The higher the actual tax rate, the more the prefecture and county officials will make!"
Gui E was stunned.
This was the fatal flaw of Zhang Juzheng's reform. No political opponents were needed to counterattack. All state and county officials were vanguards in undermining the reform.
This kind of governance means that state and county officials across the country are crazy supporters of the One Whip Law on the surface, and crazy destroyers of the One Whip Law secretly. They must support the One Whip Law so that they can make more money; they want to make more money.
To get more, you have to secretly destroy a whipping method.
Wang Yuan saw the loopholes at a glance and directly instituted a fixed levy without giving state and county magistrates the right to impose additional taxes. In this way, although state and county magistrates would not support the reform, they would not deliberately undermine it.
Gui E continued to look down, his expression becoming more and more solemn, and finally sighed: "The Prime Minister is really courageous, I can't even hope to match him."
Shi Dao also lamented: "This method is even more difficult to implement."
Guihe, Zhang Juzheng's whipping method, cannot be used against big landowners, and can only be shared equally by increasing taxpayers. The further back, the more difficult it is for the small people. It is really just a time-saving method, and it can only achieve thirty or fifty benefits at most.
The role of years.
Wang Yuan claimed that he only prescribed the "hundred-year law", but tried his best to maintain its effectiveness for a longer period of time. He added a weakened version of "dividing a small family into an entire family" into the "one whip method".
That is to say, when apportioning taxes and levies, it is not divided equally according to the head of the population, and the land has a higher weight. The actual measured acres of land are multiplied by a certain coefficient, and then the taxes and levies are allocated based on the population in the yellow list.
This is equivalent to retaining the poll tax and at the same time apportioning part of the poll tax to the land. The more land the landlord owns, the more the poll tax will be shared each year, but it has not completely abolished the poll tax for the common people.
Gui E thought carefully and said: "If we do this, I'm afraid the landlord will pass on the taxes and servitude to the tenants."
"It will definitely happen," Shi Dao nodded, "but there is no perfect way in the world."
There are policies and measures to counter.
The landlords will definitely not be willing to share the poll tax, but they cannot disobey the government orders. Then they can pass it on to the tenants and raise the land rent. Anyway, do it if you can. It is like levying a house rent tax and just pass it on to the tenants. The wool comes out.
on sheep.
You worked as a tenant in the Qing Dynasty, so you didn't pass it on to the tenants?
Even so, there is progress.
There is only so much grain produced per acre, and no matter how the poll tax is transferred, there is always a limit. If all the tenants starve to death, who will the landlord find to farm?
After Gui E and Shi Dao thoroughly understood "Wang Yuan's version of the one-whip method", they immediately recruited left and right political advisors and left and right counselors, and asked them to contact officials from various governments in Shandong, and then the governments would implement it to all prefectures and counties in the province.
Instead of imposing taxes immediately, the states and counties were asked to report the number of acres, population, and corvee expenses in the past ten years.
Gui E and Shi Dao personally led a group of civil servants to make a plan to formulate tax quotas and tax coefficients for various states and counties. From now on, they will continue to collect according to this amount. The amount of taxes each household in Shandong will pay in the future is: the number of acres of land multiplied by a fixed coefficient.
(1), plus the number of people in the household multiplied by the fixed coefficient (2).
The fixed coefficient varies from place to place and is calculated based on the total tax amount, population, and acres of land. This calculation is carried out by the Chief Secretary of each province.
Logically, it should be calculated every year. Although the total tax amount remains unchanged, the population is changing. The real situation is that the population has basically remained unchanged. Because there are too many underreporting, state and county officials have difficulty in counting and are too lazy to do so.
However, because Wang Yuan increased the weight of land taxation, the more people were underreported, the greater the head tax shared by the big landowners. Therefore, the big landowners would force state and county officials to try their best to record the hidden population statistics.
At the same time, Wang Yuan changed the performance review standards. Because the agricultural tax amount remained unchanged, the increase in land tax was no longer used as a measure of political performance. Population increase was mentioned first. The greater the registered population growth, the better the performance evaluation of officials.
In this way, landlords are willing to count more people in order to pay less poll tax, and officials are willing to count more people in order to improve their political performance.
The more the population is counted, and the total tax amount remains unchanged, the less the head tax is allocated to each person. If this is publicized, neighbors may take the initiative to report that a certain family has concealed its population.
If nothing goes wrong and the whip method is popularized, the registered population of the Ming Dynasty will increase, and the taxes shared equally by the people will become less and less, which will actually achieve the partial effect of dividing a small person into an acre.
However, as time goes by, big landowners must use various means to conceal their newly acquired land. The police officers will also secretly report the population number without telling the state and county officials, but charge according to the actual population.
Carry your own pocket.
We can only rely on the monarchs and ministers of the Ming Dynasty to regularly check the fields and population.
The country is managed by people. Even in modern society, the seemingly perfect legal system will be distorted by the people who implement it.
Wang Yuan could only change the laws of the world and try to be more reliable, but he could not control the problems of official administration a hundred years later.
At least Wang Yuan gave local officials the motivation to conduct population censuses, unlike before when local officials took the initiative to conceal the population.
Today, Shandong's autumn grain harvest (autumn tax collection) was very late, and as soon as collection began, a very dramatic situation occurred.
Gui E and Shi Dao looked at each other, then laughed.
Shi Dao said: "This is an unexpected gain, it is really dumbfounding."
Gui E shook his head and smiled bitterly: "I wonder if the king had expected such a scene."
what's going on?
After the promulgation of a whipping law, large landowners in various states and counties in Shandong went to the parents' official collectively to complain, saying that the population of their prefectures and counties was wrong. They requested to postpone the payment of taxes and conduct a population census first, and the gentry and powerful officials helped to conduct the population census.
The big landowners did this simply because they wanted to reduce the amount of money they spent on taxes and labor.
Gui E said: "Give them a month to conduct a population census and report it again for calculation."
A month later, new population figures were reported from various places in Shandong. The total number of people in the province was more than 8 million, which was double the previous statistics and 2 million more than during the Zhu Yuanzhang period!
How serious was the population underreporting in the Ming Dynasty?
Comparing the two dynasties of Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhu Houzhao, only Guizhou, Guangxi and other provinces in the country increased their population due to land conversion. Hundreds of years after the founding of the Ming Dynasty, the population of South Zhili dropped sharply by more than 2 million, and the population of Zhejiang dropped by more than 5 million.
Zhu Yuanzhang probably wanted to jump out of the coffin and kill someone.
In Shandong, there were endless wars at the end of the Yuan Dynasty and the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. In the 26th year of Hongwu, there were 5.25 million people, but now there are only more than 4 million left. Who are you kidding?
Gui E and Shi Dao did not make things difficult. They still calculated the coefficient according to the previous quota, and the amount of labor required to be paid per person or per acre was reduced by half.
The local gentry and wealthy families still wanted to pay less, and jointly petitioned the Chief Secretary: "Give me two more months, and I will definitely help my parents find more underreported people!"
Gui E replied: "You can continue to count the population, and you will pay taxes this year based on the results of the second review. The more people you clear out next year, the less you will have to pay. If you dare to falsely increase the population, once
It has been verified that the officials were exiled to Yinzhou, the civil servants were exiled to Tianzhu, the assistant officials were exiled to Nanyang, and the chief officials were exiled to Bianzhen!"
It's nonsense. I used to worry about the population not growing, but now I'm afraid that the population will grow too fast.
Historically, by the end of the Ming Dynasty, the peak population was only 70 million.
I'm afraid that if Wang Yuan's whipping method is implemented throughout the country, the population of Shaofeng Dynasty will directly exceed 100 million.