Is "emphasis on agriculture and suppression of business" a good thing or a bad thing? What problems did ancient China’s “emphasis on agriculture and suppression of commerce” bring about?

Today’s editorial is for everyone: What problems will arise from ancient China’s “emphasis on agriculture and suppression of commerce”? Interested friends please come and take a look!

Financial support is needed to keep a country running.

Obviously, business can bring prosperity to society.

Although there was no economics in ancient times, economic laws existed. The ancients could not but see the benefits of developing business. With the development of commerce and the abundance of tax sources, why did all Chinese dynasties reject such benefits?

01

Ancient China was a farming civilization, and taxation was very stable. As long as there are no serious natural disasters, this dynasty will continue smoothly.

Every dynasty has perished. As long as the financial system of the previous administration is restored, prosperity will continue to be created.

In agricultural areas, tax costs are very low and the total amount of wealth that can be gathered is also large.

But such a financial system has an insurmountable dilemma.

The characteristics of the wealth of agricultural civilization are that it is too rigid and too little elastic. After all, food depends on the weather, and the yield of the land is relatively fixed, which has formed a series of characteristics in Chinese history.

First of all, the finance of the Chinese dynasty is a kind of "living within one's means".

The total amount of wealth is so huge - there is so much land, so much land output, so many people can be fed. Whether levied on a per capita or land yield basis, the change will not be significant.

Therefore, the imperial government can only have so many functions in an era, and how much money can be used to do so many things. This is different from the financial principles of ancient Western commercial societies.

Western business societies can “live within their means” and charge according to needs.

Why? Because of business wars and foreign wars, they can completely recover the money spent on the market and battlefields, and their financial situation is very flexible.

If it were not for the temptation of huge commercial profits, Spain and Portugal would not risk their lives to go to sea.

From this perspective, you can understand why the ancient Chinese civilization has no motivation to expand overseas.

No matter how powerful this dynasty is, financial revenue is also its limiting factor. With this string, the kite cannot fly far.

China’s annual income is limited, and its income from foreign wars is also unstable. Therefore, outward expansion is a very dangerous thing. Maybe the dynasty will die. For example, Emperor Yang Di did not change Goguryeo's character and ultimately destroyed his country.

Because there is so much money, the purpose has been set in advance. Therefore, although the emperor has the highest power, he actually does not have that much space and can operate at will. Even the emperor depends on food.

02

This is a good thing, but it also brings a problem.

With the fiscal system of living within one's means and paying less taxes, there is no problem in handling the daily affairs of the empire. However, what do we do when a crisis strikes and government spending needs to increase significantly?

This crisis mainly comes from two aspects. First, internal factors are quietly increasing, draining financial resources.

For example, Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang was very concerned about his descendants. He can live his whole life without doing any work and receive salary from the government. How much can this big family get from the state's finances in the beginning? So it's not a big problem. However, 200 to 300 years later, the problem became serious.

According to Xu Guangqi’s calculations, the population of the Ming royal family doubled every 30 years, from 58 people in the Zhu Yuanzhang period to 127 people in the Yongle period, to 19,611 people in the 32nd year of Jiajing, and then to 19,611 people in the Wanli period. More than 80,000 people. By the end of the Ming Dynasty, the population exceeded one million.

The royal family has no money.

In fact, by the end of the Qing Dynasty, the hard-core crops of the Eight Banners disciples had become a serious financial burden for the Qing Dynasty.

Of course, countries that “live within their means” cannot afford it.

Another type of crisis is an external crisis, such as the attack of northern nomads, which requires a significant increase in military spending.

Where does the money come from? This also exceeds the strict financial burden of agricultural countries.

This kind of financial reason can be found when the Song Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty collapsed.

03

What did you say? /Excuse me? One solution is to find a flexible tax source. Since land production is rigid, what is elastic?

In an agricultural society, the most elastic income is the so-called profiteering resource commodities, mainly salt and iron, followed by addictive commodities, such as tea.

Historically, these goods were owned solely by the state because they provided financial flexibility.

However, there is a problem with this product. Let's leave it to the government. The efficiency is too low and the income is limited. Let's leave it to private companies, and then the government will tax it. The efficiency has increased, but the risk has also increased significantly.

After all, whoever controls these hugely profitable resources can easily earn huge amounts of income.

Individuals with huge incomes may become a threat to the government or powerful forces, causing social imbalance and exacerbating social conflicts, such as the salt merchants in the late Qing Dynasty.

So this plan is not reliable either.

The wealthy salt merchant forced the imperial envoy sent by the emperor to investigate tax evasion and died.

Some people may say that since rigid taxation is the basic dilemma, we should learn from the West and develop business, instead of being as stupid as the ancient Chinese government, which for thousands of years has "emphasized agriculture over commerce", making There is little fiscal flexibility, and there is no money to spend when a crisis strikes. Isn't that what you want?

It’s not that simple. Introducing business into the vast country of China will have two effects: one positive and one negative.

The first impact is that if social management capabilities are not improved, such as introducing a representative system and establishing a powerful ocean-going fleet. There will be no sales tax at all. If businessmen cannot participate in politics, they will not dare to create wealth. Without the protection of the fleet, merchants did not dare to risk expanding overseas trade.

British maritime trade supported the navy, and the powerful navy protected British merchants' overseas trade.

The second impact is that if this set of capacity building is completed and business tax can be levied, the social structure will be completely changed.

Let’s see, is this necessarily a good thing? Or, to be more precise, under the conditions of ancient society, was this necessarily a good thing? uncertain.

Business society is essentially an ever-changing network and an ever-expanding order. This sentence is very important.

This is a network, so it cannot live alone. A society rises or falls depending on its environment and its position in the network. Once the network changes, the living conditions of business society will also change.

This is a constantly changing expansion order, which means that a business society is either expanding or contracting, and it is difficult to maintain stability.

In the commercial society of ancient human history, when it developed, it was like burning cooking oil; when it declined, it was like a collapsed building, and the stability of civilization was very poor.

You see, those once developed oasis countries on the Silk Road, such as Loulan, are now extinct.

Another example is China's famous commercial cities, such as Yangzhou, which once prospered in the commercial network of the canal, but when the canal declined, Yangzhou's decline was a foregone conclusion.

In fact, the same is true for Western civilization. The internal commerce of the Roman Empire was very developed, but once it collapsed, it was difficult to revive.

A few years ago, many people watched the famous documentary "The Rise of the Great Powers", but have you ever thought about why the rise of Western powers is like a relay race? After a country rises and declines, Just never recovered? Portugal and Spain, which once ruled the earth, and the Netherlands, which once owned more than half of the world's merchant ships, were small and beautiful countries at best, different from their heyday.

Because navigation and commerce were complex partnerships, it often took a long time for people to form partnerships.

Once this complex cooperative relationship is destroyed by powerful forces such as war, it is almost impossible to rebuild it in place, because it is difficult to guarantee that the original complex situation can be restored, so the empire will fall apart and disappear into history.

After the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Spain never rose again.

Let’s look at China again. Although the agricultural economy seems to have various shortcomings, such as poor financial flexibility as mentioned above. But it has a simple structure and strong vitality.

After the demise of the previous dynasty, as long as the new dynasty distributed land to small peasant families, the economic and social structure would be quickly rebuilt and restored, thus reviving the empire.

This also shows from another perspective that China has the best historical continuity among all civilizations in the world. No matter what kind of chaos, it will always rise again.

04

Precisely because the fiscal system of the agricultural economy has been used in China's past dynasties, focusing on agriculture and suppressing business has naturally become the most rational choice for emperors. My goal is to perpetuate the empire, not to develop a commercial economy that threatens my innovative dominance.

However, the result is that Chinese society has been internalized.

What do you mean? This is because the Chinese are very good at this financial system and they don't want to use other systems. This completely prevented them from developing economies and technologies beyond agricultural civilization.

The eternal habit of Chinese farmers: work at sunrise and rest at sunset.

Our middle school history textbooks tell us that human society went from slavery to feudalism to capitalism, and will eventually realize communism.

However, once a civilization is internalized, it cannot break through this dilemma alone. Without external influence, China's feudal monarchy will continue to exist.

Through the financial system of the agricultural economy, we can also understand why Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty only paid attention to Confucianism in the end, and later generations also chose Confucianism as the guiding ideology of society. One of them was to emphasize agriculture while suppressing commerce.

So, it is not because we believe in Confucianism that society attaches great importance to agriculture and suppresses business, but because we have chosen such a financial system and the idea of ????focusing on agriculture and suppressing business, we have also chosen Confucianism. Thought.

Without Confucianism, there would be other schools offering such ideas. The empire needs this kind of thinking, not Confucianism. It just so happens that Confucianism provides such a complete set of ideological solutions.

History chose Confucianism, not Confucianism chose history.