Mythic version of the Three Kingdoms

Chapter 6911 The Foundation of Suffering
If Chen Junxin is not absorbed by Chen Xi in his current situation, he will be absorbed by Yingchuan Chen family sooner or later.

Even if Chen Junxin ran away from home, and no matter how unkind his father was, according to the current concept of filial piety in the Han Dynasty, it was Chen Junxin's duty to take care of his father in his old age and see him to the end of his life.

What's more, there is the Yingchuan Chen family behind them. No matter how much Chen Xi says that Chen Junxin is not valued, from Liu Bei's point of view, being literate and understanding military tactics are not things that ordinary people can master if they want to.

You have to know that there are many things in this world that some people think are normal, or even taken for granted, but in other places they are simply unavailable.

What the Yingchuan Chen family is most famous for is family education. The family will provide compulsory education to their descendants. I don’t ask you to learn something famous, but I want you to know the most basic principles of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness, and to be a normal person who can support yourself and be of some use to society.

When Chen Shi was still alive, he really didn't care about the background of his students. No matter if you were an ordinary farmer, a passerby, even a traitor, the descendant of a eunuch, or the descendant of a criminal, as long as you had a heart for good, knew your mistakes, and were willing to learn, he would teach you. He was even willing to pay for it to teach these people. Therefore, during Chen Shi's period, the overall morality of the Chen family was positive.

Even if Chen Xi were in Chen Shi's era, he would give the Chen family much more face than he does now, because Chen Shi really restrained himself according to the virtues of a saint, and then used ordinary people's morality to persuade and teach others, and truly promoted moral education.

This was the key to why Chen Shi was able to protect others during the Party Faction Persecution and, when he died, had tens of thousands of students from all over the world seeing him off. This is true morality. You can say he is pedantic, but if such a person really appears before you, you can indeed say that he is a clear stream in the world.

By the time of Chen Ji, people began to pursue sages. Although he really achieved "no flowery words, no false deeds", he no longer broadcast the teachings of sages. The core of education also shifted from Chen Shi's original intention of conducting research based on conscience and that everyone has the right to receive education.

However, Chen Ji himself has a very high moral standard. Even if he deviates, he can maintain his original intention and will not be affected too much by the outside world. This is why Chen Xi is willing to give face when facing Chen Ji, because the other party is indeed a moral gentleman when it does not involve certain things.

As for Chen Qun, he was even worse in this respect. Since Chen Qun took over the management of the family, the prestige of the Chen family increased, but the morality of the Chen family was declining.

Chen Xi didn't pay much attention to these things before, but today when Liu Bei mentioned Chen Junxin, Chen Xi realized why the history books described the generations from Chen Shi to Chen Tai in the hundred years as "the officials are ashamed of the ministers, and the ministers are ashamed of the elders." Their official positions were getting higher and higher, their prestige was getting heavier, but their morals were indeed declining.

When Chen Shi died, everyone in the world came to see him off. When Chen Ji died, many Yingchuan literati came to see him off. When Chen Qun died, only friends and bureaucrats came to see him off, and Cao Wei gave him posthumous honors. When Chen Tai died, even his friends were few and far between, and most records show that he was given a grand official funeral.

Many times, only at the moment of death can a person see clearly whether everything he has done is recognized or not by others.

It is obvious that as time goes by, the Chen family's reputation becomes more and more powerful, but the number of people who agree with what they do becomes fewer and fewer. Even the Nine-Rank System is not recognized by all the aristocratic families.

This thing is indeed beneficial for the aristocratic families to consolidate their power, but can the aristocratic families with foresight really not see the disadvantages? Can they really not see the possibility of collapse?

We have all experienced the turmoil at the end of the Han Dynasty. How could we not understand how much of a backlash there would be if we lost our way to progress? It's just that some things can't be said so clearly.

"I somewhat understand why academic research should stay away from officialdom." Chen Xi sighed.

"If that great-uncle was still alive, many things would not have happened. Even if they did happen, they would have been made up for very well later." Chen Xi looked at Chen Junxin, knowing that if Chen Shi was in charge of the family, such an incident of meeting a village woman and having a one-night stand would most likely not have happened. Now that Chen Ji was in charge of the family, since such a thing had happened, Chen Junxin's father would have to deal with it as he should, and the child would have to be educated as he should.

In this way, even if Chen Junxin knew what happened to his mother, he would have no room to blame his family, because his family had done everything they should do according to the law and morals, and taught him everything they should teach. What would happen if they knew about it later?

Will it recur? No, it will still be Chen's family.

"It will also be stronger than it is now." Liu Bei said casually.

The right education at the right time is very important, even extremely important. Chen Junxin obviously missed the right time. He has come to this point relying on his early education, his own acquired efforts and social practice. He has become the backbone that a large family needs.

"But the world is so big, it's only natural that there will be some waste." Chen Xi said calmly, "Birth, acquired efforts, opportunities and luck all have their own meanings. For example, if I was hit by a car when I drove here to surrender, wouldn't that be the end of it?"

"You bastard." Liu Bei scolded with a smile.

Liu Bei did not say any more about this matter. He watched the preliminary round of the grand martial arts performance with Chen Xi, and then left the military camp. At this time, the sky was already a little dim due to the blizzard.

"No wonder you've built quite a few enclosed halls and underground martial arts halls in recent years. The amount of snow in recent years is indeed beyond imagination." Liu Bei caught a snowflake and looked at the snowflake that was almost as big as his finger joint with a solemn expression.

"The main purpose of building an underground martial arts hall is to keep warm and reduce the number of above-ground buildings. Of course, the most important thing is that some places are indeed suitable for building such underground buildings." Chen Xi said to Liu Bei as he got on the car, "As for the climate, there is nothing we can do. It will be the same next year and the year after next unless something unexpected happens. Now it is the Little Ice Age and the climate anomaly caused by the Blazing Sky Ring. It is really terrible."

"It's okay. I went to the north before. When it wasn't snowing here yet, there was already one or two meters of snow over there. To be honest, it was all thanks to our forced integration of villages and distribution of brick and tile houses. Otherwise, if we had followed the old way, we would have been buried in the snow." Liu Bei said with some emotion. Chen Xi had explained the integration of villages and villages in detail back then, but there were many problems during its implementation. Violent law enforcement is not only an ancient thing, but is also inevitable in modern times.

So Liu Bei also heard a lot of private complaints back then. It was only thanks to Chen Xi that the houses were really divided, and the supply and marketing cooperatives, public water wells, garbage disposal, road construction, and elementary education were all fulfilled one by one, otherwise there would have been a real mess.

Of course, the most important reason for being able to cut the Gordian knot and implement the policy of merging villages and strongholds was that the various heavy taxes and levies at the end of the Han Dynasty caused many people to become bandits and flee. The Yellow Turbans also hit them twice, causing chaos throughout the country. The cost for Chen Xi to win over the hearts of the people and maintain stability was relatively low.

After all, according to official history, Cao Cao captured good people and established military farms, and forced the land to be divided 50-50, which eventually became a good policy. This shows how inhumane the government and local governments were at that time.

It is precisely because there are so many such heaven-defying operations that the people have stopped cursing at Chen Xi's behavior of merging villages and strongholds - No, brother, you really didn't capture us to be slaves, it was Lord Xuande who thought our lives were too poor, we didn't even have huts, so he gave us houses, dug wells and water tanks for us, built roads, unified the household registration of the people, and set up education?

Fuck your mother, it turns out you are the government, and the government office was previously run by local gangs!
Therefore, later on, Liu Bei hardly heard anyone cursing about the merging of villages and strongholds, because Chen Xi began to use those settled locals to lure the villagers who were still living in the huts - you use the facts to publicize that the previous evil local forces have fallen, and the government is merging villages and strongholds, and the conditions are the same conditions you enjoyed before, you can tell your own stories for one day and get 30 coins, so leave quickly.

"We didn't consider these things back then. We just wanted to make it easier to manage. Even the rooms were models, which made construction easier." Chen Xi shook his head and said, "In fact, after the construction team built more universal model rooms, the efficiency was actually very high."

In fact, in the later period, Chen Xi no longer allowed non-professionals to join Sun Qian's professional construction team, because those people would reduce efficiency.

A complete brick-concrete two-story building can be completed by Sun Qian's construction team in just one month, if God is willing.

In a village with four or five hundred households, all they have to do is build brick-concrete buildings that are exactly the same. All you need to do is allocate the progress of each link and ensure that the materials from all places arrive on time. It will take less than two months to repair the houses, dig public water wells, and pave the roads in a village with four or five hundred households. This is also an important reason why the veterans under Sun Qian have high salaries.

The efficiency is so high that it makes people's scalp tingle. They are all skilled workers, and everyone knows where to be at what time without any instructions. In the same team, if there is one less professional craftsman, the process may stop at some point.

It’s not that other people can’t do it, but no matter the construction quality or construction efficiency, replacing other people is not as good as having a dedicated person in a dedicated position.

"I know this, but there is one thing I have to mention. Two things. One is that when you designed the main house, it was indeed reasonable. But when I went to the local area in the past two years, I found that the two-story building you designed for one family to live in is now a bit crowded." After the car frame started, Liu Bei raised his thumb and said to Chen Xi very seriously,
"This is inevitable." Chen Xi said slowly.

"When it was designed, it was designed for a household of four. Taking redundancy into consideration, there are four rooms, and a kang in the living room. After all, ordinary families don't need such complicated designs. They can just use this simplest solution and add a screen if necessary." Chen Xi nodded and said. By the way, this is also an important reason why the straw mat screens with printed patterns and texts sell well.

When we were poor in the past, the kang in the living room could be seen as soon as we entered the door. Later, when we became rich, we naturally added a screen there, and the screen was considered a big item.

In particular, some specially formulated gold paint was used and some patterns were printed on it. After being harvested by the noble families, it then entered the homes of ordinary people. As for the cost, the grass was specially grown in a suitable place in the northern border anyway.

Oh, when it came to the noble families, the printed patterns were made by smashing the molds into pieces, so the same quantity was relatively scarce. When it came to ordinary people's homes, there was no such thing. They printed, printed a lot, this year this, that next year. They even made detachable ones. The patterned mat in the middle of the screen could be removed and replaced with a new one. This thing was relatively cheap, so isn't it just right to buy a new one every year?
"Well, nowadays, families with many children seem to have too little space to live in." Liu Bei thought for a moment and said, "I have seen a family with seven or eight children. Although the living conditions are much better than before, they are still somewhat cramped, especially when there are elderly parents and young children, there is really not enough space."

"Oh, the second issue should be the issue of insufficient land, right?" Chen Xi thought for a while and said, "Back then, the land was divided according to households. Each household was given 50 acres, regardless of the number of people in the household. The purpose was to force the big households to split up."

After the separation, although it is still a clan, the same thing applies. As long as the family is separated, there will inevitably be considerations for each family. This kind of thing is inevitable.

Therefore, a large family of several hundred people was divided into several hundred families. Even if there was an ancestral hall and they would worship their ancestors together, it would be very difficult for them to work together as time went on. Even brothers would inevitably have different opinions once the family split up.

Especially when the elderly pass away, there is a high possibility that they will be completely separated due to some conflicts.

Therefore, when merging villages and towns, it became Chen Xi's habit to use land to split up the weak clans in the area.

Of course, Chen Xi is doing this in order to prepare for subsequent local workshops, factories, rural enterprises, etc. There is a limit to the food that can be obtained from the land, especially when Chen Xi takes the initiative to limit food prices for food security reasons. If one wants to live a better life, there is no future in relying on farming.

Liu Bei was also aware of this. Chen Xi did not like to force certain things, but preferred to appeal to people's emotions, explain things to them with reason, teach them how to fish, lure them with benefits, and threaten them with force. Basically, he followed a several-step approach, and if it was possible to avoid using official violent means, Chen Xi would try not to use them.

It's just the current situation...

"There are seven or eight children in a family, as well as parents. They rely on fifty acres of land and live in an old two-story building. It is indeed not enough. Even if my father works hard on the farm and my mother weaves day and night, it is still not enough for the family expenses." Liu Bei sighed.

"Divide the family, send some of the seven or eight children away, and we will give the extra new households 50 mu of land. When this household disappears, we will take back the 50 mu." Chen Xi sighed and said, "You don't want to divide the family, you don't want to build military merits, and you don't want to participate in Chen Xi's industry. What can Chen Xi do? I feed you food, but you don't eat it. What can I do? Do I have time to feed you?"
"The problem is that the children are all young, and the oldest is no more than ten years old." Liu Bei said helplessly, "New households like yours will be drawn together to form a new village, even if it is not far away."

"I did that to curb local clans and ensure that local people have enough land to use." Chen Xi said speechlessly. Why did the land granting in the Tang Dynasty stop? Wasn't it because there was no way to grant it locally? In order to avoid this problem, Chen Xi directly gathered the newly added households in the village. When a certain number was reached, they were transferred together to form a new village.

After all, the scale of farmland owned by each village is limited, and even the amount of land reclaimed will be limited. Once there are too many households in the village, the existing bottom line of 50 acres per household will inevitably be squeezed.

As for further expanding the scale of land reclamation, how should we put it? Two hundred to four hundred households, with a total scale of ten thousand to twenty thousand acres, which is only three or four kilometers in radius on the plain.

This range is still acceptable for normal agricultural production. If you continue to expand it, how should I put it? The distance you go will be too far. You can't really make a joke like riding a horse or driving a car to plow the fields. That would require a family of a certain level.

To put it bluntly, the hundreds of thousands of acres of land owned by Lao Chen's family are also the sum of many local villages, and the overall pattern is a scattered pattern.

In other words, almost everyone in this village is a tenant of the Chen family, who owns a few thousand acres of land that covers an area of ​​several miles in radius. The village owns a few thousand acres of land that covers an area of ​​several miles in radius, rather than a so-called core of several dozen miles in radius. It would be impossible to farm in that way in a non-mechanized era.

Well, even if the crops are distributed in a sparsely populated manner, during the busy farming season, the people of Old Chen's family still have to ride horses to visit this village and that village. If the people below really need to run dozens of miles to farm, it would be better for them to just build a small hut at the edge of the field and live there.

Not to mention the ancient times when people had low mobility, in the 1980s and 1990s, as long as the residence was more than ten miles away from their own farmland, many families would build a small earthen building for temporary residence there, in order to save time when sowing and hoeing the fields. After all, agriculture is really delicate, and if it is not taken care of properly, the yield will be reduced, and they are not being polite at all.

Therefore, when Chen Xi gathered villages and merged villages, there was a clear upper limit to the size of the villages he formed. To be more specific, the upper limit was that it could not take more than one hour for an ordinary person to walk to the fields with farm tools.

Of course, the current village is still more than half an hour away from this limit, which means that the village can still expand secretly, but the spare designs left by Chen Xi are actually prepared for the future, whether it is factories, mines, or rural enterprises, or the need for the village to expand when the system is corrupted in the later stage.

These design margins can ensure that the national system can maintain a relatively long period of peace and prosperity by relying on social inertia when it is gradually disintegrating. This period of time can be regarded as the final adjustment time reserved by Chen Xi for future generations.

Of course, according to Chen Xi's estimation, when that time really comes, the younger generations will most likely not make improvements in this regard. But even if they do nothing, enjoying a little more prosperity and peace is also a kind act, so this kind of design margin was left when it was dealt with at the beginning.

"In short, the situation I mentioned has occurred." Liu Bei coughed lightly. He knew that Chen Xi must have his own long-term plans, and Chen Xi had explained them to him. It was just that Liu Bei himself could not see that far. So now that a problem had arisen, the easiest thing was to go directly to Chen Xi for a solution.

"It's not a big problem. We can support them." Chen Xi said calmly, "At most, I'll be a little tired, but there's nothing much to say about it. It's true that there are too many children and the burden is too heavy. Normally, there shouldn't be so many children. But even so, according to what I designed this system, as long as the mainstay doesn't get sick, it's actually not a big deal."

"You designed this?" Liu Bei frowned and asked Chen Xi. He didn't know what Chen Xi designed and was a little unable to keep up with Chen Xi's ideas.

"When I designed the upper limit of the village's carrying capacity, I referred to some other things and also considered the single labor support rate of adult males." Chen Xi recalled and said with a smile, "When I calculated it at that time, under the condition of agriculture, tools and some odd jobs, the normal single labor support rate of adult males could reach seven."

This data is extremely outrageous. It means that a healthy man, if he is willing to work, can support his father, mother, wife, children and himself (who all do not work) by working alone, and also save some money.

On the other hand, in this environment, single young people who are still working are in high demand because they are the natural breadwinners of the family.

Simply put, in a purely rational social environment, if the single labor support rate of an adult male can reach 2, he can find someone to marry, because he no longer cares whether his wife works or not. As long as he does not have any problems, he can support her, and he will have a lot of choices.

Reaching the third means that after getting married, he can go to work as long as he wants, and his wife can take care of the children full-time, and the family will be happy. If he can reach the fifth, the family can function harmoniously with both parents included.

At one point in the past, the average labor support ratio of Chinese adult men was close to four, but later it fell back to 1.1 for ordinary people, which is the core of many unsolvable problems.

When Chen Xi was designing the integration of villages and fortifications, he had already considered this thing, and he forced the data to increase the ratio to 1:7. It can be said that this is the greatest intangible gift that Chen Xi has left for ordinary people in this era.

This is also what Liu Bei often saw: some veteran families had only one adult laborer to farm and support a family of six, seven or eight people without any pressure in life. The achievement of this was not as natural as Liu Bei thought.

Dare not speak nonsense, pretend to be dead, do not move