Late Yuan Dynasty: I am the true emperor

Chapter 72: No Land Conflict (Seeking Follow-up Reading)

Why did Li Shanchang say that as long as the taxes were collected according to the standards set by the Yuan court, the people would be grateful?

Because the Yuan Dynasty did not collect taxes according to its own settings, or in other words, it did not have a fixed tax amount at all.

The Yuan Dynasty's taxes specifically refer to taxes in the south (the territory of the Southern Song Dynasty). According to the tradition of the Southern Song Dynasty, two-season taxation was implemented. There was nothing wrong with this, but there were nearly 30 types of taxes in the south!
Of course, this does not mean that we collect dozens of varieties every season, but we choose the most suitable one based on the seasonal conditions of that year.

How do we choose? In the best case, it is to take care of the people, and if there is a natural disaster, we will collect less. In the worst case, we will collect according to whichever type has more.

This is a case of no customization. The original intention may be good, but it gives corrupt officials an opportunity to take advantage of it and provides room for manipulation.

You might as well take a one-size-fits-all approach, no matter whether it's a disaster year or a good year, just set a fixed yield per acre. It would be easier to operate, after all, there were no satellites and drones in ancient times to monitor yields and disasters in real time.

Take the Jianghuai region as an example. Under normal circumstances, the average yield of paddy fields here is about 330 jin per mu, which is about two dan per mu. One dan is equal to ten dou, which is equal to one hundred liters. Two dan is 200 liters. In the Yuan Dynasty, the average yield per mu was 2 to 4.7 liters, and the highest was less than 5 liters, which was only 1% to 2.5% of the average output.

Even if wheat is grown in dry fields and the yield is reduced by half, the tax rate remains unchanged, but it is only 2% to 5%, which is the lowest in history.

What was the tax rate during the Ming Dynasty during the reign of Zhu Yuanzhang? Generally, it was between 6% and 10%, except for the territory of Zhang Shicheng in Jiangnan, where a punitive tax of 20% was imposed.

His reason was that the reason Zhang Shicheng had been able to fight him for so long was entirely because of the support of the people of Jiangnan, so he had to be punished.

Of course, the Taihu Lake area has a high yield and was the region with the highest yield per mu in ancient times, reaching 550 to 600 catties per mu. Even if 20% (120 catties) was taken away, the people could still keep 450 catties, which was higher than the annual yield of people in other regions!

The Ming Dynasty was already poor in the early days, and he might have done this as a "transfer payment", using the heavy taxes in Jiangnan to support the construction of other regions.

Of course, Jiangnan is a special case, so if we calculate it at 6% to 10%, is it too much? When the People's Republic of China was first established, the agricultural tax rate was 14%.

So, is the modern era more brutal than the feudal dynasties? Of course not.

Sometimes you can't just look at the data, because data can be deceiving.

All of the above are regular taxes. The taxation in ancient times was not limited to these. There was also the Ding tax, also known as the head tax and the mouth tax. In addition, there was also the corvée tax.

When the government has a demand for labor, you have to provide people to work. Even if there is no project to be done this year, you do not have to do corvée labor, but you still have to pay money to compensate for the labor service. In any case, taxes cannot be empty, so you either provide people or money (food).

In fact, the regular taxes in ancient times were never very high. What were high were the miscellaneous taxes. Because there were no fixed quotas for them, local officials could collect them at will for any reason.

For example, those who carried the county magistrate's sedan chair, those who cleared the way, the yamen runners, and the prison guards were all corvée laborers and were not paid.

The exemptions for gentry in the Ming Dynasty, which were criticized in later generations, were mainly based on corvee taxes, and his logic was also good.

For example, now you are preparing for the senior high school entrance exam, and the government tells you to stop studying and go work as a driver for the county magistrate, or ask you to work as a laborer when the county is building roads, or go to work as a prison guard in a detention center, and so on.

At this time, the emperor said that the scholars preparing to take the imperial examinations would be exempted from corvée labor in their families. Are you happy?
There are also families who are officials in other places. If your ancestral home is in Shandong, and you are now a county magistrate in Guangxi, the court will tell you to stop being a county magistrate and return to your hometown to serve two months of corvee labor.
Then the emperor exempted you from corvée labor, were you happy?
The regular tax is just a few dollars. As long as there aren't all those messy miscellaneous taxes, the gentry are actually very willing to cooperate.

The result was that the gentry were happy, and then the common people could not bear the oppression of miscellaneous taxes, and a large number of them sought shelter from the gentry. In order to be exempted from miscellaneous taxes, they took the initiative to donate land to the gentry, and the self-cultivating farmers were willing to become tenants, so that the court could not collect much tax.
Specifically in the Yuan Dynasty, its regular tax was indeed very low, but the imperial court would not collect it on its own. The Yuan Dynasty implemented the tax farming system, which is called contracting in modern times.

What is contracting? Suppose I want 10 shi of grain in this county. Now I am auctioning the contracting rights. Someone bid 20, and someone bid 50. In the end, the one who bid 50 got the contracting rights.

Anyway, it is impossible for a businessman to make a loss, so how much do you think he will collect from the people?

On the surface, the Yuan Dynasty was indeed the lowest in history. According to official data, the imperial court only collected 1% to 5%. In the end, no one knows how much the contractors could receive. It is possible that it was % or %.

So don’t say that taxes were low in the Yuan Dynasty and heavy in the Ming Dynasty. From Yuan to Ming, those who suffered the greatest losses were definitely the tax farmers.

The court would certainly have to pay some tax collection costs if it collected taxes on its own, but that was better than outsourcing the tax collection rights. Lu Jin's seemingly stupid tax collection plan was just to confuse the enemy, and it was only for one season. On the one hand, it was to provide relief to the people, and on the other hand, he still had the salt and iron monopoly as a trump card to guarantee fiscal revenue.

How will the future land policy be determined? First of all, forcing landlords to divide the land is unreliable. It is not that it is impossible, but that it is unnecessary, because there was no land conflict at all in the late Yuan Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty.

You think the South is too crowded? Too many people and too little land? Then why not migrate to the North? There are a lot of wastelands that no one is cultivating. If you are willing to migrate, you can get land immediately.

Even Sichuan Province, a land of abundance, had a population of only 30 at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, which is even less than the population of a small county town in modern times. There are plenty of wastelands. If you divide the land among the people now, who will immigrate there?
Of course, the big landlords can't just ignore everything. Land annexation still needs to be controlled. How to control it? Lu Jin thinks that the tiered tax system of the Song Dynasty is a good one.

In the Song Dynasty, people were divided into five categories according to the gap between rich and poor. The richer the people, the more taxes they were collected.

This is an advanced concept! If you can squeeze the poor dry, you can squeeze out a little money. If you want to collect money, you should collect money from the rich!

However, the Song Dynasty made it unclear who the high-class households were, so that Song Dynasty officials could arbitrarily raise the household status of the people.

You are obviously a poor man, living in a thatched hut and with only two acres of thin land, but he insists that you are a rich man and collects the highest taxes, forcing the people to flee and rebel.

How to draw the steps is the key point. It would be better to calculate it based on the land area, at least there is a physical object to refer to.

For example, if the area is less than 50 mu, how much will be harvested; if the area is between 50 and 100 mu, how much will be harvested; if the area is between 100 and 300 mu, how much will be harvested; if the area is between 300 and mu, how much will be harvested.

How much tax will be collected for 3,000 acres? How much tax will be collected for 5,000 acres? Anyway, the more land you have, the heavier the tax will be.

If you don't want to pay heavy taxes, you can take the initiative to split up the family and distribute the land to the children in the clan, and control the tax level to a low level. On the surface, you are still the head of the clan, or the head of the family, but when your descendants have their own land, who will listen to you?

The use of a progressive tax system not only takes care of the poor people and reduces their burden, but also breaks up the wealthy families and curbs land annexation.

Of course, this is just a preliminary idea and there are still loopholes to be exploited. Guang Lujin himself was able to come up with the method of flying and sending, which was also quite common in ancient times.

Clearly you only have ten acres of land, but your official household registration shows that you have one hundred acres. The extra 90 acres were illegally sent to you by the wealthy and powerful. You have to use these ten acres of land to pay the tax of the one hundred acres, paying taxes on behalf of the wealthy and powerful.

This kind of thing can only be restricted by law. If caught, they will be severely punished, the head of the household will be severely punished, the whole family will be exiled, and even four generations of the family will be punished and not allowed to take the imperial examinations, engage in commercial monopoly, etc.

In addition, there are many details that need to be agreed upon, such as the barrenness of the land and how much of each crop should be harvested, but the general framework is definitely to harvest in a tiered manner.

While Lu Jin was figuring out how to collect taxes, his order was quickly executed.

Notices congratulating Lu Jin on his wedding and reducing taxes next summer were quickly posted in every village under his jurisdiction.

Liao Yongan in Chao County received the news, read Lu Jin's secret letter, and began to prepare for a grand celebration banquet.

At the same time, another secret letter was quietly delivered to Bao Yu, who was lurking beside Kang Maocai.

Bao Yu burned the letter after reading it, and gave the information about Kang Maocai's recent military deployment to his servant to send back to Lu Jin. Then he found Kang Maocai and offered him advice.

"Sir, the Luzhou bandit easily captured Chao County and has become arrogant. He has not considered the possible counterattack from the imperial court and has taken advantage of this opportunity to get married.

"His men were also drinking like crazy in Chao County, searching for fine wine everywhere and holding a celebration banquet.

"At a time when food and fodder are so needed, it is foolish to exempt the people from taxes in the name of a wedding in order to gain fame.

"Envoy, our fighter planes are coming!"

There is one more chapter. It may be put on the shelves on Friday. I just received a notification today.
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(End of this chapter)