Late Yuan Dynasty: I am the true emperor

Chapter 571 The gentry all miss our Great Yuan.
After the Beijing conference concluded, Zhu Liangzu, Liao Yongzhong, and Gao Yao, the training instructor of the Second Front Army, immediately set off for Changsha, Hunan, to join their main force and prepare for the upcoming campaign to attack Yunnan and Guizhou this year.

In addition, this year, all the grain tax revenue of Hunan Province will not need to be sent to the capital. Instead, it will all be used as military rations for this southern expedition. The troops will be dispatched after the autumn harvest in September!

In addition, there were appointments of officials in Yunnan and Guizhou provinces. Although the war had not yet begun, officials had to be prepared in advance so that the Ming regime could be established immediately after a piece of land was captured.

As a result, Tao An, the current Right Provincial Administration Commissioner of Henan, was promoted to Left Provincial Administration Commissioner of Yunnan Province, a promotion of half a rank. The vacancy of the Right Provincial Administration Commissioner of Henan was filled by Hu Weiyong, the current Prefect of Jinan. Hu Weiyong's appointment was recommended by Li Shanchang.
Lu Jin had always suppressed Hu Weiyong's promotions, from serving as the registrar of Hanshan County in Huaixi, to being promoted to the magistrate of Anqing Prefecture, then to the assistant magistrate of Raozhou Prefecture, and finally to the prefect of Jinan.

To be honest, as one of the first batch of officials recruited by Lu Jin in Huaixi, Hu Weiyong's promotion speed was relatively slow compared to other officials recruited at the same time. Some of his contemporaries had already risen to the level of provincial councilors.

This was partly due to Lu Jin's deliberate suppression, but it was also partly due to his own self-destructive actions, as he bribed Li Shanchang to help him get promoted!

Before Lu Jin crossed the Yangtze River, Hu Weiyong was serving as the magistrate of Qianshan County in Anqing Prefecture. Later, when he conquered Jiangnan and then attacked Jiangxi and Huguang, he saw that other officials of the same period had been promoted to prefects and assistant prefects, while he seemed to have been forgotten by Lu Jin. In his anxiety, Hu Weiyong bribed Li Shanchang to recommend him to Lu Jin and promote him as well.

Li Shanchang was willing to do things for money and immediately recommended Hu Weiyong to be the prefect of Nanchang. Nanchang was the capital of Jiangxi Province. From a county magistrate to the prefect of the provincial capital, the promotion was quite high. However, Lu Jin did not agree after seeing this and instead gave Li Shanchang a meaningful look.

Li Shanchang was so frightened that he almost collapsed to the ground. He thought that Lu Jin had found out about his acceptance of bribes. After calming down, he still took a chance and deliberately tested Lu Jin, saying that Hu Weiyong was also one of the first batch of officials recruited in Huaixi. In terms of seniority and political achievements, he was no worse than others. Why was he not promoted for so long?
Lu Jin, considering that he was still fighting for the country and in order to maintain internal stability, gave Li Shanchang face and did not expose him on the spot. He only said that he disliked Hu Weiyong during the examination because he was too good at flattering and currying favor with his superiors and had poor character, so he would not promote him.

Then, naturally, he wasn't given the position of Prefect of Nanchang either, as it was originally reserved by Lu Jin for the intelligence bureau.

Guo Ziming, the head of the Nanchang station of the Jiangxi intelligence station, had made great contributions by infiltrating enemy territory and collecting intelligence. An intelligence officer of his rank should have been promoted directly to the position of prefect based on his merits. In addition, Jiangxi had just been pacified at that time, and no official was more familiar with the local situation in Nanchang than the head of the Nanchang intelligence station. Therefore, making Guo Ziming the prefect would be more conducive to the Ming Dynasty's rapid takeover and stabilization of Nanchang. Whether from a public or private perspective, he was more suitable for the position than Hu Weiyong.

So in the end, Hu Weiyong was only promoted by half a rank and was assigned to Raozhou Prefecture as a deputy prefect.

Although Lu Jin gave other reasons for his blocked promotion, the look he gave Li Shanchang still scared Li Shanchang half to death. Li Shanchang was guilty and unsure whether Lu Jin knew about his bribery, but it was undoubtedly a warning to him.

So after that, he quickly distanced himself from Hu Weiyong. He naturally couldn't return the money he had received, but he also wouldn't easily help Hu Weiyong again in the future.

However, due to the rapid expansion and the shortage of officials, Hu Weiyong was promoted by half a rank and became the prefect of Jinan.

Now, seeing the cabinet once again recommend Hu Weiyong as the Right Provincial Governor of Henan, Lu Jin couldn't figure out what Li Shanchang meant by this. Could it be a test of him?
However, after thinking it over, he still approved the appointment. Anyway, Henan's population is not large now, so even if Hu Weiyong causes trouble, it will be difficult for him to cause any major chaos. Let's see what their purpose is before making any decisions.

Besides Hu Weiyong, there is also Gao De, the current Provincial Councilor of Jiangxi Province. He was also one of the four Gao brothers from Wuwei who were recruited by Lu Jin in the first examination in Huaixi. This time, he was promoted to Right Provincial Governor of Hubei. Zhan Ding, who is currently acting as Right Provincial Governor of the two lakes, has now been officially promoted to Left Provincial Governor of Hunan.

There was also Li Yinbing, the Provincial Councilor of Zhejiang Province, who was among the first batch of officials recruited from Huaixi and was promoted to Right Provincial Governor of Guizhou.

In addition to these appointments at the provincial administration level, the appointments of prefects and magistrates below them were also drafted by the Ministry of Personnel, approved by the cabinet, and finally finalized by Lu Jin, who reviewed all the appointments of officials in the two provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou.

Then Lu Jin appointed Tao An as the grain transport commissioner for this southern expedition and Li Yinbing as the deputy transport commissioner. The two of them led officials from their respective provinces to escort the grain with the army. Once they arrived at their destinations, they would take up their posts directly. The duties of the transport commissioners would automatically end when the southern expedition ended.

Meanwhile, officials who received the transfer orders began to gather in Changsha, Hunan. Only Tao An and Li Yinbing, the two provincial governors, were specially summoned to the capital by Lu Jin, who personally gave them instructions, mainly about the court's future strategy for dealing with Yunnan and Guizhou provinces and the methods of governance.

Yunnan, in particular, borders Annam (formerly known as the "Great Viet Kingdom"). There is also the Si clan of Luchuan near Ruili, who are also unruly and need to be closely monitored.

Guizhou was relatively better. When dealing with the chieftains and powerful clans, the approach was to first be courteous and then force them. They would first try to win them over through marriage, and if they disobeyed the imperial court, they would seize one and beat him severely as a warning to others. Then, they would continue to send people to the area, promote new crops, and build post roads, gradually stabilizing Guizhou.

In addition, regarding the Tusi (chieftains) of Guizhou, the principle of "focusing on the small and letting go of the big" should be implemented. For those Tusi with great power, the focus should be on appeasement for the time being. For those small Tusi scattered throughout the land, the focus should be on direct conquest by force. Those who are willing to submit should be registered as ordinary citizens and live together with the newly arrived Han immigrants. Those who do not submit should be killed directly!
Lu Jin is no saint. In the original history, when the Ming army occupied Guizhou, they also relocated so many Han Chinese immigrants to Guizhou. Do you think they got so much land from that mountainous area to settle the Han Chinese immigrants? Did they cultivate it themselves?

Haha, later generations can summarize this history in just four words: "catching up with the seedlings and expanding the industry!"

Do you really think those ethnic minorities moved to the mountains voluntarily?
The migration and land reclamation efforts in Yunnan and Guizhou during the early Ming Dynasty and the westward expansion of the United States were essentially the same behavior. The only difference was that the Han Chinese were more appeasement-oriented. After all, the Han Chinese were not devils. As long as you were willing to register as a commoner, accept Sinicization, and cultivate land, pay taxes, and perform labor for the Ming Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty would allow you to continue living there. The westward expansion of the United States was different, as evidenced by the scalps of Native Americans.
Later generations often wonder why, despite Zheng He's voyages to the Western Ocean in the early Ming Dynasty, there was no overseas colonization. The answer is simple: Yunnan and Guizhou were the new continent of the Ming Dynasty. Before the Ming Dynasty, this land had never been under the actual control of the Central Plains dynasties; at most, it was under a tributary system.

From the Yelang Kingdom of the Han Dynasty to the Nanzhao Kingdom of the Tang Dynasty, and then to the Dali Kingdom of the Song Dynasty, even though the Yuan Dynasty conquered Dali, it still did not have real control. The Duan family continued to act as local emperors in Dali until the Ming Dynasty, when this situation finally came to an end. It was also Zhu Di who made Guizhou the first province.

Even Baozong, who was later criticized as a student studying abroad, initially dominated the Luchuan Kingdom in Yunnan. The Ming army swept through Burma and almost reached India. Without Baozong, people today might need passports to travel to Ruili, Yunnan. At that time, the Ming Dynasty's military focus was in the south, with its elite troops deployed to fight Luchuan, leaving the northern border less heavily armed. This laid the groundwork for Baozong's later studies abroad. Although his studying abroad is undeniable, he was certainly not weak in the early stages of the war against the Luchuan Kingdom in Burma!

Getting back to the main point, there's still the question of whether the tax revenue from establishing Guizhou as a province can support the garrison and pay the officials' salaries. Lu Jin said that once the immigrants arrive and tobacco cultivation is promoted, a tobacco monopoly will be implemented, and the financial situation will improve within three to five years, so there's no need to rush.

Historically, when Zhu Di established Guizhou as a province, the province initially suffered from a fiscal deficit. Guizhou's tax revenue was insufficient to pay the salaries of its officials, and the province relied entirely on central government transfers to survive. In the end, the province managed to stay afloat. Moreover, Lu Jin had already gathered four major resources—potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, and tobacco—in advance, which gave him even more confidence in stabilizing Guizhou and achieving a fiscal surplus.

After explaining the precautions for governing Yunnan and Guizhou to the two men, Lu Jin immediately issued an order to conscript laborers.

The army recruited impoverished people from Jiangxi who had no or little land, totaling four divisions, or 54000 people. Then, they recruited one division each from Hunan and Hubei, three divisions from Zhejiang, and one division from southern Anhui, for a total of ten divisions of laborers, totaling 135,000 people. They accompanied the army on the expedition, responsible for escorting provisions and serving as part of the migration.

At that time, Guizhou will receive three to four divisions of immigrants, and Yunnan will receive six to seven divisions of immigrants. As the first batch of Han Chinese immigrants to Yunnan and Guizhou, the specific situation will depend on the amount of land available in each region and how many people can be resettled. Once the army arrives, these immigrants will settle down and be allocated land locally.

The current population distribution of the Ming Dynasty is as follows: there are 20 million people in Jiangnan, at least 10 million in Jiangxi, and more than 10 million in Hunan and Hubei combined. The three fertile plains of Taihu Lake, Poyang Lake, and Dongting Lake are the most populous areas and naturally bear the task of population outflow.

All the immigrants who signed up began to gather in various places after the summer harvest and arrived in Changsha, Hunan before September to join the southern expeditionary army. This time, the main force plus the laborers numbered more than 300,000, which was comparable to the Ming army's southern expeditionary force in the original history. However, Lu Jin did not know whether the Ming army in history was just a nominal number, but his 300,000 was definitely a real force, even though half of them were laborers.
As soon as this decree was issued, the emperor simply uttered a few words, and hundreds of thousands of immigrants were relocated. However, the gentry and landlords of the five provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Anhui, and Hubei and Hunan immediately wailed in despair, because the immigrants relocated by Lu Jin were all their tenants. Lu Jin had recruited landless and impoverished people in the first place. At that time, who didn't own their own land? Of course, it was the tenants of those landlords.
This move immediately triggered a series of chain reactions. You have to understand that there were no tractors in this era, unlike later generations, where even a small tractor can cultivate 300 acres of land, and with a few agricultural machines and a few laborers, a farm of thousands of acres can be cultivated. However, the land in this era still had to be cultivated by human labor. Even if there were oxen, there were still tenant farmers.

Those landlords who, despite the impact of the tiered tax, had been stubbornly clinging to thousands of acres of land, intending to distribute it to their descendants when they came of age, had all broken through their defenses this time. The emperor had suddenly withdrawn so many able-bodied immigrants, all of whom were real laborers and their tenants.

Now that the tenants have been relocated, the amount of land under their names remains unchanged. It's difficult to recruit new tenants, and the land will remain barren if no one cultivates it. However, the imperial court doesn't care about this when it comes to collecting taxes. The court only recognizes household registration and land records. It collects taxes based on the amount of land under your name. Whether you cultivate the land or not is your own business. As a result, the land they gritted their teeth to retain can no longer be saved.

Otherwise, if most of the land is left uncultivated, the little rent collected won't even be enough to pay taxes to the imperial court. After a year of hard work, you'll still lose money. Who can stand that?

As a result, the landlords and wealthy families in these five provinces began to sell off their land, causing land prices in Jiangnan, Jiangxi, southern Anhui, Hunan and Hubei to be halved in just one May, and even continue to fall. Moreover, no one was buying. In addition, the nine-tier tax imposed restrictions on land consolidation, and at one point, land was so valuable that no one wanted it even if it was given away for free.

Unless someone really doesn't want to immigrate and has some savings, they might buy some land while it's cheap. Others who have neither money nor land simply won't buy any. They can just wait to immigrate and let the government distribute the land. Why should they spend their own money?
However, some people took advantage of the chaos to buy cheap land. Some urban residents who had lived in the city for generations had some savings from doing small businesses in the city. Seeing that the land outside the city was so cheap that no one was interested, they couldn't help but buy dozens of acres of land outside the city to become farmers. Even if they didn't farm, urban residents still had to have children. Buying dozens of acres of land for their sons was not bad. At least they could become wealthy farmers in the future.

Furthermore, since urban and rural household registrations are not yet clearly separated, many urban residents in the Jiangnan region have moved to the outskirts of cities during this period of policy ambiguity. This has led to a return of industrial workers to rural areas.
However, Lu Jin did not object to this. Firstly, he had not yet reached the point where he needed a large number of industrial workers. When he did need them, recruiting workers from the city would be sufficient for the time being. After all, there were simply not that many industrial projects at the moment. Even if you wanted to build some factories, you would have to understand the technology first. Otherwise, how could you build a factory without the technology?
Let me put it this way: some people always think that if China had industrialized in ancient times, it would have inevitably followed the old path of Britain's "enclosure movement," which exacerbated land annexation and led to a situation where "sheep ate people," forcing farmers to work in cities. That's pure nonsense. You can't see at all the differences between the two countries' national conditions.

The British Isles only have a tiny population. If he didn't force farmers to go to the city to work, he really couldn't find that many workers. But China is different. Ancient China had an urban economy. Kaifeng, a city in the Song Dynasty, had over a million people.

No one would think that these millions of city dwellers go out to farm every day and then return to the city to sleep at night, would they?

Even in ancient times, urban residents could still survive simply by living in cities.

The same was true in the early Ming Dynasty. Putting aside other places, Nanjing alone had at least 40 urban residents. By the late Ming Dynasty in the original history, it was even more exaggerated. There were tens of thousands of teahouses, restaurants, brothels, eateries, and various shops in Nanjing. These urban residents could live off the service industry alone. Would China lack industrial workers? Ridiculous.

It would simply mean a few hundred fewer teahouses and restaurants in the city, and a few thousand more workers in the factories. Without teahouses, people can still drink water at home, and without restaurants, they can still eat at home. It wouldn't affect their livelihoods at all. It would just be a change in the economic structure, at most transforming the service industry into the manufacturing industry. How could it possibly evolve to the extent that of Britain?

Furthermore, Lu Jin has already brought over potatoes, corn, and sweet potatoes ahead of time, and is vigorously promoting them to the public through official channels. In two years, when the population tax is abolished, the population will explode. At that time, the concern will not be whether there are enough workers, but whether there is enough investment and whether the newly added factories each year can provide enough jobs.

If that's not possible, then the only option is to "send people to the countryside," relocating surplus urban population to border regions for farming and animal husbandry. Wasn't the "send people to the countryside" movement back then precisely because the Second and Third Five-Year Plans didn't keep up, resulting in insufficient investment and no increase in industrial jobs available to society, leading to an overabundance of urban population that resulted in people being sent to the countryside to farm?
Meanwhile, in the Ming Dynasty, the land owned by landlords and gentry was so cheap that they couldn't sell it, and they were also overwhelmed by the heavy taxes levied on them. In order to protect themselves, they had no choice but to donate their land to the government, giving it away for free. They simply couldn't keep it.

Lu Jin naturally accepted it all with a smile. In fact, this situation actually happened in the early Ming Dynasty in the original history. Although Zhu Yuanzhang did not implement a tiered tax system like Lu Jin, he was even more ruthless in his immigration policy. The tenant farmers of the gentry were all relocated. What else could they do but donate their land? After all, rebellion was impossible.

As soon as the immigration order was issued, the gentry in Jiangnan all missed the Great Yuan Dynasty. After all, the Great Yuan Dynasty had really been lenient towards these landlords and powerful families. Lu Jin, on the other hand, had hit them where it hurt.

Given this situation, there are naturally some who are dissatisfied and want to rebel, but it's useless. If you dare to plot a rebellion today, you won't even have to wait until dawn; the Imperial Guards will be at your doorstep that very night.

Moreover, Lu Jin's imperial power extended to the countryside, directly controlling the population tightly. Those who plotted rebellion might not even be able to muster an army, so how could they possibly resist Lu Jin?
(End of this chapter)