When the Chengdu court was first established, many agencies were not fully staffed, and many powers had not yet been returned to the central government. Local governments were in charge. Therefore, during this period, local officials in the Chengdu court had great power.
Many matters were resolved by themselves instead of being reported to the Chengdu court for resolution. Many matters, including finance and justice, were resolved by the local governments themselves, and the Chengdu court did not intervene.
After feeling the pleasure of freedom, local officials felt that their freedom began to take off, so when they received orders from the court to stop, they felt dissatisfied and felt that the court was hindering their freedom.
They don't care about the life and death of civilians. They just want to squeeze all the oil and water out of these poor devils in their next life and the next life to satisfy their desires.
Since ancient times, how can there be any reason not to let the officials scrape the poor people's money?
It was October when the imperial court issued an order to increase the levy. Officials took action upon hearing the news and immediately started looting. The efficiency was astonishing, and a large number of refugees were quickly created. It is surprising that only at this level can the bureaucracy show ultra-high efficiency.
However, when the cease-and-desist order was promulgated in mid-November, the officials delayed it again and again, speeding up the process to force farmers to pay taxes, while blocking information to prevent farmers from knowing the court order, so as not to delay them from making money, which fully reflected improve the executive power of the bureaucracy.
So it was delayed until mid-December.
When Su Yonglin set a future prospect for the Ming Dynasty to sail to the sea of stars, the bureaucrats of the Shu and Song regime were still making money.
From early October to mid-December of the sixth year of Hongwu, Sichuan and Shu officials forced a large number of homesteaders to go bankrupt at an extraordinary speed.
They not only robbed farmers of their savings, but also took the initiative to cooperate with powerful local landlords. The two parties cooperated tacitly and practiced traditional arts. While forcing farmers to pay taxes to the point of desperation, they also stepped forward to buy land at low prices.
The farmers were desperate and could not think of resisting for a while. They had no choice but to sell large quantities of land at low prices.
The officials robbed the peasants of their property and grain reserves, and the powerful landlords robbed the peasants of their land, and then gave the government a kickback. The two sides cooperated tacitly, and it was good for you and me, achieving a win-win situation.
In less than three months, Sichuan-Sichuan officials successfully created hundreds of thousands of refugees in more than a dozen state capitals on the 5th Sichuan-Sichuan Road. As time went by, the number of refugees increased. many.
But the bureaucrats don't care.
For bureaucrats, the most important thing now is to seize the time to make a fortune. Everything else is unimportant. Anyone who dares to stop them from making money will be regarded as their enemy.
As for the imperial court's request that local large-scale households stop plundering farmers' land and that they must build porridge sheds to provide porridge to farmers, it is basically a joke. You can laugh it off and pretend that such a thing has never happened.
The local officials colluded with them and would not allow the refugees to return to their hometowns at all. This also caused a small friction between the local officials.
Obviously, refugees leave their hometowns and go to other places. In this process, some places have a "net outflow" of population, while other places have a "net inflow" of population.
The net inflow was too heavy for local areas. The local magistrates were very happy after learning about the imperial order. They immediately sent people to count the household registrations of the local stranded refugees and prepared to call the local governments to pick them up.
However, local officials with net outflows promised everything but took no action.
The local officials sent people to ask about the net influx over and over again. They all said that they would send people to pick him up tomorrow. However, after several tomorrows, there was no movement.
It is the saying that tomorrow comes tomorrow, there are so many tomorrows.
After repeating this many times, the local officials with a net inflow figured out some ideas and realized that those colleagues who had a damn net outflow would not send people to pick them up.
What they hope most is that these refugees die in other places and never come back to cause trouble to them. They will not spend money to build porridge shacks and provide porridge to feed these refugees.
When the time comes, I will also tell the court.
It's not that they don't pick them up, but that the refugees are dead and no one can take them back, so although they are very sad, they have to endure it.
This is absolutely unacceptable to the bureaucrats in areas with net inflows.
If there are too many dead people, the unlucky thing is that there will be a net inflow, which is an act of taking the blame for others. In this kind of matter, bureaucrats who are good at scapegoating and regard scapegoating as a matter of official career will never be ambiguous.
So while they complained to the Chengdu court about the bureaucrats who had experienced a net outflow, accusing them of evading their responsibilities and not coming to pick up the refugees, they also planned to organize their own manpower to send the refugees back.
Of course, it is impossible to escort them. The best way to "send people away" is to dispatch people, issue weapons, and use violent means to expel them from their jurisdiction.
And this matter was also learned by the Chengdu court.
Zhao Buxi was furious and issued an edict requiring officials in the area to take back all the people. He immediately sent a censor to supervise. Anyone who dared not take people back would be dismissed on the spot.
The officials in the net flow area were helpless. While scolding the officials in the net flow area for not doing human affairs, they argued in court, and then prepared to spend money to bribe the censor.
Bribing one or a few people is much cheaper than bribing thousands or tens of thousands of people.
The imperial court just fooled around and passed away. If they really wanted to bring all the refugees back, they couldn't fool them with tens of thousands of mouths. They would have to pour real money into them.
They will still calculate this economic account.
The bureaucrats were happily fighting with each other, making various decisions and interfering with the Chengdu court. All their energy was focused on this matter, and their calculations were making loud noises, but they never paid any attention to the landless farmers who were treated as if they were kicking a ball. them.
The farmers were unable to stay in the refuge area. After being violently driven away, they found in despair that no county would accept them. There were brutal armed teams everywhere to drive them back and forth, and they were no better than livestock.
Some of them stay in the wilderness, making the sky and the earth inoperable.
Some were forced to return to their place of origin, only to find that their place of origin was even more ferocious against them. When they saw it, they would be beaten and driven away, and they would never be allowed to return to their hometown.
Although the world is huge, it seems that there is no place for them anywhere. It seems that they do not belong to this world and this era.
As a result, during the coldest winter of the sixth year of Hongwu and the early spring of the seventh year of Hongwu, when the cold wind blew, the landless farmers in Sichuan and Sichuan who were living outside starved to death and froze to death in droves.
During the process of a procession of refugees walking from one county to another begging for food, more than one-third of the people died of cold and starvation. If the distance was longer, two-thirds of the people died of cold and starvation.
While the team was walking, some people fell down and never got up again. Some of them had relatives still alive, and some people howled around the corpses. For those without relatives, the corpses were pushed directly to the roadside.
No one is watching or taking care of it. Just waiting for spring, the body will slowly rot and become a lonely ghost.
Although the land of Sichuan and Sichuan has always had a hot and humid climate, in winter and early spring, it is still cold when it should be, and it is bone-chillingly cold.
Wearing single clothes and having no food to eat, refugees froze to death in large numbers. There was no hope at all. What awaited them everywhere was not warm houses and thick vegetable porridge, but fierce armed forces. Personnel and hard sticks.
After all, they fell into boundless despair.
But the armed officers and bureaucrats who treated them in this way may have forgotten that when people are desperate, they are not only very miserable and pitiful, but also very dangerous.
Danger in a physical sense.
.bqkan8..bqkan8.
