Bai Congxin is about to cross the river, so what is Zhang Zhao doing?
Zhang Shengren was still in Chuzhou and didn't pay attention to the battle in Yangzhou at all.
Because he knew that even if he couldn't defeat them, with the abilities of powerful men like Bai Congxin, Murong Nobunaga, Li Cunhui, Gao Huaide, Zhao Kuangyin, and Yao Yuanfu, it was impossible for them to be defeated by Southern Tang.
At most, it would be impossible to defeat the Southern Tang Dynasty, but it would be easy to bring the army back.
So Zhang Zhao took advantage of this rare free time to divide the land among local tyrants in Chuzhou (Huai'an), Haizhou (Lianyungang) and Lianshui, which were already controlled by the Zhou Kingdom.
Many people think that the idea of allocating land to local tyrants must be a patent of New China.
But this is not the case. China has had this rule since ancient times. Land equalization has always been something that must be done in the early stages of each imperial court starting from the Han Dynasty.
Moreover, when mergers are suppressed in history books, in fact, in many cases, what is suppressed is not the annexation of almost impoverished farmers whose families of five or six only have one or two acres of land and have to rely on renting land from landlords to survive.
Instead, it restrained powerful households and annexed the kind of homesteaders whose families owned more than ten or twenty acres of land, mastered farming techniques, and could live a relatively prosperous life.
Zhang Zhao didn't know that farming was a highly technical job before, because although he grew up in a rural area, his father was a cotton craftsman.
Therefore, the family does not need to farm at all. It is contracted out, so he has no idea about farming.
In this era, agriculture is the foundation of everything. After Zhang Zhao learned more about it, he discovered that farming is a highly technical labor.
At this time, there were no chemical fertilizers, no high-quality seed companies, and no relatively accurate weather forecasts. Many farmers could not even calculate the days clearly.
So how to select and breed? When to sow? How to prevent and control pests and diseases?
What crops are grown on what land? When will it be poured? When should we water less or even not at all?
Even the composting of human and animal manure, the selection of fire ashes, etc. are all technologies.
At this time, those who can master three or four of these are the capable people in the countryside and are famous in all villages.
Those who can master them all and use them can even find a position in the government.
Since there are people who can rely on agricultural skills to find positions in the government, there must be a large number of people who are completely unable to master these agricultural production skills.
Even if you give these people a few pieces of land, if there is not a smart person who is good at farming in one or two generations, they will basically go bankrupt and become tenants, and even being tenants will be looked down upon by their families.
Therefore, the main force in rural production in ancient times was the owner-cultivator who knew certain agricultural techniques and had more than ten acres of land per family.
In the Han Dynasty, they were good family members, and in the Tang Dynasty, they were the kind of soldiers who could prepare their own weapons and armor.
These talents were the foundation of the entire feudal country. They relied on them to pay taxes, serve in the military, and defend the country.
Since these homesteaders have good skills and their fields are more fertile due to careful care, land annexation usually involves annexing them.
If local powerful people absorb them, they will have advanced production technology and high-yield good land.
They can also block these production technologies and pass them on from generation to generation, forming the kind of Eastern Han Dynasty tyrants who monopolize most of the local resources and can also build Wubao.
On the contrary, if this large number of homesteaders are not annexed by powerful landlords, then the government can rely on them to organize these people through government power and form a check on local powerful landlords.
It has reached a point where even without strong power, it can fully control and mobilize the local area.
While Zhang Zhao was tallying up the data from various newspapers, he compared the current situation with the early stages of various dynasties in history.
He suddenly discovered an important factor in the Song Dynasty's lack of force.
That is, in all dynasties, except the Song Dynasty, all unified dynasties carried out land equalization reforms.
Even the Qing Dynasty carried out land equalization. Of course, since they were a bandit military group, the land equalization would only be among the group. The construction of horse racing enclosures and full cities was a kind of land equalization.
Only the Song Dynasty did not implement land equalization. Since Zhao Da established the Song Dynasty, the land in the Song Dynasty has been highly concentrated.
Well! wrong! The Northern and Southern Song Dynasties were considered Mao’s unified dynasty!
Zhang Shengren touched his head. He always felt that something was wrong with the Song Dynasty, but he could not tell what was wrong. It turned out that the problem lay here.
The Song Dynasty was completely lame on the basis of founding a country.
This Zhao Da inherited the chaos of the Five Dynasties and came to power by mutiny, and the target of his mutiny, Guo Rong, was his benefactor among his benefactors!
Guo Rong's love for Zhao Dayen was as high as the sky, and his righteousness was deeper than the sea, so much so that even a coward like Fan Zhi dared to question Zhao Kuangyin angrily.
"The late emperor raised the prince like a son, but he is not cold now. Why is this so?" '
In Fan Zhi's view, once Guo Rong left, even Li Chongjin and Zhang Yongde had reasons to rebel, but he, Zhao Kuangyin, was the only one who was deeply favored and should never be like this.
Zhao Da is already crooked to this point, and Zhao Er is even more outrageous.
Not to mention the uncertain matter of candlelight and ax shadow, the problem of the Jingui Alliance is huge.
He also went on a northern expedition to regain Youyun, but was beaten and left his army behind in a donkey cart drifting away.
It is said that he is the Lord of the Central Plains. First, there is no Youyun, second, there is no Heshuo, third, there is no Hexi, fourth, there is no Anxi, fifth, there is no Jiaozhi, and sixth, there is no Liaoxi. The orthodoxy and legal principles of the Central Plains country have been completely destroyed.
So how can such two founders of the country avoid falling into the strange circle of the Five Dynasties?
Relying on bribery, the unification war carried out by the Northern Song Dynasty did not actually take place because of the poor opponents. Only the local tyrants and the local tyrants were defeated.
So Zhao Da and Zhao Er shared their political power with these local wealthy families, guiding them to abandon military affairs and turn to civil society, and ensure their interests by not restraining annexation.
The Northern Song Dynasty transformed the country's grassroots structure from local tyrants with armed forces to academic lords occupying large amounts of land.
He bought a Taiping throne by giving up his ability to mobilize at the grassroots level and spending more than 80% of fiscal revenue on military expenditures.
hehe! Military expenditure accounts for 70% to 80% of the fiscal budget. As a result, soldiers are treated like waste, oh no! Perhaps it should be called raising trash as soldiers, but it is indeed a military empire.
This is an evil path!
Zhang Shengren immediately made up his mind that he could not take this path of the Song Dynasty.
Zhang Zhao would rather follow the old path of the Han Dynasty, where the countryside was full of powerful people but full of martial virtue. Nor should we follow the evil path of the Song Dynasty, which was to abolish martial arts and spread money at home and abroad.
Now that he had decided on the old path and could test it out, Zhang Shengren, who had great righteousness in his hands and had elite soldiers under his command, immediately started his strategy of equalizing the land.
However, equalizing land is not so easy to achieve, because it is not called equalizing land when the land is distributed equally.
You must know that after two hundred years of war since the Anshi period, many fields have been deserted. Without farmers to take care of the wasteland, it cannot produce value immediately. It is meaningless to waste the land.
The only favorable condition is that in today's world, the Central Plains has been devastated by wars, and there is no shortage of land despite the large number of people.
Since all wasteland has no value, Zhang Zhao is ready to link land with military merit. The specific method is to convert the rewards, military pay and even official positions that should be given to soldiers in the army into land gold.
First, let the government spend money to hire people to tidy up the abandoned land, and then let the soldiers use the land money to purchase the reclaimed land.
You can also sell them in large quantities at a low price, turning the soldiers who fought with Zhang Zhao into the country's backbone farmers.
In places like Meng Shu, Southern Tang, and Nanping, which were politically stable and had large populations but serious land annexation, the land that had been seized and devoured by royal families, corrupt officials, powerful men, etc. was returned to the people and their land was directly divided.
This would not only create a large number of people loyal to the new dynasty, but also push the resources they occupied to the market to revitalize the economy.
Just go ahead and do it, Zhang Zhao is now piloting it in Chuzhou, Haizhou and Lianshui.
Among these three lands, Zhang Zhao took half of the millions of acres of mature land that had been occupied by the Southern Tang Dynasty as military land, and then took out another million acres of land that had been occupied by the Southern Tang royal family, corrupt officials, and powerful men.
Later, in these three states, he planned to directly hold agricultural examinations. At least hundreds of agricultural doctors would be admitted, and then the agricultural doctors would be dispersed to various places, and the land would be equalized among them first.
But only half of these fields will be given to them first, and then they will be allowed to teach their farming skills.
In the future, whichever area of farmers reaches the academic standard, the other half of the field will be given to the agricultural doctor. As for the common people, their land is divided according to the actual local conditions.
The last move was to arrange for the soldiers in General Zhang Zhao's army who were older, physically disabled, seriously wounded once, and lightly wounded three times to be arranged on the spot. They enjoyed equal land plus land gold plus three times the land granted.
According to their official positions and meritorious service in the army, the older ones are in charge of inspections and are in charge of a township, while the smaller ones are in charge of Li Zheng and are in charge of one mile.
In this way, doctors of agriculture are formed in local areas to teach agricultural technology, organize the sharing of farming technology, and coordinate the use of important agricultural production tools such as cattle.
Inspection and inspection teams composed of retired soldiers are responsible for the township's public security, taxation and other grassroots structures.
Of course, will Zhang Zhao’s pilot project be successful? I'm afraid it will take two to three years or even longer before it can be verified.
But he had time to wait, and the fields were not divided between Zhang Zhao and Zhang Zhao. They were all stolen, so he didn't feel bad at all.
It is impossible to say that in the next few years, Chuzhou and other places will still experience turmoil because of these new policies. That is also part of the experiment, isn't it?
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In mid-May, the report of the Yangzhou battle was sent to Zhang Zhao, and the city of Chuzhou instantly burst into joy.
In addition to the last defeat at Meng Zhuze, the losses of the Imperial Army alone in the Southern Tang Dynasty were as high as 40,000, and the higher-strength state and county soldiers and Jiezhen Ya soldiers also lost 20,000 to 30,000.
At least 60% of the elite of the entire Southern Tang Dynasty has been reimbursed. With the current situation of the Southern Tang Dynasty, it is almost on the verge of destruction.
So is the Southern Tang Dynasty still surviving? Whether to completely destroy it and plunge the entire Jiangnan into chaos, Zhang Zhao needs to make a decision.
Bai Congxin and Murong Nobunaga jointly submitted a letter, asking Zhang Zhao to decide this matter.
At the end of May, Gao Huaide swept away all the Southern Tang forces on both sides of Hangou. Xinghua, Yancheng and other places either abandoned the city and fled, or surrendered the city.
Zhou Jun was in Jiangbei and seemed to have a firm foothold.
So Zhang Zhao left Feng Hui to lead 10,000 troops to guard Chuzhou. He led 10,000 infantry and cavalry plus the 3,000 fine cavalry brought back by Gao Huaide, and marched along Hangou to Yangzhou to decide Li Jing's decision. Destiny.
