Tang Ke hurriedly said, "Your Majesty is wise. If this is done, our Great Song will be at peace throughout the land within ten years. Your Majesty's achievements are unprecedented and unparalleled."
Xu Churen replied, "Lord Zhao, please forgive my bluntness, but these four strategies are like drinking poison to quench thirst; they may bring immediate benefits, but their consequences will last for generations!"
Upon hearing Xu Churen's words, Zhao Huan immediately perked up.
Instead of constantly chasing after them and telling them that their policy is unreasonable and that the poor will get poorer and the rich will get richer, it's much less effort to set goals based on the results you want.
For example, Xu Churen was the Grand Chancellor, a bigwig in the Council of State Affairs, and the true Prime Minister of the Empire.
You have a very important task: to double the income of the common people in the Central Plains. You can figure out the method yourself.
Once this goal is set, the Political Affairs Hall will use it as a guide when planning various policies to enrich the people. If it goes astray, Xu Churen will step forward to point it out.
This eliminates the need for Zhao Huan to serve him like a nanny every day.
In this way, Zhao Huan could detach himself from specific matters and focus on the empire's highest strategy and how to rationally allocate all resources.
The Song Dynasty was relatively humane in its household registration system, abolishing the "lowly" status and dividing households into three categories.
The first category is the primary household, the second category is the customer, and the third category is special household registration.
The main households account for the largest proportion of the population. The main households are divided into five classes, mainly based on land ownership, with other factors only used as a reference. Therefore, the fifth class of main households generally refers to rural households.
The first and second classes were upper-class households, mainly large landowners.
These were the people Zhao Huan was looking for, because they were extremely few in number nationwide, accounting for only about 5%, yet they, along with officials and commoners, controlled most of the resources, including money, land, policies, privileges, and so on.
When Zhao Huan transmigrated, according to the statistics provided by the Zhou Dynasty, the upper-class households and official households owned more than 85% of the land in the country, and they were exempt from corvée labor.
Given this social structure, Fang La's rebellion seems quite plausible!
The third class consisted of middle-class households, including small and medium-sized landowners and wealthy farmers, equivalent to the middle class in later generations. These families comprised less than 10% of the entire Song Dynasty.
Because of the constant wars, inflation, and the increasingly serious problem of redundant officials, the economic crisis deepened. During the reign of Emperor Shenzong, many middle-class households had already gone bankrupt. When Wang Anshi launched another round of reforms, the number of bankrupt middle-class households skyrocketed.
It has been reduced to its current size.
The fourth and fifth classes were the lower classes, including self-cultivating farmers or tenant farmers who had little or no land and needed help to cultivate the land for survival. They accounted for more than 60% of the national population.
The rest are customers and special clients.
Our customers are migrant workers, usually bankrupt farmers who go to the city to work and have a registered household registration. This group accounts for about 7% of our customers.
Special households are further divided into those with special status, those with official status, those with military status, those with temple or monastery status, and miscellaneous households.
The urban population, including some registered residents and special households, was called "fangguo households." Among them, miscellaneous households consisted of artisans, such as the girls in the textile factory.
The urban household registration system was further divided into five upper classes and five lower classes. The five lower classes were the "poor population" in the city, creating a stark contrast between the two.
This is the population structure of the Song Dynasty.
Among them, the upper-class households, the powerful households, and the official households were the key targets that the emperor sought out, because although these people were few in number, they occupied most of the country's resources, forming a huge monopoly and widening the gap between the rich and the poor.
This makes it increasingly difficult for those who work as sub-households, customers, and miscellaneous households to survive.
Zhao Ding's "Four Policies on Banking in the Great Song Dynasty's Commerce and Trade" was formulated with reference to the population structure of the Great Song Dynasty.
Zhao Ding, in order to control the risks, has very lenient loan policies for upper-class households and fifth-class households in the city, and middle-class households can also get some loans. However, it is almost impossible for lower-class households, customers, miscellaneous households and other "vulnerable" groups in the city to get bank loans.
Zhao Huan knew perfectly well what was going on, but asked, "Minister Xu, what do you mean by that?"
Xu Churen, with an air of righteous indignation, said: "The imperial court has already explicitly prohibited officials from engaging in commerce. Not to mention official households and households in power, the loan policy of the Great Song Royal Bank is very lenient towards upper-class rural households and households in the upper five classes of urban areas, but it starts to tighten from the middle-class rural households. It is almost impossible for lower-class rural households and households in the lower five classes of urban areas to borrow money."
"In that case, rural households can only rely on farming a little bit of land to save money to make a living. Lower-class households in the city need to accumulate assets to the level of upper-class households in the city before they are eligible for loans. For a lower-class household in the city to reach the upper-class level, based on current prices and income, it would take twenty years without eating or drinking. How many twenty-year periods does a person have in their lifetime?"
"His Majesty once taught us that national wealth must be accompanied by the wealth of the people. We cannot simply pursue total wealth while completely ignoring what the people truly want!"
After Xu Churen finished speaking, Zhao Huan couldn't help but want to applaud, but restrained himself due to his status.
It seems that we need to set the right goals. If we set the wrong goals, we'll be exhausted. If we set the right goals, we can worry less about many things.
Tang Ke said, “What Minister Xu said makes sense, but if the court lends money to rural households and the five households in the city, the risk will increase greatly. These people have no business experience, and many of them can’t even read. If the court lends money to such people, not to mention the interest, they won’t be able to get their principal back. If this happens, and it causes panic among the people, and the people who have deposited money no longer trust the banks and want to withdraw their money, and the court’s money will be reduced, then the situation will be serious!”
"If the imperial court wants to mint coins, but the supply of goods in the market has not increased, the value of the paper money will face the risk of devaluation, which will further cause panic among the people. The consequences would be unimaginable!"
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