On February 4, the sixth year of the Qingli period, Gong Xu, Pan Shi, Wang Wei, and Zhang Ruohai gathered at the Gong family manor in Wu County, Suzhou.
In addition to the four major families, more than ten more family heads were added this time.
They are all large families in Suzhou, and almost every one of them owns more than 30,000 acres of land.
The local elites in feudal society were the landlords, who controlled the main wealth.
Different from the wealth of capitalism, the landlord class's concept of wealth is land and official position, so they emphasize farming and studying to pass on the family tradition.
Make money by farming, use the money to study, become an official after studying, become greedy for money as an official, use the money to buy land, and buy land to grow crops.
This forms an endless cycle, where the more land one controls, the more social wealth and "money" one possesses.
In later times, money is a general equivalent and an item of exchange. But in ancient society, money was not only an item of exchange, it was also a commodity in itself.
Because money is a kind of precious metal, it has its own value. And the bureaucracy and capitalism of feudal society are actually playing with land. The more precious metals and land, the more money there is.
Therefore, in essence, the biggest capitalists in the feudal period were the landlord class.
But their existence is different from that of capitalists.
Although capital breeds evil and every pore drips with blood and filth, it can also drive social progress. Many emerging technologies and industrial revolutions are promoted and invented by capitalists.
For example, Edison was a capitalist through and through, but this did not prevent his inventions from influencing and changing the entire world.
Therefore, the existence of capitalists will increase productivity and expand the cake. Even if most of the cake is eaten by the capitalists, there will always be some soup left for the people below to drink.
The landlord class is different. They only have so much land and the pie is so small. Once all the land is annexed by the landlord class, the landless poor will become the main force of rebellion and uprising, causing social instability.
So, in the final analysis, although capitalists are despicable, they can make society progress. Landlords are just despicable. Even conscientious landlords indirectly cause land annexation in the process, harming the poor.
After all, for the poor who lost their land, it was not that they did not work hard to farm, but natural disasters and man-made disasters. A severe drought, a flood, or collusion between the government and the landlords could make them penniless.
This is the fragility of the small peasant economy.
If Zhao Jun wanted to change the Song Dynasty, he had to destroy the landlord class. Even if he could not completely eliminate it like in later generations, he had to severely damage it so that it could no longer shake the foundation of the country.
Therefore, starting from the beginning of the fifth year of the Qingli period, policies have been promoted to continuously suppress landlords and damage their interests from both explicit and implicit aspects.
At this moment, the four major families of Gong Xu, Pan Shi, Wang Wei, and Zhang Ruohai gathered in the house, as did more than a dozen other landlords in Suzhou.
There was a faint scent of tea wafting through the room, but it was also filled with silence.
After a long while, Zhang Ruohai suddenly spoke up: "In the past year, most of my tenants have left my farm. They have all been taken away by the government to repair the river."
As soon as he said this, it was like opening a floodgate of chatterboxes, and the others also started complaining.
"You've only got half of it. My farm used to have over 600 households, but now there are less than 300 left. And that's only because I lowered the rent."
"Whose family isn't? Which of us doesn't have hundreds of acres of land and thousands of migrant workers? How many of them are left now?"
"If this continues, our fields will soon become wasteland, and our land will become barren land."
Everyone was talking at once.
Everyone's face showed an extremely helpless expression.
The protection of tenants in the Song Dynasty was relatively adequate, except in some remote areas such as the deep mountains and forests of Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and Fujian.
These places, such as the Sichuan and Xia roads centered on Kuizhou Road, have sparse populations and backward production, and many places still practice slash-and-burn agriculture.
As a result, customers account for a very high proportion of the total number of households, and wealthy families often employ hundreds or even thousands of "side households" and "local guests".
These "side households" and "land guests" not only had to pay rent in kind, but also provide labor service. They were "inherited for several generations" and were "treated as slaves."
During the Southern Song Dynasty, the landlords of Kuizhou Road not only enslaved the tenants themselves, but also their families, and even interfered with the marriages of their wives and daughters, making these tenants actually in the status of serfs.
But the situation was different in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions. As the agricultural and economic center of the Song Dynasty, the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions had always been firmly controlled by the imperial court. The government had greater control, and the laws were naturally more sound and complete.
The tenants here are not dependent on the landlords and are not their appendages. The relationship between the tenants and the landlords is merely a simple lease relationship.
In addition, the ruling class also recognized the legal status of tenants. Legally, landlords did not have many privileges over tenants, and landlords were not allowed and could not interfere with the behavior of tenants themselves.
Therefore, under the court's both explicit and implicit attacks, the landlords in Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions suffered heavy losses.
The explicit aspect is self-evident: under the system of "equalizing the land tax by the acreage," they had to bear much higher taxes than ordinary farmers. The implicit aspect was that the court took away all their tenants, leaving them with no one to cultivate the land.
Under such circumstances, the landlords in Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions are suffering terribly and are now in a very difficult situation.
"The imperial court is only happy if it forces us to death."
Gong Xu sighed and said.
"Brother Gong, we have to think of a solution. This won't work."
Everyone looked helpless.
They had thought of a solution and had once protested at the gate of the Transport Commissioner's Office.
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