Chapter 248 The era of large-scale infrastructure construction begins
Seeing this, Wang Shouren couldn't help but shook his head: "Another one who is unwilling to commit suicide, take him away."
then.
Xu Zan was taken away. Like other gentry who followed King Ning in rebellion, he was neither willing to die generously nor committed suicide.
Therefore, they can only wait for the court's judicial organ, the Ministry of Punishment, to deal with them according to law.
Although Zhu Houzhao established the outline of the constitution, he did not make changes to the decrees left by the emperors before the Ming Dynasty.
There is no doubt that for this serious crime of rebellion, punishment according to law will be more severe than punishment according to human will.
What's more, now the civil and military officials in the capital are all tied together because of the infrastructure investment that Emperor Zhu Houzhao wants to make. Most of them have turned into staunch supporters of His Majesty the Emperor. Naturally, they will not easily forgive these rebels who challenge the emperor's authority.
Not long after Sun Sui, who was responsible for the trial and conviction of King Ning's rebellion, arrived in Nanjing, King Ning and all those involved in the rebel party who followed King Ning were taken to Nanjing, waiting to be tried and convicted.
In addition, the governors, inspectors, magistrates, and officials from the three regions of Jiangxi, Nanzhili, and Huguang, as well as officials from the three judicial systems in Nanjing, were summoned to Nanjing by Sun Sui to hold a Ming judicial conference on governing the country according to law.
At the meeting, Sun Sui denounced how evil King Ning's rebellion was, and at the same time highly praised the great achievements of His Majesty the Ming Emperor Zhu Houzhao, and asked the officials present to maintain high respect and absolute respect for the Emperor Zhu Houzhao. loyalty.
"According to Confucianism, Your Majesty is the king and father. The most important thing for the king and father is the food, clothing and prosperity of the people in the world. We are all your majesty's pastoral and guarding officials, just like the king's father's sons, we should share the king's father's worries and benefit him. People, therefore, we should not attempt to disrupt the world, harm the country, and expose the people to war, but should do more practical things, pave roads and build bridges, build water conservancy and dredge rivers, and open workshops for hundreds of jobs!"
"Even if we do not rely on Confucian theory, from the perspective of Shengxue, the Ming Dynasty is composed of the people of the Ming Dynasty. The people of the Ming Dynasty are the real owners of the country of the Ming Dynasty. The people of the Ming Dynasty now recognize that the current Emperor Zhengde of the Ming Dynasty is the king of the country. Since we are The ministers of the king must have the correct consciousness in line with the current Ming Dynasty and be loyal to our king to benefit our people..."
Although Sun Sui only came to Nanjing to interrogate and convict Prince Ning and his party, in fact he seemed to have become a loyal supporter of Emperor Zhu Houzhao, constantly instilling the idea of loyalty to the emperor and loving the people to the officials and gentry in the south, regardless of these southern officials. Whether the officials or the gentry listened, they also expressed their hope that local officials in the south would do more infrastructure construction.
Some southern officials and gentry who are dissatisfied with the central court's too strict control over the south do not understand why even Sun Sui, who was also a southern gentry, has now become a loyal supporter of His Majesty the Emperor and wants local officials to replace the gentry in local affairs. Carry out infrastructure construction activities.
Only Sun Sui himself knew that everything he did was still just to maximize the interests of his family, but now he could use a more glorious reason.
Li Shishi, Liu Yangzheng, Wang Lun, Pei Xin, Xu Zan and other officials who followed King Ning to rebel were all sentenced to lingchi by Sun Sui. Naturally, their family properties were confiscated, and most of their family members were sentenced to imprisonment ranging from life to ten years. , providing sufficient labor force for the empire to carry out local infrastructure construction in the future.
The key criminal, Prince Ning, naturally received the heaviest punishment and was cut to pieces with a thousand knives.
But those who really understand know that although King Ning is hateful, what is truly hateful is the literati who deceived King Ning into rebelling. They deceived him into thinking that he could easily conquer the world. As a result, he had to do something against the whole world. Pay a heavy price for human interests.
After King Ning's rebellion was put down, the Ming Empire entered an era of frantic construction.
The capital accumulated by King Ning for many years finally flowed into the hands of the imperial court and the government, allowing Emperor Zhu Houzhao and his Ming Empire to add a substantial amount of capital after raising a large amount of capital through the establishment of the Infrastructure Bureau.
In addition, the large amount of income gained from the establishment of Haicheng, a colony in Manchuria, gave the Ming court sufficient financial resources to carry out construction related to the national economy and people's livelihood.
After all, after the empire has a lot of capital, it cannot keep it forever. Whether it is gold, silver or food and cloth, these things that serve as currency will never reflect their value as currency unless they are spent.
Because of this.
The empire must distribute this capital to the people so that the people can own more property, thereby increasing the level of national prosperity, that is, transforming national prosperity into national prosperity.
However, Ming Dynasty was not yet developed to the point where it could be distributed on demand.
Therefore, the country's capital cannot be distributed directly to the people. It must be distributed to the people who work hard through public infrastructure construction. Only in this way can it play a positive role in rewarding hard workers and increase the country's investment in transportation and commerce. The level of service in public services such as trade and agricultural disaster relief.
Therefore, while the central court and local governments continued to spend money, the construction projects of official roads began to be launched, the construction projects of bridges began to be carried out on a daily basis, and rivers and lakes began to be dredged and embanked by the government on their own initiative. .
Of course, money to carry out these projects is not a problem. Zhu Houzhao gave these localities self-retained taxes. Those with money can naturally use local public funds to invest, and those without money can borrow money from the Ming Dynasty's state-owned World Investment Bank. The technology is not difficult either. Cement concrete has been developed in Daming for several years. After the construction of Datong Official Road, it already has a complete set of experience in using cement concrete technology in road construction. It is also not difficult when it comes to the steel bars required for bridge construction. Daming's Dozens of state-owned iron plants have started using the open-hearth steelmaking method.
In addition, Zhu Houzhao had already established the Ming Academy of Sciences, the Ming Academy of Engineering and the Ming Imperial Library.
The scholars and people of the Ming Dynasty are no longer unfamiliar with the term science, and they even actively understand it as encyclopedia.
Although the Ming Academy of Sciences is still in its infancy, except for a large amount of money allocated to the Academy by the Royal Family and the Ministry of Household Affairs every year, the entire Academy does not have many talents. However, there are some Jinshi candidates trained by the Capital University and those from the Academy of Sciences. Based on the national recruitment of people with a certain level of expertise in arithmetic, physics, medicine refining, traditional Chinese medicine, etc., some relatively capable people can still be selected to serve as academicians.
In addition, the Daming Engineering Academy has assembled a group of skilled craftsmen, which was reorganized from the former Ordnance Bureau's R&D Institute. Many of these skilled craftsmen have already made outstanding contributions to the Ming Dynasty's ordnance manufacturing and steel smelting. Some people are no longer illiterate and have mastered sophisticated numerical operations and physical distance measurement capabilities.
Naturally, some complex bridge construction and road construction are not too big a problem.
But building bridges across the Yellow River and Yangtze River was still a difficult problem for the Ming Dynasty.
In general, the nationwide infrastructure construction wave that began in the 10th year of Zhengde in the Ming Dynasty laid the foundation for the future development of the commodity economy in the Ming Dynasty.
After all, this is the first time in history that the imperial government has carried out large-scale public infrastructure construction, instead of relying on one or two honest officials and enlightened gentry to carry out public infrastructure construction on a whim at a certain period of time, such as the Soviet Union in history. Gongdi, Liugongdi and the like.
The central court's intervention naturally avoided many traditional problems caused by public infrastructure construction, such as the problem of local governments conscripting people into corvee service or even forcing people to serve because of insufficient financial resources.
In addition, Zhu Houzhao also directly issued an order for administrative intervention, prohibiting people from serving in public services because of public construction.
This prevents the people from losing their farming time due to large-scale public infrastructure construction, or even being oppressed by officials.
Zhu Houzhao was not polite to those who defied the will of the imperial court and still asked the people to serve. Officials were directly dismissed from their posts and exiled to places such as Liaodong or Taiwan.
Of course, because the Ming Dynasty had sufficient capital, it was easier to solve the problem of relocating people for some public infrastructure construction because the people of the Ming Dynasty had always settled down and relocated.
Because the Ming Dynasty court could directly spend money instead of forcing the people, and the settlement allowance of one hundred taels was not enough, so only two hundred taels were needed.
Of course, the people are cunning, and if the government is too polite to them, it will make the people forget the violent and cruel side of the rulers, and start shouting prices, even refusing to accept the government's offer of 500 taels or even 1,000 taels. move.
The government can only change the place to build, and the people who raise the price with the government will naturally get nothing. Sometimes the more tough local government will take coercive measures, but this will often trigger civil unrest.
But in the end, the people also learned their lesson, and the government also learned its propriety. The government did not dare to compensate the people at a low price for the land loss and property loss after the relocation, and the people did not dare to ask for excessive compensation.
Large-scale public infrastructure construction naturally needs to be completed by the common people at the bottom. After all, the gentry and officials will not do such hard work, and because the court is rich and is afraid of squeezing the people too hard and civil uprisings occur, the cost is relatively high. Employing people with wages enabled a large number of Ming Dynasty's strong laborers to be invested in public infrastructure construction.
As a result, the income of ordinary people has been greatly increased, and they no longer just rely on the weather to be self-sufficient. Even this has caused many ordinary people to become more and more migrant workers or directly become urban workers.
Because people have discovered that they can no longer earn enough extra income by simply farming, but they can earn real money by just mixing cement or carrying a few bricks on the construction site.
Therefore, more and more homesteaders have become migrant workers.
The problem of land desolation is becoming more and more serious. In addition, the empire has abolished the road guide system, making this phenomenon even more serious. A large number of people migrate to large and medium-sized cities and wealthy areas, which directly leads to many gentry groups representing the interests of the landlord class. Benefits are further damaged.
Among them, the most serious problems were those of the largest local landowners, namely the clan members of the vassal kings of the Ming Dynasty.
There are fewer and fewer people farming, and the income of these vassal clansmen who dare not do anything but live on land rent has dropped sharply.
Of course, a great impact on the entire Ming Empire was the decrease in agricultural income, which was directly reflected in the sharp decline in taxes and grains paid in various places, and even led to a food crisis throughout the empire.
(End of chapter)