The reasons are many and complicated. The author believes that changing the dynasty is an accidental result caused by inevitable factors. What do you mean? It can be understood in this way: for example, if you experience a dynasty change in 300 years, then the number of 300 years can be regarded as accidental. However, in Tang, Song, Ming and Qing dynasties, the time of change was 300 years, which means that the number of 300 years has become a cycle, a cycle of changing dynasties. In this way, the accidental number of "300 years" must have its inevitable reasons. The author believes that there are two inevitable reasons that dominate the cycle of "300 years"-"land merger" and "climate change".
1, how to understand centralization
Let's talk about the first one today, which is "land merger".
Since the unification of the Qin Dynasty, the "feudal system" has been accompanied by the rise and fall of China's dynasty for more than two thousand years. This is a long time, long enough to be described by the word "terror". The empire under the feudal system, or monarch, has been doing one thing repeatedly and circularly for more than two thousand years-centralization.
How should we understand the word "centralization"? In fact, we can explain these four words by a famous historian Professor Huang Renyu, that is, "a country where the central government can directly tax every farmer."
The most striking representative of such a country is the first feudal dynasty in China, the Qin Dynasty. With his supreme power, Qin Shihuang compiled a set of carefully designed ruling networks that were accurate to "everyone". Based on counties and counties, he set up a "railway" transportation hub extending in all directions with a huge workload and exquisite workflow, and classified every household and every citizen of the State of Qin into the hierarchy of the empire to compile and record files. In this way, every production unit of the empire (including farmers, craftsmen and businessmen), their output and the taxes they should pay are completely under the control of the empire. There are few local strongmen who embezzle land, there are few false reports of land grain output, there are few tax frauds, and there are few concealment of various production quantities. In a word, the power of the empire can penetrate into every corner of imperial rule in a highly centralized way, and the empire can enjoy all the resources of the whole country.
Is this "centralized" rule good? Of course there is. First of all, such a system will not only ensure that the country's tax revenue is stable and continuous, but also ensure that the lowest taxpayers, such as the hardest-working farmers, will not have too heavy a burden if the rulers are not cruel. Because the tax percentage of the empire is certain, there will be no exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous taxes anywhere except paying taxes to the empire (the taxes on farmers in the Ming Dynasty are very low, and the main reason for the heavy taxes on farmers in general is the various extra taxes made by local officials under various pretexts), which will definitely guarantee the basic life of farmers, as long as there is no large-scale natural disaster, farmers can basically get enough food and clothing. These two points alone are enough to show that if "centralization" can achieve this idealization, then it is absolutely possible for the dynasty to be realized forever.
However, the Qin Dynasty, which was very close to this "centralization", why did it perish after only ten years of rule? The reason is very simple. This high degree of centralization made the desire of the rulers of the Qin Dynasty endless, and the rulers were cruel and abnormal. The taxes imposed by the state on the people were enough to crush them. When ordinary people can't even solve the basic problem of food and clothing, all they can do is rebel.
As a result, the feudal rulers of later generations fully understood this point. They often did not ask the people for too heavy taxes, but adopted a moderate ruling attitude, the so-called "benevolent government." Hundreds of years later, this social system with benevolent governance as the core concept has been continuously promoted, and the way the empire operates has become more and more mature.
2. How to understand land merger?
Most emperors in later generations had neither the shrewd means of Qin Shihuang nor his ruling energy. In this case, with the continuous development of the feudal system, the original reality that "the central government can directly levy taxes on every farmer" has actually existed in name only under the circumstances that the emperor can't do everything in detail and the officials are constantly enriching themselves. This is the beginning of land annexation.
How to define land annexation? The land of the country is certain, and the population (productivity) of the country is also certain in a certain period of time. The state verifies the amount of land used for farming by measuring land, and verifies the number of taxpayers by census and household registration customization. In this way, the annual tax collected by the state from the land should also be certain. When land annexation began, this system, which was supposed to be as rigid as iron, would soon undergo qualitative changes. The first manifestation is the gradual transfer of land property rights to a few people, which is what we often call the landlord class. Landlords invaded farmers' farmland by violence, which made these farmers who were originally self-sufficient and paid taxes according to law lose their land. In order to survive, they had to depend on these landlords and become tenant farmers. What does it mean to be a tenant farmer? It means that every grain cultivated and produced by tenant farmers belongs to the landlord, and the landlord will only give them enough rations to survive. The purpose of maintaining their survival is to enable them to continue to work for the landlord to farm. In this way, our feudal government can no longer get a dime tax from these farmers who used to work hard and pay taxes on time. They changed from citizens who served the feudal empire to private servants of the local tyrants and landlords. Every time a yeoman becomes a tenant farmer, it means that the central government reduces the actual tax revenue of this place by one point. Every reduction in tax revenue means that the central government's control over local governments is reduced by one point. Therefore, the "small-scale peasant economy" of one household exists in name only, and the "small-scale peasant economy" has become a "manor economy" similar to that of western planters in disguise. This is land annexation.
If we idealize it again, it is ok if these landlords can pay taxes according to the national standards, that is to say, the state has sufficient conditions to control them and firmly grasp the resources of the state, so that the resources produced by those tenant farmers can flow to the central government reasonably. However, there is an irreversible difference between reality and ideal. Those powerful landlords who encroach on private land in local areas have sufficient interests and reasons. They collude with officials and gentry, deceive the central government, falsely conceal the number of private land they own, and falsely report their household registration, which means that some national resources are taken for themselves. Their own power has been expanded, which means that the power of the central government is constantly being weakened. The more serious the land merger is, the weaker the control power of the central government is. When this merger reaches a certain level, the power of the central government is completely alienated, and the survival of the central government has reached the point of relying entirely on the support of these landlords. Then at this time, it is not far from national subjugation.
3, 300 years, becoming the maximum carrying capacity of the land merger cycle.
Land annexation leads to less and less farmland used by the state to tax, and less farmland means less tax revenue of the state. The reduction of national tax revenue means that the financial expenses can't make ends meet, and the army can't afford to support it, which leads to the weakening of its combat effectiveness. In this way, once a war breaks out, the country will become more and more unable to suppress the rebellion, and this kind of unrest will become more and more serious, so that the government's strength is no longer enough to provide a solution. And what about those landlords who own most of the country's land and hold most of the tax revenue? They can only be considered speculators. They have most of the resources in society, and they have the ability and obligation to share the worries for the country. But they tend to take a wait-and-see attitude. They may help the country when it is profitable. If they think that investing in the country may not benefit them too much, then they will completely become misers and sit back and watch the country survive. For those rebels who lost their land, they are looking forward to a devastating upheaval and a reshuffle after troubled times.
So far, it is not difficult for us to see that the feudal society in China for more than 2,000 years, from the beginning of its establishment to the autumn of its demise, is repeating the same process, that is, the process of land redistribution-land merger-land merger has reached its limit-the world is in chaos and reshuffle-land redistribution is once again established in a new dynasty. The whole dynasty history is the history of the struggle between the central government and local powerful landlords for land and population. This kind of history repeats itself from generation to generation, just forming such a cycle of 300 years. Influenced by the amount of land and population in China (and of course by production technology), 300 years is the maximum bearing time from the beginning to the development of land merger.
Yesterday, we discussed an inevitable reason why most feudal dynasties in China could not escape the fate of changing dynasties once every two or three hundred years-land merger, and summed up such a dynasty replacement cycle with a limit of 300 years-land redistribution-land merger-land merger developed to the limit-the chaos in the world reshuffled-the establishment of a new dynasty and land redistribution again. Today we continue to discuss another inevitable factor-climate change.
1, what is the Little Ice Age?
Before getting into the subject, there is a very important question that needs to be explained first. Yesterday, a netizen left a message and asked such a question: Why is the cycle from the beginning to the limit of land merger 300 years, not 500 years, 800 years or other longer? How to prove that this cycle is 300 years? The author believes that the 300-year cycle does not need to be proved, because it is a fact that Tang, Song, Ming and Qing all died in almost 300 years (because the demise of the Qing Dynasty has an extremely special nature, it can not be discussed). What we need to do is to find out why the cycle is 300 years on the basis of this fact and explain why it is not 500 years or 800 years longer with scientific methods and theories. What can explain this problem is the inevitable factor of climate change that I want to discuss with you below.
Now there is a very novel and distinct view on the internet about the demise of the Ming Dynasty, that is, "the late Ming Dynasty caught up with the Little Ice Age" (I will focus on this historical phenomenon below). What is the "Little Ice Age"? Simply put, it is a process in which the earth's temperature drops sharply in a certain period of time, which leads to a sharp reduction in crop production, violent social unrest and a sharp decline in population (all these phenomena occurred in the Little Ice Age in history without exception, and interested readers can consult relevant materials). However, the "Little Ice Age", like the seasonal cycle, did not last forever after it happened, but was periodic.
According to the research of meteorologists in Europe in recent years, the Little Ice Age in Europe began in the13rd century, reached its peak in the17th century, and finally slowed down the activity trend about 200 years ago. At its peak, famine raged in northern Europe. Some people think that half the population of Norway and Sweden died in famine. At the same time, snow and ice spread all over the world, and some parts of Ethiopia were covered with snow. At that time, China, the largest traditional agricultural country in the world, greatly reduced its crop production, and the lake surface of Lake Superior, which was calm all the year round, began to freeze.
In the data of meteorological history of China written by Professor Zhu Kezhen, a modern meteorologist in China, it is clearly recorded that several times of the largest social unrest in China history are indeed closely related to four small ice ages in China history-the first small ice age from the end of Yin Shang Dynasty to the early years of Western Zhou Dynasty, the second small ice age in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, the Three Kingdoms and the Western Jin Dynasty, the third small ice age in the late Tang Dynasty, the Five Dynasties and the early Northern Song Dynasty, and the fourth small ice age in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties. At that time, the temperature dropped sharply, causing drought in the north and a sharp reduction in grain production. According to Professor Zhu Kezhen's research results, many historians in China have clearly pointed out that the sharp reduction of grain crops caused by the cold climate has caused decades-long social turmoil, famine and war. The long-term famine has led to unlimited expansion of war, and the war has caused corpses everywhere, which has led to a large-scale disease and plague. The total factors are intertwined, which has caused a sharp drop in population and nowhere to vent people's resentment. Therefore, all of them point their finger at the government, thus changing dynasties and order.
2. The national famine caused by the cold climate is the core force to shake the dynasty regime.
Some historians even believe that the drought-resistant and high-yield crops, such as potato, corn and sweet potato, imported from America in the late Ming Dynasty greatly saved the lives of China farmers who were on the verge of famine due to reduced grain production. If these foreign food crops were not introduced into China, the Ming Dynasty would have perished more than ten years earlier because of the great famine, even in the first year of Chongzhen (1628). At the end of the Ming Dynasty, there were 120 million people on the land of China, and only 50 million people remained after the Qing Dynasty entered the customs to establish a new dynasty. At this time, the Little Ice Age in China was far from over. During this period, the transition to "Kanggan Prosperity" was due to the foreign crops such as corn and potatoes. The reason why the prosperity of Kanggan can be formed is that the Little Ice Age ended in the middle of Kangxi, and the land of China began to pick up, and the traditional food crops in China began to increase production significantly.
According to "Annals of Continued Counties in Hannan", only the famine caused by climate change in Shaanxi Province has not been interrupted for ten years since the first year of Chongzhen. If we add the hell on earth in other areas that is enough to frighten any gods and demons, it will simply uproot the dynasty with extremely low productivity and which has been based on agriculture since ancient times, and its damage is even higher than that of contemporary nuclear war.
In the era when the Little Ice Age flooded, Chongzhen was absolutely right. The phrase "everything is like the death of the country" fully illustrates the characteristics of the famine and turmoil at that time that could not be recovered by manpower. The Little Ice Age of the Ming Dynasty began in 1580, after which the temperature suddenly dropped, and the whole cooling process was very obvious, and the lowest temperature stage was the period at the end of the Ming Dynasty-1600 to 1644. During this period, the temperature suddenly dropped to the lowest point in a thousand years, the second lowest point in a thousand years, and one of the lowest six or seven extremely cold periods in a million years. It can be said that it is the coldest period since mankind entered the civilized period. At that time, droughts and floods occurred one after another in summer, and it was extremely cold in winter. Not only to the north of the Yellow River, but also to Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong and other places, these strange and impermanent phenomena were mentioned in the historical materials of the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties, such as Reading the World, Notes on Yong Xian Zhai, Five Elements of Ming History, and Disasters. Regardless of whether Chongzhen has the talent to govern the country, can he and his empire save all these irresistible and devastating natural factors?
3. China's climate changes once every 300 years, which coincides with the life span of the dynasty.
Let's take a look at some data analysis. Because the time span of China's history is too long, it is difficult to have a clear and detailed record of the temperature changes in the early years due to the influence of technology. Some experts have counted the temperature changes from 850 A.D. (Tang Xuanzong period) to A.D. 1900 on the eve of the demise of the Qing Dynasty: the cold period is 539 years, and the warm period is 5 1 1 year. If subdivided according to the principle of alternating cold and warm periods, it can be roughly divided into eight warm periods and eight cold periods, that is, 16 climate periods. Seven national upheavals and upheaval broke out in one of the eight cold periods. Except for the Yuan Dynasty, which perished in the warm period (1368, eight years after the last Little Ice Age), the other dynasties all perished in the cold period. If the peasant riots, large and small, which did not cause regime change during this period are counted, it can be counted that 86% of the riots occurred in the trough of the cold period. The high coincidence between the changes in cold and warm periods and the changes in the frequency of national unrest can no longer be explained by coincidence alone.
You may say that the Song Dynasty was not killed by peasant riots, but was destroyed by foreign invasion. Yes, the Northern Song Dynasty and the Southern Song Dynasty died of nomadic people of Jin and Meng Yuan respectively. However, it is not difficult to find that the most frequent war activities of nomadic people against the Central Plains Dynasty in China's history were almost all around the time point when the Little Ice Age in northern China reached its peak. In the middle of the Han Dynasty, the Huns were like this, the five random flowers were like this, and the Jin people went south. The so-called frequent invasions of the people of the Central Plains by these nomadic people are actually nothing more than constant looting and looting. Rob the grain resources and product resources of the Central Plains to survive. Compared with the farming people in the Central Plains, those nomadic people depend on the sky for food. Even if there is a famine in the central plains, there must be hoarding of grain. However, once nomadic people herded horses and herded sheep in the Little Ice Age, the grassland was barren and a large number of cattle and sheep died in the extreme cold, and they would immediately face the food fault. In this way, what can they do but plunder south? So every cycle when the climate starts to turn cold, that is, when the northern nomads and the Central Plains regime broke out in war.
Having said that, it should not be hard for everyone to see why the feudal dynasties in China were generally changed once every two or three hundred years. Because every two or three hundred years, China has to go through a Little Ice Age, which is a period of extreme cold. During this period, due to the serious land annexation, a large number of farmers lost their land and became tenant farmers. Their families had no surplus food and worked for the landlord class. Once they encounter a great famine caused by cold, they have no ability to cope with the famine. These people have been farming on the land all their lives, and when there is no relief in famine years, the corrupt dynasty can't take care of their life and death, so they can only wait for death. At this time, the dynasty has experienced two or three hundred years of development, and the contradiction between the population growth and the shortage of land resources has reached its maximum in the famine years, so the peasant's resistance war is inevitable anyway. Subsequently, the regime changed, the dynasty changed, all resources began to be redistributed, all order began to be reorganized, and all chaos began to be reshuffled.
"Land annexation" and "climate change", the two factors that lead to a dynasty change once every 300 years, are interrelated and mutually causal. If there is no land annexation and the dynasty government has enough grain reserves, then even in the Little Ice Age, the government has enough disaster relief ability to help farmers tide over this famine, and the time for changing the dynasty is probably unknown. If there were no Little Ice Age, even if there were land annexation, there would be no large-scale famine, and farmers would not be unable to eat or pay taxes. It is still unknown whether the empire can support Takuya under such a morbid balance.