Chapter 271: The King Would Overturn the Boat, Seeing White Delusions

The three of them followed the method laid out in the lesson "Several Explanations on the Methods of Holding Meetings" from the Northern Zhili County Magistrate training course.

First, they set out their individual views separately, grouped them, wrote them on small slips of paper, and only then merged and discussed them.

In the training course's terminology, this effectively prevents two problems.

One is "thought influence" — that is, once you know a certain line of thought, you become trapped in that line of thought.

The other is "authority suppression" — that is, because of status, certain opposing opinions are unconsciously stifled and extinguished.

The New Policies' working methods... truly, each one is newer than the last, and each one is more troublesome than the last.

But after using them a few times, Lu Zhenfei and the other two felt that they were indeed much better than how they had discussed matters before, so they kept using them.

But no matter how thoroughly they thought it through, Laoting was, after all, only Laoting, and the three quickly pooled all their ideas.

Lu Zhenfei spoke. "Liye, summarize the discussion we just had."

Li Liye did not have Lu Zhenfei's soaring ambition to compete for the title of best in Northern Zhili.

For him, this was already an enormous space in which to put his abilities to use — do it well for half a year, then smoothly go take the examination for New Policies officials, that was the broad road to heaven. And so when he spoke, his tone was extremely energized.

"Of the various matters just discussed, we shall first speak of what cannot be done, then of what is easily done, and finally of what is difficult to do."

"By 'cannot be done,' we mean things that are impossible, unnecessary, or not worth doing."

"First: bandits... Laoting does not abut any guard station, does not border the frontier, is not near any strategic thoroughfare, and the nearest post station is a hundred li away. This locality has no bandits."

"Second: the White Lotus sect... For this sect to flourish, it customarily requires places of extreme hardship, and it especially breaks out along the Grand Canal, in famine-stricken areas, or at commercial hubs. Locally, we have not yet heard of anyone going out by night and returning by day, practicing talismans and incantations. Let us not count on this item for now."

"Third: commercial taxes... Local commerce is not thriving. For example, Xingren Street Market holds a market every five days, Hujiadi Market every nine days, and markets like Tangjiahe and Xinzhai Fort hold markets only once every sixty days. Commercial tax silver is therefore a mere twenty-two taels..."

"Although every household plants mulberry and jujube trees, it is mostly for their own use or local trade, and the scale is truly not large."

"This matter can only be handled incidentally; it can hardly be a main focus, since the inherent conditions are poor."

"Fourth: fishing and maritime trade... Tianjin lies to the south, swallowing up ships and cargo..."

"Fifth: mining... the locality has no mineable deposits..."

Li Liye checked off the "rotten projects" one by one and looked at the other two.

Seeing each of them nod in confirmation, he then continued.

"And the easily done things are those with little obstruction and quick results."

"First: rectifying the clerks."

"This item alone, if done well, should be able to press the effective tax rate down to around twelve percent, and moreover win the people's hearts."

"It is truly, among all these matters, the one of highest value and quickest results, and should be ranked first class."

"Second: clearing the fields."

"On the one hand, we must re-register and levy taxes on the hundred thousand mu of land belonging to the Liao refugees. For this matter, we can use the local gentry and commoners to suppress the guest population."

"They have been broken up and resettled, and will not be able to put up much combined resistance. This matter is easily done."

"In addition, we must clear up the local gentry's practices of fraudulent registration, concealment, and scattered allocation."

"For this matter, we must seize upon the three families — Liu, Zhang, and Wang — who have members serving as officials at court, and use them to take the lead in pressing the other gentry to declare."

"If they are willing to cooperate, the proprietor will naturally not stint in speaking well of them in the routine New Policies reports. If they are unwilling to cooperate..."

Li Liye shook his head. "Surely there cannot be men so unwise as that..."

At these words, the three could not help but simultaneously reveal knowing smiles.

In this world, when it comes to making money, nothing is faster than being an official.

And how much can one really earn from so-called fraudulent registration and exemption privileges?

Take Liu Tingxuan, for example: a capital official of principal fifth rank, by regulation exempt on four hundred seventy mu. Converted to tax per mu, that is a mere nineteen taels.

If we calculate his case using a fraudulent registration coefficient of 4.0, he would have fraudulently registered an extra one thousand four hundred mu, and the extra tax silver converted would be only fifty-six taels. Even if we calculate him at a coefficient of 10.0, that would be four thousand two hundred thirty mu fraudulently registered, and the converted tax silver would be one hundred sixty-nine taels.

One hundred sixty-nine taels versus the prospects of a capital official of principal fifth rank — who cannot tell which matters more?

This is also why, the moment the Yongchang Emperor made his attitude known, New Policies officials everywhere voluntarily requested land surveys.

The matter of exemption and fraudulent registration involves economic interest calculations, but very often it is a calculation of personal-favor interest and moral interest.

Generally speaking, government students and juren give more weight to economic interest.

But once an official rises in rank, the personal-favor and moral components tend to increase instead.

After all, with a slight lift of the hand, all manner of relatives, friends, and old acquaintances can be shielded and evade various tax and corvée assignments — who can say a word of refusal?

Especially... in the Jiangnan region, once assigned the task of shipping grain north, families can truly be ruined by it.

The three laughed for a while, then grew serious again. What Li Liye was about to discuss next were the truly difficult matters.

"As for matters difficult to handle and difficult to do, there are only four."

"First: water conservancy."

"In the third month of spring here, the busy farming season begins, so the time available for constructing waterworks is only a little over two months."

"This matter can begin as soon as the rectification of clerks and clearing of fields are finished."

"As for funds and grain, and soliciting donations from the gentry — their fields are all along the river anyway — the difficulty is that it must be done quickly."

"The faster we unite people's hearts, the more working time we can seize."

"If it is done too slowly, we can only wait until after the spring busy season."

"Second: paddy fields."

"I and Mr. Wang have already inspected the various coastal areas and confirmed that they are all lands where, as the registers say, water can be pooled to flush out the brine."

"But this matter is not as simple as one might imagine."

"On the one hand, there are expenses for seed, plow oxen, farm tools, and the like."

"Calculated out, for fifty thousand mu of land, even with the strictest budgeting, it still requires twenty thousand taels of silver in capital."

"We have currently made slight cuts to certain items in the Equal Corvée silver and obtained only nine hundred forty-two taels."

"Added to the proprietor's six hundred seventy-two taels of new-appointment congratulatory silver, and the two thousand taels of customary silver for the County Magistrate, Vice Magistrate, Constable, and Instructor — altogether, the total is three thousand six hundred fourteen taels. This is the first difficulty."

This was precisely the difficulty of local finance under the Ming dynasty.

Under a static fiscal philosophy of "matching revenue to expenditure," local governments had virtually no discretionary funds on hand.

If they wanted to get anything done, they either had to impose additional levies, pay out of their own pockets, or collaborate with the gentry.

"The other aspect is manpower."

"Paddy fields are nothing like dry-land farming; they consume several times the labor. Based on southern experience, one able-bodied novice, at the very start, can manage at most ten mu of paddy field, and that's with diligent instruction."

"At that rate, fifty thousand mu of paddy field would require five thousand able-bodied men — roughly twenty thousand in total population."

"But this place, Leting, lies on a coastal corner, touching no mountains and bordering no forests. Even if there are refugees fleeing here, they number at most a little over a thousand..."

Adviser Wang sighed.

"And on top of that, the various prefectures of Northern Zhili are very likely to undertake major public works next year. Trying to attract idle hands from neighboring counties and districts seems equally impossible."

"Therefore, this paddy-field project, it seems, can only make a start next year; we truly cannot accomplish fifty thousand mu."

"By my reckoning, the absolute most we could manage next year is about eight thousand mu."

Lu Zhenfei frowned and pondered for a moment, then said:

"Set the target at ten thousand mu. We can still strive to find more manpower and silver to make up the gap."

"As for manpower, one thing is to keep an eye on the matter of the Liaodong levy review."

"When I was in the capital, I made a point of asking around about this. I heard the general direction is to register and review the levy, but it's unclear whether they will discharge the old and weak. But whether they discharge them or not, we can use the connections of the local Liaodong population here to recruit some over. No matter what, life inside the Pass is always more stable than outside the Pass."

"As for the matter of silver..."

Lu Zhenfei paused, gritted his teeth, and said, "Include a portion of my private savings as well, and scrape together four thousand taels to do this... Also, later I'll ask Brother Yuanhui whether he's willing to donate some money."

"I can issue him one hundred qing of land... if he wants it."

These words left the other two silent.

Land is only valuable once it has been reclaimed and cultivated; otherwise, its price is wretchedly low.

And coastal saline-alkaline land is the cheapest of the cheap — the kind that even if you gave it away to commoners, they would wave their hands and refuse, afraid of being saddled with taxes on it.

For Lu Zhenfei to offer this was, in truth, rather in the style of the Yongchang Emperor.

Setting aside Lu Zhenfei's pain at paying his way into office,

Li Yeli pressed on.

"Third: population."

"Currently, seventy-seven thousand are on the registers. Of these, thirty-three thousand date from the Hongwu era; calculated at a 2.5 multiplier, that comes to over eighty-two thousand. Add the twenty-two thousand who moved in only during the Tianqi era, and the total is one hundred and five thousand."

"Clearing this up shouldn't be difficult, since the head tax is no longer collected."

"But we still need to establish public trust first before we can properly set about this task. Otherwise, if we frighten the common people into fleeing in all directions, that would be bad."

Adviser Wang laughed heartily and shook his head, dismissing this worry.

"Flee... flee where?"

"If they were in Daming Prefecture or someplace near the provincial border, that would be one thing. But here in Leting, so remote — if they flee outward, they're still in Northern Zhili, aren't they? They'd still have to be registered in the household rolls and counted among the population. What's the point of all that trouble!" At this dark joke, even Lu Zhenfei couldn't help laughing out loud.

He shook his head and said, "This item really shouldn't be listed under the difficult tasks. Move it back to the easy ones."

Li Yeli nodded, made some corrections on the paper, and continued.

"Finally, there is the matter of tax revenue — and this is the hardest task of all."

"To increase tax revenue, merely boosting paddy-field yields or achieving two harvests in three years is useless."

"Because whether it's the land tax, the equal-corvée silver, and the like, these are all fixed-quota levies. No matter how much production increases, what's due is what's due, and that's what gets collected. If we want to increase tax revenue, we have to raise the tax rate in real terms."

"But this matter is probably not easy to handle."

Adviser Wang nodded and stroked his beard.

"For many years in our dynasty, taxes have always been cut first, then raised again. They've been equalizing the corvée for a hundred years, and it's never once been equalized successfully."

"Now, to raise taxes — not to mention the alarm among the rural gentry, even the common people will grow uneasy."

Once Adviser Wang laid out the crux of the problem, the other two fell silent together.

This thing called a tax rate, according to the booklet, is divided into the nominal rate and the effective rate.

Of the two, the effective rate is easy to lower; the nominal rate is hard to raise.

After all, however high the effective rate, one could still hope that now and then an upright official would come along, clean things up, and give everyone a breather.

But once the nominal rate is set, taxes will be levied according to that standard for all time.

This difficulty had not been resolved in their earlier discussion and had been set aside for the time being.

Now that the other matters had been sorted out, this problem could no longer be ignored.

Adviser Wang spoke first, voicing his own thoughts:

"How about we follow the precedent of the Liaodong levy and impose a 'temporary surcharge'?"

"We could collect it under a levy item for building water-conservancy works, or under a project for improving per-mu yields."

"In short, use the levy method to raise taxes for now?"

This, too, was something that had happened many times before in the Great Ming.

An upright official would come down, trim the underlings, persuade the gentry, and bring the effective tax rate down.

Then he would levy some silver to fund public works.

After the man left office, this levy would either disappear, or the underlings would continue to demand it, thereby raising the nominal rate bit by bit.

Lu Zhenfei hesitated for a moment, then shook his head and rejected this clever notion.

"The matter is not so simple."

"Looking at the outline of the Northern Zhili New Policies, I can't help feeling somewhat uneasy."

"The training courses and the details only lay out rewards, punishments, and constraints, but they haven't set a fully unified New Policy plan."

"It's nothing like the Wanli New Policies, which clearly defined the unified Eight Rules of Cadastral Survey and then required every County Magistrate to strictly implement them."

"Under the new policies as they now stand, everything rests on each County Magistrate's letter of commitment; the command headquarters merely reviews and sets broad constraints."

"It looks as though each is free to spend as much or as little as he pleases, to follow his own inclination…"

"But how is that not, in fact, a strategy of raising venomous insects?"

The more he talked, the clearer his thinking became, and the more certain he grew that this idea was correct.

"This Northern Metropolitan selection may never have ended at all! Perhaps it has only just begun!"

"Next year's round of new policies — that will be the true Northern Metropolitan selection!"

"Those who pass will be a carp leaping through the Dragon Gate; those who fail will be nothing more than a night-blooming cereus, a flash in the pan!"

Adviser Wang was silent for a moment, then stroked his beard and asked, "Then what does the patron have in mind?"

Lu Zhenfei remained silent a long while, and at last made his decision.

"On the road from the capital to Laoting, I kept turning one question over in my mind."

"That lesson on tax rates — why was it that, back then, the full committee staff and the full secretariat staff were specially assembled to audit it together?"

"Apart from that one lesson, the only other course given treatment of that caliber was the one on 'Studying Zhang Juzheng's New Policies.'"

"This business of nominal tax rates and effective tax rates is absolutely not so simple, and it absolutely cannot be fobbed off with arbitrary apportionment!"

"Perhaps it is precisely here that we have room to make our mark!"

"I do not believe His Majesty endorses the present fixed-quota tax system. After all, with an ambition to surpass and excel — if everything is fixed by quota, how is one to surpass and excel?" Li Liye was stirred, but still hesitated. "But how is it to be done?"

"If we do not fold it into the Equalized Corvée Silver and apportion it, are we to add it onto the principal land-tax items? If that goes wrong, it could easily stir up a great storm." Adviser Wang, being older and shrewder, saw the ways of the world more clearly, and added his own caution.

"The nominal tax rates in the registers already include the Equalized Corvée Silver to begin with, so collecting the additional taxes from increased production under that heading would seem unproblematic, would it not?"

"As for whether this money and grain travels through the principal land-tax accounts or through the Equalized Corvée accounts — perhaps that hardly matters."

"So long as, when the new policies are rolled out next year, Laoting can truly show an increase in tax revenue, will the men above trouble themselves over such details?"

"Silver is silver, grain is grain — where is the distinction between righteous and wicked?"

It was a rare thing: for the first time since the new policies had been launched, the two advisers were in complete opposition to Lu Zhenfei.

This threw Lu Zhenfei, for a moment, into inner conflict.

His instincts told him that within this lay great merit, a great achievement.

Yet what the two advisers had said was not, in truth, mistaken.

Within this lay, at the same time, a great terror.

Lu Zhenfei hesitated a moment, still unwilling to let go, and spoke again.

"But even if we set aside the two terms 'nominal tax rate' and 'effective tax rate'—"

"What of the 'petty-official coefficient'? What of the 'gentry coefficient'?"

"Those two terms do not merely aim their spearpoint at the petty officials; they aim it at the gentry as well."

"This whole series of concepts plainly intends to drag what has been hidden beneath the table out onto the tabletop for open discussion."

"From this we can see — how could the new policies go on collecting taxes in such a muddled, ambiguous fashion?"

"And how could they ever again permit the petty officials and the gentry to carve out profits from the state's mouth, to build up what the documents call the 'Dark Great Ming'? I believe that casting aside the effective tax rate — and even casting aside the nominal tax rate that smuggles in the Equalized Corvée — and re-examining everything from the ground up, with unified collection and unified disbursement, is the true direction!"

"This is the real achievement of the new policies, a far grander enterprise than cadastral surveys, acreage, population registers, and all the rest!"

The more he spoke, the more he felt he had glimpsed the truth, and his emotions could not help but surge.

"At present, everything in Laoting is placid: the regulation of officials, the acreage, the population, the waterworks — all these matters are easy to carry out."

"That is a sorrow for the achievements of the new policies — but is it not also a joy for the great cause of the new policies?"

"Where else is there a better surface on which to paint than a blank sheet of paper?!"

Lu Zhenfei was now wholly immersed in his own world, beyond pulling himself free.

"Yes, yes, yes — that is exactly it!"

"There are achievements other counties can pursue that Laoting cannot."

"But is this particular achievement not one that Laoting can pursue, while other counties cannot?!"

"Disaster is that upon which fortune depends; fortune is that within which disaster lurks! That is exactly it!"

Feeling that he had at last discovered the way to break the deadlock, his tone could not help but grow fervent.

"Can you two gentlemen still not see it clearly?"

"The king wishes to overturn the boat! This is plainly the king's intent to overturn the boat! This is plainly his intent to build a new vessel!"

"At such a moment — what does a lord intend to do? What ought a lord to do?"

Li Liye, being young after all, was so stirred that he very nearly spoke out in agreement on the spot.

But Adviser Wang, grown shrewd with age, effortlessly suppressed this rising fervor with a turn of his hand.

"Patron, why not take this idea of yours and go ask Hanlin Wu about it?"

"If we are speaking of what the king desires — outside the capital, here within Laoting, is there anyone who understands it more clearly than he?"

"Would that not be better than our wild guessing here?"

This reasoning was truly sound. Lu Zhenfei's expression brightened, and heedless of the hour, he pushed open the door and went straight out.

Adviser Wang watched Lu Zhenfei leave, then turned back and saw Li Liye's face still full of excitement. He could not help shaking his head inwardly.

Give it a rest…

That time when His Majesty conducted the interview, the patron had guessed wildly just like this, swearing with absolute conviction that the path to heaven lay right before his eyes.

After he came back, boiling with enthusiasm, he had seized the two of them and forced them to stay up an entire night.

Only the next day did they discover that the five-circle official documents had been a trap all along, and that everyone had been concealing their methods.

Young men… young men, after all.

At this thought, he stroked his beard and said with a smile:

"Liye, if it truly is the king's wish to overturn the boat, then you have certainly caught a fine moment."

"Sort out the documents and get more familiar with the administration of Leting. That way, when the clerks' selection exam comes next year, it'll be a walk in the park." Li Liye sensed nothing amiss and cheerfully agreed.

"All right, Master Wang, you go and rest now. I'll take care of sorting the remaining documents!"

Adviser Wang smiled faintly, patted him on the shoulder, and left the room as well.

The difference between an adviser paid sixty taels a year and one paid thirty taels a year—how could it be merely a matter of the work they did?