Chapter 327: Li Zicheng, You Need to Be a Bit More Ruthless!

Zu Zepu glanced at Liu Sheng, who was following behind Wu Sangui. He had been moving about Wu Sangui's army often lately and had become quite familiar with this Wu-family retainer of Qin-army origin, and he also knew that this rough fellow only looked rough — he actually had brains.

"Liu Sheng, you're of military-register status, aren't you?" Zu Zepu asked.

"That's right," Liu Sheng said. "I'm Shaanxi-army born, served under Supreme Commander Sun, and my family's been military-register for generations — an ancestor of mine even made Centurion."

"Then you ought to know what Li Zicheng has to do to gain a firm footing in Shaanxi?"

"Course I know!" Liu Sheng nodded. "Clear the military farms. Oh, he doesn't even need to clear them — he can just hand out the land directly. He's not the Ming, after all. He's a roving bandit. Anyone who won't submit, grab him and put him to the ankle-press! He already did that sort of thing in Beijing, so what's he got to be polite about once he gets to Shaanxi?"

Zu Zepu said, "Changbo, you see? Even he knows it! Would Li Zicheng not know it? The problem now is that time is tight. Give Li Zicheng one peaceful year, and his great army will put down roots in Shaanxi. When that happens, can we still drive him out? On paper, Shaanxi has at least 30 million mu — in real terms it's no less than Northern Zhili!"

At this time, Shaanxi included Ningxia, Gansu, and other places, so its land area was very large. But the arable land on the books was not much — only a little under 30 million mu. Moreover, the land was barren and could hardly support people. So Shaanxi's total land-tax revenue was also small, only a paltry 1.73 million-odd shi.

So by collecting taxes, Li Zicheng could never sustain himself, to say nothing of remitting taxes for three years. But if Li Zicheng divided the 30 million mu of land on the books, plus at least 20 million mu of unregistered land, among his 200,000-strong army, that would average out to 250 mu per man!

Two hundred fifty mu of land — in Shaanxi, that made one a middling landlord! Collect one dou of flour per mu, and 250 mu would yield 25 shi of flour. In this age of chaos, that was worth around 50 taels of silver.

This arithmetic was truly frightening. In Shaanxi, the land-tax quota was 1.73 million-odd shi. If the gentry landlords who held the land were stripped of it, and the officers and men of the Shun army were turned into new landlords, then the whole Shun army could dig at least 5 million shi out of Shaanxi's land every year — and that was on the basis of the new Shun landlords collecting relatively low rents!

If the Shun had those 5 million shi of flour, then never mind Wu Sangui — even if the Eight Banners troops came themselves, victory would be hard to win.

This three-way struggle for hegemony among the Shun, the Ming, and the Qing was, in truth, also a question of economics!

The reason the Great Qing could win lay to a great extent in the fact that the land, population, and wealth (including grain and silver) that the Great Qing directly controlled through the Eight Banners system already far exceeded those of the Great Ming and the Great Shun. Although the Eight Banners troops were even better than Li Zicheng's Shun army at seizing people and goods, they had never neglected the firm control of population and land!

And now, the land inside and outside the Pass directly controlled by the Great Qing (developed farmland) amounted to no less than forty or fifty million mu, and the population numbered no less than several million. Moreover, the Great Qing was at its most ferocious right now. If necessary, the Qing court would still enclose and seize more land, turning more Han people into banner slaves, tenant farmers, or enrolling them into the Eight Banners and the Green Standard. So the Great Qing was absolutely not an enemy that could be easily defeated!

On the Great Ming side, Zhu Cilang was of course not as ruthless as Dorgon, but the southeast of the Ming had abundant resources! Without having to squeeze too brutally, he could obtain enough land, population, and wealth to resist the Qing — but ever since Crown Prince Zhu arrived at Dengzhou, he had spared no effort in contending for population, for land, for salt taxes, and for commercial taxes!

Now he had finally achieved something, having slowly brought tens of millions of mu of land and several million people under his own control. With this bit of land and population, Zhu Cilang had his base, and the merchants and scholar-officials of the southeast would have to obediently pay their taxes.

Among these three parties, Li Zicheng was currently in the hardest position and held the worst territory. If he still deluded himself with benevolent governance and tax remission, and could not harden his heart to seize Shaanxi's land and population into his own hands, then his defeat and destruction would be only a matter of days.

The situation was changing with lightning speed, like shifting winds and clouds, too fast for the eye to follow. The changes in the northern situation during the seventeenth year of Chongzhen were truly dizzying — one turn after another, leaving those caught up in events with the feeling of being in a dream.

For Li Zicheng, the Son of Heaven of the Shun, who at the start of the year had been full of high spirits as he led his 60,000-strong veteran-camp army on the eastern campaign, this dream had surged and plunged to the extreme.

In the third and fourth months, Li Zicheng had still believed he was the true Son of Heaven, soon to unify all under heaven and sit securely on the throne. But his good luck stopped at the Tianjin garrison, and then on the Shanhai Pass battlefield he ran into Tartar troops who were like the bane of the Shun army!

After that, the Mandate of Heaven swiftly departed from old Li, and the Shun's national fortune plunged. First they lost Beijing and Northern Zhili, and then they were defeated again in Shanxi. Although during the retreat they fought one decent counterattack — the great army that had circled north from Huaiqing Prefecture once advanced as far as Zhending Prefecture, and it looked as though they were about to cut off the rear of the Tartar troops who had broken into Shanxi through the Jingxing road!

But the main force led by Li Zicheng failed to seize the opportunity to counterattack, and instead retreated all the way, only pausing briefly at Xiezhou by the Yellow River. That left the eastern-route troops of Li Guo and Tian Jianxiu as an isolated force, with no real possibility of cutting the rear of the Qing army in Shanxi. Under the counterattack of Wu Sangui and the Eight Banners troops sent from Beijing, the failure of the eastern-route army's counterattack was only to be expected.

Still, they were fairly lucky. Although the Shun army suffered defeat after defeat, the Ming army was now stronger than it had been historically and could share the pressure from the Qing, so the Shun army's losses were far smaller than they had been in history.

Not only did Li Zicheng's main force and the detached force of Li Guo and Tian Jianxiu withdraw intact, but even Chen Yongfu, who had been left to hold Taiyuan, broke out with several thousand remnants and returned to Shaanxi.

So a rare opportunity now lay before Li Zicheng!

In Chang'an, in the Shun imperial palace, soft footsteps sounded outside the east warm chamber of the Great Governance Hall. Li Zicheng, who had been reading memorials with his head lowered, set down the memorial and stretched. Then he heard a eunuch's somewhat shrill voice: "Imperial Lord, the Chancellor and the two military advisors have arrived."

"Summon them," Li Zicheng said.

Today was already New Year's Eve, and the Shun court was on holiday. Because everyone had been too exhausted over the past year, and had also been through a great deal of busy work, they had decided not to hold any celebrations — just rest well and eat something good.

Li Zicheng, however, was still fated to toil. He had gathered a great pile of reports and military dispatches to look through in the palace, and reading them alone was not enough, so he had sent for Niu Jinxing, Song Xiance, and Gu Junen to come and look at a report sent by Li Guo, who was stationed at Nanyang.

(End of Chapter)