Chapter 550: Oh No, Capitalism Is Coming!

There were plenty of things that would make trouble for the Army-Pacifying Crown Prince Zhu, and the most troublesome of them was not money or grain, but a savage beast — one called capitalism!

No one now knew that this utterly wicked thing had in fact already been let out of its cage by Zhu Cilang. Even Zhu Cilang himself, the very man who had started it, had no idea what he had done.

Oh, right — the sprouts of capitalism had actually appeared long before. The silk and cotton handicraft workshops widespread in the southeast at Nanjing, Yangzhou, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Songjiang, as well as the ironware workshops that appeared at Foshan in Guangdong, could all be seen as signs of the emergence of capitalist sprouts.

But these sprouts had developed extremely slowly in China, and the small-peasant economy had always held the dominant position. Even the series of operations Zhu Cilang had carried out in the southeast — opening the Salt Merchants' Bank and the Sea Merchants' Bank; opening the five treaty ports of Shanghai, Ningbo, Quanzhou, Guangzhou, and Dengzhou; dealing with the Dutch and Portuguese colonizers and pushing the Great Ming into the Age of Discovery — none of it had truly touched the cage that imprisoned the Ming's capitalist sprouts: the small-peasant economy ruled by gentry privilege!

The reasoning was simple: once the Southern Ming, with its population of over a hundred million, set out upon the wicked road of capitalism, both its demand for agricultural products and its absorption of rural labor would grow at an extremely rapid pace.

In other words, the efficiency of Southern Ming agricultural production had to rise dramatically! Only in that way could a smaller labor force produce more agricultural goods, enough to satisfy handicraft (industrial) production and the urban population.

Moreover, once Southern Ming society entered the evil primary stage of capitalism, its population would continue to grow fairly rapidly for quite a long period!

Now it was over a hundred million and several tens of millions; in the future it might well be two hundred million, three hundred million, or even more!

To provide enough food to fill the bellies of so many people, and at the same time supply enough raw materials for the vast handicraft-workshop industrial system, Southern Ming agriculture had to enter the capitalist stage!

Even if the Southern Ming, under Zhu Cilang's leadership, could acquire overseas colonies rich in rice, they would still have to be developed by capitalist methods and run as capitalist farms before they could supply the domestic market with enough primary products.

Otherwise, if they were all just feudal fiefs with low production efficiency, how much rice could anyone expect them to produce? And opening up land in Champa (the Mekong plain) or Siam required massive capital investment and high-level management. Where would feudal lords get that much capital? How would they know how to run overseas farms?

Feudal lords had risen by being good at cutting people down, not by running agriculture. Could you really send them off to run farms?

So to turn the rich lands of the Southern Seas into the Great Ming's granary, what was needed was for many Ming agricultural capitalists to go to the Southern Seas and set up farms!

But if the Ming homeland had no large number of capitalist farms, where would the agricultural capitalists of the Southern Seas come from?

According to the research of later historians, the Ming's first batch of agricultural capitalists appeared in the nineteenth year of Chongzhen, in the four prefectures of Hanyang, Jingzhou, Chengtian, and De'an in Hubei.

And their appearance was in fact brought about by the combined efforts of Li Zicheng and Zhu Cilang!

Li Zicheng's attacks on the four prefectures of Jingzhou, Chengtian, De'an, and Hanyang; the land equalization he carried out in Jingzhou, Chengtian, De'an, and Hanyang; and the earlier land enclosure and distribution he had carried out in the two prefectures of Xiangyang and Yunyang — all of these had dealt a devastating blow, one could even say utterly destroyed, the rule of the gentry class over the countryside of these prefectures.

By the time the height of summer arrived in the nineteenth year of Chongzhen, most of Hubei no longer had any gentry landlords left.

Of course, Li Zicheng had only destroyed the rule of the pro-Ming gentry class in the Hubei countryside. He had not let the tiger of capitalism out of its cage; instead he had replaced it with an even sturdier cage — the Shun veteran soldiers who had risen up and enclosed the land!

Given time, they would grow into a military aristocracy, replacing the old gentry class and becoming staunch defenders of the small-peasant economy!

But Zhu Cilang and his Hard-New Army had caused Li Zicheng's "cage" to collapse completely before it could even take shape.

Zhu Cilang, however, had no intention of restoring the old order. So before he left Wuchang to return to Nanjing, he put forward a Hubei post-war plan of "redemption-style land reform."

The detailed rules of this plan were drawn up in the few days before Zhu Cilang left Wuchang, and on the day after his departure they were posted on the notice boards newly erected at every gate of Wuchang city.

Beyond Zhu Cilang's own expectations, this "redemption-style land reform plan" would bring capitalism, that man-eating monster, to the rich countryside of Hubei. And once this monster gained a firm foothold in the Hubei countryside, it would very quickly sweep through the southeastern countryside on the strength of its own high efficiency. Capitalism was coming!

The docks outside Hanyang Gate finally showed some signs of life — not because many grain boats had come down the Yangtze and the Han River, but because large numbers of troop transports had arrived from Little Wuchang downstream, moored in dense rows on the river beyond the Hanyang Gate docks.

These warships carried the hopes of many of the gentry and profiteering merchants who had fled to Wuchang. So every morning, as soon as Hanyang Gate opened, crowds of those refugee-like gentry and profiteers would pour out to look — they wanted to see whether the fleet had set out on campaign. Only if the western parts of Xiangyang Prefecture and Jingzhou Prefecture were retaken could their rule, the rule of these local tyrants and evil gentry over Hubei, possibly be restored!

But this morning, Yao Daqiao and Ye Jiaxin, coming out through Hanyang Gate, saw a scene that astonished them.

Not many people were crowding the Hanyang Gate docks to ply the soldiers on duty with questions. Instead, everyone was gathered around the notice boards newly erected outside Hanyang Gate, chattering away in a hubbub, and from time to time someone burst into loud weeping.

What was going on?

Could it be that the Crown Prince did not intend to send troops to retake the Jingzhou-Xiangyang region?

Yao Daqiao and Ye Jiaxin both started, exchanged a glance, and then walked quickly to the edge of the notice-board crowd.

It was a sea of people; there was no squeezing in. But that did not stump Yao Daqiao. He had a wide circle of acquaintances, and he quickly found a middle-aged man dressed like a scholar squatting by the roadside weeping — none other than Peng Ziqin, the De'an juren who had last time grabbed a cleaver and gone off to "hack Li Zicheng to death."

He was considerably thinner than he had been last winter, his face ashen, obviously malnourished. From last winter until now, most of these Hubei gentry and profiteering merchants who had fled to Wuchang had been living on "relief gruel." Those who still had a bit of property, like Yao Daqiao, could still get by.

But Peng Ziqin had fled with practically nothing but his two fists. He had nothing at all, and his whole large family could only live on gruel, all of them so hungry their eyes glowed green. When the hunger got truly unbearable, he had even thought of selling his two concubines, but in the end he could not bring himself to be so ruthless, so the whole family simply starved together!

Yet even reduced to the verge of starvation, Scholar Peng and most of the juren and xiucai gathered inside Wuchang city still refused to accept the "Wuchang poor-land exchange plan" that Zhu Cilang had offered — Scholar Peng still held the title deeds to three or four thousand mu of farmland in De'an! If he could get them back, he would still be a great landlord. How could he bear to let go?

So Peng Ziqin and a group of Hubei gentry with some standing had spent these days playing the rogue with Zhu Cilang — one day weeping at the Confucian Temple, the next day weeping at the Imperial Ancestral Temple (Wuhan was now Jiangdu, so of course it had an Imperial Ancestral Temple), and the next day weeping outside the Wuchang traveling palace.

Weeping here and weeping there, they had actually managed to cry the "land exchange plan" out of existence, and it was replaced with a grain compensation plan. Depending on the fertility of the land, each mu would be compensated with two to four shi of grain, and payment would be spread over five years after the three prefectures of Jingzhou, Xiangyang, and De'an were retaken. Of course, this grain would not come from the Ming court, but from the Hubei peasants who received the land — the peasants would pay a bit more, the landlords would take a bit less, and peasants who received official fields, military fields, or hidden fields would likewise have to pay grain to redeem the land!

Peng Ziqin's family had some 3,400 to 3,500 mu of land, most of it dry farmland (he was from De'an, where the land was considered poor by Huguang standards), but getting 7,000 shi of white rice in compensation would still be no problem. Even spread over five years, that came to more than a thousand shi a year. Compared with the earlier "land exchange plan," it was actually a bit more. But ninety percent of his family fortune had still been wiped out. At the same time, Peng Ziqin would still lose his juren degree, his household registration would be moved to Wuchang, and he, his sons, and his wife would be forbidden for life from acquiring property in De'an Prefecture.

So he was grieving in his heart, and he wept at the edge of the notice-board crowd. But after he told Yao Daqiao about the compensation plan Zhu Cilang had offered, this profiteer suddenly burst into loud laughter.

"Hahaha! A fortune, a fortune — this is a chance to get rich!"

(End of Chapter)