Chapter 570: A Classical Military Empire or a Brain-Dead Military Empire

A fine book...

Bai Congxin was about to cross the river, so what was Zhang Zhao doing?

Sage Zhang was still in Chuzhou, and he was not paying any attention at all to the fighting at Yangzhou.

Because he knew that even if they could not win, with the abilities of fierce men like Bai Congxin, Murong Xinzhang, Li Cunhui, Gao Huaide, Zhao Kuangyin, and Yao Yuanfu, they could not possibly be badly defeated by the Southern Tang.

At worst they would fail to chew through the Southern Tang, but bringing the army back would still be effortless.

So Zhang Zhao took advantage of this rare free time, and in the area of Chuzhou (Huai'an), Haizhou (Lianyungang), and Lianshui, which were already under Zhou control, he set about striking down the local tyrants and dividing up the land.

Many people think that striking down local tyrants and dividing up the land must be a patent of New China.

But in fact it is not. China has had this practice since ancient times, and equalizing land taxes has been a necessary task at the founding stage of every dynasty, beginning with the Han.

Moreover, the "curbing land annexation" in the history books, in many cases, did not actually curb the annexation of the nearly destitute farming households of five or six people with only one or two mu of land, who had to rent the landlord's fields just to survive.

Rather, it curbed the powerful great households from annexing the independent farmers whose families had ten or twenty mu of land, who possessed farming skills, and who could live a relatively prosperous life.

Zhang Zhao had not known before that farming was a highly technical job, because although he grew up in the countryside, his father was a cotton fluffer.

Therefore his family had no need to farm at all; the land was all contracted out, so he had no real concept of farming.

In this era, agriculture was the root of everything, and only after Zhang Zhao looked into it deeply did he discover that farming was an extremely skill-intensive form of labor.

At this time there was no chemical fertilizer, no seed companies, no relatively accurate weather forecasts, and many farmers could not even keep the calendar straight.

So how to select seeds and breed them? When to sow? How to prevent and control pests and diseases?

What crops to plant in what kind of land? When to irrigate? And when to water less or not at all?

Even the composting of human and animal manure, and the choice of ash from the cooking fire, were all skills.

At this time, a person who could master three or four of these was a capable man in the village, famous across ten villages and eight townships.

One who could master and apply all of them could even obtain a post in the government.

Since there were those who could obtain a government post through farming skill, there were certainly large numbers of people who could not grasp these agricultural production skills at all.

For such people, even if you gave them a few plots of land, if within a generation or two no clever person skilled at cultivation appeared, they would basically all end up bankrupt and become tenant farmers, and even as tenant farmers others would look down on them.

Therefore, in ancient times, the main force of rural production was the independent farmer who understood a certain amount of farming skill and whose whole family averaged about ten mu of land per person.

In the Han they were the "sons of good families," and in the Tang they were the fubing soldiers who could provide their own weapons and armor.

These people were the foundation of the entire feudal state; taxation, labor service, and defending home and country all depended on them.

And because these independent farmers were skilled, their fields also became relatively fertile through careful tending, so land annexation generally targeted them.

If local strongmen absorbed them, they gained advanced production techniques and high-yield, superior farmland.

They could also monopolize these production techniques and pass them down generation after generation, forming the Eastern Han-style local strongmen who monopolized the great majority of local resources and could even build fortified manors.

Conversely, if these large numbers of independent farmers were not annexed by powerful landlords, then the government could rely on them, organizing these people through state power to form a check on local strongmen.

Reaching the point where, even without the strongmen, it could fully control and mobilize the localities.

As Zhang Zhao tallied the various figures reported to him, he compared the present situation with the early periods of the various dynasties in history.

He suddenly discovered an important factor in why the Song dynasty's military strength was so feeble.

That is, in all dynasties, apart from the Song, every unified dynasty carried out land equalization reforms.

Even the Qing carried out land equalization. Of course, since they themselves were a robber military clique, their land equalization was only equalized within their own clique; the enclosure of land for horse pastures and the building of the Manchu garrisons were a form of land equalization.

Only the Song did not carry out land equalization. From the time Zhao the First established the Song, Song land was always in a state of high concentration.

Eh! No! The Northern and Southern Song—what kind of great unified dynasty were they!

Sage Zhang rubbed his head. He had always felt something was off about the Song, but could never say what was off; so the problem lay here.

The Song was completely crippled at the very foundation of its founding.

This Zhao the First inherited the chaos of the Five Dynasties, rose to power himself through a mutiny, and the target of his mutiny, Guo Rong, was the greatest of all benefactors to him!

Guo Rong's kindness to Zhao the First was higher than heaven and his righteousness deeper than the sea, so much so that even a coward like Fan Zhi dared to question Zhao Kuangyin in grief and indignation.

"The late Emperor raised the Grand Commandant like a son; his body is not yet cold—how can you do this?"

In Fan Zhi's view, once Guo Rong was gone, even Li Chongjin and Zhang Yongde had reasons to rebel, but Zhao Kuangyin alone, having received such profound favor, absolutely should not have done this.

Zhao the First was already this crooked, and Zhao the Second was even more absurd.

Not to mention the Candlelight and Axe Shadow affair, which cannot be confirmed—even the Alliance at Jinkui was deeply problematic.

He also launched a northern expedition to recover Youyun, yet was beaten into abandoning his army and drifting away in a donkey cart.

Claiming to be the lord of the Central Plains, he had neither Youyun, nor Heshuo, nor Hexi, nor Anxi, nor Jiaozhi, nor Liaoxi, and he utterly squandered the legitimacy and legal right of the Central Plains as the superior state.

So how were these two founding rulers supposed to avoid falling into the strange cycle of the Five Dynasties?

They relied on buying people off. In the unification wars waged by the Northern Song, because the opponents were too weak, no truly fierce fighting actually occurred; only the various regional warlords were destroyed, while the local tyrants were not harmed.

So Zhao the First and Zhao the Second shared political power with these great local clans, guiding them to abandon the military for the civil, and used non-curbing of annexation to guarantee their interests.

The Northern Song transformed the nation's grassroots structure from armed local tyrants into scholarly cliques occupying vast amounts of land.

By giving up the ability to mobilize at the grassroots level and spending over eighty percent of fiscal revenue on military expenditures, it bought itself a peaceful throne.

Heh! Military spending took up seventy or eighty percent of the treasury, and the result was raising soldiers like trash—oh no! Perhaps it should be called raising trash like soldiers. Truly a brain-dead military empire.

This was an evil path!

Sage Zhang immediately made up his mind: he could not walk the Song dynasty's path.

Zhang Zhao would rather walk the old path of the Han, where the countryside was full of strongmen but martial virtue was abundant, than walk the Song's evil path of self-destruction and throwing money around at home and abroad.

Since he had decided that the old path could also be tried, Sage Zhang, holding righteousness in his hands and commanding his own elite troops, immediately began his policy of land equalization.

But land equalization was not so easy to carry out, because simply dividing the land equally did not count as equalizing the land.

One must understand that after two hundred years of warfare since the An Lushan Rebellion, much farmland had gone to waste. Wasteland that had lost the care of farmers could not immediately produce value, so equalizing wasteland was meaningless.

The one favorable condition was that in the present realm, the Central Plains had been through repeated wars, so there were few people and much land; land was not in short supply.

Since equalizing wasteland had no value, Zhang Zhao prepared to link land to military merit. The specific method was to convert the rewards, pay, and even official posts that the army owed its soldiers into land credits.

First, the government would spend money to hire people to put the abandoned land in order, and then let the soldiers use their land credits to purchase this reclaimed land.

They could also be sold cheaply in large quantities, turning the soldiers who fought with Zhang Zhao to conquer the realm into the backbone of the nation — self-sufficient farmers.

And in places like Meng Shu, the Southern Tang, and Nanping — politically stable, densely populated, but with severe land annexation — the lands seized and swallowed up by royal houses, corrupt officials, and local strongmen would be returned to the common people, their land directly redistributed.

This would both create a large number of commoners loyal to the new dynasty and push the resources they had monopolized back onto the market to revitalize the economy.

No sooner said than done — Zhang Zhao began piloting the program in Chuzhou, Haizhou, and Lianshui.

In these three places, Zhang Zhao took half of the million mu of mature farmland that the Southern Tang court had seized as military fields, and then took another million mu of land that the Southern Tang royal house, corrupt officials, and local strongmen had usurped.

Then, in these three prefectures, he prepared to directly hold an agricultural imperial examination, admitting at least a hundred Doctors of Agriculture, then dispersing these Doctors of Agriculture to various places, first granting them equal land allotments.

But this land would only be given half at first, and then they would be required to teach their farming skills to others.

Later, whichever region's farming households met the standard in their studies, the other half of the land would be given to the Doctor of Agriculture. As for the common people, land would be equalized according to local actual conditions.

The final measure was that Zhang Zhao would settle in place those soldiers in the army who were older, physically disabled, had suffered one serious wound, or three minor wounds — they would enjoy triple land allotments: equal-field land plus land compensation plus granted land.

They would also, according to their rank and merit in the army, be appointed — the higher ones as inspectors, governing a township; the lower ones as village heads, governing a village.

In this way, at the local level, Doctors of Agriculture would teach agricultural techniques, organize the sharing of farming methods, and coordinate the use of important agricultural production tools such as plow oxen.

The inspectors and village heads formed from retired soldiers would be responsible for local security, tax collection, and other grassroots administrative structures.

Of course, whether Zhang Zhao's pilot program would ultimately succeed — that would probably take two or three years, or even longer, to be verified.

But he had time to wait. And besides, the land being distributed wasn't Zhang Zhao's own — it was all seized, so he felt not the slightest pang of regret.

It could well be that in these few years, Chuzhou and the other places would even experience unrest because of these new policies — that too was part of the experiment, was it not?

In mid-May, the battle report from Yangzhou reached Zhang Zhao's desk, and Chuzhou city instantly erupted in celebration.

Combined with the previous great defeat at Mengzhu Marsh, the Southern Tang's losses in the imperial guard army alone reached forty thousand, and the prefectural and county troops and provincial yabing guards with somewhat higher combat strength also lost twenty to thirty thousand.

At least sixty percent of the Southern Tang's entire elite force had been wiped out. Given the Southern Tang's current situation, it was almost on the verge of extinction.

So whether to preserve a Southern Tang that lingered on its last breath, or to utterly destroy it and plunge all of Jiangnan into chaos — that required Zhang Zhao to make a decision.

Bai Congxin and Murong Xinzhang jointly submitted a memorial, asking Zhang Zhao to go and decide the matter.

By the end of May, Gao Huaide had swept away all Southern Tang forces along both banks of the Hangou Canal. In places like Xinghua and Yancheng, the enemy either abandoned their cities and fled, or surrendered their cities and came over.

The Zhou army, on the surface, had secured a firm foothold north of the Yangtze.

So Zhang Zhao left Feng Hui with ten thousand troops to garrison Chuzhou, and himself led ten thousand infantry and cavalry plus the three thousand elite cavalry Gao Huaide had brought back, advancing in grand array along the Hangou Canal toward Yangzhou, to decide the fate of Li Jing.