Fu Song

Chapter 637

The last few months of the three years of the Tian Song Dynasty will undoubtedly leave a heavy mark on history.

Since September, when Yingzhou suddenly rebelled against Zhao and voted for Song, a great war kicked off. On the thousand-mile battlefield, Jiangning Xinsong waged a war with Zhao and Qi that lasted for several months.

In the end, Song State won a brilliant victory.

The central battlefield defeated the Nanyang area heavily guarded by Zhao Guo, captured Nanyang in one fell swoop, and included the Nanyang Basin in his pocket. Immediately after that, Huang Chun in Shangqiu, Songcheng and other places was forced to surrender to the Song Dynasty, making him entrenched in the Central Plains. The regime of Zhao Guoquzhen in the land is crumbling.

In the east, Liu Yu's puppet Qi was also defeated by Gao Yingxiang, the general of Xingyuan in the east of the Song Dynasty in Xuzhou. The prime minister Yelu Dashu and [-] Liao cavalry under his command were beheaded, and their heads were even made into Jingguan.Liu Yu's idea of ​​regaining Xuzhou, a strategically important place, not only failed to materialize, but was counter-killed by the Song Dynasty and lost all the places in Peixian County. As Weishan Lake and other Nansi Lakes fell under the control of the Song army, the Song Dynasty The power of the country went straight to the hinterland of Qi.

Qu Zhen, Liu Yu really had a hard time this New Year.

However, Jiangning Xinsong also took advantage of this big victory to start a series of internal adjustments.

From the perspective of outsiders, the Jiangning Xinsong regime is divided into two distinct factions.

One is the Southwest faction headed by Xiao Cheng. This faction is strong and strong, and has the big name of the emperor in its hands. After the founding of the New Song Dynasty, several consecutive victories in Xiangyang, Xuzhou and other places have completely established the strong position of this faction.

The other is the Jiangnan faction headed by the Second Assistant Secretary Junchao. This faction can be regarded as a local snake. The local power is powerful and extremely rich, and it almost controls the purse of the new court.

Others, such as Li Shilong in Yizhou and Li Chunfeng on Qinfeng Road, although they are also quite powerful, are obviously inferior to the above two factions.

And in the last month of the Tian Song Dynasty, the huge adjustments made by the Jiangning court gave everyone the impression that the Southwest faction headed by Xiao Cheng had completely won.

The adjustment of administrative divisions implies the adjustment of power.

Jiangnan East Road and Jiangnan West Road, the two areas with the strongest local faction, were completely wiped out.They were incorporated into Liangjiang, Fujian and Zhejiang, and Lianghu respectively.

In this way, the local control of the Jiangnan Party will inevitably weaken gradually, and their influence will naturally gradually decrease.

You must know that what the Jiangnan faction used to fight against the Southwest faction earlier was these tens of thousands of local people who were tied to them.

So what if you send strong troops to the southwest?Want to raise a knife and slaughter your people?Want to ruin the place?
But now, these foundations were pulled by Xiao Cheng for a while, and then they were dismantled in pieces.

Ordinary people don't care.

They don't even know the changes in their area, because they still work at sunrise and rest at sunset. When it's time to pay taxes, they still have to get money, and when it's time to serve corvee, they still have to prepare dry food and carry their blankets to go out. go.And those who manage them are still those Lizhengs from the past.

But the higher you go, the more pronounced the change becomes.

A large number of officials have been laid off.

With the redrawing of administrative regions and the streamlining of institutions, there are only so many seats, and many people will inevitably lose their seats.

The imperial court gave them two choices.

One is to go to another place to continue to be an official, and the level will not change, but the position must not be as high as before.

In short, it is a high-level low-level job.

The wages and benefits remain the same, but the power has shrunk significantly.

Moreover, the place to go is definitely not a good place.

Compared with where they stayed in the past, the court gave them a new choice, which is simply a barren land, unsightly.

In such places, there are territories just captured by the Song army, such as Nanyang, Shangqiu, Songcheng, Xiayi, and Peixian. Officials in these places either fled with the defeated troops of Zhao and Qi, or So he stayed at home obediently and waited for someone from Song Dynasty to deal with them. Who asked him to be a thief?
Although they are not qualified to be on the list of traitors, the fact that they are thieves cannot be changed. How to deal with them, the Jiangning court has not yet come down with an answer. Obviously, they have not taken care of these people.

Anyway, these people are fish on the felt board, and they can be disposed of at any time.

Naturally, we must first finish the urgent matter at hand.

Of course, these places do not want to go, and there are other places, such as Guizhou, Yunnan, and even Leizhou in Guangdong and Guangxi, which also need a large number of officials with culture, knowledge and etiquette to enrich the places.

Although these places have been worked hard by Xiao Cheng, Luo Gang and others for more than ten years, compared with Jiangnan, they are really not a star. There is a big leap forward in these places.

And the second choice is to resign and return home, and become your rich man!

Don't say that the imperial court didn't arrange a party for you, but arranged for you not to go, so you can't blame the imperial court.

It is already magnanimous not to pursue your crime of refusing to share the worries of the country and relieve the worries of the king.

After this paper order is passed, the officials who are willing to go to new places to perform their duties are only one out of ten. A large number of officials who have been downsized would rather go home and stay than go to those dangerous places in their hearts.

Yunnan, Guizhou is a land of smog, and Guangdong and Guangxi are places of exile. As for the places in the Central Plains that have just been conquered, they were originally good, but now that the war has just subsided, the people are in dire straits, and there are many bandits. If you go there, you will be afraid day and night All worry about safety.Those places are also border areas confronting the enemy. Maybe at any time the opposite side will call suddenly, and if you are not careful, you will become the opponent's prisoner.

Anyway, my family is not short of money, so I will go home and become a rich man, waiting for the opportunity.

Compared with these officials, more officials are more troublesome for the court.

The officials of the flowing water are the iron-clad officials.

Almost all the officials are local people, and many officials are even handed down from generation to generation, from father to son, and from son to grandson. Over a long period of time, it is not uncommon for officials to control officials to control places.

Regarding such a situation, Zhou Wei, the newly appointed Minister of the Ministry of Officials, came up with an idea.

As an old bureaucrat who has worked in grassroots positions for decades, Zhou Wei is well aware of this situation.

Make an opening for officials to be promoted to officials.

From official to official, it is a natural moat.

Many people will not be able to cross this hurdle in their lifetime.

Of course, there is another group of people who don't want to cross this hurdle at all. They just want to stay where they are, stay in this comfort zone and control everything.

Zhou Wei suggested that the recommendation system should be used for outstanding officials.

Local officials recommend Youto officials as officials.

Once you become an official, you can't be in the local area. It is common sense to be an official in a different place.

In this way, the door to promotion will be opened for those conscientious old officials, and on the other hand, it can also tear a hole in the families of officials who are entrenched in places.

As long as you leave this place, as long as you no longer stay in this position, then you can naturally check whether you are breaking the law or not.

In this world, there has always been no shortage of people who have fallen into trouble.

Xiao Cheng's third saber was aimed at Hubu.

To be precise, it pointed to Da Song's taxation.

In Jiangning and the New Song Dynasty, the income from agricultural tax was already negligible in the revenue of the imperial court. According to statistics in the second year of the Tian Song Dynasty, agricultural tax accounted for only [-]% of the entire imperial court's tax revenue, and the remaining [-]% came from non-agricultural taxes.

The commercial tax is the biggest head among them.

The commercial taxation of the Song Dynasty has been quite institutionalized and standardized.

Residential tax and overtax are the main types of commercial tax in the Song Dynasty. The residential tax is the transaction tax with a tax rate of [-]%, and the overtax is the commodity circulation tax with a tax rate of [-]%. There are clear regulations: the tax rules for listed merchants are regulated by the business sector.It means that the tax collection items should be posted on the outer walls of government offices and yamen to show openness and transparency, and facilitate mutual supervision. If the tax collection items are not public, businessmen can refuse to pay and can leapfrog the appeal.

Of course, the punishment for tax evasion is also extremely serious.Once discovered, one-third or even more than half of the tax-evaded products will be confiscated, and what's more, they will go to jail.

As for peddlers and pawns, those who lead cars to sell pulp, the Song Dynasty was exempt from tax. This one can be regarded as quite close to the people.There are even clear regulations that rural people can be exempted from tax if they sell a little chicken, duck, fish, vegetables, melons and fruits produced by themselves.

These policies of the Song Dynasty greatly encouraged the circulation of goods and the prosperity of commerce, and also facilitated the circulation of goods across the country, effectively controlling prices, and greatly increasing people's interest in doing business.

Would you be willing to store the profits you made at home?

Because of these policies, the number of people doing business has greatly increased, and the scope of national tax collection has been expanded. It seems that there are many tax cuts, but national tax revenue has increased significantly.

Of course, the bulk of commercial taxes in the Song Dynasty mainly came from banned commodities and bulk goods.

Tobacco, alcohol, tea, salt, iron, media, spices and other industries with high profits and simple processes have been included in the scope of state management, and only need to invest very small resources to obtain high profits.

And foreign trade is also one of them.

In addition to the large amount of foreign trade hosted by the imperial court, powerful businessmen were also encouraged to carry out foreign trade.And the profits of these trades are also extremely astonishing.

Compared with commercial tax, agricultural tax is quite simple.

It is a bucket of tax per mu.

This tax rate is quite low.

If you grow one stone per mu, it is one tenth tax, but if you produce three stones per mu, it is thirty one tax.

In Guizhou and other places, as the yield per mu of grain increases steadily, the tax paid by farmers is getting lower and lower.

In Song Dynasty, urban residents had to pay another kind of tax, which was housing tax.

For example, in Jiangning Stone City, the house tax used to be about three hundred Wen per year, which is not high.

Those who own houses in Jiangning Stone City have made a lot of money in the past few years. No one thought that after the founding of the New Song Dynasty, they would choose the capital here.

In just a blink of an eye, the housing prices here have been rolling upwards. In three years, the housing prices have increased by more than five times.The rise in house prices has also brought about a boom in transactions in the housing market.

In the Song Dynasty, the department in charge of tax collection was the Ministry of Households.

Jiangning Xinsong is no exception, and the person who controls this department is Xu Xiangqi from the Jiangnan School.

Now, Xiao Cheng is going to attack the household department.

Guns and money, these are the two legs of a country.

How can you not control it in your own hands?

Xiao Cheng wants to separate the right to collect taxes from the household department and set up a separate department.

In order to achieve this goal, whether it is the Imperial City Division or the Zhiqiu Academy, in the past few years, they have been working hard to collect major tax mistakes or corruption in the Ministry of Households.

Just when the yamen were preparing to rest for the New Year, the Overwatch Council suddenly made a move and arrested dozens of officials in Jiangning alone. Unsurprisingly, all of these people were officials who had something to do with taxation.

From Yuanwailang, who is in charge of taxation in the Ministry of Households, down to supervisors and officials of large-scale negotiating venues.

The dossier, which was as thick as a person's height, was placed in front of Xu Xiangqi at this moment, making his face turn pale.

And the summarized account book that Xiao Cheng pushed high in front of him showed that in Jiangning alone, the loss of taxes last year due to corruption, government-business collusion, or negligence was as high as tens of thousands. If this number is placed in the area controlled by the entire Song Dynasty, one can imagine the huge loss.

"Taxes are related to the economic lifeline of the imperial court. If there is a slight mistake, the earth will be shaken. Over the years, the imperial court has not had a fixed tax management department. Every year, it is temporarily appointed, which is complicated and lacks supervision. Officials are extremely lacking in professionalism. "Xiao Cheng slowly flipped through a piece of information in his hand: "Like Xu Zhongqiu who went to Zhejiang Province to supervise taxes last year, he was completely ignorant of money and goods. Let’s take a look at this corruption case again. The court reduced the burden on ordinary people, so the reliance on the taxation of bulk goods transactions will be greatly increased. However, officials and businessmen colluded to make a fuss about the accounts, and lost money every year. Tens of thousands."

"This is the dereliction of duty of the Ministry of Household Affairs. After returning from the post, it must be rectified and the country's wealth must not be allowed to be lost." Xu Xiangqi looked at the piles of pens in front of him, feeling a little frightened.These things are enough for the supervisory censor to impeach him for dereliction of duty, or even cover up.

Xiang Qi from the Overwatch Council, that's a stone in a latrine, whoever he catches will bite, and every bite will hit three points. He even dared to bite the first and second assistants, let alone himself.

Just like this time in the Quanzhou maritime trade smuggling case, the first assistant and the second assistant reached a tacit agreement, and he has been clamoring at the court for several days!
"Xu Shangshu, I'm going to set up a special tax agency and select professionals in this field to specialize in tax collection. What do you think?" Xiao Cheng said.

Xu Xiangqi was devastated as soon as he heard it, Xiao Cheng made it clear that he wanted to intervene in the affairs of the household department.

Without waiting for him to refute, Xiao Cheng continued: "This taxation department is still placed in the household department and managed by the household department. How about the rank, how about it is set at the fifth rank? After you go down, you can take care of it. New Year's Eve After that, I hope to see the prototype of this structure, and then you can discuss your charter and candidates at the imperial court, and strive to put it into formal operation after the beginning of spring."

(End of this chapter)