Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming Dynasty

Chapter 488 The New Deal of Ming Officials at Wuqiao (Part 7)
Since Zhu Youjian's policy of allowing officers and soldiers of the guards to participate in the imperial examination, the traditional form of the imperial examination system, which only cultivated civil servants of Neo Confucianism, has been under attack by new scholars who are both civil and military.

Among the officer students trained by the Ming Army Military Academy and the Imperial Guard Military Academy, there will be people who are more interested in politics. These people will be uniformly reported to the local government by each army and the Daming Army Military Academy to participate in the ceremony. But he will still serve in the military.

This means that the officers and soldiers of the Ming Guards are already the class of soldiers, and they have also become the ruling class of the empire.

Bao Shuo is just one of them. He defines himself as a new Confucian scholar. He accepts both Confucian classic theory and Zhu Youjian's sacred theory. He began to implement his own control of Wuqiao County with the knowledge of political economy he learned in the Military Academy of the Guards and the knowledge of ethics unearthed in Confucian classics.

The first thing Bao Shuo did was to set up an inspection team based on the soldiers of the Guards to which he belonged.

A regiment-level unit of the Guards has its own officers and soldiers directly under it.

Although Bao Shuo is the county magistrate of Wuqiao County, he also has his own military rank, Zhongwu Xiaowei, so he also has his own soldiers.

Bao Shuo used his own soldiers as the captains of the inspection teams, recruited local loyal and responsible people to form inspection teams, and divided troops to manage the security of each sub-district in Wuqiao County, so as to achieve the purpose of stabilizing order.

After all, after the guards wiped out the gentry class in large numbers, it also led to chaos in the ruling order of the entire Wuqiao County. Some gangsters and criminals also started to make trouble, and even some street gangsters increased, and they regarded robbing the rich as a just cause. thing.

Therefore, the first thing Bao Shuo had to do when he came to Wuqiao County was to restore the ruling order, and then to uniformly distribute the means of production and stabilize prices.

Ming's economic war against Manchu has been going on.

A large number of silver dollars printed flowed into the northern region ruled by the Manchu Qing, but the Manchu Qing government did not know how to reserve gold to deal with the impact of the Ming Dynasty on its currency. In addition, the Manchu Qing launched two wars in the south to conquer the Ming Dynasty, which caused inflation in the northern region. It is very powerful, and the gentry and wealthy households are all hoarding, which makes the price of goods in the north ridiculously high.

Especially the price of food and salt that are most related to people's livelihood.

According to Jin Yiwei's report, only one hundred silver dollars can buy one stone of rice in the northern region, while in the southern region the same one hundred silver dollars can already buy one hundred stone of rice.

People in the whole north had to carry big bags of silver dollars to exchange rice or silver if they wanted to buy rice.

The government no longer trusts silver dollars and only accepts silver, which makes the phenomenon of expensive silver and cheap money in the entire northern region more and more serious, the life of the people at the bottom is getting more and more difficult, and social conflicts are becoming more and more acute.

Therefore, when the Guards retaliated against the gentry in Wuqiao County, the common people in Wuqiao County did not have much sympathy for the gentry. .

But Bao Shuo ruled here for Daming, so if he wants to re-establish a long-term and stable ruling order, he has to lower this price and restore the political and economic order of the entire Wuqiao County.

This is not a problem for Bao Shuo who has received a new cultural education, and there is already a set of model procedures in the administrative field of the Ming Dynasty.

First of all, after the establishment of an inspection team to maintain law and order, Bao Shuo began to fulfill the promise to distribute the basic production materials such as food, cloth and two silver dollars hoarded by the Guards from various gentry families to the servants and maids of these gentry families according to the specifications he set.

At the same time, the land was allocated to tenant farmers, and the remaining large amounts of grain, cloth, houses, and antiques were sold at low prices, so as to achieve the purpose of recovering a large amount of silver dollars.

Not only the army but also many students from various systems followed the guards to the north, among them were students from the Daming Central Bank system. At this time, Bao Shuo personally selected a student from the Daming Central Bank system to be in charge of the Wuqiao County The county-level branches of the central bank were established, and a large amount of silver dollars was recovered through savings business.

The people in Wuqiao County don't trust the currency value of silver dollars very much, and after they have obtained the basic means of production, there is no need for currency trade. Therefore, after seeing that they can get interest by depositing them in the bank, they think about putting them at home for nothing. It's better to put it in the bank, and some don't trust the bank and only hide it at home.

But no matter which method is used, the hot money on the market will cool down, the currency circulation will decline, the total wealth of economic activities and the total wealth of currency circulation will begin to balance, the price will also drop, and people's hearts will also be improved. stable.

Fundamentally, it was because the guards distributed the benefits occupied by the gentry to the common people, which reduced social conflicts, and the decline in prices was just an economic manifestation.

The recovered silver dollars were transported back to Nanjing to be melted or destroyed, but most of them were planned to be placed in the unoccupied Manchu and Qing ruled areas by Ming Dynasty, which led to such a phenomenon in the Manchu occupied areas. No matter how far you go, there will always be local tyrants who can spend a lot of money to buy back your things that have increased the price by ten times.

The Manchu Qing government was even more powerless than the military and political Northern Expedition of the Imperial Guards for such an economic Northern Expedition, but Bao Shuo, a young Ming official with little official experience, was able to solve this problem perfectly as soon as he took office, giving the common people the best My direct feeling is that the Ming Dynasty is naturally better than the Manchu Qing government, and even the government of the Ming Dynasty is more trustworthy than the government of the Manchu Qing Dynasty.

In the Manchu-occupied area, a banknote with a denomination of one thousand silver dollars could not be trusted by the people, but in Wuqiao County, where the Ming Dynasty occupied it for a short time, Bao Shuo just randomly wrote a banknote with a number on it to facilitate the trade between the government and the people. The paper can gain the trust of the common people, and the common people believe that with such paper, they can be exchanged for the objects they should be worth.

After stabilizing public security and economic order, Bao Shuo began to try Lou Sheng and other officials of the Qing court.

All the dissatisfaction of the people in the north with the ruling class was concentrated on the Manchu Qing officials like Lou Sheng, so Bao Shuo's punishment of these people was also to stabilize the political hearts.

Lou Sheng originally thought that Bao Shuo would persuade Bao Shuo to surrender and even take him in, but he didn't expect that Bao Shuo would send him to the trial stand and accept the trial of all the people in Wuqiao County. This broke Lou Sheng very much, but it made him even more broken What's more, he never thought that he would be executed by Ling Chi.

The changes brought about by the Ming Guards' occupation of Wuqiao County meant that the Northern Expedition was no longer what Zhang Yanghao called "prosperity, the people suffer; death, the people suffer." If you are in a city, you will save the people in one place.

(End of this chapter)