Emperor Zhengde

Chapter 248 The era of large-scale infrastructure construction begins

Wang Shouren couldn't help but shook his head when he saw this: "Another person who doesn't want to commit suicide. Take him away."

then.

Xu Zan was taken away. Like other gentry who followed Prince Ning in the rebellion, he was unwilling to die heroically but also unable to end his life by committing suicide.

Therefore, they could only wait for the court's judicial organ, the Ministry of Justice, to deal with them according to the law.

Although Zhu Houzhao established the outline of the constitution, he did not make any changes to the laws left by previous emperors of the Ming Dynasty.

There is no doubt that for such a serious crime as treason, punishment according to the law would be more severe than punishment according to human will.

What's more, now all the civil and military officials in the capital are tied together because of the infrastructure investment that Emperor Zhu Houzhao wants to make. Most of them have transformed themselves into staunch supporters of His Majesty the Emperor. Naturally, they will not easily forgive those rebels who challenge the emperor's authority.

Not long after Sun Sui, who was in charge of the trial and conviction of Ning Wang's rebels, arrived in Nanjing, Ning Wang and all the implicated members of the rebel party who followed Ning Wang in the rebellion were brought to Nanjing to await trial and conviction.

In addition, Sun Sui summoned the governors, provincial judges, and prefects of Jiangxi, Nanzhili, and Huguang, as well as officials from the three judicial systems in Nanjing, to Nanjing to hold a Ming Dynasty judicial conference on governing the country according to the law.

At the meeting, Sun Sui denounced the Ning Wang's rebellion as a heinous crime, while highly praising the great achievements of the Ming Emperor Zhu Houzhao, and demanded that all officials present maintain high respect and absolute loyalty to the Emperor Zhu Houzhao.

"According to Confucianism, Your Majesty is the ruler and father. The ruler and father's greatest concern is the food, clothing and prosperity of the people. We are all your Majesty's shepherds, just like the ruler and father's sons. We should share the ruler and father's worries and benefit the people. Therefore, we should not attempt to cause chaos in the world, harm the country, and make the people suffer from war. Instead, we should do more practical things, build roads and bridges, develop water conservancy projects, dredge rivers, and open workshops for all kinds of craftsmen!"

"Even if we don't follow the Confucian theory, from the perspective of the sacred learning, the Ming Dynasty is made up of the people of the Ming Dynasty. The people of the Ming Dynasty are the real owners of the country of the Ming Dynasty. The people of the Ming Dynasty now all recognize that the current Emperor Zhengde of the Ming Dynasty is the king of the country. Since we are the subjects of the king, we must have the correct consciousness that conforms to the current Ming Dynasty and be loyal to our king! For the benefit of our people..."

Although Sun Sui only came to Nanjing to interrogate and convict Ning Wang's party, in fact he seemed to have become a loyal supporter of Emperor Zhu Houzhao. He kept instilling the idea of ​​loyalty to the emperor and love for the people into the officials and gentry in the south, regardless of whether these southern officials and gentry listened to him or not. He also expressed his hope that local officials in the south would do more infrastructure construction.

Some southern officials and gentry who were dissatisfied with the central court's overly strict control over the south did not understand why even Sun Sui, who was also a southern gentry, had now become a loyal supporter of the emperor and wanted local governments to carry out infrastructure construction activities in the local area instead of the gentry.

Only Sun Sui himself knew that everything he did was still just to maximize the interests of his family, but now he could use more glamorous reasons.

Li Shishi, Liu Yangzheng, Wang Lun, Pei Xin, Xu Zan and other officials who followed Prince Ning in rebellion were all sentenced to death by slicing by a thousand cuts by Sun Sui. Their property was naturally confiscated, and most of their family members were sentenced to prison terms ranging from life to ten years, in order to provide sufficient labor for the future infrastructure construction of the empire in the local areas.

The important criminal, Prince Ning, naturally received the heaviest punishment and was cut into pieces.

But those who truly understand know that although Prince Ning was hateful, what was truly hateful were the literati who deceived Prince Ning into rebelling. They deceived him into thinking that they could easily seize the world, but in the end, he had to pay a heavy price for going against the interests of the entire world.

After Prince Ning's rebellion was put down, the Ming Empire entered an era of frenzied construction.

The capital accumulated by Prince Ning over the years eventually flowed into the hands of the imperial court and government offices, allowing Emperor Zhu Houzhao and his Ming Empire to gain a huge amount of capital after raising a large amount of capital by establishing the Infrastructure Bureau.

In addition, the large amount of income obtained from the establishment of the colony - Haicheng in Malacca gave the Ming court sufficient financial resources to carry out construction related to national economy and people's livelihood.

After all, once the empire has a lot of capital, it cannot keep it forever. Whether it is gold, silver, grain or cloth, these things that serve as currency will never reflect their value as currency unless they are spent.

Because of this.

The empire must distribute these capitals to the people so that they can own more property and thus improve the national wealth, that is, transform national wealth into national wealth.

However, the Ming Dynasty had not yet developed to the point where it could distribute according to demand.

Therefore, the country's capital naturally cannot be distributed directly to the people. It needs to be distributed to the working people through public infrastructure construction. Only in this way can it play a positive role in rewarding the hard-working people and increase the country's service level in public services such as transportation, commerce and trade, and agricultural disaster prevention.

Therefore, with the central court and local governments spending money non-stop, construction of official roads began to be launched, bridge construction projects began to be put on the routine basis, and rivers and lakes began to be dredged and embankments built by the government.

Money for these projects was not a problem. Zhu Houzhao gave these places their own taxes. The rich could use local public funds for investment, and the poor could borrow from the Ming Dynasty's state-owned World Investment Bank. The technology was not difficult either. Cement concrete had been developed for several years in the Ming Dynasty. After the construction of Datong Guanlu, there was a complete set of experience in the technology of using cement concrete in road construction. The steel bars needed for bridge construction were not difficult either. Dozens of Ming Dynasty's state-owned ironworks had begun to use the open-hearth steelmaking method.

In addition, Zhu Houzhao had already established the Ming Academy of Sciences, the Ming Academy of Engineering and the Ming Imperial Library.

The scholars and people of the Ming Dynasty are no longer unfamiliar with the word "science", and they actively understand it as encyclopedia.

Although the Ming Academy of Sciences is still in its infancy, apart from a considerable amount of silver allocated to the academy by the royal family and the Ministry of Revenue every year, the entire academy does not have many talents. However, with some Jinshi and Juren trained in the Imperial University of Peking and some people with a certain level of arithmetic, physics, alchemy, traditional Chinese medicine, etc. recruited from all over the country, some people with relatively strong abilities can still be selected to serve as academicians.

In addition, the Ming Academy of Engineering has gathered a group of skilled craftsmen. It was reorganized from the previous Research and Development Institute of the Ordnance Bureau. Among them, many skilled craftsmen have made outstanding contributions to the Ming Dynasty's military equipment manufacturing and steel smelting. Some of them are no longer illiterate and have mastered precise digital calculation and physical distance measurement capabilities.

Of course, some complex bridge and road construction are not too big a problem.

However, building bridges across the Yellow River and the Yangtze River was still a rather difficult problem for the Ming Dynasty.

In general, the nationwide infrastructure boom that began in the tenth year of Zhengde in the Ming Dynasty laid the foundation for the future development of the commodity economy in the Ming Dynasty.

After all, this was the first time in history that the imperial court had carried out large-scale public infrastructure construction, rather than relying on one or two honest officials and enlightened gentry who carried out public infrastructure construction on a whim at a certain time, such as the Sugong Dike and Liugong Dike in history.

By having the central government take action, many traditional problems brought about by public infrastructure construction were naturally avoided, such as avoiding the problem of local governments conscripting the people for labor service or even forcing them to serve due to lack of financial resources.

In addition, Zhu Houzhao also directly issued an edict to intervene in the administration, prohibiting the use of civilians for military service for public construction.

This ensures that the people will not miss farming time due to large-scale public infrastructure construction, or even be oppressed by officials.

Zhu Houzhao was not polite to those who defied the will of the court and still required the people to serve in the army. He directly dismissed the officials and exiled them to Liaodong or Taiwan.

Of course, because the Ming Dynasty court had sufficient capital, it was easy to solve the problem of some public infrastructure projects requiring the relocation of the people because the people of the Ming Dynasty have always been reluctant to move.

Because the Ming court could directly use money to attack the people without forcing them, if one hundred taels of silver was not enough for resettlement, they could use two hundred taels.

Of course, the people are cunning in their own way. If the government is too polite to them, the people will forget the violent and cruel side of the rulers and start to bid on the spot. They will even refuse to move even if the government offers five hundred or even one thousand taels.

The government can only move to another location for construction, and the people who try to bargain with the government will naturally end up with nothing. Sometimes, more powerful local governments will also take coercive measures, but this will often incite civil unrest.

But in the end, the people learned their lesson, and the government knew its limits. The government did not dare to compensate the people for their land and property losses after relocation at a low price, and the people did not dare to demand excessive compensation.

Large-scale public infrastructure construction naturally needs to be completed by the common people at the bottom. After all, the gentry officials would not do such hard work. And because the imperial court was rich and was afraid of exploiting the people too harshly and causing civil unrest, it hired the people with relatively high wages, which led to a large number of strong laborers in the Ming Dynasty being invested in public infrastructure construction.

As a result, people's income has increased significantly, and they no longer have to rely solely on the weather to be self-sufficient. This has even led many people to take the initiative to become migrant workers or directly become urban workers.

Because the people have discovered that they can no longer earn enough extra income by simply farming, but they can earn real money just by mixing cement or carrying a few bricks on a construction site.

Therefore, more and more self-employed farmers have become migrant workers.

The problem of land abandonment became increasingly serious, and the fact that the empire had abolished the road permit system made the phenomenon even more serious. A large number of people migrated to large and medium-sized cities and wealthy areas, which directly led to further damage to the interests of many gentry groups representing the interests of the landlord class.

Among them, the most serious problems are still the largest local landlords, namely the princes and relatives of the Ming Dynasty.

There are fewer and fewer people farming, and the income of these princes and relatives who dare not do anything and can only live on land rent is declining sharply.

Of course, a major impact on the entire Ming Empire was the reduction in agricultural income, which was directly reflected in the sharp decline in tax grain paid in various places, and even led to a food crisis in the entire empire.

(End of this chapter)