Having nothing to do today, I found a copy of the political gains and losses in China written by Qian Mu from the bookshelf. The content of the book was written in the 1950s. The usage of some historical terms is slightly different from that in contemporary China.

It used to be regarded as feudalism, but in the modern division, the Qin Dynasty is the beginning of feudalism. For example, in the book, in order to solve the contradiction between private land ownership and taxation, the Han Dynasty mentioned that Dong Zhongshu restricted the large-scale concentration of land, and Wang Mang Then the method of equalizing the fields was directly used, which resulted in failure. Wang Mang’s land equalization was not the only one in history. The Revolution of 1911 also proposed the establishment of the Republic of China and the equalization of land rights. Of course, he did not actually do it. In the end, this great problem of thousands of years was completely realized in the Deng Xiaoping era, and the corresponding poll tax and agricultural tax were also completely ended in the Wen Jiabao era. This may also be after the founding of New China. The biggest change to our basic institutions in 2,000 years.

We summarize the above-mentioned economic policies of the Han Dynasty. For industry and commerce, it is close to advocating the so-called restraint of capital. In terms of land rent for farmers, it has also achieved light labor and light taxes, but it has not equalized land rights. . During the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, Dong Zhongshu once advocated the policy of restricting land. Even if the acres of land in the country cannot be distributed equally, there must be a maximum limit so that each landlord cannot exceed the limit of a thousand acres. Unfortunately, even this policy has not been implemented. So when Wang Mang got up, he aroused a major reform, and all the land was nationalized, called Huangtian, and redistributed. The idea at the time was to restore the well field system of the feudal era, but the result was a major disturbance. Wang Mang failed, and there has been no thorough reform of the land system in Chinese history since then. ‬

This book is divided into five parts: Han, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing. Due to time constraints, I only read the first part of the Han Dynasty. For the rest of the time, I watched a recent eight-episode documentary called Qiangjun.

In contrast. China’s political system for more than 2,000 years has actually been finalized very early, including many of our current systems, which were already applicable before the Qin and Han Dynasties. The biggest problem is that after the New Culture Movement and the dilapidation of the Cultural Revolution, contemporary education has an overly negative evaluation of the imperial dynasty.

The political system of China’s past dynasties cannot be separated from two core issues, one is the relationship between the first and second leaders, and the other is the relationship between the central government and the local government. For example, in the Han Dynasty, the first leader was the emperor, and the second leader was the prime minister. The power of the emperor is mainly embodied by the six books in charge of food and daily life, while the power of the prime minister is embodied in various government agencies. In fact, it is very close to the state form of modern constitutional monarchy. There is a strict distinction between imperial power and government. The problem is that. This good institutional model is only continued through customary law, and has not risen to the framework of statutory law, resulting in very different effects in different emperors’ reigns. Some emperors have outstanding abilities and must do everything by themselves, so the prime minister has no room to use his skills. The imperial power and the government have become one, and they have become the de facto home world. Some emperors are willing to inherit the ancient system, the imperial power and regime are highly differentiated, and professional bureaucrats can exert their maximum effectiveness. This is also a reference for observing the political situation in the past 20 years. And such a system that the main local bureaucrats cannot be held by local people was unexpectedly established in the Han Dynasty, and the original intention was to prevent problems caused by excessive local power.

The documentary talks about the reform of the military in recent years, which is actually a process of destroying the old and establishing the new, and the system must ultimately be implemented by people. Throughout the Chinese dynasties, there has been a mass mentality of respecting the virtuous but not the public. There is no democratic soil. Only a virtuous monarch can lead the people to prosperity. The era of stagnation and retrogression must be due to the emergence of corrupt leaders. This kind of system design is estimated to continue for a long time, and the public will buy it, and they will always think that this is definitely not a problem with the system at the top, but a problem with the implementation at the bottom.

Qian Mu mentioned in the book that it is impossible for any system to be implemented for one or two hundred years without changing, because the people who implement the system are always changing. This point still needs to be further understood. The framework of the rule of law will not be achieved overnight, and self-healing ability is too important.

Added on October 10th:

Personally, I don’t have a deep understanding of history. Except for a certain understanding of Chinese history in middle school history books more than ten years ago, I have basically never touched it in the rest of the time. When I saw this book, I saw it by chance in a bookstore and thought it was quite thin, so I bought it. It has been placed on the bookshelf for several years, and just in time for the National Day holiday, I pulled it out and looked through it when I had time. I have also bought some other history books, almost all of which are more than hundreds of thousands of words, and I have never read them. After reading this book, there are three main impressions:

1. Answers to many years of doubts

This book explains very thoroughly the relationship between imperial power and the government in Chinese history. It can be said that after so many years of socialist history education, I have always mistakenly believed that the emperor is arbitrary and has the final say. But I didn’t expect that there would be a practice similar to the constitutional monarchy in the Han Dynasty, and the imperial power would have so many constraints. Secondly, the book explains very clearly the origin, development and reform of many political, military, household registration and taxation systems. I have a more systematic understanding of Chinese history, and my impression of imperial dynasties has also changed a lot. I am even more amazed The ancients were able to design such a sophisticated political system more than 2,000 years ago.

2. A new understanding of the relationship between personnel and systems

In my work, I often talk about the need to set up various systems to make the work more standardized, let the system restrain people, and hope that the system can solve the problem once and for all. However, in practice, there are indeed huge contrasts when different personnel operate the same system. This book lists many examples of system failure caused by changes in the times and personnel changes, highlighting the core issue of system self-healing.

3. Strict distinction should be made between opinions on history and opinions on the times

When we evaluate many historical events and characters, we often involuntarily apply the contemporary social environment and values, and always hope to judge from the perspective of God or from a position that we think is neutral. But in the end, the historical characters or events Whether it is good or bad, we should mainly follow the opinions of the people at that time, and it would be very immoral and meaningless to evaluate it out of that environment.