The law of historical periodicity was the cause of peasant uprising in feudal society, which led to the change of dynasties. However, different dynasties have different characteristics, and their historical periodic laws also have different performances. By the end of the Ming Dynasty, peasant uprisings broke out frequently, almost to the point of "all the people were against it". Specifically, the frequent outbreak of peasant uprisings in the late Ming Dynasty was the result of the intensification of social contradictions and the collapse of the institutional system.
Uncontrolled exploitation, factionalism and oppression have intensified the contradictions between various classes and made farmers rise up against them. Peasants, landlords and rulers are the three largest classes in feudal society, in addition to bureaucrats, citizens and other classes, but the outbreak of peasant uprisings mostly revolves around farmers seeking living space. Farmers live on land, farmers are producers, landlords are exploiters, and rulers generally represent the interests of big landlords, but they should also try their best to reconcile the contradictions between landlords and farmers so that peasant uprisings will not break out. The frequent outbreak of peasant uprisings in the late Ming Dynasty began with the intensification of the contradictions among the three.
(A) the intensification of contradictions between farmers and landlords
Peasants and landlords are the two classes that are most prone to conflict, and the intensification of class contradictions in the late Ming Dynasty first began between them. In the Ming Dynasty, the landlord class expanded the object of exploitation from tenant farmers and semi-tenant farmers to yeoman farmers, and the degree of exploitation of farmers was far ahead of that of North Korea.
The tenant is directly controlled by the landlord, and the rent exploitation is quite harsh, up to 20%. In addition to the prescribed land rent, landlords can also raise land rent at will, and exploitation means are pervasive. Tenants are not only exploited and enslaved economically, but also suppressed in social status. In the Ming dynasty, there was a saying that "those who rent land have the income from the land, which is also cheap". By the end of the Ming Dynasty, the situation of tenants was even more difficult. In some areas, tenants can't even marry civilians:
"A slave or tenant is not allowed to get married if he is virtuous" —— Ming History
Compared with the miserable tenant farmers, although the yeoman farmers have their own plots of land, they can produce independently, but in the plight of natural and man-made disasters, they often can't escape from the clutches of the landlords. Since the middle of the Ming Dynasty, bureaucratic landlords have wantonly annexed farmers' land, with individual land exceeding tens of thousands of farmers:
"Xu Jie, a university student, has a field of 2,400 hectares, Dong Youtian, a minister in the official department, has a field of 1,000 hectares, and Shao Zeng, a magistrate, has bought a field of 80 hectares". Generally speaking, if you acquire land with both hands, you can either buy it at the price or buy it at a discount with debt. "At first you will get rich by accumulating, and then you will become famous in Tianwanmu." -Institute of History, China Academy of Sciences. On the study of Ming history)
By the end of the Ming Dynasty, there were more than 200,000 hectares of land in Zhuangtian, Wang Fu alone. No matter tenant farmers, semi-tenant farmers or yeomen farmers, they are all brutally exploited by the landlord class in different forms without exception. Farmers have lost their original social status, and even the most basic production cannot be guaranteed. The contradiction with the landlord class naturally broke out into irreconcilable. The so-called root cause that the poor hate the rich mostly comes from this, and the peasant uprising broke out.
(B) the intensification of contradictions between farmers and rulers
At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the rulers not only increased the exploitation of landlords, but also gave up the will to reconcile the contradiction between peasants and landlords and began to exploit peasants. Since the twenty-fourth year of Wanli (1596), the royal family's demand for funds has become increasingly huge, so the rulers, in the name of collecting taxes and mining, sent a large number of mine supervisors and tax envoys to plunder businessmen from all over the world. Later, the imperial court set a quota for collecting local mining tax and commercial taxes, instructed local officials to collect them, and local officials also took them? "Or vendors, or brokers" make farmers bear a part of the taxes that should be borne by businessmen, which increases the burden on farmers. Under the rule of increasing farmers' burden, official corruption has become increasingly rampant. Wang Tingxiang, a Jiajing native, described the change of official corruption from furtive to rampant in "Days Changed from Chen Shu":
"Power without bribers, hundred Liang food, people have been terrible. Today is also called thousand, or ten thousand. There is no insatiable person who disappears at dusk for fear that others will know. Today, I also took bribes, unscrupulous. Is it really bad? "
The exploitation of farmers by the rulers continued until the end of the Ming Dynasty. However, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, in order to cope with the military crisis of internal troubles and foreign invasion, the Ming government repeatedly increased taxes, which made the already poor farmers more seriously exploited by farmers and citizens. At this time, it has increased, which naturally exceeds the exploitation limit that farmers can bear. As a result, the contradiction between farmers and rulers intensified and they turned to the uprising team one after another.