The Merchant-Based State (2)
"If the common people are to devote themselves to farming, they need land. Getting land in the first place is hard enough — and even if they somehow manage it, the great clans hound them until they are forced to sell it off for a pittance. Being taken in under a clan and allowed to till their fields is already a stroke of luck. The moment a clan lord says, 'Next year I'm giving this plot to someone else,' they are thrown out on the spot. So what is that commoner supposed to do then?"
As far as I knew, people in that position had precious few paths left to them.
"...Wander. Turn bandit. Or both."
"There's a third path."
Liu Hong smiled — a smile that sat strangely on his face.
"The word merchant originally meant the leftover people of Shang — those who could no longer live in the lands ruled by the Son of Heaven of Zhou."
The path chosen by commoners who had no other means of making a living.
"When I encourage commerce, I am doing nothing more than returning to the root of what that word meant. If those who would otherwise become wanderers can be made into merchants instead, the people will have a way to live that does not depend on land alone. The great clans always spend their hoarded wealth on luxury — so through the merchants, money and goods will circulate through every walled town in the realm instead of pooling in one place."
As he spoke, hatred boiled up in Liu Hong's eyes once more.
I was beginning to understand, at last, where his contempt for the Qingliu, the great clans, and the celebrated worthies truly came from.
"And yet the Confucians speak of agrarian fundamentalism and tell you to suppress commerce."
"That is not a word spoken out of any genuine concern for Us or for the realm. It is nothing but a rotten habit — they simply cannot stand to see the common people slip their control and find a way to live on their own."
The Emperor squatted down and scooped up a handful of earth from the garden.
"The great clans grow rich through land and through people. The more tightly the commoners are bound to the soil, the fatter those clans become. But if the people try to escape poverty by some means other than land? Then the clans grow poorer. All that talk of order and righteousness from the Qingliu is nothing but the squealing of pigs who want greasy food at every meal."
The soil trickled out between Liu Hong's fingers.
"The Confucians claim that if you just solve the land problem, every sickness of the state will vanish. But the land does not hold the answer. That is why I selected capable merchants and appointed them Attendants to the Crown Prince."
An Attendant to the Crown Prince was an aide to the heir. But the imperial house had no Crown Prince now. Liu Hong had never invested Liu Bian as heir.
Which meant the Crown Princes he spoke of were Liu Bian's elder brothers.
"The Crown Princes died so pointlessly."
Liu Hong gave a hollow laugh, as empty as the words themselves. I had no idea what to say, so I simply looked at him.
"The merchants were too weak to protect a Crown Prince. My brother-in-law, the one serving as Governor of Henan now, handled money as a butcher and can swing a blade himself, but... his family's power is far too thin."
"A powerful house is too easily made into imperial in-laws. A weak house cannot actually protect a prince."
Liu Hong nodded.
"Choosing a weak maternal clan is unavoidable. Imperial in-laws always end up joining hands with the Qingliu — no matter what I do, they are the sort who will put everything back the way it was."
"That is why Your Majesty entrusted a prince to the household of the Daoist Shi Zimiao."
"As it turned out, the Daoists were stronger than the merchants."
The Taiping Dao — a faith that spanned the entire realm. Naturally, almost no one could punch through that to threaten Liu Bian's life.
"I do not believe the Confucians, and I do not believe the Daoists either when they say you can enjoy an age of Supreme Peace through wuwei ziran. If you go before the barbarians and preach non-action and naturalness, do you think they will snap their bows in two? The Daoist would just become a quiver."
And so I refused to become a believer of the Taiping Dao, Liu Hong said.
I thought I understood what he meant.
"Bao. You still want to criticize Us for selling offices, I expect. But these Qingliu types who want to stop commoners from becoming merchants because they might stop being their slaves — how exactly are they any better than the Zhuoliu?"
I had no answer.
"The Qingliu puff each other up as filial sons and recommend one another for office, but this one and that one alike have nothing but a reputation for having been so praised — not a shred of actual ability. They could not even grasp the fluctuations in the value of the wushu coin, something you understood. Do you have any idea how hollow I felt when an eleven-year-old child — not even a Han, a Xiongnu — understood what they could not?"
Liu Hong drew a deep breath.
"I said, 'At the very least, let Us appoint men who know how to make money as officials.' And the ones who went mad with rage because they might lose the privilege of recommending each other — those are the Qingliu."
I called to mind the Qingliu as I remembered them from the Three Kingdoms.
The ones who shut their eyes and stopped their ears at Yuan Shao's massacre at Mengjin, chanting nothing but "six years of mourning." The ones who did not merely look away from Cao Cao's great slaughter in Xu Province, but took part in it themselves. The Sima clan, who massacred the people of Liaodong in the name of putting down rebellion, who murdered an emperor in broad daylight under the pretext of usurping the Cao Wei, whose purges made Dong Zhuo and Cao Cao look gentle by comparison, and who gutted the Central Plains with the War of the Eight Princes.
And the men who, in exchange for turning a blind eye to the Sima stench, sat in high office living in every kind of luxury, exchanging qingtan while insisting that practical affairs were for the lowborn, and turning their backs on every urgent problem of the realm.
"What divides the Pure from the Turbid is not honesty. Cooperate with the power that flows from the Emperor, and you are Zhuoliu. Reduce the Emperor to a shadow and suck the marrow from the realm among yourselves, and you are Qingliu."
"I understand well that Your Majesty wishes to join hands with the Taiping Dao and sweep such men away. To be honest, I feel the urge to put Xiongnu arrows through Qingliu throats this very moment, if that is Your Majesty's will. But... is this method not too cruel?"
"Cruel?"
"Too many will die. In trying to catch the Qingliu, it seems to me you would set the whole realm on fire."
I staked my life on the next words. A conversation with this mad emperor was a thing you staked your life on anyway.
It was no different from covering Cao Cao's atrocities with the excuse that he laid the foundations of what would become the Three Departments and Six Ministries, or that he carried out reforms and preserved Chinese civilization... and saying, as Liu Hong did here, that sacrifices could not be helped. There was no difference at all.
In the way they treated their anguish for the realm as a heavy thing while calling small sacrifices unavoidable — perhaps Wei truly was the successor of Han after all.
Liu Hong heard me out, his brow furrowing —
"You are right."
...and conceded it without a fight.
"Bao. Did you think I did not know that people whisper behind my back that I am mad? What I am trying to do is a mad thing. To mobilize the Taiping Dao and slaughter the Qingliu to the last man. But Bao — I am trying to change the very way this realm lives. It is not so different from telling a fish to breathe in filthy water. But a fish cannot live on land."
Liu Hong squeezed his eyes shut.
"The wars that will blanket the realm may yet destroy Great Han in my own generation. If Great Han cannot weather those wars, it will fall. But if I sit still and never start this war — Great Han will fall all the same."
Would it perish through the Yellow Turban Rebellion and Dong Zhuo's uprising? Or would it perish as Cao Wei and Western Jin had perished? Or would it find some path between them that I did not know?
Liu Hong had become emperor at twelve, they said.
The problems laid before Emperor Liu Hong would not have been limited to the Dou clan, who meant to use him to enjoy power. As he himself had spoken of Emperors Shun, Chong, Zhi, and Huan — a twelve-year-old boy had been handed the wretched finances his predecessors left behind, an unreformed land-ownership crisis, and a country dying of both.
I thought I understood, now, where Liu Hong's madness had come from.
"Good heavens — something this precious..."
Watching He Miao, who could not hide his smile, Yuan Shao folded his hands with perfect courtesy and bowed at the waist.
"You have been so kind as to instruct this Shao. I merely wished to offer a small token of my regard."
The gift Yuan Shao had given him was a gift, certainly — but what delighted He Miao even more was that a young master of the Yuan clan, a man he would not have dared look in the eye before his younger sister became Empress, was now paying him respects. So delighted he did not even notice what he had let slip.
"You need not have gone to such trouble. If there is anything Benchu wishes to hear, I shall tell it whenever you like."
Yuan Shao offered another bow, a gentle smile on his handsome face, and left the mansion under He Miao's escort.
The moment he climbed into the carriage, a man who had been holding his breath inside threw a question at him.
"How did it go, Brother Benchu?"
"He did not say anything particularly useful."
"No?"
"He and his elder brother do not get along. Not a good path for approaching He Jin."
"Well — He Miao was never a He to begin with."
The affairs of the He siblings were complicated.
He Jin's father and He Miao's mother had each already had a child when they remarried. He Jin's father took the son his new wife brought with her as his own and gave him the He name. Afterward the couple had two daughters — one became Empress, the other the daughter-in-law of Zhang Rang.
In other words, He Jin and the sisters shared a father; He Miao and the sisters shared a mother. But He Jin and He Miao were complete strangers by blood.
"Still, it seems he has picked up a few things by virtue of his brother's and sisters' power."
"What did he say?"
"He rambled so much I will need to sort it out myself — but it is clear Mengde has not told us everything."
"Hah — Mengde is always like that. He tosses you exactly the bits that benefit him and then shuts his mouth. That's just how that bastard is."
Yuan Shao gave a wry smile.
"A eunuch household's habit of caution in uncertain matters does not simply vanish, I suppose... Ziyuan. From He Miao's mouth came the words: 'The Taiping Dao is not coughing up as much as they took from His Majesty.'"
Xu Ziyuan — Xu You — furrowed his brow.
"So there was a deal. That's certain."
"Not 'was.' They may still be dealing now."
"...I looked into the Jizhou situation as you asked, Brother Benchu. For some time now, Wei Commandery has been crawling with people from Jingzhou and Yangzhou."
"Wei shall replace Han..."
"The ones who think so have been gathering in Wei Commandery, I expect."
"And men who think that way did not gather just to tour Ye."
Yuan Shao and Xu You looked at each other. In both their minds, the organizational structure the Taiping Dao was said to possess and the mass flight of commoners from Jingzhou and Yangzhou were rapidly connecting.
And that, in turn, connected back to the Emperor.
"He sentences the Qingliu to what is effectively a permanent lockout from office by selling those offices — and as if that were not enough, he is gathering a Daoist army...?"
At Yuan Shao's murmur, Xu You's eyes narrowed as well.
"Your Qingliu foundation is under threat, Brother Benchu."
"...A fallen feudal lord who barely deserved the title becomes emperor, and look at the things he gets up to."
Xu You had always thought Yuan Shao clung too hard to the Yuan clan's prestige — perhaps because he had been born a bastard. At times it seemed he considered the Yuans more noble than the Liu imperial house, which had sunk to the level of country bumpkins.
But that was just as true of Yuan Shu, who had been born of the principal wife. Yuan Shu would fly into a rage if he ever heard such a thing, but the brothers — cousins, by the strict rules of lineage — were remarkably alike.
"We should expose it, then?"
"The entire Qingliu — every man who calls himself a scholar-official — must come to know. For that, we will need evidence..."
"I'll keep watching Mengde's movements."
"I am counting on you."
The right corner of Yuan Shao's mouth lifted. It was a smile he showed only in front of Xu You — thin and faintly sour.