The rapid development of the rebels in Li Zicheng mainly depends on this slogan: Open the city gate to welcome the King, who will not accept food when he comes. This inflammatory political slogan is very useful to the bottom people. They not only welcomed King Chuang very much, but also directly joined the team of King Chuang.
In history, whenever there was a peasant uprising, it must have destroyed the political order at that time. Li Zicheng refused to accept the political proposition of grain, seized the pain point at that time, completely subverted the most important political foundation of the Ming Dynasty, and made farmers and tenant farmers actively support it. Moreover, he hoped that this grass-roots force in Li Zicheng could replace the Ming Dynasty and rebuild social order.
Although Li Zicheng's political slogans have won over a considerable number of people at the bottom, as a military force, it definitely needs wealth to maintain it. Since farmers can't be moved, they definitely need other sources of income. The rebels in Li Zicheng chose the work of bandits? Rob.
It is unrealistic to rob farmers, not only because they have no money at all, but also because the rebels have chosen the middle class. These people have not only accumulated a lot of wealth, but more importantly, they have deep contradictions with proletarians. Starting from the middle class can not only solve the income problem, but also cater to the expectation of the proletariat to kill the rich and help the poor.
When the territory laid by Li Zicheng is getting bigger and bigger, this robber-style wealth plundering method won't work. Although the middle class has a lot of wealth, the number is limited. This plunder not only aroused the resistance of the middle class, but more importantly, they chose to flee with money, leaving Li Zicheng with nothing but poverty and economic collapse.
At the suggestion of strategist Niu Jinxing and Yan Li, Li Zicheng redistributed the landlord's land, allowing farmers not to pay taxes for three years, and paying taxes according to regulations after three years. At this time, the Li Zicheng Rebel Army has already had a little basic appearance of the regime.
Farmers began to settle down, and there were fewer and fewer refugees. The rebels in Li Zicheng tend to formalize gradually, but the stability of a regime can't depend on farmers alone, and the social composition is diversified. Because of Li Zicheng's predatory exploitation of the middle class in the early stage, it lost the popular support of this class, which led to Li Zicheng's lack of support from landlords and scholars, so that Li Zicheng's army and later regime did not have the political foresight to join, so Li Zicheng's subsequent failure was inevitable.
Compared with Li Zicheng's land system, history has striking similarities. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in the late Qing Dynasty also played the political slogan of "equal land system", which gathered a large number of people at the bottom and almost failed to bring down the Qing court.
The problem in China is actually the land problem, which is the root of all the problems in China for thousands of years!