jdhmnovel Chapter 179 This bastard is always giving us trouble!
Chapter 179 This bastard is always giving us trouble!
Upon hearing Li Shanchang express his thoughts on the century-long and five-year plans, Emperor Zhu suppressed his anger slightly. He gave a soft hum and first asked Yang Xian to sit down. Then, he looked at Li Shanchang and said, "Brother Shanchang, please speak. We are all ears."
Li Shanchang cupped his hands and said, “Your Majesty, I remember that Magistrate Yang previously submitted a memorial saying that he wanted to establish a community school in the Confucian Temple in Ningyang County. Later, I also heard that Magistrate Yang wanted the people of Ningyang County to learn to read as well.”
Zhu Chongba nodded and said, "That's true. We also heard that this scoundrel offered a big fat pig as a reward for any community that could recognize a thousand characters in order to make people literate. I just don't know if any community will actually get the pork."
Li Shanchang nodded and continued, "I remember that Magistrate Yang said in his memorial that education is the foundation of a hundred-year plan, and that it takes ten years to grow a tree but a hundred years to cultivate a person. If we are to formulate a hundred-year plan, in addition to the livelihood of the people, the most important thing should be education, as Magistrate Yang said. The Ministry of Rites must carefully consider how to establish schools and cultivate more scholars for the Ming Dynasty."
"Besides education, there are roads and bridges in various places. I heard that Magistrate Yang is building a road from Ningyang to Yanzhou Prefecture, which covers a width of ten zhang. He said that for every zhang built, nine zhang of land should be reserved, so that when the road needs to be widened in the future, it can be built directly without having to consider occupying the people's farmland. This is also a century-long plan. When the Ministry of Works plans the roads and bridges of the country, it should also take this into consideration."
"..."
Li Shanchang talked about education and transportation, then about the population and corvée labor, and then about the current amount of land and territorial expansion. The more he talked, the more alarmed and troubled he became.
The mere act of reserving ten zhang of land for road construction, building one zhang, and leaving nine zhang for future widening demonstrates the foresight of Magistrate Yang. If the civil and military officials of the court had possessed such foresight, how could the capital city be so congested every day?
Indeed, traffic congestion has begun to appear in the capital of the Ming Dynasty. Not only are boats blocked at Dinghuai Gate every day, but many streets in the capital are also congested with people every day.
Sometimes Li Shanchang wished he could just transfer half of the people in the capital to Ningyang County or Yangzhou City, since Ningyang County was short of people and Yangzhou City didn't have many either.
But then again, a five-year plan involves so many aspects; it can't be discussed in just a day or two. How long will it take to actually put it on paper? And then how long until it's implemented?
Both are five-year plans, but the difficulty of a five-year plan for a county is not the same as that of a five-year plan for the entire Ming Dynasty.
Li Shanchang's headache was evident, and so was Emperor Zhu Chongba's.
What troubled Emperor Zhu even more was that after Li Shanchang finished speaking, Liu Bowen added a sentence: "Brother Xiwu was right when he said that times change and things change. Whether it is a long-term plan of a hundred years or a short-term plan of five years, it may change over time and will need to be revised again. I think this is why Magistrate Yang proposed a five-year planning cycle and auditing it."
Well, that bastard Yang the Madman has suddenly assigned a full hundred years' worth of work to all the civil and military officials of the Ming Dynasty. Even if they only consider the present, they have to think about the next five years. But the entire Ming Dynasty has thirteen provinces, more than a thousand counties, and more than fifty million people. Even a single day could cause a whole bunch of messy problems. Now, they've adjusted this time scale to five years...
The more Emperor Zhu thought about it, the more his head ached. He couldn't help but sigh softly and say, "That damned thing, he's always giving us trouble!"
Li Shanchang also looked extremely troubled and conflicted. After bidding farewell to Emperor Zhu and leaving the Qianqing Palace, Li Shanchang looked at Liu Bowen and asked, "Brother Qingtian, do you know who has recently offended that Yang fellow?"
Liu Bowen stroked his beard and smiled, but his smile was full of unyielding bitterness: "Brother Shanchang, you've asked the wrong person. I've been studying at home lately, how would I know who Magistrate Yang has made enemies with?"
At this point, Liu Bowen turned his head to look in the direction of the Qianqing Palace and said meaningfully, "Perhaps, it was simply that Magistrate Yang suddenly thought of this five-year plan, so he submitted such a memorial?"
Upon hearing this, Li Shanchang couldn't help but curse Liu Bowen, the old fox, in his heart. Judging from the previous incidents, if no one had provoked the man surnamed Yang, he would have been quite well-behaved. Only when someone provoked him would he find ways to cause trouble.
The first time, it was Kong Xi who provoked him, and then he revealed the "Hongwu Zhengyun" and "Hongwu Dictionary".
The second time was when rumors circulated in the capital that he "scraped three feet from the ground and called himself a righteous official," and then he exposed the "Hongwu Encyclopedia."
This time, he directly released a five-year plan, probably because someone provoked him again. And this scoundrel, unable to contain his anger, started taking it out on the civil and military officials in the court.
Or rather, he never directly targeted the ministers in the court, but rather threw out something randomly to first attract the attention of Emperor Zhu Chongba, and then used the emperor to cause trouble for others.
Li Shanchang couldn't help but rub his forehead and whispered, "When we get back, tell everyone that no one should provoke him in the future. This is a long-term plan that lasts for a hundred years plus a short-term plan that lasts for five years. It won't be finished in two or three years. Who knows what kind of trouble he will cause next?"
……
A complete five-year plan involves all aspects of the East and West. It was a headache not only for Li Shanchang and Liu Bowen, but also for Magistrate Yang, who proposed the plan.
Damn it, all I was thinking about was making things difficult for the officials in the court, but I forgot that while I was messing with them, I also had to come up with a five-year plan to get by.
After letting out a soft sigh, Magistrate Yang simply picked up his pen and began to write and draw on the paper.
Since it's a five-year plan for the entire county, let's just start from three major perspectives: economy, culture, and people's livelihood, and then break it down further.
For example, people's livelihood is nothing more than how many households and how many people there were in the first year of Hongwu, how many households and how many people were expected to be in the fifth year of Hongwu, how many acres of land there were in the first year of Hongwu, and how many acres of land were expected to be in the fifth year of Hongwu.
We can also discuss the illiteracy rate in relation to people's livelihood, how to eradicate illiteracy, and how to formulate a plan from the first to the fifth year of the Hongwu reign to establish a certain number of schools, train a certain number of scholars, and reduce the illiteracy rate to a certain level.
The economy is even simpler; it's just a matter of how many shops and workshops there are, how much commercial tax can be collected, how much commercial tax is expected to be collected by the fifth year of Hongwu's reign, and how much money the people can earn.
The remaining issues are simply the number of murders or other cases, the number of roads, bridges, reservoirs, canals, and other miscellaneous projects to be undertaken, the budget, and the estimated manpower required. In reality, it's just a bit troublesome, but it's not really that difficult.
Anyway, it's much easier than the century-long plan and five-year plan that the imperial court has to come up with for the Ming Dynasty.
Then, combine all these things into a dimension table, and proceed according to this dimension table for the next five years. It is best to complete it ahead of schedule and report it to higher authorities just before the deadline. This will not only make you look like you are serious and responsible, but also give you enough time to slack off and do nothing.
Tsk tsk, it has to be me, the official. I'm so kind-hearted. Even if I'm going to mess with you, I'll set an example for you first and write out an assignment for you to copy. How many people in this world can be as kind to others as me?