明初人口政策与农业发展

Population Policy and Agricultural Development in Early Ming Dynasty

明初统治者在"以农为本"及"户口盛而后田野辟,赋税增"思想的支配下,制定了相关的人口政策。通过招抚流亡、严控户籍、调整分布,鼓励生育等多种举措稳定社会秩序,垦荒辟田,增加人口,达到人地相称,从而农业生产得以恢复和发展。探寻明初人口政策和农业发展的关系,可以发现,统治者思想上的高度重视和有所作为是明初农业发展的主观条件,人口政策与其他政策相辅相成为农业发展提供了前提和基础,而这些政策符合社会客观需要和经济规律则是农业发展的根本原因。此外,明初人口政策也带来诸如田地、赋役的不均和生态恶化等负面影响。

The rulers of the Ming Dynasty took the agriculture as the basis of the nation＇s development, they conceived that, when the population is prosperous, there will be enough manpower to open up new land which is the source of state taxes. Therefore the more land is cultivated, the more the state tax accumulated. Based on this idea, they formulated the corresponding population policy. By recalling displaced persons and the homeless, strict controlling of household registration, adjusting of population distributions, encouraging births and other initiatives to stabilize social order, cultivate wasteland, increase the population, to match people and farmland, therefore, the agricultural production had been recovered and developed.From the relationship between the population policy and agricultural development in the early Ming Dynasty, we can see that the high importance attached and the associated actions taken by the government was the subjective conditions of the agricultural development. The complementarity of the population policy and other policies provides the premise and basis for the agricultural development; these polices conformed to the objective needs of society and economic principle, which is the root cause of agricultural development. In addition, the population policies of the early Ming Dynasty also brought about some negative impacts such as the inequality of farmland, taxes and eorvee, and ecological deteriorations.