Is it really because of the cold weather and poor harvest that the Ming Dynasty perished?

The answer is no, absolutely not. The cold weather in the Ming Dynasty refers to the Little Ice Age that Northeast Asia experienced from the Yuan Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, but the biggest reason for the demise of the Ming Dynasty was definitely not because of the cold weather. So what is the reason? I summed it up as a point, which is the increasingly serious class contradiction. Next, I will explain it separately.

First of all, there were too many princes in the Ming Dynasty, and the emperors of the Ming Dynasty were proud. Why do you say that? In the early days of the founding of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang was thinking about how to deal with Beiyuan, the enemy in the north. He was also thinking about one thing, that is, how the throne of Zhujiajian could be maintained forever. One of the ways he could think of was to make his son become a vassal everywhere, so he sealed many vassals. It is said that at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the number of governors reached an astonishing tens of thousands, all of them were mouths, or the mouths of the Zhujiajian family. One mouth is a big mouth. They want to eat money. What caused this phenomenon? That is to say, in the late Ming Dynasty, for example, the tax paid to the court in a province's annual fiscal revenue was not even enough for the Zhujiajian family in this province. This is a very serious problem.

So will the court let this situation last forever? No matter how hard it is to make ends meet, the answer is that the court really has no other way. It's just that as long as the court can open, the princes can't spend less, but in fact many powerful princes have taken most of them, and the little princes don't even have enough to eat. So what should we do? These little princes began to think of ways for themselves, that is, to invite the holy family to allow the royal children to take part in the imperial examination and do business and agriculture, but how could the emperor agree? Objection, of course, is because it will hurt the royal face; However, these princes have no choice but to ask them again and again. It was not until the late Ming Dynasty that the emperor agreed to this request. However, at this time of the Ming Dynasty, it was hard to return.

Second, officials embezzled land. This kind of thing happened in any dynasty, but it was especially serious in the Ming Dynasty. According to records, during the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, Xu Jie, the cabinet minister, owned an astonishing 200,000 mu of land, many of which were illegal. This shows that under the social form at that time, how difficult it was for the bottom farmers.

Third, there is a huge difference between ordinary people and officials. The people of the Ming Dynasty were burdened with huge taxes. However, in addition to their land being taken away by many illegal officials, they also face a more serious problem. Economically, the Ming dynasty was very cruel to ordinary farmers and craftsmen, but very tolerant to officials or scholars. In the Ming dynasty, scholars were not only exempt from taxes, but even from military service. Many officials are not only exempt from military service themselves, but also those around them. Not only do you enjoy tax-free military service when you are an official, but you still enjoy tax-free military service after retirement.

What will this lead to? If a place has100000 mu of arable land, local scholars or officials account for 50000 mu, and the remaining 50000 mu is planted by local farmers. When it comes to tax collection, this place has to pay 100,000 mu of tax, while the literati don't have to pay tax, and the peasants have to pay 100,000 mu of tax on 50,000 mu of land; By analogy, the more land occupied by scholars or officials in a place, the heavier the burden on farmers in this place, and the farmers feel the least secure. In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, even middle-class farmers would easily go bankrupt.

In connection with the third point and the second point, we know that the peasants in the Ming Dynasty were the worst, but even so, the government did not sympathize with the peasants and was good at suppressing peasant uprisings anyway. In connection with the first point, we know that emperors and literati are exploiters, and the peasants in the Ming Dynasty are miserable, and they will never sympathize. The final conclusion is that both the emperor and the literati will be destroyed.