China: The Social Stairway

The traditional Chinese scheme of social division into "officials" and "commoners" (the latter, in turn, was divided into "servicemen", "farmers", "artisans" and "traders"), penetrating into Thai legislation, did not reflect real social gradations. Among the "commoners" were representatives of the ruling class - large and medium-sized landowners, rich traders and shop owners who exploited other people's labor, and peasants, and small craftsmen, and traders of different property wealth and positions subjected to varying degrees of exploitation. Most of the "commoners" were peasants. A special layer in the society of Tang was represented by monks. China: the social ladder ...

The lower stages of the social ladder were also occupied by heterogeneous categories of personally unfree people. These were various state and private underemployed workers, as well as slaves. The source of slavery was the loss of free status by those who committed crimes, as well as the reproduction of this layer from the marriages of slaves and slaves. Slaves freely sold and passed.

Their rights to kill the owners were not, although relatively easy punishments were imposed for such a murder (one year of correctional labor). Although the number of the unqualified population was quite considerable, it was used mainly outside the main production sphere of the rural economy, namely in state craft and mining, for various kinds of auxiliary work and in maintenance, in domestic service, etc.

Class privileges, on the one hand, and duties and incompleteness, on the other, were recorded in a detailed and very perfect for their time Thai legislation. The code "Tan Liu Shu and" was compiled in the middle of the 7th century. Many laws were issued in the form of separate orders. In the first half of the VIII century. An extensive body of laws of the Tang Liu Dian was published.

The basis for economic and financial well-being, and indirectly and military-political power of the Sui and Tang empires, was the allotment land use system described above, which in the late 6th - early 7th c. It is being strengthened nationwide. Moreover, legal norms related to the implementation of this system are more detailed and improved than ever before.

At Sui, every adult man had the right to get 80 mu of arable fields, which were subject to redistribution, and 20 mu of land in "perpetual cultivation" legally allocated for mulberry planting; Each woman - 40 mu of arable fields. In general, the same standards were maintained even with Tan, with the clarification that 40 mu of land could be given to the "aged" and maimed, and 30 mu to widowed women. Warehouses began to rely also on urban residents, artisans, traders and monks.

China: the social ladder