A Study Of Imperial Government's Relief In Dinasty Ming In Hunan

Sorting by their different financial sources, the reliving of natural disasters in Ancient China can be categorized by relieving by the central government, relieving by the feudal official and non-government relieving. In this paper, the author mainly study the reliving by central government in the Ming dynasty.China is a country suffered from natural disaster since ancient times. During the Ming dynasty, natural disasters happened every year and sometimes covered a lot of provinces. Hunan was included in the Hu-Guang state. In the early stage of Ming dynasty ,Ming chengzu took policies which attached more attention to agriculture, such as Jiangxi helpHu-Guang policy ,thus Hunan gained a great opportunity for its development. However, due to over reclamation of the land, Hunan became an area suffered from unprecedented natural disaster as well as a fast growing region with abundant corn production. The natural disaster not only jeopardized the very existence of the people in Hunan, but also resulted in the prevalence of theft, unsettlement, even riot, so shook the stability of society and dangered the reign of Ming. At the same time, the environment damaged by the former disaster also foreshadowed the next disaster.Famine is inevitable in some extent, but the protective measures can defend and reduce the loss caused by it, it will also secure the reign of the Government. As a usurper suffered from famine in the former Yuan dynasty, Ming taizu obviously realized this.So at the beginning of Ming dynasty, he started to rebuild and improve the disaster relieving system, the "emphasize on agriculture and care for the people" idea he proposed had a strong influence over the rest of Ming's rule. Ming's system and laws of disaster relieving covered the prediction, situation report and relieving measures etc.In face of the huge damage caused by disaster in Hunan, Ming Government took lots of positive countermeasures both traditional and innovatory. Those countermeasures reduced the loss caused by disaster, contributed to the restoration of social production. However, social, political and economic factors also influenced the effectiveness of the counter disaster measures. Ming's disaster management focus more on prevention at the beginning, then swift to control, but ended up fail to do both prevention and control. Although Ming paid great attention to regulate its disaster management, but the government failed to avoid the weak point of traditional measures, especially Ming was poor in execution, thus weakened the effectiveness. We can learn from the gain and loss of Ming's disaster control today.