The Research Of Natural Disasters And Government’s Relief In Early Tang Dynasty

Early Tang Dynasty which is the heyday of feudal society is also the period ofthe frequency of natural disasters. The kinds of diasters appear in the way of groupand chain recurrence, and the increasing artificial factors bring a wider range of thenation and cause a lot of trouble to people’s life and production. Luckily the socialstability and the national prosperity of the Early Tang Dynasty makes the governmentmore efficient in dealing with disasters, so that people are less affected by thedisasters in some degree.The government in the Early Tang Dynasty has its own system basically,including three parts: thought of relief, measures of relief and mechanism of relief.The thought of relief also can be divided into some parts, such as people-basedthought, focusing agriculture theory, scourge calamity view and the five elements.Under the influence of these thought, the government forms a variety of measuresof relief. These measures include pre-disaster prevention, disaster relief andpost-disaster restoration, at the same time, the government provides the guarantee ofoperational mechanism enabling the measures more effective. The relief mechanismmainly includes reporting and inspecting mechanism, consulting deciding mechanism,execution and supervision. The four parts rely on each other through the government’srelief work.The thought of relief theoretical provides guidance to the measures, while themeasures provide a platform for the thought to practice. The mechanism of reliefprovides guarantee for the relief measures which perfect the mechanism at the sametime. So they are independent and complementary, in order to promote the relief ofthe Early Tang Dynasty effectively.