Chen Xun opened his mouth to look at her, then said quietly after a moment, "People will die."
Yu Qian remained silent, his expression unchanged.
Hu Ying sighed. "His Majesty has been on the throne for barely a year. If we survey the land now, we will not uncover much concealed acreage. Grand Secretary Yu is proposing this now for three reasons: first, to find a pretext for rectifying officialdom; second, to help the Ministry of Revenue increase production; third, to kill the chicken and scare the monkeys, so those people will behave themselves for the next few years."
Hu Cheng was from the south and said nothing.
After glancing at Pan Yun, Hu Ying chuckled softly. "There is nothing bad about it, really. With the land survey coming first, it will be much easier for the Ministry of Works to carry out these matters afterward. But this memorandum absolutely cannot leak. At most, it may be shown to His Majesty alone."
Some national policies needed to be announced to the world in advance, so that officials and commoners alike could work toward them together.
Others, however, needed to remain secret, achieved under the guise of other excuses.
Because once certain things were made public, they would face immense resistance from the very beginning.
If certain people saw this memorandum, they would probably consider even the land survey a trivial matter.
The most crucial point of this memorandum was people!
The entire thing was about people!
If matters truly proceeded as the memorandum described, not only could the landless people of the realm be settled, but many farmers would also be dragged away from the land.
And how many of those farmers were cultivating their own land?
Hu Ying had been a Jinshi scholar during the Jianwen reign and had