Some of the Shang Dynasty reforms that made the Qin State powerful were specifically aimed at "home".
For example, it is forbidden for fathers and sons to live in the same room.
Another example: if there are two or more men in the people, they will carry their endowments.
Shang Ying's explanation for such changes is to change customs, but in fact, the core objectives of Shang Ying's reforms in the category of "home" are the same:Break up the big family into a small family.
The core of the Qin system was to break up all the larger organizations within the empire, so that all the Qin people could exist as small families of yeoman farmers, and then the state would directly collect taxes from these yeoman farmers and apportioned conscription and military service.
Since there is no interception of the middle class, the Qin Empire can set the tax very high, and there is no middleman, and I can make the difference in price.
Collecting more taxes and allowing more people to serve themselves in conscription and military service was not the only reason for the Qin Empire to break up the big families, and the Qin people who existed in the form of small families were geometrically less likely to resist the power machine of the Qin state than the Qin people who existed in the form of large families.
These, combined with the system of mutual supervision and reporting among neighbors, can achieve the goal of controlling the Qin people to the greatest extent.
At the beginning of the Shang Dynasty's reform, with the full support of Qin Xiaogong, the Qin Empire finally achieved the goal of breaking up the big family into a small family with great effort, and the administrative efficiency of the empire was rapidly improved.
For a country, the improvement of social efficiency is of course a great thingBut it is not without a price, and that price is the cost of domination.
Direct rule over all small families is far more expensive and difficult than indirect rule over a few large families, so the Qin Empire must cover the high costs of direct rule in an efficient way of social operation, a large number of taxes, a large number of conscription, military service and other personnel who serve the state apparatus are indispensable.
Through the efforts of several generations, the rulers of the Qin Empire were able to achieve internal circulation within the state, allowing this huge state apparatus with high efficiency and cost to continue to operate.
But the reverse of this sentence is also true: in order to maintain the operation of Daqin, a high-cost state machine, efficiency and cost must match, once the balance between cost and efficiency of this state machine is broken, what awaits it is an instant collapse.