The fable in the “Outer Congeries of Sayings: The Upper Right Series” of Han Feizi about the public welfare competition between Duke Jing of Qi and his imperial clan members and powerful officials contains the concept that people can choose their rulers through peaceful means. In other words, those who desire to gain ruling power would compete in public welfare and win by obtaining greater support from the people. This concept is significantly different from the Changing of the Mandate of Heaven in the Ages of Tang and Wu and other claims that rely on violent actions to implement people’s will. Although Han Fei opposed this concept, it provides a unique design or imagination of implementing the “popular opinion theory” during the pre-Qin period (before 221 BC). The views on the public opinion theory in early texts such as the Book of Documents and the Confucian and Mencian schools of thought may be regarded as the basis or source of the aforementioned design. This design is rooted in social conditions such as the traditional system of enfeoffment (fenfeng) and the traditional military system of integrating the army and people (bing min heyi) in the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BCE) but declined with the transformation of the social structure during the period of Warring States (403-221BCE) and Qin (221-206 BCE) and Han (206 BCE-220) dynasties, and was almost forgotten. From this perspective, the early public opinion theories, including the fable of public welfare, were not initially some kind of pedantic utopianism.

Filial piety was regarded by the Han government as the basis of its rule. It respected the elderly people and took care of them. Besides, it issued several decrees on the old-age support and established the old-age support system to care for the well-being of the elderly people. Based on the age of the elderly, the old-age support system of the Han Dynasty provided them with various benefits, such as granting them the privileged canes, awarding them millets, decreasing their off-springs’ taxes and corvee, or exempting them from these things. The newly published bamboo slip on old-age support in the Han bamboo slips of Xuanquan vividly reflects the old-age support system of the Han Dynasty. These bamboo slips clearly record the various preferential treatments enjoyed by elderly people of different age groups, which gives us a clearer understanding of age stratification in the old-age support system of the Han dynasty. During the period of the two Han dynasties, there was a gradual change in the old-age support policy of the Han Government. The old-age support bamboo slips were produced during the reign of Emperor Cheng of Western Han and the preferential treatment for the elderly people recorded in these bamboo slips is a reflection of the old-age support system of the late Western Han Dynasty.

When Emperor Xuanzong of Tang ascended to his throne, he was faced with problems such as “no financial surplus” and “empty granaries.” While keeping reducing expenditures, he adopted traditional methods of increasing income such as increasing registered households and cultivating wasteland. After the household registration conducted by Yuwen Rong, there was another large-scale registration around the twenty-fourth year of Kaiyuan (736). By taking measures such as taking back farmland from officials, organizing the official cultivation of wasteland, and encouraging people to cultivate wasteland on their own, the government increased the available land resource and actually granted it to those who fled and came back and impoverished people in order to resettle them. Among the measures, official cultivation of wasteland is the major one. It mainly happened in the most densely populated areas such as the capital city and its environs, and areas south and north of the Yellow River, showing a trend of extension from the Central Plains Economic Zone to the Economic Zone of the South of the Yangtze River. Most of the cultivated wasteland was beside rivers and canals. These measures reflect the fact that the government tried its best to maintain the Farmland Equalization Decree during the Kaiyuan period.

There are extremely scarce records of individual villagers in the Song and Yuan dynasties in handed-down literature, and it is also difficult to see the public documents, records, and other materials in the initial state. The printed version of The Rhyme Dictionary of the Ministry of Rites with Emendation and Annotation, an official document of the Yuan Dynasty, which has grassroots household documents of Huzhou Circuit on the back, has been published after collation. These documents include 900 households and nearly 3,000 people, with complete records of the population and people’s properties. As most of the people in the documents lived during the transition from Song to Yuan dynasties, and their family businesses were already finalized in the Song period. Therefore, these documents reflect people’s production and living conditions at the end of the Song Dynasty. Through comprehensive discussions of all the data, this paper analyzes the rural construction in Anji Prefecture (Huzhou Circuit) by using micro-level measurement and accounting in the way of statistical induction. Moreover, this paper also gives statistics including sex ratio, age ratio, average household population, fertility rate, number and type of land owned by households, and housing types, and analyzes the residence and livelihood of the villagers. This is the first time that comparison analysis is made based on original records among the study of rural history in the Song and Yuan dynasties, which provides relatively accurate statistics for the in-depth study of the rural society in the Jiangnan Region (south of the Yangtze River). It is also helpful for understanding the operation mode of the rural society in the Song and Yuan dynasties, and provides basic data support for exploring and reconstructing the daily life history of the villagers.

Attaching importance to people’s livelihood is not only an important measure for rulers to consolidate their power, but also a concrete expression of Confucianism’s people-oriented thinking in state governance. Based on his own experience and his understanding of social relations in the late Yuan and early Ming dynasties, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, regarded the people at the bottom as the “foundation of the state,” and his concern for people’s livelihood became an important part of his governance. The development of China’s unified multi-ethnic state, including the Ming Dynasty, has repeatedly shown one fact: between success and failure, there are only two words—people’s livelihood.

In the Qing Dynasty, agriculture as the state’s foundation was gaining increasing attention. In the 18th century, the rulers put forward the governance philosophy of “Revering Heaven and Serving Thy People” to meet the need of state governance. Therefore, the Ploughing Ceremony with distinct characteristics of the time was reconstructed to encourage farming and reinforce governance. Rulers of the Qing Dynasty paid special attention to the Ploughing Ceremony and made effort to turn it into a political ceremony with all the people participating so as to establish the image of the saintly emperor and provide values and norms for better operation of the empire. At the same time, in order to solve livelihood problems, rulers of the Qing Dynasty had a craving to the pro-ploughing ritual. Therefore, diligence had become the common ideal and belief during this period, and this provides certain impetus for social and economic development. The Ploughing Ceremony of the Qing Dynasty as an important part of the development of traditional Chinese etiquette culture, helped to shape the national spirit of hard work, and left a deep imprint on the development and continuation of the Chinese civilization.