What caused the decline of the Ming Dynasty?

The fundamental reason for the decline of the Ming Dynasty was that its policies could not keep up with the development of local folk economic forms.

The Ming Dynasty succeeded in maintaining the feudal small-scale peasant economy, but this was at the expense of resisting the development of commodity economy. Although the typical policy of emphasizing agriculture and restraining commerce maintained the stability of the empire for more than 100 years, the result was that the overall structure of the Ming Dynasty was based on four words, namely, "maintaining the status quo". The Ming dynasty's control over commerce was the strictest in all previous dynasties. The Hongwu dynasty stipulated that the people in the world were divided into four households. At first, the merchants did not have any ownership in the four households, but they were classified as "miscellaneous households" in the Yongle dynasty, and their social status was obvious. As the old saying goes, scholars, farmers, workers and businessmen are the last to do business. It is the Confucian thought of attaching importance to agriculture and restraining business.