The Period of the Five Hu and Sixteen Kingdoms was a turbulent period in China's history, due to the political corruption of the Western Jin Dynasty, the squeezing and disparity of the Hu people in the northern region by the exploiting classes, and the vicious changes in the geographical environment, which caused the continuous resistance of a small number of famous ethnic groups.
With the intensification of the Hu-Han divide, the Hu leaders successively raised troops to resist the tyrannical rule of the Han Dynasty and created a warlord melee party. Among them, Ran Min is inseparable from the Later Zhao in the Sixteen Kingdoms period, what kind of legend and real history does he have?
I. The Decline and Fall of the Later Zhao State
1. Civil unrest in the Later Zhao State
At the end of Shi Hu's reign, due to his tyranny and hard labor, which led to many internal contradictions in Later Zhao, the Liang Calf Rebellion took place in this context. Although the Liang Calf rebellion failed, it also deeply shook the foundation of Later Zhao's rule, Zhang Hedu, Shi Bao, Li Nong and other later Zhao main forces were no longer able to suppress the people's resistance, and the rise of the Qiang and Qiang nationalities meant the decline of the Qiang forces in the north.
2. Ran Min Tu Hu
Shi Hu died, the crown prince Shi Shi took the throne, Liu Shi listened to the government, and the power was completely in the hands of Zhang Jackal. After Shi Jian ascended the throne, Shi Min was made the great general and the King of Wude, and Sikong Li Nong was made the Grand Sima and recorded Shangshu. Although Shi Jian was emperor, he was really a vain name, and the real power of the Later Zhao State was in the hands of Shi Min and Li Nong.
The following year, Ran Min established the Ran Wei regime, killed the Zhao lord Shi Jian, and killed Shi Hu's twenty-eight grandsons to destroy the Shi clan. Since then, the rule of the Qiang people in the Central Plains has also come to an end.
The rise and fall of Ran Min during the Second and Fifth Hu Chaohua periods
1. The establishment and decline of Ran Wei
After Shi Min slaughtered Hu, two political centers gradually formed in the former Later Zhao, namely Shi Min's Yicheng and Shi Qi's Xiangguo. In the sixth year of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Shi Min killed the puppet emperor Shi Jian, established himself as emperor, restored his surname to Ran, changed his name to Yuan Yongxing, and the state name was Great Wei, known as Ran Wei in history.
The new king Shi Qi also took the throne in Xiangguo, that is, the emperor, and later Zhao's old ministers Dazai Zhao Shu, Taiwei Zhang Ju, and the Chinese general Zhang Chun opposed the Shi Min regime and fled to Xiangguo. In April of the same year, Shi Yuan, who claimed the title of emperor in the Xiang kingdom, sent Shi Kun as the xiangguo and sent him to lead an army of 100,000 to attack Ran Wei.
At this time, civil unrest broke out in Ran Wei, and ran Min and Li Nong suddenly broke out into contradictions, resulting in the killing of Li Nong and his three sons, and Shangshu Wang Mo, Wang Yan of Shizhong, Zhongchang Shi Yan zhen, Zhao Sheng, and other senior officials of the court, and the people of Yicheng were panicked. Ran Min sent an envoy to Jin, hoping to get the support of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, but the Eastern Jin Dynasty ignored it on the grounds that Ran Min had claimed the title of emperor.
Rumors spread that Ran Min had died in battle, and the military and civilians in the country were worried and uneasy. Zhang Ai, a lieutenant of the Shooting Sound School, asked Ran Min to go out of the city to reassure the people, and Min Congzhi stopped talking. However, the ultimate fate was that Murong Juan gave the title of Fengxi Jun (奉玺君) under the title of Fengxi Jun (奉玺君). Granting Ran Zhi the title of Marquis of Haibin and Shen Zhong the Grand General Right Changshi, Murong Zhi ordered Murong Zhizhen to defend the city of Yicheng, and Ran Wei declared his demise.
2. Ran Min Tuhu's deep thinking
During the Wei and Jin dynasties, the han oppression of these foreign nationalities entering the Central Plains was relatively serious, and it was in this context that Shi Le, as a "tribal petty rate", was trafficked to Shandong as a slave by Sima Teng's "two hu and one shackle". After the establishment of Later Zhao, the contradictions between Hu and Han did not weaken.
Measures such as Shi Le's "concealing Hu", improving the status of the Chinese people, "calling Hu people a national", and "specially managing Hu people's lawsuits" superficially reflect Shi's efforts to resolve the contradictions between Hu and Han, but in fact they have just exposed the problem that he is not good at handling ethnic contradictions. First, during the Sixteen Kingdoms period, the title of "Hu" was not directed at the Qiang people. With the intensification of the contradictions between the Hu and Han people in the northern region during the Sixteen Kingdoms period, the title of "Hu" gradually took on the meaning of contempt.
But even so, no other political party has ever been so sensitive, not even the Han Zhao State has "secretive Hu", and the practice of increasing the influence of the Turks is obviously an insight into the Han people's "Yixia Distinction". During the Sixteen Kingdoms period, some internal migration nationalities always tried to move closer to "Huaxiaization" when facing the Han "YixiaGuan" and rejected those "non-Huaxia" factors.
However, the Qiang people have done the opposite, striving to improve the status of the "Hu people", but they do not know that this practice itself is based on the premise of recognizing the "Yixia distinction", calling themselves "Hu" "nationals", and improving the status of the Hu people, naturally will not win the support of the vast number of Han people. In addition, the deviation of the Hu and Han nationalities in social status, judicial proceedings, and career choices made ethnic relations under the Later Zhao regime extremely complicated and ethnic contradictions extremely acute.
At the end of the Shi Hu period, "serving the Jin people for hard labor" led to the boiling of public resentment, which had already laid hidden dangers for the outbreak of the Hu-Han contradiction. The unstable position of the crown prince and the new monarch of the Hu and Qian regimes is largely due to the traditional military system inheritance method of the grassland.
The emperor's successor was not necessarily the crown prince, but more likely the most powerful person in the military group. Shi Xuan's conspiracy to rebel, Shi Xuan's and Shi Tao's civil unrest, and Shi Hu's and Shi Zun's ascension to the throne were all like this. Nevertheless, the attitude of the enlisted people within the Clique towards the deposed new monarch was not extreme.
Under the influence of Chinese culture, as the heir to the jurisprudence of the regime, the coup d'étatist, even if successful, generally did not kill him immediately. Shi Hu usurped the throne, first forced Shi Hong to be established, swept away political enemies, and then "deposed as the King of Haiyang"; Shi Zun treated Shi Shi and also "crowned Shi Shi as the King of Tan", although in the end Shi Hong and Shi Shi were still sought out by chance, but compared to Ran Min's simple and rough approach, it was already more political considerations.
3. The root cause of Ran Min's failure to seize power
Ran Min had hoped to seize power through a military coup, but slaughtering Hu was not what he expected. Before Ran Min went to war in Xiangguo, he made his son Ran Yin a big danyu and accompanied by a thousand subordinates of Hu, so he also killed the persuasion of Wei Chen, and it can be seen that Ran Min was still looking forward to using the "Hu Han partition algorithm" method perfected in the Later Zhao stage to maintain power.
The extermination of Li Nong's father and son also confirmed that he wanted to cut off contact with the Han clique, which can be seen that Ran Min Tuhu did not mean that the "Han" concept sprouted out of the blue, or suffered the harm of the Han people's "Yixia Guan", but only introduced the palace coup into the increasingly fierce contradictions of the Chinese nation, and the tragedy of the Chinese nation was murdered.
The unfortunate period caused by the outbreak of the Hu-Han divide in the Tuhu incident was not a simple act of Ran Min. After the death of Shi Jianren, the Later Zhao Turks and military towns from all walks of life successively applied the Xiangguo Shi Yuan, and the Han Qihuo Army, Wubi, and jin Dynasties did not give Ran Min sufficient application, which was the key factor that caused Ran Wei's rapid defeat.
After the slaughter of Hu, Ran Min did not obtain any good political assets, and the battles with Shi Yuan and Shi Kun were also limited to the scope of Later Zhao's internal strife. Under such circumstances, it was not surprising that they were annexed by the newly rising Murong Xianbei forces.
Third, the policies implemented by Ran Min
1. The co-optation of the Han officials
The record of Ran Min's co-optation of the Han officials occurred in the fifth year of Yonghe, when Shi Zun broke his previous promise to make Ran Min crown prince and made Shi Binzi Shi Yan the crown prince.
In this case, whether it was for the sake of preserving himself or in order to gain higher power, Ran Min was in urgent need of strong allies, so the so-called "robbery of Li Nong and the Right Guard Wang Ji" incident occurred. So why did Ran Min take Li Nong and Wang Ji as the object of the alliance? Wang Jiqi has no materials, so let's leave it alone.
The reason why Li Nong became the object of Ran Min's co-optation and alliance was mainly due to Li Nong's political prestige and the strong forces he maintained near Yecheng. Ran Min's co-optation of Han officials was first facilitated by power struggles, and Han officials were more in a state of being coerced by Ran Min, a situation that did not change until Ran Min took over the Later Zhao regime through a coup d'état.
Although the Han official group in the Later Zhao regime occupied most of the positions, including the officials of the three provinces, some important positions such as Lu Shang Shu shi and Shang Shu Ling were always controlled by Hu Xian, and Han officials were restricted from holding positions, that is to say, the Han official group has always been in a relatively suppressed state relative to the Hu Xian bureaucracy, which also created a natural political contradiction between Hu Xian officials and Han officials in the Later Zhao regime.
It was precisely because Ran Min noticed this that he chose the Hanguan group as the object of his co-optation, trying to use their strength to achieve the purpose of expanding the foundation of his own rule.
2. Ran Min's suppression of Hu Xian
The co-optation and appointment of the Han official group harmed the political interests of the Later Zhao Emperor and the Hu officials, who had long been at the top of the Later Zhao regime and had a very high political status, so Ran Min avoided the expansion of the situation, handled the situation with relative restraint, and the spearhead was only aimed at the Hu Xian bureaucrats who were directly involved in the rebellion.
During Shi Zun's reign, Ran Min, in order to protect himself and gain a higher position of power, chose to co-opt the Han officials who had long been suppressed by hu xian bureaucrats, which caused dissatisfaction and resistance from hu xian bureaucrats.
For this part of the opposition forces, Ran Min's initial policy was also based on restraint and gentleness, but with the addition of a large number of strategists, Ran Min realized the seriousness of the situation, and finally had to adopt the strategy of slaughter and purging to stabilize his own rule, and the object of the purge was mainly the Hu Xian bureaucrats and soldiers who rebelled against their own rule, and the Hu Xian bureaucrats who were not with them were not within the scope of the massacre.
It can be seen from this that the direct inducement of a series of policies implemented by Ran Min, including the co-optation of han officials and the suppression and even massacre of Hu Xian, was a power struggle, not an ethnic contradiction brought about by blood origin.
epilogue:
History should be viewed from a historical perspective, and the evaluation of a period of history should consider the general environment at that time, during the Period of The Five Hu Chaohua, the establishment of Ran Min's Ran Wei regime to its demise was nothing more than to kill Hu and then win over the Central Plains people for its own small regime. This kind of behavior was not the zhengda and bright practice of the rulers of China's feudal dynasties, and in the end it was not respected and borrowed by successive emperors.
The integration of china's multi-ethnic groups is a trend of history, and it will not be unified because of the establishment of such a political power, on the contrary, it will aggravate conflicts and contradictions between ethnic groups.
bibliography:
Historia
Zizhi Tongjian