Zhu Yuanzhang
According to historical records, whenever Huang Chao, the leader of the peasant rebel army at the end of the Tang Dynasty, attacked a place, he had to first arrest all the officials in this place and kill them. Why did he hate the tang officials so much? The main reason is that local officials are corrupt and corrupt, and the people are miserable, and they hate local officials to the bone, and once they have the opportunity, they will inevitably retaliate fiercely against them. Zhu Yuanzhang was born as a peasant and was well aware of the problem of official corruption, and when he became emperor, the crackdown on official corruption was not insignificant, but what was the actual effect? Today Wen Shijun will lead you to take a look.
I. Why were Ming officials poor?
After the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered a large-scale reduction in the salaries and benefits of officials. First, the official Feng Lu was abolished. Originally, the field was a field specially allocated by the state to incumbent officials, and its income was owned by the individual officials. Second, lower the specifications of the rice.
Officials in many dynasties in China often paid out in the form of rice, that is, the government directly paid grain to officials as wages. Zhu Yuanzhang did the same, which was understandable, but the standard of rice he issued to officials was extremely low. The annual salary of a Ming Dynasty official was only 1044 stones, while the annual salary of the Han Dynasty prime minister was as high as 10,000 stones. Although this has a difference in weights and measures, it is indisputable that the Ming Dynasty officials were extremely low.
Some people will ask, why did Zhu Yuanzhang treat the bureaucratic clique that worked for him? On the one hand, he wants to allocate as much money as possible to his children and grandchildren to make them comfortable, after all, the people who have planted trees before them are cool. On the other hand, he felt that being an official was a profession of honoring the ancestors, and the literati of the Ming Dynasty who read the book of Confucius and Mengzhi should restrain themselves with morality, and since they had a good reputation, they should not ask for economic treatment. Hai Rui in the Jiajing period may have best met this requirement.
Huang Zhizhong's version of Hai Rui
Second, how did Zhu Yuanzhang fight corruption?
In 1382, Zhu Yuanzhang established the Metropolitan Inspection Bureau, whose duty was to supervise the central government and the officials of the six ministries and prevent them from embezzlement. Later, six sections were set up to supervise the six departments. The above are the supervisory bodies set up by Zhu Yuanzhang in the central government. At the local level, thirteen supervision royal histories are set up to supervise local finances, but they can also supervise the central departments. Not only that, Zhu Yuanzhang also regularly sent inspectors from the central government to inspect local officials and supervise local officials. Both central and local officials have been supervised, and the supervision departments have also been supervised, forming a big anti-corruption network.
Metropolitan Hospital
In order to prevent officials from abusing their powers, Zhu Yuanzhang also strictly restrained the behavior of officials at all levels. First of all, local officials are not allowed to go to the countryside to inspect the people's situation. Why? In Zhu Yuanzhang's impression, all the officials who went to inspect the people's feelings ostensibly went down to the grass-roots level, but in fact they were looking for opportunities to eat and drink and loot the people's fat and people's ointment. Second, limit officials' excessive use of public resources. For example, officials are not allowed to use public vehicles and horses to transport personal belongings when traveling on business. If it is an item that must be brought to the office, you can use public carriages and horses, but there is a weight limit, generally not allowed to exceed ten pounds, after which you will be punished with a cane.
Third, unstoppable corruption
Normally speaking, Zhu Yuanzhang set up so many supervision organs and formulated such a strict code of conduct for officials, so officials in the early Ming Dynasty should have been rarely corrupt, right? But the truth is just the opposite, up to the princes and nobles, down to the petty officials and petty officials, almost no one is not greedy, no one is not dirty. After the officials of the Ministry of Punishment received the money, they released the criminals, and the officials of the Printing Bureau colluded with the officials of the Ministry of Households to hide about 20% of the printed seven million ingots of paper money. At the local level, farmers in Zhejiang province pay about 45 percent more taxes than standard taxes. What is more serious is that some local officials and landlords collude to transfer all the taxes on the landlords' heads to ordinary peasants. Once the peasants could not pay the taxes, the local government would send people to the peasants' homes to demolish houses and drive away the livestock.
There are no idle fields in the four seas, and the farmers are starving to death
Seeing that the code of conduct for officials he had formulated was not observed, and the supervision organs he had set up were useless, Zhu Yuanzhang was extremely angry and decided to kill corrupt officials and corrupt officials. From the empty seal case in 1382 to the Guo Huan case in 1385 AD, Zhu Yuanzhang killed 70,000 or 80,000 corrupt officials in a row, including many who were wronged, but Zhu Yuanzhang adhered to the principle of preferring to kill a thousand by mistake and not let go of one, and did not show mercy to corrupt officials.
Fourth, intimidation of corrupt officials and grassroots anti-corruption
Zhu Yuanzhang had always wondered why the anti-corruption measures of the imperial court were so severe, but they could not always eradicate corrupt officials. Through reflection and summary, he believes that the root cause lies in the social atmosphere. During the Yuan Dynasty, the social atmosphere was already corrupt, corruption became a common practice, and corrupt officials and officials were unscrupulous, and now only by correcting the social atmosphere can the problem of official corruption be solved in the end.
So how should we correct the social climate? Zhu Yuanzhang personally wrote a book called "The Great Curse". The main content of this book is to discuss the 10,000 ways to die of corrupt officials, and in the book, various cruel punishments for dealing with corrupt officials are recorded in detail. Zhu Yuanzhang wanted to use this kind of horrific book to intimidate corrupt officials and achieve a deterrent effect, so that they would not dare to embezzle.
"The Great Curse"
In addition to intimidation, Zhu Yuanzhang also attached great importance to grass-roots anti-corruption. The concrete measure is to announce to the people of the whole world that everyone can report corrupt officials. This measure did have a certain effect at first, but gradually deteriorated. Some ordinary people used this to blackmail officials, and some officials forced ordinary people to falsely accuse officials who refused to embezzle, and there were many drawbacks, and finally even Zhu Yuanzhang himself admitted that it was really too difficult to fight corruption.
Elderly Zhu Yuanzhang
Compared with other emperors of the Ming Dynasty, the officials during Zhu Yuanzhang's reign were still relatively honest and honest, much better than in other periods. But Zhu Yuanzhang's desire to completely sweep away the trend of corruption has not been realized until his death, or it will never be realized. Why? On the one hand, the Ming Dynasty officials were too low, not to mention decent, and they may need to be corrupt if they want to maintain normal living expenses. On the other hand, it is because the supervision institutions established by Zhu Yuanzhang are essentially dependent on the mutual supervision of imperial power, rather than the mutual checks and balances of power in the modern sense. Since they are dependent on the imperial power, these officials are bound to want to make a profit before they retire, and who really wants to make decisions for the people? So tackling corruption is almost impossible.
Wen Shijun said:
From an ordinary peasant counterattack to the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang thought that by relying on cruel means and strict supervision institutions, he could eliminate the historical disease of corruption, a feudal dynasty. However, it ignores the reality that officials are also human beings and also have to support their families, and the overly meager Feng Lu actually forces some officials to be corrupt. Although Zhu Yuanzhang failed, and some of his anti-corruption measures were too cruel, his intentions were good. Zhu Yuanzhang can be called the first person to fight corruption, which deserves praise for him.
bibliography
1. Zhang Hongjie, "Bad Rules: Corruption and Anti-Corruption in the Ming and Qing Dynasties", Yuelu Book Club, 2020.
2. Zhang Tingyu et al.: History of the Ming Dynasty, Zhonghua Bookstore, 2010.
(Author; Haoran Wenshi Kan Xiang)
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