The evaluation of Huang Chao in the main history is generally negative. In fact, there is a certain truth to this, a person was "forced to Liangshan" by a seemingly innocent person, perhaps his behavior naturally has a certain degree of justice; unfortunately, what he did next was far more brutal than the person who "forced" him, which is not the sad story of "the dragon slayer became a dragon", but the direct birth of a more ferocious dragon.
Similar to the situation at the end of most dynasties in history, the large-scale peasant uprising at the end of the Tang Dynasty was originally a typical "official forcing the people to rebel". After the Anshi Rebellion, the once open, confident, and powerful Tang Empire fell into the predicament of eunuch dictatorship and centrifugal centrifugation; political corruption, the reduction of the actual control area, and the endless wars made the Tang court face unprecedented political and economic pressures, and this pressure naturally shifted to ordinary people.
At the end of the Tang Dynasty, the situation further deteriorated, with harsh taxes and miscellaneous taxes as fierce as tigers, corrupt officials and corrupt officials as wolves, land annexation as serious, coupled with the destruction of various wars, the displacement of the people, the destruction of lives, and countless times the situation that was staged appeared again: the people rose up, and the Yellow Nest emerged from it, leaving a heavy mark in history.
However, compared with the leaders of the peasant uprisings in previous generations, Huang Chao's identity is more special, and he does not belong to the ordinary "people".
First of all, he was an "illegitimate" – the family had been a salt merchant for generations, "rich", that is, very rich. However, after the Anshi Rebellion, faced with increasing financial pressure, the Tang court gradually tightened its policies and implemented a strict salt and iron official camp system, and the business run by the Huangchao family for generations has since become an "illegal activity".
No one wants to pursue such a shady profession all year round, even if the rewards are considerable. This mentality gives Huang Chao a second identity: a reader. As a child, he aspired to change his life from an illegitimate to a civil servant in the system; and his family was not a magnate, and there was only one way to achieve this goal: the imperial examination, which was one of the limited ways to break through the class in that era.
However, the Tang Dynasty had the saying of "thirty old Ming Classics and fifty young scholars", the number of places in the examination system was very small, the selection criteria were extremely strict, and those who could pass the entrance examination and enter the official field were all the elites of the elite who were extremely talented and elite. In the end, after several examinations but continuously fell behind Sun Shan, Huang Chao, who was not strong, had to go home to inherit the ancestral inheritance.
This unpleasant experience made Huang Chao's heart gush with the idea of "revenge on society", full of resentment, he wrote the famous "Not the First After Fu Ju": "Wait until the autumn comes on September 8, I will kill a hundred flowers after the flowers bloom." The incense of the sky penetrated Chang'an, and the city was full of golden armor. ”
Through this sharp poem, it is impossible to see the lofty ideals of confucian students to help the people and protect the country and anbang, but instead they are murderous and aggressive, and Huang Chao's ambition to destroy the Tang Dynasty is undoubtedly evident. In today's parlance: "What I don't get, I'm going to destroy." And to realize this grand ambition, all he needs is to "stay until the eighth of September in the autumn", that is, a suitable time. For this reason, in ordinary days, he has begun to deliberately recruit outlaws.
The time came quickly. In 859 and 868, two large-scale rebellions broke out in eastern Zhejiang and Guizhou in the Tang Empire, which were quelled but sowed the seeds for later larger uprisings. As the history books say: "Tang died in the Yellow Nest, and the disaster was based on Guilin!" ”
By 874 AD, a large-scale famine broke out. In the Henan region (south of the Yellow River in the Central Plains), a large number of people fell into the grass for survival; the next year, Puzhou Haojie Wang Xianzhi seized the opportunity, he added the title of "great general" to himself, and then issued a letter denouncing "greedy officials, heavy taxes, unfair rewards and punishments", successfully crowned himself with the label of justice, and the size of the team rapidly expanded, claiming 300,000 to the outside world.
This is the "September 8" that Huang Chao is looking forward to. Seeing the chaos in the world, his heart was ecstatic, and he immediately took his own group of dead parties to rise up, and with his strong financial resources, quickly recruited thousands of soldiers and horses, and then snowballed bigger and bigger, and joined Wang Xianzhi, and the two of them joined forces to run rampant in the Central Plains.
In 878, Wang Xianzhi was hanged by the Tang army, and the remnants of him successively defected to Huangchao; at the same time, other large and small rebel forces also joined in order to warm up the group, and Huangchao's strength soared, becoming a veritable leader of the late Tang rebel army.
Huang Chao can stand out in the chaotic world, and it really has its own uniqueness.
First, at the strategic level, he can make a correct judgment of the situation and have an excellent view of the overall situation. Although he had become the de facto leader of the rebel army and had hundreds of thousands of troops, he knew in his heart that these teams seemed to be amazing in size, but they did not have the ability to confront the battle-hardened and experienced regular army of the imperial court (and the clan town), and the best way was to avoid their sharp edges and deal with them with sports warfare.
Therefore, Huang Chao's army trajectory was erratic and open, first from Shandong, and then all the way south to Guangzhou; then, from Guangzhou, it set out north, attacked Luoyang and Chang'an, and fulfilled his bold words of "rushing through Chang'an". In this bold strategic circuitous process, Huang Chao skillfully preserved his strength, and he could also intersperse into the weak defensive areas of the imperial court, realizing the use of war to feed the war, and the soldiers, grain and grass fought more and more.
This proves that although he was a reader, Huang Chao's military talent was quite remarkable, and such a pioneering large-scale movement warfare as his was extremely rare in the previous ancient history.
Second, at the specific tactical level, HuangChao creates preconditions for mobile warfare in a simple and crude way.
Huang Chao's strategy is a big detour, which seems to be full of qi and intestines, but in actual implementation, it also faces realistic problems: how to replenish the consumption of personnel and materials in a timely manner, how to stabilize the "occupied areas", and how to resist the group's counterattack by landlords. The peasant uprisings of successive dynasties have all fallen on these two issues.
And Huang Chao's solution is brutal.
First of all, everywhere his army went, it looted the local rich households, and part of the goods, grain, and grass they obtained were used for their own use and partly distributed to the poor people. Through this attitude of cutting through the iron and distinguishing between the enemy and the enemy, Huang Chao not only boosted the morale of his own army (almost all of them were composed of extremely poor people), but also obtained a steady stream of logistical supplies at the lowest cost, and also won the support of the people everywhere and smoothly replenished the source of troops.
Secondly, in order to solve the concerns of the instability in the rear, every time the Yellow Nest went, he uprooted the local family clan and killed none of them. That is to say, wherever Huang Chao passed, the large and small landlords who might support the Tang Dynasty were thoroughly purged by him; in this way, even if he retreated, the imperial court could not restore basic political order after recovering the local area.
This move can be described as a trick that completely destroyed the backbone of maintaining social rule since the Wei and Jin dynasties, and the local administrative foundation on which the Tang Dynasty had survived for hundreds of years was wiped out, and it was a matter of time before it was doomed.
However, this method is undoubtedly extremely cruel and bloody, and wherever Huang Chao went, "the blood of the family was like a fountain, and the voices of injustice were everywhere", "the inner treasury was burned into splendid ashes, and the heavenly streets trampled on the bones of the secretary of state", and the blood flowed into rivers and became a hell on earth, not only the big and small landlords, but also countless Li people in the process of being turned into unjust souls.
In addition, at the personality level, Huang Chao is not very authentic. As a reader with a heart and a reputation, he tried to give preferential treatment and reuse to the reader in the process of the uprising, but once he found that the other party was not used for his own purposes, he did not hesitate to kill, without the slightest regard for the so-called social public opinion and the people's hearts, which objectively made his team lack the wisdom of being able to stand tall and see far.
Behind the above appearance is a direct embodiment of the shortcomings of the Yellow Nest itself. Historically, it has always been difficult to fight and govern the country, and the original Anshi Chaos was so shocking, but it was essentially a riot of a group of soldiers, and although the momentum was fierce, it could not escape the end of rapid collapse. Huang Chao is the same, his uprising seems to be full of justice, occupying the advantage of public opinion, but in the final analysis, his means are simply to fight violence with violence, while destroying and plundering, he has achieved nothing in the political and economic aspects, and is doomed to a dismal end.