Yongzheng took over a relatively bad stall from his father Kangxi: at the beginning of Yongzheng's reign, he checked the national treasury and found that there was a large Qing Dynasty, and there were only eight million taels of silver in the treasury. According to the current silver price, this amount of money is equivalent to two billion yuan. YongZheng was frightened and couldn't sleep for several days, and he knew very well that the problem lay in the word "corruption." Usually, when the new emperor ascended the throne, in order to win the hearts and minds of the people, there was a practice of exempting officials from deficits and not counting old accounts, but Yongzheng deleted this article from the edict drafted by the cabinet and decided to punish corruption.
He first set up an auditing body in the central government, called "Huikaofu". The duty of the Examination Office is to check the accounts. Previously, the provinces paid taxes and silver to the ministry of households, and the moisture was very large, because the ministry of households had to collect "ministry fees" from it, otherwise it was not allowed to write off and report. Yongzheng said that the deficit of money and grain in various places, whether it is extortion by superiors or their own encroachment, is illegal, "The present cannot be tolerated as the imperial examination." He ordered Prince Yi Yunxiang (thirteenth master) and his uncle Long Keduo and others to be responsible for the investigation, and said to the old thirteenth: "If er cannot investigate, he will send another minister; if the minister can no longer investigate, he will personally find out." "A vigorous accounting campaign was launched.
Yun Xiang led the team to find out many problems, such as the deficit of 2.5 million taels of treasury in the household department, Yongzheng ordered the successive officials of the household department to compensate 1.5 million taels, and the remaining one million taels were repaid in installments, and they were made up year by year. When Wang Yunyu of Lu County was in charge of the Internal Affairs Office, he had a deficit and was found to be in compensation, and Yunqi helplessly changed the seller to make up the arrears. Zhao Shixian, the governor of the river, withheld water conservancy materials and was imprisoned in a large prison, and his family wealth was confiscated. Suzhou weaving Li Xu lost 380,000 taels of public funds and made compensation for the raiders.
Yongzheng copied the family property of a large number of corrupt officials, and this iron fist method really shocked the officialdom, and the officials scolded him behind his back as the "emperor of the family". Yongzheng also forbade officials who were found to have lost money to stay in their posts to make up for it, and all were dismissed from their posts. In the 10th year of Yongzheng, Li Wei, the governor directly under him, said that very few prefecture and county officials had served for more than three years because too many had been dismissed. Some officials knew that they could not escape punishment and committed suicide in fear of crime, but Yongzheng still did not give up, ordering the investigators to continue to strictly interrogate the relatives of the criminal officers, "all the stolen money is recovered and compensated." ”
Why are officials corrupt? This is an old and difficult problem, and it cannot be solved by simply losing money by raiding the house. Yongzheng knew that in fact, the Qing Dynasty official Feng Lu was on the low side, and the annual salary of the official in Beijing was one hundred and eighty-two silver, which was equivalent to more than 40,000 yuan today. The prefect is one hundred and five two, the zhizhou is eighty-two, and there are only forty-five two at the county order level, and it is bare to support the family, not to mention the gifts of hospitality.
Yongzheng struck a heavy blow against corruption, cutting off officials' financial roads, and without a salary increase, officials would not be able to survive. In order to solve this system problem, Yongzheng introduced the "raising clean silver" system, which gave officials additional subsidies depending on the level of their position. With the continuous enrichment of the national treasury, the number of incorruptible banks has increased year by year, and the highest subsidies for officials have reached 30,000 taels per year, and the few hundred taels are also several hundred taels, which is dozens or even hundreds of times higher than their basic wages.
Through a series of anti-corruption decrees and economic adjustment strategies, Yongzheng finally filled the big hole in the national treasury. In just five years, the treasury's silver reserves increased from eight million taels to fifty million taels. Although by the last year of Yongzheng, the money in the treasury had fallen back to less than 30 million taels, and the treasury had money, and the people did not necessarily have money in their pockets - but compared with his father Kangxi, Yongzheng was still an emperor who could fight corruption and manage money.