Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang attacked Ying Tianfu in the sixteenth year of the Yuan Dynasty (1356 AD), and in 1368 AD he was proclaimed emperor of Ying Tianfu, with the state name Daming, and changed the era name to Hongwu Yuannian. Before ascending the throne, Zhu Yuanzhang was born into a peasant family and even worked as a beggar. Zhu Yuanzhang, who was born in the folk, can most empathize with the people under his rule.
Moreover, when Zhu Yuanzhang was young, his relatives were victimized by corrupt officials, so the most famous anti-corruption campaign in history was during Zhu Yuanzhang's reign. At that time, how harsh was the Hongwu Dynasty on corrupt officials? At that time, the standard of death for officials on corruption was more than sixty taels.
And this was not enough, at that time, Zhu Yuanzhang also wrote the first relevant anti-corruption textbook in Chinese history, "A Brief Record of Awakening Greed". At the time, the book was extremely harshly punished for corrupt officials, in order to warn the successor officials not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Officials who had embezzled more than sixty taels were not only beheaded for public display, but also skinned, and then hung on the tables of their governments in the skin filled with straw and lime.
This kind of "skinning and weeding" torture naturally shocked a group of people, and to a certain extent, he curbed the atmosphere of corruption and corruption. However, corrupt officials and corrupt officials are always frequent, and there is even a feeling that "wildfires burn endlessly, and the spring wind blows again." Zhu Yuanzhang even killed nearly 150,000 corrupt officials during his reign.
However, the later it became, the more there was a feeling of inexhaustible killing, and this kind of atmosphere was even worse after Zhu Yuanzhang's death. Why? According to historical records, the officials of the Ming Dynasty at that time were too few to be able to support their families. According to historical records, during the Ming Dynasty, the famous Qing official Hai Rui was known to everyone.
He was promoted to Erpin official in the forty-first year of Jiajing (1562 AD), and he was paid strictly according to the salary set by Zhu Yuanzhang when he founded the country, but on the birthday of Hai Rui's mother at that time. Hai Rui went to the market to cut two or two meats for his mother to celebrate his birthday, which was already a big event that caused a sensation in the province. There are also two wives of Hai Rui, both of whom died of abnormal circumstances, according to the history of Yuno, they starved to death.
Therefore, why did Zhu Yuanzhang not kill corrupt officials at that time, because Zhu Yuanzhang's requirements for Qing officials were too high. Hai Rui officials could not afford to raise a family, let alone the small officials below them. If all of them were used to support the family according to Zhu Yuanzhang's set up, then the whole family would really starve to death.
The Yongzheng Emperor during the Qing Dynasty seems to have learned the lesson of Zhu Yuanzhang, who announced two policies when he ascended the throne in the sixty-first year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1722 AD). The first is "returning envy to the public", which means that the gray income of officials in private is "fire and silver" to be counted on the surface. Fire consumption is that when the officials at that time levied taxes, they would levy more silver from the people because the silver was recast to consume some silver. Some officials who are greedy can even receive eight points, and the people pay so much more tax can be said to be miserable.
After the adoption of the policy of "returning envy to the public", all fire consumption was uniformly levied a five-point tax and included in the state's tax. After all the expropriations have been collected, a part of the collected fire consumption is taken from the expropriation and given to the officials as "raising clean silver".
Subsequently, it is necessary to clarify the system of raising clean silver, and set different standards for raising clean silver according to the level of splicing of different officials and the busy situation of the department. Similar to the performance of companies today, it is often about twice the salary. When officials have higher incomes, they can support themselves and their families, and there is much less corruption.
On the other hand, Yongzheng cracked down on corruption, punishing them one after another, increasing the cost of corruption among officials. Officials have found that they can maintain a normal life and even have surplus money if they are not greedy, and once the corruption is light, they will raid their homes and exile them, and if they are heavy, they will not choose to be a corrupt official. "Fighting corruption and promoting honesty" is a two-pronged approach, and Yongzheng's trick has done what Zhu Yuanzhang has not done in his life.