In June of the sixth year of Xiande (959), Zhou Shizong fell ill and died, and his son Chai Zongxun took the throne as Emperor Gong, only seven years old, "the lord is suspicious of the country", the political situation was unstable, and the Later Zhou Forbidden Army commander-in-chief of the palace was all ordered to inspect Zhao Kuangyin and lead Song Prefecture (present-day Shangqiu, Henan) to the Envoy of The De Jiedushi, defending the Beijing Division, the military power was in hand, "the soldier obeyed his grace and prestige", and everyone expected it. In the first month of the seventh year of Xiande (960), Zhao Kuangyin, in the name of Bianzhou, falsely claimed that the Khitan and Northern Han allied forces were going south, and launched a large-scale attack on Houzhou, and empress dowager Fu was busy sending Zhao Kuangyin out to resist the enemy, and the army marched to Chen Qiaoyi, 40 miles northeast of Kaifeng, Zhao Kuangyi and the secretary Zhao Pu and other commanders, launched a mutiny, supported Zhao Kuangyin as the son of heaven, Zhao Pretended to resign, but the generals who supported Zhao Kuangyin added the yellow robe symbolizing the emperor's ascension to the throne to him, and then returned to Kaifeng, and in front of the palace, they all commanded Shi Shouxin to respond internally and "switch to Nazhi". He easily seized the Power of later Zhou, and the founding name was Song, known in history as the Northern Song Dynasty. Zhao Kuangyin became the Taizu of Song, known in history as the "Chen Qiao Mutiny".
A portrait reflecting the "Chen Qiao Mutiny"
The establishment of the Northern Song Dynasty seems to be a bloodless mutiny, but behind this mutiny is a profound reflection of the social phenomenon of warlords dividing and warriors gaining power since the end of the Tang Dynasty. Zhao Kuangyin, Zhao Pu, and others believe that the reason for the fragmentation caused by the warlords' divisions and wars since the five dynasties of the late Tang Dynasty is that "Fang Zhen is too heavy, and the king is weak and the subject is strong." In order to ensure the "long-term peace and stability" of the Great Song Dynasty, so as to prevent the Zhao and Song Dynasties from becoming the sixth short-lived dynasty after the Five Dynasties, and also to avoid the emergence of the next "Zhao Kuangyin" who was dressed in yellow robes, Zhao Kuangyin "punished the five seasons and corrected the mistakes of the late Tang Dynasty", and implemented the measure of "slightly seizing its power, controlling its money valley, and collecting its elite troops", that is, to the greatest extent possible, the power of political power, financial power, and military power will be seized from fang zhen' hands, collected by the central authorities, and concentrated in the hands of the imperial emperor, so as to achieve the purpose of further strengthening the centralization of power and preventing the restoration of local separatist forces. Under the guidance of this idea, the rulers of the Song Dynasty constructed a set of dynamically accumulated governance strategies, that is, the "law of the ancestors".
Statue of Zhao Kuangyin, Song Taizu
The core content of the "Law of the Ancestors" is "anti-malpractice", which ensures the stability of the political pattern and the ruling order through the prevention of micro-laws. At the beginning of his reign, Emperor Taizong of Song expressed the connotation of the ancestral law very clearly in the edict of the throne: "The first emperor started a business for twenty years, and things were prevented, and the system was made, the discipline was fixed, and the things were constant, so they should be obeyed and did not dare to go beyond." ”
Emperor Taizong of Song inherited the ancestral law of Taizu
The first principle of the anti-malpractice government is to collect power, that is, to return local power to the central government as much as possible, and to ensure that the situation of feudal and town division does not recur from the system. Specifically, it includes "slightly seizing their power, controlling their money valley, and collecting their elite soldiers."
A slight seizure of power - The Song court took a series of measures to limit and weaken the power of the governors of the prefectures and counties and prevent the recurrence of the division of the feudal towns: the abolition of the branches and counties. At the beginning of the Song Dynasty, the five-generation system was inherited, and in addition to the large domain where the governor was located, he also managed some states and armies, called "branch counties". In order to strengthen the centralization of power, Emperor Taizong issued an edict in the second year of the Taiping Revival (977), abolishing the branch counties and putting them under the central government, directly under the Jing division. The governor of the prefecture is called "Quan ZhiJun Prefecture Affairs", referred to as Zhi Prefecture for short. This enabled the administrative power to be greatly reduced, equal to that of the general Zhi Prefecture, only slightly higher in rank, and gradually evolved into a false title, only receiving the title of Feng Lu and not going to the post. On the one hand, the governors of the prefectures, including the envoys of the Early Song Dynasty, adopted the three-year method of change and frequently transferred, and on the other hand, they made full use of the supervisory power of the post of general judge, stipulating that everything must be signed by the joint signature of the general judgment, so as to ensure the central government's control over the states.
Control of their money valley -- change the phenomenon of the past thrifty envoys controlling local finances, retaining a large amount of property and property in the state, so that all state financial endowments except for the necessary funds are handed over and managed by the three divisions of the central financial institutions. The Department of Zhulu Transit was set up to strengthen the financial inspection of the localities on behalf of the Central Premier and the central premier (the whole country is divided into fifteen roads). He also ordered the abolition of the privilege of trading in the feudal towns since the late Tang Dynasty, and from then on, "from the interests to the public and the external power to the cutting."
Emperor Renzong of Song developed the ancestral method
Collect its elite troops - continue to implement the policy of the Zhou Shizong period, conscript the local elite troops into the forbidden army as much as possible, and the local governments are old and weak and unable to attack the war, and only serve in engineering, called the "van army". Among the more than 200,000 forbidden troops, more than 100,000 are stationed near the Beijing Division, and more than 100,000 are stationed in local areas. The local forbidden troops are not stationed, but instead implement the "more discipline method", changing and moving regularly. In this way, the military superiority of the central government over the localities has been strengthened compared with the five generations.
The second principle of anti-malpractice government is the separation of powers, that is, to disperse the power of the various levels of power as much as possible, so that they can contain each other and prevent the phenomenon of monopoly.
In the center, one is the right to divide the three points. In the early years of the Song Dynasty, it inherited the Tang system, with Tong zhongshu menxia Pingzhangshi as the prime minister, and later added the counselor to the government affairs as the deputy prime minister, collectively known as "ZaiZhi" to jointly take power. He also ordered the Privy Council to be in charge of the military and politics, and the three divisions to be in charge of finances, of which the Privy Council and the Prime Minister were in charge of the civil and military affairs, and the title was "Second House". The three chiefs of the three divisions are called "counting ministers."
The second is the separation of the right to unify the troops from the right to transfer troops. Although the Privy Council is in charge of the military and government, its power is mainly limited to the dispatch of orders and dispatches, and it does not participate in the day-to-day rule. In command of the army were the three institutions of the Imperial Guard Commandery Division, the Guards Pro-Army Ma Jundu Commanding the Envoy Division, and the Guards Pro-Army Infantry All Commanding the Envoy Division, collectively known as the "Three Guards". That is to say, the so-called "soldiers under the heavens, originally from the Privy Council, have the right to send troops but do not have the weight of holding troops, and the soldiers of the Beijing Division (forbidden army) are generally superior to the three marshals, and they have the weight of holding troops but not the right to send troops." Not only that, there is a distinction between the daily unified troops and the wartime unified troops, the three are only the daily commanders, in case of war, the imperial court will appoint another general to command the troops to go out on the march, and the soldiers who have completed the war will return to the three armies and will return to their own posts.
In the setting up of local officials, the central government's control over local governments has also been strengthened. Initially, the Zhulu Transit Envoy Department (CaoSi) was set up to supervise local finances and administrative supervision, with the name of "Supervision Department". However, later, a variety of names were added to the Road Supervision Division, with the Criminal Prison Division (hereinafter referred to as the Constitutional Division) in charge of the judiciary, the Changping Division (referred to as the Cangsi Division) in charge of warehousing, and the Pacification Envoy Division (hereinafter referred to as the Shuai Division) in charge of military affairs and public security, collectively known as the "Four Supervision Divisions". They are not subordinate to each other, the division of jurisdiction of the road is not the same, or although they are the same, the place of governance may not be in the same place. Each has its own scope of competence, but it also overlaps with each other, often making it a combination of responsibilities. Among the state-level institutions (there were local institutions such as government, military, and supervisors outside the Song Dynasty Prefecture, which were generally at the same level as the prefectures), the general judges and the chief officers formed a separation of powers, and signed the same documents, "neither deputy two-in-command nor subordinate officials, so they often competed with Zhizhou for power, and every cloud 'I am a prison county, and the imperial court makes me supervise Ru', and the actions are controlled by him." As a result, "states and counties are often at odds with general judgments."
In order to control bureaucrats at all levels and strengthen imperial power, a system of official dispatch was also implemented. The Song Dynasty implemented a system of separating official titles from actual affairs. An official is an official name, which is used for the classification of ranks and the establishment of a rank; a post is also a post, an honorary title conferred on some civilian officials, and there is no actual position; dispatch is the actual position held by an official. Ordinary officials, before the position they hold, are given the words "judgment, knowledge, management hook, and lifting" to show their dispatch. This is done to prevent the occurrence of authoritarian acts by officials in a position for a long time.
Song Taizu "Cup of Wine Releases Military Power"
In order to curb the power of military generals and consolidate the imperial throne, Song Taizu soon took the throne by using banquets to "release the right to release the troops with a cup of wine" and deprived the general Shi Shouxin and others of the power to command the forbidden army, replacing them with generals with shallow talents. In the future, it is even more conscious to suppress the military generals, and the privy councillors all use civilian ministers, and there is no commander in battle, and they will be in charge. In contrast to light force, it vigorously elevated the status of civilian officials and scholars, advocated civil rule, expanded the scale of the imperial examination, encouraged Taiwan to give advice and deeds, strengthened supervision work, and gradually formed a traditional "family law" of "not killing scholars and doctors and those who speak things" and "ruling the world with scholars."
The negative impact of the anti-malpractice government was also fully exposed in the subsequent historical process, and the most concentrated embodiment was the "accumulation of poverty and weakness" summarized by the people of the times. The Song Dynasty central government was highly centralized, and the design of the political power embodied the design principle of "civil and military system, internal and external dimensions, and upper and lower rolling" required by the law of the ancestors. However, it was the excessive emphasis and respect for the law of the ancestors that created the old-fashioned political atmosphere of the Zhao and Song Dynasties, so that when the country was in crisis, it was impossible to make correct decisions and could only sit still. The real significance of the Ancestral Law of the Song Dynasty lies in the fact that it maintains the stability of the Discipline and the Discipline, thus maintaining the long-term stability of the political situation and even the whole society, and maintaining the Great Song Dynasty for more than three hundred years.