According to the Philosophy of History, Einstein commented Chinese: "Even those who are forced to work like cattle and horses will never show a sense of suffering. A peculiar people like a herd... They are more like robots than humans. It would be sad if one day other races were replaced by Chinese. For people like us, the idea of a life without thinking is indescribably frustrating in itself."
The Chinese mentioned here are precisely those who lived under the autocratic rule of the Manchu Qing Dynasty at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic, and whose minds were enslaved by the autocratic rule.
During the 250 years of qing dynasty rule, the Han chinese were brutally ruled, and even caused great damage to the spiritual strength of the Chinese. And all this is closely related to the century-old literal prison of the Qing Dynasty.
The prison of words is to suppress the freedom of thought because of the misfortune of literature. The Qing Dynasty was rampant in the literary prison, of which the Three Dynasties of Kang Yongqian were very prominent, and under the cloak of that magnificent prosperity, it was extremely despotic and dark.
The historical reason for the flourishing of the literal prison
From the Shunzhi period to the Qianlong period, there were four dynasties, lasting more than 150 years, during which the literal prison was endless. According to historical records, in the Qianlong Emperor's dynasty alone, there were more than 120 cases of literal prisons, and even a madman was not spared. Behind these more than 100 literal prisons, hundreds of lives are buried, and they are also the joys and sorrows of countless families.
Over the years, the literal prison has always existed and has hardly been broken, and when it developed into the Qing Dynasty, the literal prison also reached its peak. In the Qing Dynasty, it was also so prosperous that it also had its own special historical factors.
At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Li Zicheng overthrew the Ming Dynasty, and Wu Sangui led the Qing army into the Customs, and eventually the Qing Dynasty unified the world and established the last feudal unified dynasty. The manchu rulers were able to enter the Central Plains as ethnic minorities, which was rare in China's thousands of years of history.
Therefore, from the traditional concept of the Han nationality, the rise of the Qing Dynasty is also called "Qiankun repeatedly, the Central Plains land sinks". This also doomed the Chinese orthodoxy formed by the Han people for thousands of years in the central plains, which the rulers of the Qing Dynasty were doomed to be unable to seize by force.
At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, Han intellectuals had a strong sense of national ideology and anti-Qing, and various writings in this period were far-reaching. And for the Qing rulers, this was a huge potential threat to sit on.
Therefore, in order to consolidate the ruling position of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the rulers were very strict against the anti-Qing ideology of the Han nationality, and the crackdown was extremely intense. During the Qianlong period, it developed even more pathological suspicion and wanted to completely destroy the national consciousness and national integrity of the Han people.
From the Shunzhi to the Qianlong period, most of these cases may have been anti-Qing in nature, or they were deliberately fabricated anti-Qing crimes. It can be seen that the special historical background of the Qing Dynasty's literary prison is the persistence of contradictions and struggles between the Manchu and Han nationalities.
The wind of false accusations set off by money
The contradiction between nationalities is the background of the times, so the wind of false accusations is the direct fuse. The false accusations mentioned here do not refer to the power struggle between officials, but to the folk customs.
According to the Qing Dynasty, there were 194 cases of literal prisons, and of these 194 literal prisons, 25 were framed, and most of the people framed were unknown small people in the city. Most of them have no connection with the framed people, but only because they falsely accuse the gentry, and their purpose is to extort money.
During the Qing Dynasty, the population gradually increased, but the land was gradually reduced, and the people had less land, and the people's lives could not be guaranteed, and the people attached great importance to money. The inability to rely on agricultural production to feed their stomachs has led to some courageous people amassing wealth and survival through other means.
So when the imperial court was vigorously promoting the literal prison, these people began to denounce the gentry and profit from it, and even had an alternative phenomenon of endorsing the literary prison as a policy.
Because once the crimes of the literal prison were fulfilled, most of these gentry were punished with the crime of conspiracy to rebel, such as Ling Chi, Lian Sitting, etc., and the punishment was extremely severe.
At the same time, in order to mobilize the masses to report, the imperial court also provided rich material rewards, not only granting him official and military positions, but even the entire property of the criminals would be given as rewards to the whistleblower.
These reward policies are extremely prone to misreading: once a gentry who has committed a taboo against words is reported and caught, he can be promoted to a higher rank and rich.
Although the Qing court also had many punishments for false accusations and frame-ups, it could not resist the profundity of Chinese characters, multi-tone, poly-meaning, and the existence of analogous metaphors, even if the writers did not have the heart of rebellion, good people could also pick out faults from them.
As long as there is an explanation that touches the nerves of the imperial court, then it is successful. It can be seen that the textual framing at that time was basically a costless and high-yielding transaction, which eventually led to the prevalence of false accusations during the Qing Dynasty.
As we all know, the harm of literal hell is many, so is there a little benefit to the country?
Is it really harmful and not beneficial?
The harm of literal hell is indeed quite a lot. First of all, it corrupted the official atmosphere; during the Qing Dynasty, officials were recruited by examination. On the one hand, as literati, these courtiers are also very likely to become victims of the literal prison. On the other hand, as bureaucrats, they are accomplices or even makers of the literal hell.
Therefore they do not want to die and destroy their own homes, and they do not want to be guilty of failing to obey the instructions of the commandments and not being able to strictly punish the written responsibilities of others. This cycle led to the development of Qing officials in the direction of being cautious and undisciplined.
During the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the literary prison deepened with the stabilization of the rule, and during the period of stable rule, the literal prison was even more extreme. Therefore, in the Qianlong period, it was even more inexorably strengthened, resulting in China's traditional culture being distorted and deformed, and even becoming an out-and-out "slave talent" culture! The integrity of the Chinese literati is getting worse with each passing day.
In the wars of aggression in modern times, many traitors have emerged, and why do they not have this reason? Without the national temperament and cultural integrity, how can we make due contributions to the development and prosperity of the country?
Another serious consequence of the prison of words is the extinction of a large number of text books. The Manchu rulers confiscated the national collection of books, and once the documents and historical facts that were unfavorable to the Manchu Qing were banned and destroyed, they had to be tampered with and processed in the main history of the Khitans, Jurchens, Mongols, and Liaojinyuan. During the Qianlong period, nearly 3,000 kinds of historical books and classics were destroyed, with more than 60,000 to 70,000 volumes.
Third, feudal and ignorant Manchu rule led to a weakening of China's power and its backwardness to the world. At a time when the world industrial revolution was in full swing, the Qing Dynasty still stubbornly closed the door to communication with the West, and arbitrarily pursued a policy of cultural absolutism, using extreme means such as the literal prison to imprison thought and control speech in order to maintain its feudal rule.
Therefore, the most direct thing was to cause the backwardness of the entire Chinese society at that time, thus widening the gap between China and the West and hindering the progress and development of China's society.
Talking about this benefit, the most obvious is the promotion effect on the strengthening of feudal monarchy.
The literal prison is a product of the heyday, an extreme means used by rulers to stabilize their political power and consolidate their rule. Undoubtedly, the literal prison has indeed greatly strengthened the ideological and cultural control of the rulers over the entire country, thus making the development of the country more stable.
In addition, the rise of the literal prison made the literati at that time afraid to develop new ideas, so they turned to the study of some classical poetry, and the social atmosphere became quaint. During the Qing Dynasty, a large number of cultural heritage of the previous dynasties was sorted out, which made many classical books popular again, and also left countless valuable literary wealth experiences for the research of later generations.
Therefore, in this context, the Qing Dynasty examination and evidence science developed imperceptibly, and gradually occupied an extremely important position in academic history.
brief summary
Looking at the heyday of the ancient dynasties, it is not difficult to find that most of them have the blood and tears of the literati, which is due to the need for the rule of the great unified dynasty. Only when there was war and chaos was when the ideas of various schools and factions were released, and the phenomenon of a hundred schools of thought and a hundred flowers blooming in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods appeared against the background of such an era.
Judging from the above analysis, the prison of words shackled the ideological progress of the Qing Dynasty and caused many harms that led to historical regression. Perhaps the only consolation is that many literati can only indulge in the study of classical poetry books, have a lot of novel discoveries, and eventually derive a new scholarship.
Reference: Philosophy of History
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