The Southern and Northern Dynasties of the Wei and Jin Dynasties were the period when the Shi clan gate valves were in the highest ruling position. The scholar system was formed on the basis of the ever-expanding power of the bureaucratic landlords of the two Han Dynasties, and this system made the scholar clan the stable top of the feudal ruling class, enjoying all kinds of feudal privileges exclusively. This determines the great parasitic and decaying nature of the scholar system once it is formed. The extreme corruption of the Western Jin Dynasty's gate valve politics most epitomizes this.
Behind the formation of the scholar system there is a strong economic, political, military and other aspects of the foundation, so it is very difficult to break this system. The only thing that can be broken is a massive reshuffle. The repeated peasant uprisings during the Southern and Northern Dynasties satisfied this point, and coupled with the power struggle within the Shi clan, this political system began to decline in the Southern and Northern Dynasties.
The door valves were hit by the Peasants' War and other opposition forces and tended to decline, which can be roughly divided into three periods. The first period was under the blows of the great uprising of the people of all ethnic groups in the last years of the Western Jin Dynasty. The Western Jin Dynasty, ruled by the Shi clan, was destroyed. In this fierce class struggle, a large number of Gaomen, including the Sima royal family, were wiped out by the rebel army or ethnic minority chiefs, and except for some of the shi clan who fled south, the Gao Men shi who remained in the north suffered a heavy blow both economically and politically.
When the peasant rebels of Shi Le and Wang Mi suppressed the Gaomen clan, they would inevitably kill innocents indiscriminately, but their main attack was still directed at the rule of the gate valves. At the same time, the rebels killed countless bureaucrats in the siege.
After the impact of the great uprising of the people of all ethnic groups in the last years of the Western Jin Dynasty, the power of the Gaomen clan in the north was weakened for a time, so although there were differences in the regimes of the Sixteen Kingdoms, although the former Liang and Former Yan regimes were special, although other regimes used the shi clan to varying degrees, and some even tried to restore the clan system, most of the decision-making figures of the supreme ruling groups of each regime were from ethnic minority chiefs and Han Shu landlord classes.
At the end of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Sun En and Xu Daofu revolted, giving the Gaomen clan a second serious blow. After the overthrow of the Western Jin Dynasty, a large number of northern warriors fled south, and the Eastern Jin Dynasty was established on the basis of the combination of southern and northern shi clans, thus forming a heyday of door valve politics. The revolt of Sun En and Xu Daofu in the Eastern Jin Dynasty launched a fierce attack on the Eastern Jin dynasty, on the one hand, it dealt a heavy blow to the central shi clan ruling faction headed by Wang and Xie, resulting in the transfer of the military power of the northern province held by the shi clan to Liu Yu, who was from the Shu ethnic group; on the other hand, it caused the internal contradictions among the shi clan to deepen and a civil war (Huan Chu regime) broke out.
On the other hand, the struggle between the Liu Yu clique and the Huanxuan clique is in essence a struggle between the landlords of the Shu ethnic group and the landlords of the Shi ethnic group. After Liu Yu suppressed the rebellions of Xu Daofu and Lu Xun, he established the Song Dynasty in the second year of the Eastern Jin Dynasty (420 AD). The victory of liu Yuqibing, a landlord of the Shu clan, and his ascension to the emperor's throne, broke through a gap in the political monopoly of the Shi clan. Although throughout the Southern Dynasty, the Shi clan still had greater political and economic power, especially the social status has always been very high, but the Hanmen Shu landlords also continued to embrace the highest ruling level and gradually controlled the real power.
The struggle between the Shu and the Shi clan began as early as the Western Jin Dynasty, but the Shu landlords had close ties with the Gao Men Shi clan, most of them were their subordinates or protégés, and the two were equally oppressive and exploitative, there was no fundamental conflict of interest, and often united to suppress the resistance of the people of all ethnic groups. Victory in this struggle can only be achieved by relying on the large-scale class struggle of the masses of the people to weaken the power of the gentry. It was after the peasant war weakened the power of the warrior clan that the Liu Yu clique came to the political stage.
In the last years of the Northern Wei Dynasty, the people of all ethnic groups revolted, giving the Gaomen shi clan a third serious blow. After the northern Gaomen shi clan power was once hit, it gradually recovered in the late Sixteen Kingdoms, and played an important role in the process of northern Wei unifying the north and stabilizing the political situation. For example, the Northern Wei Ming Emperor Tuoba Si (409-424 AD) and the Taiwu Emperor Tuoba Tao (424-452 AD) used the warrior Cui Hao, "obeying the words, Ningkuo District Xia". Emperor Xiaowen of Wei made Gaomen Li Chong "prime minister's affairs" and "entrusted it to the Taiwan Division".
In the last years of the Northern Wei Dynasty, the people of all ethnic groups revolted, and the blows against the highest group of scholars were like destruction. The Northern Wei clan and the Gaomen clan were severely hit economically, politically, and militarily. When Ge Rong led hundreds of thousands of rebels from Hebei southward and their troops were directed directly at Kyoto, Erzhu Rong took advantage of the weakening of the power of the central warrior clan, the destruction of the main military force of Northern Wei, and the threat posed by the rebels' southward advance to Wei Ting, and in April of the first year of Wutai (528 AD), he raised an army to Luoyang and launched a massacre in Heyin (present-day east of Mengjin County, Henan), known in history as the "Change of Heyin". The essence of the "Heyin Revolution" was a struggle between the local chieftains and powerful factions against the central shi clan in power, although some innocents were killed indiscriminately, it was undoubtedly a serious blow to the Gaomen shi clan, which opened the way for Gao Huan and Yu Wentai to come to power and carry out political innovation, so it was of objectively positive significance.
Under the fatal blow of the uprising of the people of all ethnic groups, the fierce struggles between the supreme ruling groups of the Northern Wei Dynasty and between the ruling factions of the central shi clan and the local chieftains and powerful factions of the central shi clan were launched, which weakened the decadent forces of the northern Wei supreme shi clan door valve group. Politically, the two powerful chieftain groups of Daibei Huaishuo and Wuchuan, who belonged politically to the newly emerging Shu landlords, took the opportunity to rise up in the struggle to suppress the uprisings of the people of all ethnic groups and to eliminate the forces of the Erzhu clan. From the formal point of view, the regimes of Eastern Wei and Northern Qi and Western Wei and Northern Zhou were from unification to division, but in fact history continued to advance. The two new regimes controlled by the Gao clan and the Ziwen clan, whose highest-level decision-makers were mainly the landlords of the Shuai clan of the Daibei Haoqiang chieftain, while the former high-ranking shi clan Gaomen, who was originally in the highest ruling position, was demoted to a secondary position, thus bringing about a series of economic, political, and military reform measures, which had a far-reaching historical impact.
Taking the great uprising of the people of all ethnic groups in the last years of the Northern Wei Dynasty as a turning point, the Shu landlords began to rise and grasped the supreme military and political power, and the Gaomen clan further declined, thus undergoing major changes in the selection of officials.
After the Sui unified the whole country, although the Nine Pins Zhongzheng system was once implemented, due to the decline of the Gaomen clan and the rise of the landlord power of the Hanmen Shu clan, the Jiupin Zhongzheng system no longer met the needs of the redistribution of rights within the ruling class, and the result was "subliminal confusion" and was deposed. In the end, the Jiupin Zhongzheng system was replaced by the imperial examination system, which was a measure taken after the rise of the Hanmen Shu landlords in order to strengthen the centralization of power, abolish the political privileges of the Gaomen clan, and expand the class base of the feudal regime. It opened a new page in the history of elections in China's feudal society, reflecting the rise and fall of the status of the landlords of the Shu ethnic group and the ten ethnic groups of Gaomen in the feudal ruling class. The emergence of this change, in the final analysis, is mainly the result of the peasant war against the decaying door valve group.