In the eighteenth year of Hongwu, a corruption case occurred in Daming that shocked all the officials of the whole country, and Guo Huan, the servant of the household department, and many officials throughout the country jointly engaged in fraud and embezzlement, and about thirteen political departments in the country were implicated.
It is reported that Guo Huan's corruption and bribery caused a total of 24 million quintals of refined grain losses to the country, and at that time, the country's annual income was only 29.4 million quintals of refined grain, accounting for more than 80%.
Such a huge amount of corruption, anyone who came could not help but feel frightened, and the enraged Zhu Yuanzhang immediately ordered that all high-level officials related to this case be executed, and other low-level officials were also punished accordingly.
According to the "History of Ming", "From the six left and right attendants below, tens of thousands of people died. ”
At the same time, because the case involved a large number of official and local powerful activities, a large number of rich aristocrats in Jiangsu and Zhejiang went bankrupt because of this case.
In this case, Zhu Yuanzhang showed an attitude of zero tolerance for the phenomenon of corruption and bribery of officials, and adopted the method of heavy punishment, slight offense, and knife sawing.
The Guo Huan case is only a microcosm of Zhu Yuanzhang's purge of qing politics, preceded by the Empty Seal Case and the Hu Weiyong Case, each of which was able to successfully implicate tens of thousands of officials, and each time it also adopted heavy punishment and extrajudicial punishment, large-scale purging of corrupt and bribed officials, and the establishment of Jinyi Wei to strengthen the surveillance of officials.
Why Zhu Yuanzhang wanted to purge the officials on such a large scale was his idea. At that time, with the gradual improvement of the national situation, there were several problems that needed to be solved urgently, which had seriously interfered with the political and economic ecology of the entire country.
First, a large number of meritorious nobles are increasingly blind to the king's law and act arbitrarily, seriously disrupting the normal operation of the country;
Second, the gradual strengthening of local powerful forces, they joined hands with officials at all levels and meritorious nobles from top to bottom, colluded with each other, annexed land, concealed land property, evaded taxes and avoided taxes, and so on, these things were stubborn problems for the new dynasty of the Ming Dynasty.
Zhu Yuanzhang had a clear understanding of this, and the four major cases in the early Ming Dynasty were all directly directed at the three forces of meritorious nobles, local tyrants, and corrupt and bribery officials at all levels.
The outbreak of the Guo Huan case shocked all officials inside and outside the government and the public, and some small officials who were thousands of miles away had to worry about it when they worked every day.
Although Zhu Yuanzhang adopted a relatively crude method in dealing with the problem of corruption, it still had an immediate effect; a large number of local tyrants and strong people went bankrupt as a result, expanded the proportion of rural self-cultivated peasants, and a large amount of concealed land was re-included in the state's tax revenue, laying a foundation for good social and economic development and laying a solid foundation for the later Yongle prosperous world.
It is worth mentioning that the Guo Huan case also unexpectedly contributed to the birth of capitalized figures, and Zhu Yuanzhang, in order to put an end to the corrupt and perverted behavior of officials by falsifying numbers, changed the numbers "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, hundred, and thousand" to "one, two, three, wanton, wu, lu, qi, pinch, nine, pick, hundred, and qian".