#历史开讲 #
Introduction:
Last year, this county town, the people of the county did not speak out about it. Today, the Zaijia Zhu in the county is dyed with the blood of living beings.
The Tang Dynasty poet Du Xunhe passed through Hucheng County twice, the first time only heard the people shouting grievances and complaints, and the second time he saw the county commander wearing the dress worn when he was promoted, and lamented that the high ascension of officials was originally based on sucking the flesh and blood of the people and searching for the people's fat and anointment.
Since ancient times, corruption has been an open secret in ancient Chinese officialdom, and as an official of the imperial court, he did not want to solve problems for the people, but instead scavenged the people's money, and was bent on opening up relations with his superiors to pave his own officialdom.
But if there is any dynasty that is most corrupt, it is the Ming Dynasty.
At the beginning of the founding of the Ming Dynasty, corruption was already very serious, and in the eighteenth year of Hongwu, the case of Guo Huan, a household attendant, who embezzled autumn grain, shocked the government and the public, and involved many central and local officials.
Zhu Yuanzhang personally handled it, and since then introduced various measures in the hope of preventing similar incidents. As a result, the Ming Dynasty spent about a hundred years in the early years, when politics was relatively clear and society was relatively stable.
However, the good times did not last long, and during the orthodox years at the turn of the early and middle Ming dynasties, corruption reappeared. In the following years of Zhengde and Jiajing, corruption intensified, and gradually became one of the triggers for the demise of the Ming Dynasty.
First, the beneficial official Houlu is a capable product, and the cold and thrifty officials are exempt from laughter
Three factors that prevailed in corruption in the Ming Dynasty were the low salaries of officials, the culture of officialdom, and the appeasement and connivance of rulers.
Unreasonable low salaries have led some officials to the road of corruption. Throughout ancient Chinese history, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, was a feudal emperor known for his diligence and simplicity.
The poverty of his birth and the hardships on the road to revolt made him develop the habit of opposing luxury and waste and advocating frugality. As a result, the salaries of officials in the Ming Dynasty became correspondingly thin.
For example, in the Han Dynasty, the official salaries ranged from "100 stones" to "2,000 stones", and from time to time there was a salary addition, and in the Song Dynasty, the official salaries ranged from 136 stone to 3800 stone, in addition to a lot of food, public use, tea and soup money, etc.
However, in the Ming Dynasty, even in the highest amount, the salaries of Ming officials were 956 stone less than the Han 2,000 stone and 2,756 stone less than the Song Dynasty. From the "History of Ming and Food Goods", "Since the thinness of ancient officials and Dai, there is no such person" is enough to glimpse the situation of officials in the Ming Dynasty.
For example, Chen Shou, a Jiangxi native who had been in politics for forty years at that time, and was an official to an attendant and a shangshu, had no place to return, and even his family could not afford to bury him after his death.
The meager salary is not enough to support daily expenses and the expenses of the old and young at home, except for a very small number of officials who regard the word "integrity" as more important than their lives, and more officials choose to go down the road of corruption, the so-called "he has nothing to support himself, and he does not take the people's favor" is the best explanation for this.
The officialdom atmosphere in the middle and late Ming Dynasty can be described by the four words "black and white upside down", under this atmosphere, honest and honest officials have become outliers.
In the early Ming Dynasty, corruption was still regarded as immoral, and most officials knew to guard themselves and love themselves. In the middle and late period, the emergence of capitalism, the change of production mode and way of life caused the renewal of conceptual patterns, and people's enthusiasm for money has exceeded ever.
The same is true of officialdom, where officials' ways of acting as officials are quietly changing. The credo of Kuang Shiji was forgotten, and they began to work as officials to make a fortune.
There was a wave of money-seeking, pleasure-seeking in the bureaucracy. People began to use new value standards to judge officials, and the amount of wealth they made was the yardstick for measuring their official status.
In this smoky officialdom environment, corrupt officials form small groups by offering and accepting bribes to protect each other.
The survival of Qing officials in the officialdom is difficult, "that is, there are Qing cultivators, or do not protect their wives, and people are eliminated by pedantic", which is not only difficult to carry out their ambitions, but may also attract ridicule and ridicule, and even be retaliated.
The appeasement and connivance of the rulers has prevented corruption from being effectively curbed. In the Ming Dynasty, the punishment for corrupt behavior was first tightened and then relaxed, which made the cost of corruption lower and lower, which invisibly encouraged the arrogance of corrupt officials. After Emperor Minghui, the rigid policies that had been used to deal with corruption were replaced by leniency, and even the government even indulged in some corrupt behavior.
It must be mentioned that even the emperor was involved in the operation of accumulating wealth, which made the problem of corruption more and more serious. The Wanli Emperor sent a large number of mine superintendents and tax envoys to all walks of life in various places to accumulate wealth for his own use. He was even scolded by the official, "There are four diseases of wine and wealth, and the disease is not light."
Second, the spectacle of bribery in the Ming Dynasty
Objectively speaking, corruption runs through the entire ancient history of China, but only in the Ming Dynasty, the widespread and extreme corruption, the leakage of corruption techniques and the huge amount of corruption formed a "spectacle".
Bribery is constantly emerging. When a briber bribes, he usually gives a handkerchief, a rare book, and a new edition of the book, and then attaches a number of gold and silver jewelry to it. It is both elegant and concealed.
In order to achieve their goals more smoothly, bribe-givers often turn to the bribe-taker.
For example, during the Jiajing period, there was an official who liked to eat turtles by nature, and at that time, some people were good at cooking this delicacy, so they often used this sycophancy to curry favor with this official, and soon after he was really promoted.
There are also bribe-takers who seize all available "opportunities" to give gifts to bribe-takers, so that bribes are justified and people cannot be faulted. For example, meeting gifts, holiday gifts, birthday gifts, bosses have festive things such as marriage, childbirth, promotion, housewarming, etc., there are many names, all of which are good opportunities to bribe in the name of gifts.
The officialdom in the middle and late Ming Dynasty can be said to have gradually become a source of corruption and a market for power and power trading. This has also led to a "culture of bribery"—the creation of several metaphors for bribery and corruption.
For example, gold and silver, which are common in bribery, are replaced with yellow and white rice, yellow essence and white wax.
Li Guang, a major embezzler of the Ming Dynasty, when he ordered people to search his home, he found a booklet, which recorded that "it is necessary to bribe people to advance... Feed yellow and white rice thousands of stones", the yellow and white rice is not ordinary grain, but refers to gold and silver.
In a feudal society dominated by "rule by man," power and corruption are twin brothers, and officials, big and small, do their best to maximize the role of limited power and obtain the greatest economic benefits.
In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, whether it was a cabinet member, a Beijing official or a local official, whether an officer or a eunuch, they were somewhat contaminated with the vice of corruption.
In the early Jiajing, Longqing, and Wanli periods, the power held by the chief assistant of the cabinet almost reached its peak, and compared with the position of prime minister of the previous dynasty, cabinet members often used their power to embezzle and accept bribes, embezzlement of the law, embezzlement of public funds, and all kinds of crimes are innumerable.
Yan Song, the chief assistant of the cabinet during the Jiajing period, is one of the typical ones, and the history records that "Yan Songzhi's bribery is unprecedented since ancient power traitors"; after his downfall, the government investigated and dealt with his family property, including more than 30,000 taels of gold, more than 200,000 taels of silver, and countless treasures and jade. It even exceeds the royal treasure, which is enough to show the depth of its corruption.
In addition to cabinet members, Beijing officials and local officials also have their own ways of corrupting and bribery, and the clear system stipulates that local officials should make pilgrimages to Beijing once every three years to report their work to the central authorities and take the opportunity to inspect officials. In order to obtain excellent results of investigations, local officials often paid bribes to Beijing officials.
Or Beijing officials use their power to openly demand bribes from local officials. Zhou Yingqiu, as an official Shangshu during the Apocalypse Year, he had publicly demanded prices according to the size of his official position many times, and it was rumored that he could get a bribe of 10,000 taels of silver every day, so he had the nickname "Sunday Wan".
In addition to withholding soldiers' salaries and embezzling treasury silver, some generals did not report in time after soldiers fled or died, but instead assumed the leader's salary and took their money and grain for themselves. There are also military generals who encroach on the tuntian, accept bribes from subordinates to provide them with ways to promote them, occupy military service (private service makes soldiers handle private affairs for generals), use their authority to embezzle other military materials, such as officials in charge of military weapons manufacturing embezzle material prices and silver, resulting in substandard weapons, and so on.
Third, for a time to abide by the order and fear the law, the law loves the people, and the ruler rejuvenates the king
The demise of any dynasty is invariably linked to the catalytic role of corruption. Therefore, each dynasty was founded at the beginning of the lessons of the demise of the previous dynasty and paid enough attention to corruption. The rulers of the Ming Dynasty were no exception.
The Ming Dynasty promulgated a series of laws related to the punishment of corruption, such as the Law, the Decree, the Great Edict, and the Regulations on Questioning Punishment. Taking the "Great Commandment" as an example, it exposes the corrupt officials who violate the law and harm the people, and admonishes his subjects to take this as a warning. Among them, the punishment of officials was extremely severe, such as "clan criticism, delay, chopping off fingers, and cutting off hands." Some of the torture has served as a deterrent to corrupt officials.
Rulers are also further refining their monitoring mechanisms to curb corruption. Zhu Yuanzhang changed the imperial history station to the capital inspection yuan, and the duty of the imperial history of the capital was to correct and impeach the hundred divisions, and its duties included supervising lawlessness, rectifying official style, and inspecting officials.
In addition to the Metropolitan Prosecutor's Office, the Ming Dynasty also set up six departments in the central government, which also played a supervisory role that could not be ignored, and some officials were loyal to their duties, exposing and flogging many corrupt elements.
In addition, the Ming Dynasty established a set of systems for evaluating and punishing officials, and its assessment system mainly included two categories: examination completion and inspection. The latter is aimed at the discipline of officials.
The above-mentioned measures have indeed played a positive role in curbing corruption.
The promulgated legal provisions were the legal guarantee for the long-term peace and stability of the Ming Dynasty. A series of relevant legislation against corruption and bribery crimes in the early years of the Ming Dynasty and continuous amendments in the later period enabled the normal operation of the Ming Dynasty for 277 years.
According to the records of the "Ming History and Criminal Law": "For a while, the law obeys the law and fears the law, and the law loves the people. Compared with the last years of the Yuan Dynasty, the goal of "clarifying the rule of officials" to a certain extent was indeed achieved, and the official atmosphere gradually improved.
However, in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the law paled in front of some privileged officials, and some officials regarded the law as a play, and violated the law and committed fraud. The previous system of investigation was often a formality, failed to play its own role, and gradually became a tool for the party to fight against differences.
The system and the efforts of some officials alone could not stop the spread of corruption, and even though there were struggles and hopes on the way to reform, the end of the decline of the Ming dynasty was ultimately unreversed, which is embarrassing.
Epilogue:
The corruption in the Ming Dynasty was so serious and the disease so difficult to get rid of was enough to wake up to future generations.
The phenomenon of corruption has appeared from time to time in the historical process after human society entered the era of civilization, and even if it disappeared for a short time, it has never been written out of the history books.
Corruption is related to a certain degree of greed in human nature, and this greed cannot be restrained by people's own conscience and self-discipline, but by just systems and laws. But at the same time, the implementation of any system requires a group of talents with wisdom, enthusiasm and perseverance.
Therefore, in the process of punishing corruption, we must pay equal attention to the improvement of the legal system and the cultivation of anti-corruption personnel, otherwise it is easy to cause the consequences of double the effort. The anti-corruption process of the Ming Dynasty also demonstrated this law.
In the end, the problem of corruption has not been effectively solved. And when the wheel of history runs forward for hundreds of years, today's people should learn from the experience and lessons of their predecessors to ensure the well-being of the people, create a clean and healthy social atmosphere, and maintain the orderly and benign operation of the state apparatus.
Bibliography:
"History of Ming Food"
"The Great Curse"
"Records of Ming Taizu"