introduction
Bureaucracy was an important part of the ancient superstructure of the mainland, but due to the uneven personal qualities of officials, corruption also became a serious governance problem that had long plagued the rulers of various dynasties.
When it comes to the famous "anti-corruption fighter" in the history of the mainland, it is none other than Ming Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang. Its anti-corruption efforts are so strong and the punishment is severe, which can be described as unprecedented and unprecedented. However, the brutal punishment used did not solve the problem of corruption in the early Ming Dynasty.
How to eliminate greed? The difficult problem that plagued the entire Ming Dynasty, but a hundred years later, the Yongzheng Emperor, the ruler of the Qing Dynasty, handed in a full score.
1. Eliminate evil and fight corruption in the early Ming Dynasty
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, legislation stipulated that anyone who embezzled more than 60 taels of silver would be immediately beheaded. Even in the early days of Ming Hongwu, when everything was in ruins, sixty taels was not a huge amount of stolen money, but only a year's salary for second-grade officials in the imperial court.
Later, Zhu Yuanzhang even amended the law, saying that anyone who embezzled would be executed if he received a report. In addition to the law, Ming Taizu also set appalling penalties specifically for corrupt officials.
In the early Ming Dynasty, almost all torture was used on corrupt officials, skinning and cramping, and iron brushes were delayed, and anyone involved in corruption was more serious than treason, and was sentenced to death.
At that time, the local Yamen Middle Hall also set up a special "land temple", and when local officials were caught corrupt, they would skin them and display them to the public, and hang them in the ancestral hall to set an example.
According to legend, Zhu Liangzu, a relative of the clan in the early Ming Dynasty, and his son Zhu Xian shielded bullies, were suspected of corruption, and were eventually whipped to death in the court.
The famous "Kongyin case" and "Guo Huan case" in the early Ming Dynasty were listed as the top two of the four major cases in Hongwu, and the imperial court buried tens of thousands of corpses and shed thousands of miles of blood for the treatment of corrupt officials. In the case alone, all the officials of the main printing industry in more than 1,000 counties across the country were killed, and the total number of people implicated in the case reached several thousand.
Guo Huan's case implicated more than 30,000 people, and it is said that the number of killings was so high that all the families of the wealthier officials in the imperial court were destroyed.
For a while, panicked officials in office would say goodbye to their wives in the morning, explain their land and property, and even buy coffins before daring to go to the court.
In the end, it was under the strong dissuasion of Empress Ma that Zhu Yuanzhang curbed his killing behavior.
Second, it is better to obstruct than to slack? Returning to the public and "raising cheap money"
Despite enacting the toughest anti-corruption laws in all of Chinese history, corruption in the Ming Dynasty did not abate. Corrupt officials are killing more and more, criminal acts are not curtailed, and torture has even brought about serious personnel shortages.
In the fourth year of Hongwu, a total of 364 candidates were admitted through the imperial examination, and one year later, six were sentenced to death for corruption, and 358 were also sentenced to death for work style.
The so-called death penalty is that because of the lack of personnel, the official who committed the crime is allowed to handle the case, and then the execution is issued after the case is over, and there is an embarrassing scene of "wearing a yoke in the hall and trying under the court".
In other words, under the severe punishment of Zhu Yuanzhang, corrupt officials did not decrease but increased, and in the four years of Hongwu, none of the 364 new officials were innocent.
The new emperor ascended the throne, corruption was rife, and the imperial court was difficult to govern ... After Zhu Yuanzhang, these problems were circulated between the kings of the Ming dynasty, but they were never truly rationalized.
It was not until the Yongzheng period of the Qing Dynasty, when reforms were implemented to eliminate corruption, that the problem of corruption was truly dealt with in a relatively positive way.
Learning from the experience of his predecessors, the Yongzheng Emperor deeply realized that the magistrate is like managing water, and it is better to open the flow and dredge it than to torture and intimidate, and use a more gentle and effective strategy that points to the fundamentals.
The anti-corruption methods he used mainly include two parts:
One is the so-called "return to the public with envy".
Different from the modern era with developed science and technology, ancient taxation relied on the government to collect grain, and the grain was converted into silver money, and the silver money was recast into official silver. Due to the receipt of physical goods, it is inevitable that there will be "loss" in the process of transportation and casting, and the difference caused by these so-called losses gives officials an opportunity.
For example, when collecting taxes, some magistrates will use a method called "dripping and kicking", that is, by kicking hard the container containing grain, spilling grain and rice, and classifying the fallen part as loss to obtain "benefits".
When the government collects silver money tax, it will also collect more, called "fire consumption", that is, there will be a certain loss in the process of silver casting, so the people should pay more taxes to pay for the fire consumption of the official government.
After the Yongzheng Emperor came to power, the first thing to solve was the problem of fire consumption. The Yongzheng Emperor proposed that "fire consumption should be returned to the public", treating the so-called additional tax amount as official income, setting up a special agency to collect statistics, and sending tax commissioners to supervise the annual fire consumption of each locality.
However, at that time, officials engaged in behaviors such as "fire consumption" and "kicking and kicking", mainly because the salaries offered by the imperial court were too low.
In the early Qing Dynasty, the old system was inherited, and the official to the best silver was only 180 taels, Lumi was 180 taels, and the annual salary of Qipinzhi County was only 45 taels. Prefecture and county officials have to support their masters and buy carriages and horses, and their salaries are difficult to cover their daily expenses.
Therefore, the second is the "maintenance of cheap silver" system that is bound to the "fire consumption to the public" system. These silver money, which was charged into the public treasury, was used under the unified management of the state to commend officials and distributed to those civil servants who were clean and excellent.
The treatment of officials has been improved, and the channels of corruption have been managed by the central government, and corruption in the early Qing Dynasty has been curbed.
Third, the anti-corruption eradication of the roots, the comparison of the success or failure of the anti-corruption in the Ming and Qing Dynasties
Why did the anti-corruption campaign in the early Ming Dynasty use such torture? To answer this question, we need to start with both personal emotions and practical needs.
First, there is the strong personal sentiment in Zhu Yuanzhang's policy.
Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang came from a peasant family, and since childhood, his family has been plagued by corrupt officials of the Yuan Dynasty.
The "History of Ming, Taizu Benji" records that in the fourth year of the Yuan Dynasty (1344), the Yellow River burst its banks, hundreds of thousands of people along the river became refugees, and when the Huai River suffered serious plague and drought, and the corruption of officials in the Yuan Dynasty caused a large number of refugees to starve to death, Zhu Yuanzhang's family died in this disaster.
In just half a month, all his relatives died of starvation, which made Zhu Yuanzhang extremely hate official corruption since he was a child, and the resentment brought about by his childhood experience turned into the emotional cornerstone of severe punishment and anti-corruption in the early Ming Dynasty after Zhu Yuanzhang ascended the throne.
The fundamental reason for the severe punishment and anti-corruption in the early Ming Dynasty was the social reality that the Ming Dynasty was early established, everything was in ruins, and the people's livelihood was deteriorating.
Under the rendering of the Yuan Dynasty, official corruption has become a habit, and after more than 20 years of chaos, the people at this time are starved and the fields are barren.
Restoring production became one of the most important tasks at that time, and controlling corruption and ensuring people's livelihood was undoubtedly an important measure to promote agricultural stability. The urgent practical needs and the emotional factors of Taizu himself led to two major failures in the anti-corruption campaign in the early Ming Dynasty: impatience and low treatment.
The Yongzheng Emperor, who was born in the royal family, while understanding the sufferings of the people, knew better the art of control than Zhu Yuanzhang, who was a peasant, and also had a deeper vision, and well grasped the key point that "official corruption has nothing to do with human nature, but due to insufficient income."
When the root causes are solved, the problem of corruption will naturally be solved.
epilogue
Punishing corruption is wide-ranging and cannot be achieved overnight.
In today's anti-corruption work, we should establish a long-term anti-corruption mechanism, improve the talent selection system, improve supervision, and while increasing the intensity of punishment for corruption, attach importance to education, unify in various aspects, and ultimately achieve the goal of fighting corruption. #历史开讲 #