Today we finish Chen Xubin's "Two Thousand Years of the Qin System: Rules of Power for Feudal Emperors".
Chen Xubin's book is not thick, you only need to spend an afternoon to read it. Although the number of pages is small, the time span is long. The author selects several important figures from the two thousand years of Chinese history, from the pre-Qin to the end of the Qing Dynasty, and re-examines the heroes Hao Jie, the Qin Emperor Han Wu, the Tang Emperor song zu who have been admired for generations, with the perspective of power, showing us the other side of their great achievements.
In fact, when the author says it, it is nothing more than to tell us that those who have achieved success in history are often masters of the power game, and to put it more bluntly, they are all dictators. Even those emperors who bear the banner of "benevolent kings" first care about whether their power is stable and whether their desires can be satisfied in time.
Among them, there were emperors who were good at using institutional tools to control Li Min, such as Qin Shi Huang. There was also Cao Cao, the emperor of WeiWu, who was brilliant and fierce. Even Tang Taizong Li Shimin, who is known for his enlightened advice, said one thing with his mouth and one set behind his back. When the ministers criticized him, they accepted him with an open mind, but they went back to doing their own thing and took the exhortations of others as the wind in their ears.
However, in my opinion, among all the emperors, the most cunning, the most sinister, and the most proficient in power skills are none other than the Yongzheng Emperor.
Yongzheng you must be no stranger, many people know him through historical dramas and palace fighting dramas. Most people's impression of Yongzheng is nothing more than the following two points:
On the one hand, Yongzheng is quite diligent, a workaholic, busy from early morning to late at night every day, without any bad habits, and is a rare good emperor.
On the other hand, Yongzheng is also a ruthless man, and his ability to stand out from the fierce struggle to seize the wife proves in itself that his city government is deep and his means are extraordinary. After coming to power, Yongzheng showed no mercy to his brothers who had competed with him for the throne in the past, and also created a secret folding system, encouraging ministers to make small reports and have zero tolerance for cheating and concealment.
Yongzheng film and television image
Regarding the dictatorship of Yongzheng, there are various terrible legends in the folk. For example, there is a hidden weapon called "Blood Drops", which is said to be the invention of Yongzheng. It can be put around the neck of a person, surrounded by a mechanism with a sharp blade, and the assassin only needs to pull the rope, and the blade in the mechanism can cut off the head. Yongzheng is killing disobedient people in this way.
Yongzheng concentrated almost all the characteristics of a dictatorial monarch: fierce heart, harsh punishment, arbitrary behavior. However, compared to these, the most unique thing about Yongzheng is that he likes to insult the personality of the minister.
In the book, the author gives two examples to illustrate Yongzheng's means.
The first example comes from the second year of Yongzheng, when Fengqiu County, Henan Province, demanded that "students and civilians work together with the people on an errand on the grounds that repairing the Yellow River embankment requires manpower and material resources." The result caused an uproar.
Why is that? Originally, the Qing government had stipulated that readers could be exempted from military service and forced labor, and whether you had a meritorious name or not, as long as you were a reader, you could enjoy this privilege.
However, after Yongzheng came to power, he felt that something was wrong, so why should the readers make an exception? On the one hand, he believes that readers are not entitled to this privilege. On the other hand, in order to avoid servitude, many ordinary people organized themselves into the so-called "Confucian households" through the back door of the trust relationship, so that the manpower that the imperial court could recruit was reduced.
So Yongzheng issued a new rule: Unless an official or a scholar who has obtained a meritorious name, no one else can be exempted from military service.
We will leave aside the quality of this new policy, but for readers, it is nothing less than a great insult. In the traditional concept of Chinese, the hands of the reader are never stained with mud. Now that you actually want them to do those dirty and rough jobs, how can the readers accept it?
Therefore, the readers of Fengqiu County took the lead in attacking, and they decided to give the government a downward spiral - a collective strike.
We all know the importance of the imperial examination in ancient societies. The boycott of the readers is equivalent to the strike of enterprise workers, telling their bosses: We will not work for the government in the future!
This was not a big deal. But in the process of examining the ins and outs of the incident, Yongzheng found a big problem. Among the officials who suppressed the boycott, only one official named Tian Wenjing was the most active, while other Officials in Henan generally held a negative attitude. And Tian Wenjing was not from keju.
Tian Wenjing
Why are most officials reluctant to suppress the strike? The reason is simple: officials and readers are one and the same. Officials themselves came up this road through the imperial examination, and they naturally wore the same pants as the readers. If the readers of the world are unlucky and their lips are cold, then it will not be them who are unlucky!
For Yongzheng, this poses a major challenge to his authority, in his opinion, officials have been complicit with the readers, you refuse to work for the imperial court today, tomorrow may be encouraged by the common people to rise up!
Therefore, Yongzheng instructed Tian Wenjing to impeach officials from the Henan Provincial Examination. As I said before, Tian Wenjing was not from a scientific background, and he was already looked down upon in the official field that emphasized academic qualifications. Not only that, Tian Wenjing also often appointed city scoundrels as cool officials and brutalized local people.
For such a person, of course, officials will not buy it. They wrote to Yongzheng to complain, saying that Tian Wenjing's appointment of treacherous villains was a scourge to the people.
In the face of the impeachment of officials, Tian Wenjing was not in a hurry. Unexpectedly, he confessed his sins to Yongzheng, and then the conversation turned sharply, and he pointed out to Yongzheng that the most fundamental reason why the officials impeached him was that they were all from the imperial court and formed a friendship party for their own interests.
Tian Wenjing was a very cunning person, and he knew very well what the emperor was most concerned about. For Yongzheng, power is always the first. Power is threatened, more seriously than ordinary people. Therefore, instead of punishing Tian Wenjing, he also granted him great powers to encourage him to continue to examine officials who were born in keju.
Please note that Yongzheng is not unaware of Tian Wenjing's misdeeds against the people. Even so, he deliberately let a person who has a stain on his character and is looked down upon by others to supervise the group. This act itself is a kind of humiliation for the reader. This is tantamount to telling everyone: I would rather use a villain with flawed moral character than you so-called upright gentlemen.
In order to take revenge on the readers, Yongzheng also has a more ingenious approach. For example, Li Fu, the governor of Zhili, once played an impeachment of Tian Wenjing, saying that he had done many things that hurt nature and reason. However, Yongzheng, out of his own selfishness, not only did not hold Tian Wenjing responsible, but also removed Li Fu from his post, and finally simply threw him into prison.
Even in prison, Yongzheng still did not spare Li Fu, and he twice ordered Li Fu to be tied up and sent to the execution ground to watch the execution of the prisoners. This is no longer a secret humiliation, but a clear attempt to embarrass you.
Note that this kind of personal insult to the reader is much more cruel than physical annihilation or mental repression. Readers love face, have great integrity, and want them to die, they are not afraid, so that at least they can leave a name in history. However, forcing them to be ugly and making them confess their sins, this made the reader Sven sweep the floor and completely lose his personality, but Yongzheng enjoyed the pleasure from it.
The second example of Yongzheng torturing a reader comes from the famous Nian TangYao case.
Nian Qianyao was once Yongzheng's favorite vassal, as powerful as the sun in the sky, and later the monarch lost peace and was given death by Yongzheng. With the fall of Nian Qianyao, Yongzheng also made a big fuss about this matter, and by the way, he taught those officials who had been good with Nian Qianyao.
There was a man named Qian Mingshi, a famous scholar in Jiangnan, known as "Jiang Zuo Caizi", before Nian Qianyao lost power, Qian Mingshi wrote eight poems to send to him, and one of the words caused him great trouble.
This passage is written like this: Divide the Shaanxi Jingqi Zhou Zhaobo, from the Tiangu Horn Han General. Zhou Zhaobo, that is, the Duke of Zhou and the Duke of Zhao, when they assisted the young King Cheng of Zhou and achieved a great deed.
Readers patted officials on the ass, and this kind of thing is not new from ancient times to the present. Ordinary people will not feel that there is any problem when reading this poem, but Yongzheng does not see it that way.
Yongzheng felt that comparing Nian Qianyao to the Duke of Zhou was comparing him to the young King Wen of Zhou, which was obviously looking down on him. But even more serious than that are the values behind the poem. The relationship between Zhou Gong and Zhou Chengwang is the relationship between auxiliary and assisted, they are like partners of a start-up company, cooperating with each other, and each has a division of labor, and the relationship between them is relatively equal.
Obviously, Yongzheng did not want his ministers to be the Duke of Zhou, and as the most dictatorial monarch in Chinese history, how could Yongzheng possibly share power with anyone? Therefore, he grabbed the poem of Qian Mingshi and made a big fuss and decided to beat him up fiercely.
To change to other emperors, there are usually two ways to deal with such literati, either kill or exile. But Yongzheng felt that it was really cheap for the other party to do so, and he wanted to strike at the things that the readers cared about most.
Don't you love to write poetry? Okay, the emperor now immediately orders all the officials in the capital to write poems satirizing you. Not only that, Yongzheng also gave all these satirical poems to Qian Mingshi, ordered the other party to edit and publish them, and published his own books to satirize himself.
Not only that, Yongzheng also gave Qian Mingshi a plaque with the inscription: "Famous Sinners." And asked to hang it in the lobby of Qian's house. He also instructed the local Zhixian to go to the Qianming family on the first and fifteenth day of the first day of the year to see if the plaque above the lobby was still there.
The purpose of Yongzheng's use of this trick is to make a reader like Qian Mingshi unable to lift his head. Yongzheng as a whole, not only showed his fierceness, but also had to stand on the commanding heights of morality, condescending, and completely take away the right to speak of the reader in public opinion.
It can be seen that the autocratic tradition of China's feudal politics, which lasted for more than two thousand years, has reached yongzheng and has become a pure fire. Although the previous emperors were also dictatorial, their means were nothing more than through institutions and killing. Like Qin Shi Huang formulating harsh laws, it finally made people angry. Zhu Yuanzhang brutally killed corrupt officials and heroes, causing a storm in the government and the public.
The dictatorship of some emperors is soft, such as Li Shimin, who opened up his speech, humbly accepted advice, and vigorously advocated the imperial examination, saying that "all the heroes of the world are in my hands", on the surface, Li Shimin absorbed a large number of intellectuals, but in fact let them be under their control.
The Yongzheng Emperor, on the other hand, wanted to be blue. Those soft and hard means, he is proficient in everything. On the one hand, he dealt with political enemies and disobedient ministers, and he always killed decisively, and the six relatives did not recognize him.
On the other hand, he can also make his subordinates cry out and embrace himself with a dead heart. For example, he would write down to the minister replies such as "I miss you very much" and "I really don't know how to hurt you", and he would do his best. When Tang Yao was favored that year, he sent someone to send the tribute lychees from Beijing to Xining to let the other party taste the early.
But in addition to these, Yongzheng will also have a hand, he not only wants to punish those who disobey, but also make them convinced, and even let them punch themselves in the face. Rather than physical annihilation, Yongzheng prefers to suppress them morally and humiliate them on a personal level.
This is where dictators really fear. Not only does he put the knife in your neck, but he also forces you to admit that you deserve it. Worse, you even have to thank the knife-wielding man for mentally sacrificing your free will completely.
In today's popular parlance, this is the leader "routine" you, and the dictator's routine, always make you unconscious, but looking back, it makes people think about it very much.