The young historian Zheng Xiaoyou gave me a copy of her book "The Death of Nian Tangyao" last year, and after reading it, I had a lot of feelings in my heart, and I wanted to pick it up and write it up, but then I put it aside because of trivial matters. Recently, he also saw the new work "Cases and Punishments in the Qing Dynasty" (Shanxi People's Publishing House). After reading it, I was very impressed by the author's analysis of historical materials and the angle of writing, and his analysis of how criminal cases were interpreted into major political events to observe the evolution of political style and system inspired me a lot.
In the book, "The Matter Is Heavy on the Inside and Heavy on the Outside, and the Matter Has Been Accumulated: The Murder case of King Shuwending of Zhenping in Henan during the Guangxu Years," the process of twists and turns between this appalling unjust case from the local county, prefecture, and province to the criminal department of the imperial court, brilliantly shows the political ecology in which the local political forces represented by the Xianghuai system rose during the Years of Qing Xianfeng and Tongzhi and had an impact on the central authority. The struggle between the central and local governments over judicial power in this case is particularly noteworthy.
Zhao Shuqiao, a legal expert and criminal official who gained fame in the redress of this unjust case, entered the fast lane of promotion, and became one of the han ministers most trusted by Empress Dowager Cixi. After the Gengzi Incident, the empress dowager who had taken refuge in Xi'an, at the strong request of the Eight-Nation Alliance, had to order Zhao Shuqiao to commit suicide. At that time, the Qing court and public people believed that Zhao Zhi's execution was really unjust, and the empress dowager also understood this truth in her heart. But he had to be the scapegoat.
The tragedy of the life of this expert and high-ranking official may be a portrayal of the fate of the elite of scholars who were still loyal to the imperial court at the end of the Qing Dynasty, and it also indicates the fate of the Qing Empire that will quickly collapse.
The Wang Shuwending murder case was originally a very ordinary criminal case. In the fifth year of Guangxu (1879), a band of robbers robbed the rich families in Zhenping County, Henan, and Wang Shuwen, a naïve teenager who ran away from home, unknowingly let the gang of robbers lure him into taking care of the stolen goods. Later, a group of robbers, including the unfortunate Wang Shuwen, were captured by the local government, and the great thief Hu Tihuan, who participated in the crime, bought the messenger of the Yamen, stole the beam and changed the pillar, and Replaced Hu Tihuan with Wang Shuwen in the document. The real Hu Tihuan was released, and Wang Shuwen, who bore the name of "Hu Tihuan", was sentenced to death and was about to be beheaded. Before Wang Shuwen was sentenced, he cried out for injustice and suspended his beheading. The case was transmitted to the imperial court through Henan officials, and some of the section officials (that is, the imperial history and the matter of the special supervision) went to the imperial court and demanded that the case be retried.
The emperor ordered Li Henian, the governor of Henan, and Mei Qizhao, the governor of Hedao, to jointly review the case. The Qing Dynasty court was very strict in evaluating officials, especially once the wrong case was overturned, many officials up and down would be severely punished. Defending the officials in one's own jurisdiction is tantamount to defending oneself, which is almost an instinctive choice of local governors, and it is inevitable that the bureaucracy of a place will form an alliance from top to bottom. Li Henian and Mei Qichao still upheld the original judgment, that is, they determined that Wang Shuwen was not the real murderer. The imperial court's officials were in an uproar, and still did not spare the case, so the emperor again assigned the Punishment Department to directly examine the case. At this time, the case had been delayed until September of the eighth year of Guangxu. Zhao Shuqiao is a native of Xi'an and grew up in a hansu family. In the thirteenth year of Tongzhi (1874), he was twenty-eight years old. Starting from the Punishment Department as the chief of the Prison Department, he has been directly subordinate to the chief of the department, and has achieved the goal of being a member of the foreign lang in eight years. After he and several highly skilled colleagues took over, they quickly identified the flaws in the case.
The process of overturning the case was very difficult, and these legal experts in the Punishment Department were confronted with feudal officials who had been wandering in the official field for many years and were entangled in the imperial court and local forces. With the help of the "friendly army" Du Cha yuan in charge of supervision, borrowing the power of public opinion, and finally sacrificing the political weapon, Wang Shuwen was able to wash away his grievances and the real offenders were punished.
This political killer is the supremacy of the authority of the imperial court. The Ministry of Punishment impeached Li Henian in the context of the Shangshu to the Emperor: "The wind of grass and mustard life in the changwai province is still small, and the gradual deception of the imperial court by the Qijiang ministers is really great. Now that everything is light and heavy inside and outside, things have been accumulated, and there has not yet been such a blatant and protective person. ”
Zheng Xiaoyou regards this passage as a "theory of the heart", but in the era of centralized authoritarianism, this kind of rhetoric that rises to the height of politics is very effective and is also telling the truth. For maintaining the authority of the imperial court, the lives of grass people are indeed "small things".
Zhao Shuqiao made a great contribution to the rehabilitation of this unjust case, and he insisted on his own opinions and dared to openly confront Pan Zuyin, the Shangshu of the Punishment Department, who was very concerned about himself. Pan Zuyin had a deep friendship with the local powerful faction, and he once impressed the Xianfeng Emperor with the compromise of "the world can not be without Hunan, and Hunan can not be without Zuo Zongtang for a day", so that Zuo Zongtang not only washed away the crime of "inferior curtain", but also was entrusted with a heavy responsibility and soared. He was also one of the presiding judges of the case, Mei Qizhao, who was also ordered to review the case, in the same year (Xianfeng II Enko), so he once wanted to suppress the case.
Observing and analyzing this case, in the context of the whole politics of the late Qing Dynasty, it is even more able to see the complex spectrum reflected by it.
Before the Taiping Rebellion, the Qing Empire was highly centralized, and the personnel, military, fiscal, and judicial powers were controlled by the imperial court, which was said to be in the hands of the emperor, and the local officials were nothing more than doing errands according to the rules. Hong Yang rose from Lingnan and soon swept through southern China, the Eight Banners and Green Camp of the Qing court were no longer useful, and the Xiang army rose up in response to the situation, and its warriors were the Huai army separated from the Xiang army. As the war raged on, the emperor had to give local governors the power to work cheaply in order to support the crumbling regime. As a result, the power of the imperial court was gradually usurped by local officials. In terms of personnel power, the power of supervision over officials has increased, and there is no need to report to the imperial court when appointing messengers in their own jurisdiction; on the military side, they recruit and train bravely, and the generals have personal attachment to the commander-in-chief instead of fighting for the imperial court; in the fiscal and taxation aspect, they set up their own cards to collect taxes; the judicial aspect is that because of the "strike hard" of the wartime state, they have the right to "rectify the law on the spot" against criminals. Previously, the Qing court was very cautious about the execution of death row prisoners, and the death penalty cases imposed throughout the country were eventually summarized to the Punishment Department, reviewed by the Punishment Department's Autumn Trial Department, and the execution of the death penalty could only be carried out after approval.
Zeng Guofan, the founder of the Xiang Army, was the initiator of the large-scale "fa-rectification on the spot." At the end of the second year of Xianfeng, Zeng Guofan, who was at home in Ding You, was ordered to go out of the mountains and go to Changsha to serve as the minister of regimental training. The Zeng clan set up a "Trial Bureau" to use heavy codes in the chaotic world as an excuse to interrogate some major crimes suspected of rebellion and looting, and after trial, they obtained a confession and asked wang to order the flag to execute the criminals, and there was no need to report them to the imperial court. A qualified Lin Mingguang was also beheaded by Zeng Guofan for falsely accusing bandits, and he did not inform the provincial scholar and government in advance of his meritorious name according to the regulations. This incident provoked the anger of Liu Kun, the scholar-politician of Hunan Province, who believed that Zeng Guofan had exceeded his power and went to Futai to file a complaint. He was also given the notoriety of "shaving his head".
In this way, the death penalty approval power of the Ministry of Punishment existed in name only, and local officials abused their power and took people's lives, resulting in unjust imprisonment everywhere. By the early years of Guangxu, the situation was slightly more peaceful, and the Ministry of Punishment had been trying to take back the right to approve the death penalty to the imperial court, but encountered delays and resistance from local governors. This case is one example.
Although Li Henian and Mei Qichao were not from Xiang and Huai, and both of them started in Hanlin, they had a deep relationship with the Xianghuai clan. When Li Henian was serving as an imperial historian in the early years of Xianfeng, he played a heavy lifting and used Zeng Guofan. Most of his career as a magistrate was spent in the Central Plains. When he was in Pingtuo, Henan, he recruited about 20,000 people from two soldiers, one of whom was the Yi Army, commanded by Song Qing. The first was the Song Wu Army, commanded by Zhang Yao. Song Qing and Zhang Yao later became two generals of Zuo Zongtang's pacification of the northwest and the restoration of Xinjiang. Not to mention Mei Qizhao, he is Zeng Guofan's right-hand protégé and important staff, and he is a major member of Zeng Guofan's cultivation and growth. After Ma Xinyi, the governor of Liangjiang, was stabbed to death by Zhang Wenxiang, Mei Qizhao was one of the chief judges of the "thorn horse case." At that time, many people believed that the Xiang army department had a major suspicion, because after the Xiang army captured Tianjing, Liangjiang had always been the sphere of influence of the Xiang clan, and the imperial court sent Ma Xinyi, the governor of Shandong, liangjiang, to contain the Xiang forces. However, the "thorn horse case" was eventually closed in a confused way, with Zhang Wenxiang being executed by Ling Chi, and no one else was involved. After all, at that time, the imperial court still needed to continue to rely on the Xiang Army. Zeng Guofan's widow before his death was copied by Mei Qizhao himself, so Mei said in the lianzhong of Bang Zeng Guofan: "Twenty-six years of door wall looking back, dai Chen's widow is sad." ”
Li Henian, who had been a local supervisor in the military for such a long time, had cultivated the courage to kill and make a decisive decision, and the people of the time had a denouncement of Li Hongzhang's "turning Hanlin into a green forest" was also appropriately used on Li Henian, and he was the representative of the local governor who flew high and low. The "Yang Naiwu and Xiao cabbage case", which preceded Wang Shu's copy a few years earlier, was also an example of the politicization of criminal cases, and was used by the imperial court to suppress the local overseers represented by the Xianghuai department. Ding Baozhen, who had murdered the eunuch An Dehai, was the governor of Sichuan at the time, and he told Shangshu that if the case were to be overturned, no one would dare to become a magistrate in the future. ——This was the voice of many local officials at that time.
However, it is an exaggeration to say that the politics of the Qing Dynasty during the same and light years were really the governors of the Qing Dynasty, and the internal weight was light and the outside was heavy. It was only compared with the Yongzheng and Qianlong Emperors, who were dictatorial and did not say the same thing, that the power of the monarchy had declined, but fundamentally the Qing court still maintained the bottom line of centralized power, and the power of local governors was withdrawn or restricted in various ways. Wang Shu's copy was overturned, and many officials who created unjust cases were punished, which shows that at the level of judicial power, the imperial court did not blindly retreat. Only this time to fight back, the win is not so beautiful.
Qiu Tao, a professor at the School of History of Beijing Normal University, discussed in detail the successful response of the Qing court to local power groups in his monograph "The Changes in the Power Pattern of the Qing Court and the Xianghuai Group in the Same Year of The Xian Dynasty" (Beijing Normal University Publishing House, June 2010, first edition). He said:
Although since the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion and the rise of the Xiangjun clique, up to the Beiyang Clique, it has indeed had a huge impact on the absolutist centralization of power in the Qing Dynasty, the Qing central government has taken more effective countermeasures, so that the Qing court still maintained its own control to a large extent and on a large scale under the condition of decentralization, and there was no situation in which local governments greatly decentralized power and the central government's control was greatly weakened, and the situation of local forces "tailing big" was not formed in the late Qing Dynasty. In fact, throughout the late Qing Dynasty, the power struggle between the central and local governments was always in a process of mutual attack and defense and wave-like advance. Overall, the Qing Dynasty's highly centralized autocratic rule did take a hit. However, through various means, the supreme ruling clique of the Qing Dynasty basically maintained the situation of central authorities, and there was no serious situation in which local forces could not be left behind, and the internal and external forces were light.
I thought Mr. Qiu's judgment was sound.