People in the Ming Dynasty are lawless

Chapter 673: Lao Zhu is indeed a ruthless person! And he is not just an ordinary ruthless person!

So this is the very strange thing. Zhu Yuanzhang clearly encouraged the common people to sue the officials.

However, the strange thing is that even though the cases were accepted, not many of the officials who were actually accused were brought down.

This is also why Chen Han felt that Zhu Yuanzhang was deliberately creating conflicts. In fact, he knew very well what the people liked to see, and even better what the people wanted to see.

In fact, what the common people really want to see is the emperor punishing those officials.

why?
Because the officials actually inherited many bad habits from the Yuan Dynasty at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty.

A large number of officials in the Yuan Dynasty were actually using their power to benefit themselves, causing chaos throughout the world. Chen Han admitted that this was the case.

It is also acknowledged that this situation actually continued until the beginning of the Ming Dynasty.

To put it bluntly, it is a kind of historical inertia.

Because in the eyes of many officials and many people, they cannot say that they often experience the change of dynasties, but they have heard of it a lot. In their eyes, the change of dynasties is just a change of person as emperor.

People are still the same people, officials are still the same officials, and even if there are some minor adjustments, it is impossible to truly achieve top-down changes.

It is precisely because of this cognition that they did not worry at all that they might really be targeted by Zhu Yuanzhang as emperor. They also had no way of imagining that Zhu Yuanzhang would deal such a severe blow to them just after he became emperor.

Chen Han discovered that Zhu Yuanzhang might really be taking advantage of something. For example, he actually discovered that his low salaries would definitely lead to corruption and bribery among officials, because they would not be able to survive without corruption and bribery.

Many people in later generations have sorted out the salaries of officials in the early Ming Dynasty. For example, the lowest-ranking county magistrate's salary was sixty dan of grain per year.

If he really wanted to live, he could actually survive, but if he also wanted to support some advisers and staff, then he must have 200 dan of grain every year to feed these people.

Even during the Yongle reign, the annual grain ration for officials was only increased by 10 shi, which amounted to only 70 shi.

How can officials really survive on such a salary? In fact, they cannot survive, and they must resort to corruption and bribery to survive.

Because of this, there is actually no conclusion yet as to whether Zhu Yuanzhang was deliberately and consciously exploiting system loopholes to encourage corruption and bribery. This is just Chen Han's own summary of some of Zhu Yuanzhang's behaviors in modern times as a history enthusiast.

But he was very confident in his own conclusion. He felt that it was absolutely impossible for a smart person like Zhu Yuanzhang to fail to see such a problem.

I also believe that the reason why Zhu Yuanzhang promoted the Great Edict, allowing common people all over the world to use this edict to file complaints to the emperor and sue dissatisfied officials in the capital, must be because Zhu Yuanzhang was fanning the flames.

Because the promotion of the great way is really a bit strange. First of all, under normal circumstances, a person who breaks the law knowingly should be dealt with severely and strictly, because his motive and purpose may be to circumvent the punishment of the law in the first place.

This kind of thinking is extremely bad and should be punished more severely to serve as a warning to people all over the world.

But the opposite is that Zhu Yuanzhang not only did not do so, but instead deviated from this purpose and did something that seemed ridiculous to later generations.

That is, if you broke the law, the officials might send someone to your home to check whether you had the book "Da Gao" before trying you. If you did, your crime could be reduced.

So Chen Han guessed that this was a complete deviation from normal behavior.

This behavior can prove that Zhu Yuanzhang promoted the Great Edict not only to warn the people not to break the law, but also to deliberately tell the people the methods in the Great Edict, especially to allow the people to go to the capital to file a complaint, and to magnify it and tell the people.

To put it bluntly, Zhu Yuanzhang used this viral fission to promote the Great Edict. When the common people held this outline in their hands, their recognition of the imperial power would be greatly increased.

It is also worth noting that the Great Edict was implemented in the 18th year of Hongwu, which was when the Guo Huan case had just occurred.

The Guo Huan case is truly representative.

Because many historians have inferred that this was a case of corruption that Zhu Yuanzhang intentionally encouraged in order to make money.

Putting aside the objective analysis that many people hold, saying it is impossible for Guo Huan to embezzle so much tax grain, the case itself is filled with too many artificial and beneficial straight-hook fishing hooks.

Because Zhu Yuanzhang actually knew for a long time that Guo Huan and those around him were engaging in corruption and bribery, but he did not make it public. Instead, he asked the Jinyiwei to deliberately pretend to be grain merchants to get close to him, and even deliberately do business with him.

Of course it’s not with him, it must be with the people around him.

Then he collected evidence little by little. In fact, he discovered this kind of thing a long time ago, but why didn't he make it public? Because he needed to wait for the right time to take action.

The reason why this opportunity came in the 18th year of Hongwu was because there was a lack of money for the Northern Expedition.

Therefore, Zhu Yuanzhang no longer tolerated Guo Huan's incident and began to use Guo Huan's case to reap the world.

At that time, the country had entered a relatively stable period, so the Jiangnan area had returned to its prosperous state.

A large number of wealthy people also emerged at this time.

So, by taking advantage of Guo Huan's case, on the one hand, they wanted to recover all the grain that had been embezzled by Guo Huan and his group, no matter how much Guo Huan had embezzled.

Even if all of Guo Huan and his gang were added together, the amount of grain they embezzled would only be 100 dan, but with this excuse, Zhu Yuanzhang could write countless blank checks.

For example, Guo Huan and his men embezzled 100 dan of grain, but Zhu Yuanzhang said that was impossible and that they had embezzled 20 million dan. The Jinyiwei investigated and said that Guo Huan had colluded with the wealthy people in Jiangnan to resell grain and make a fortune.

The officials below were so smart. Those who survived the Hu Weiyong case and the Empty Seal case all knew what Zhu was trying to do, which was to implicate others and expand the scope.

Since he has connections with wealthy people in the Jiangnan area, our property should be confiscated.

No matter what, you have to gather these 20 million dan of grain for me. In this way, a large number of officials and a large number of wealthy middle-class people were innocently killed and their property was confiscated because of Guo Huan's case.

To be honest, Zhu Yuanzhang's method of handling these cases was too crude. He directly accused Guo Huan and others of embezzling more than 20 million shi of grain over the years.

In order to quell the so-called public grievances, he even killed the chief judge Wu Yong.

To put it bluntly, is this to appease the people's grievances? This should be to appease the so-called resentment of random accusations, because the people are not fools.

The amount of money embezzled in the entire Ming Dynasty in one year can be calculated, and it is not much less than the amount they embezzled. How did these few people, along with so many provincial governors in the country, connect with each other under the poor transportation conditions of the Ming Dynasty? How did they have the means and plans? Even how did they have the time to work together on this case?

There are twelve provincial governors, which means it involves twelve provinces.

Not to mention the Ming Dynasty, such a connection would be impossible. Even in modern times when information is so well-informed, information can be connected smoothly and sending a WeChat message or making a phone call is possible, but how to store more than 20 million shi of grain?
More than 20 million shi of grain would require more than 2,000 warehouses to store it. They would have to go through a very careful transaction process to sell all this grain.

In fact, ordinary people can see at a glance that these are fake. This is an intentional means of reaping rewards. In other words, at this stage, Zhu really doesn't even bother to hide it.

This fully explains why Zhu had always known that loopholes in the system would inevitably lead to corruption, but he did not make any changes and instead allowed the loopholes to continue to exist because he could reap the benefits in the name of these loopholes when he needed them one day. The Guo Huan case was the ultimate harvest this time.

Because Zhu's method was too crude, he actually said that a large amount of embezzled grain was in Jiangnan, or more specifically in Zhili at the time, which was Jiangsu and the neighboring Zhejiang Province. They were all rich, and it was also Zhang Shicheng's territory at the time, which was originally a heavily taxed place.

At that time, the taxes paid by Suzhou Prefecture in Jiangsu alone amounted to more than two million shi each year, which was almost one-tenth of the national tax revenue. The taxes collected by this prefecture alone might be more than those collected by an average underdeveloped province.

In the final summary of the trial of the National Defense Case, it was emphasized that Guo Huan and others embezzled a large amount of taxes from Zhenjiang Prefecture, Taiping Prefecture and other prefectures, as well as two million shi of taxes in western Zhejiang.

Western Zhejiang should have paid more than 4 million dan of taxes, but half of it was embezzled by Guo Huan and his men.

If this is true, then we have to admire the methods of Guo Huan and his team. If you open the map, you can see that the capital of the Ming Dynasty at that time was Nanjing, which is Yingtian Prefecture.

How far were the places where Guo Huan and his gang embezzled taxes, such as Taiping Prefecture, Zhenjiang Prefecture, and Suzhou Prefecture, from Nanjing? Probably only about 500 to 600 li, or 200 to 300 kilometers.

In modern times, a journey that takes an hour by high-speed rail would not take more than two days in ancient times if there were boats that could go directly to these places.

Even if the case of Guo Huan is true, we can only say that people like Guo Huan are not just skilled and daring, they are simply brainless and extremely bold. They resold millions of dan of grain right under the emperor's nose.

To make an analogy, it is equivalent to more than a hundred thieves collectively stealing the police cars at the door of the police station. Not only did they steal them, they also dismantled the police cars into parts and sold them.

Will anyone believe this kind of thing if I tell them?
So this is too obvious. This is the evidence that Zhu deliberately condoned corruption and bribery. This is what he deliberately did by exploiting loopholes in the system.

Even in the end he felt guilty. He said that the amount of grain exceeded 20 million shi, but he was afraid that the people might not believe it, so he changed it to 7 million shi, and then killed the presiding official to make him take the blame.

Lao Zhu really reaped a lot of rewards from this case, and it can even be said that it was an excess reward.

First of all, he used this case to implicate countless officials, resulting in the deaths of about 30,000 to 40,000 people.

There were twelve provincial governors, left and right assistant ministers of the Ministry of Revenue, and even the entire Ministry of Revenue was empty.

It is said that except for the Minister of Revenue, all the officials in the Ministry of Revenue were killed.

It even implicated other departments, such as the Ministry of Rites, the Ministry of Works, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of War, where some ministers and vice ministers were killed.

All the wealthy families in the world were wiped out. Anyway, it can be said that except for those truly low-income people, every family in the world has a dead person.

Just like this, everyone from officials to the middle class was wiped out.

His purge this time was so thorough that every official felt insecure.

Then in this year he began to implement the Great Edict, making the Guo Huan case a key case, writing it into the draft, and even requiring that every household must have one, otherwise you would be exiled to a foreign land.

This outline not only lists a large number of harsh laws and punishments, but also mainly targets officials and wealthy people.

Of course, there were also some small vendors. There was a classic case of a young medicine seller who sold poison. After being caught, he was made to swallow the poison himself and then make the antidote himself. After he finished the antidote, he was beheaded the next day.

How simple was Zhu Yuanzhang's purpose in doing this? The answer is obvious. He knew very well what ordinary people resented. They hated officials and the rich.

They take advantage of the people's resentment towards these people to achieve their goal of using public opinion to monitor and observe them.

Therefore, Zhu Yuanzhang was definitely a master at using public opinion, but this has also left extremely serious trauma to the Ming Dynasty today. It is certain that officials are reluctant to do anything.

Many officials feel that the more they do, the more mistakes they will make, so they would just lie down if they can.

Throughout his life, Zhu Yuanzhang used this method to repeatedly train officials all over the world, and he trained those officials very well, making them round or square as needed.

But to put it bluntly, a large number of officials are actually waiting for you, Zhu Yuanzhang, to die.

Because after Emperor Jianwen Zhu Yunwen ascended the throne, he made a lot of adjustments to Zhu Yuanzhang's policies, which was obviously a revenge. It was a backlash for being too harsh.

It was because Zhu Yuanzhang had suppressed the situation too harshly at the beginning that the backlash was so violent that it had reached the point of overcorrection.

As a result, Prince of Yan Zhu Di was forced to rebel, and the Ming Dynasty's national strength, which could have been thriving, was cut in half.

Even later, when Prince of Yan Zhu Di ascended the throne and became Emperor Yongle, he could only passively inherit these harsh laws...

(End of this chapter)