Ming Dynasty: Domination of the World from the Imperial Examination

Chapter 24 Zhu Yuanzhang betrayed the peasants!
Zhu Yuanzhang's cheeks twitched, and he was shaking with anger. He pointed his finger at Xia Zhibai's face and cursed, "What nonsense!"

"We are the emperor."

"Can I become the son of the common people below?!"

"How can there be such a logic in the world? I just don't understand. I have done so many things for the world, why do you have to hold on to my selfishness and willfulness?"

Xia Zhibai's face was grim, and he pointed angrily, "You are the one who is holding on to me."

"Why do you insist on taking advantage of the people's food supply? To allow the people to have one more bite of food is truly an unforgivable crime, a heinous crime."

“What did the people do wrong?”

"They worked hard, but had to do endless corvee labor and pay taxes that increased year by year."

"You also came from poverty, why have you become like this now? Do you really have to make the people below you be treated as slaves?"

“I wrote it, too.”

"The best way to govern a country is to be clear-headed."

"You conquered this world by yourself. You didn't usurp the throne. You are not a minister who caused rebellion in the previous dynasty."

"You don't have a noble family like Li Yuan and Li Shimin, nor a military family like Zhao Kuangyin. You are just a cowherd who was once oppressed by corrupt officials and landlords and gentry and is at the bottom of society."

"You joined the rebel army because you were hungry and had no other way to survive. After joining the rebel army, you have always cared about the people."

"I never thought you were a saint."

“There are no saints in the world.”

"Everyone makes mistakes, and there is nothing wrong with that. You have indeed helped more people survive, and you have set great goals for the corrupt Yuan Dynasty."

“You did it!”

"After the end of this chaotic world, you have been diligently handling government affairs, healing the scars of war in the world, and mending the north and the south."

"These achievements, if given to any emperor, would be enough to be recorded in history and deserve the title of an eternal emperor."

"If you were not born poor, no one in the world would be able to blame you, nor would they be qualified to blame you. But you were born poor, and this meant that you could not emulate other emperors."

"You have never been the same as scholars, gentry, and nobles. Because you came from the lower class, you are deeply loved and trusted by the lower class people."

"He who wins the hearts of the people wins the world."

"It is precisely because you have won the hearts of the people that you were able to secure your throne, because the vast majority of the people in the world support you."

"That's why."

"You can easily slaughter the meritorious officials, political and economic interest groups that have been extremely difficult to deal with in every dynasty, without any backlash. Instead, you will win applause."

"It won't shake your foundation."

"It's just that after you gained the kingdom, you changed. You gradually forgot your original identity as a farmer and tried to put yourself above everyone else."

"You seemed to be trying to establish a system based on the grassroots people, a system that governs the country with laws and morality, and is above the privileges of the literati."

"But later on you changed beyond all recognition. No one could recognize you anymore."

"You have become a more extreme tyrant than any emperor in the past, and you still proclaim your love for the people as you did in the past."

“More for self-interest.”

“It is not the world, and it is not the people.”

"You have calculated the daily lives of the people to the extreme, and you are beginning to fear that the lower-class people will one day develop their own self-awareness."

"You have been promoting your own governance theory in an attempt to tame the people into submissive animals." "But you come from the grassroots after all, and you know that you can't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, and you can't drain the pond to catch the fish, so you are selectively resting and recuperating the local areas."

"I hope that the local people will be like leeks, selflessly devoting themselves to your Zhu family one after another, and contributing their blood and sweat for free."

"As the largest landlord in the world, and even the only landlord in your heart, you will definitely strictly fight corruption and slaughter corrupt officials, because the wealth they embezzled is yours."

"But don't you think that everything you do is becoming more and more vulgar and low-brow?"

"Sometimes, what you do is not like an emperor, but more like a peasant fighting wits and courage with weasels and rats, or a landlord trying to prevent his slaves from stealing his eggs and white flour and bacon."

“He who wins the hearts of the people wins the world, and he who loses the hearts of the people loses the world.”

"How you treat the people now is how they will treat your descendants in the future. They will even pay you back tenfold or a hundredfold. The people are starving, while your descendants are getting fatter and fatter."

"You have utterly betrayed your people."

"You are guilty of a heinous crime."

"You have turned this society into one where the end is foreseeable, where there is no hope, no future, and where people are just walking corpses. You have made it impossible for the people at the bottom to be human beings."

"The world should not be like it is now, and it must not become a world where beasts run rampant. Instead, it should be a world that gets better and better."

"You could have done more for the world."

“Do more for the people.”

"But you didn't!"

"You have forgotten your roots!"

"Right now, the people of the world have not yet fully reacted. When they do, your Zhu family's rule will end here."

"When you choose to stand against the lower-class people, you have become a loner, because your background restricts the scholar-officials, gentry and other interest groups from standing with you."

"You won't stand with them either."

"Because you are Jun."

"The emperor who is high above everyone else, you are superior to others. You have the qualifications and ability to be superior, but what about the rest of your Zhu family?"

“Are they qualified to suppress others?”

"What about your descendants?"

"Do they have the ability, qualifications and capability to do so? In the end, they can only choose to go along with the corrupt and exploit the lower classes even more crazily."

"When the people abandon your Zhu family, it will be faster and more severe than you can imagine. At the end of your Ming Dynasty, the backlash from the lower-class people will be completely beyond your expectations."

"As for those filial sons and grandchildren of your Zhu family, you have raised them to be fat and white, aren't you just waiting to slaughter pigs during the New Year so that the people can have a full meal?"

"As a self-made emperor, I respect you, even admire you, but as a farmer's son, you don't deserve respect."

"Zhu Yuanzhang!"

“You betrayed the peasants!!!”

Xia Zhibai had said everything he wanted to say. He turned around, without even looking at Zhu Yuanzhang, and walked out of the hall, ready to die.

Just as he was about to leave the palace gate, he suddenly burst into laughter: "Only with great sacrifice can one's ambitions be exchanged for the sun and the moon."

"Haha."

(End of this chapter)