Chapter 151: If You Are A Demon, You Will Bewitch Sheng Ting
Chapter 151 If you are a demon, you will bewitch the saint.
night.
"Your Majesty, I can tell you clearly that this will be the Ming Dynasty in the future."
Yang Feng looked at Zhu Yuanzhang.
This is the first time the two of them have met alone since he killed the tribute envoy in front of Chengtian Gate last time.
Of course, it's not entirely alone.
After all, her daughter is still there, but apart from that, there is really no one else in Yang Feng's office, because the matters discussed by the two are classified as confidential, not to mention the Jin Yiwei, even the trusted eunuchs are not allowed to listen.
Eunuchs are not safe either.
Zhu Yuanzhang is dead, but the eunuchs still have to live, so there is still the possibility of leaking secrets when interests require it. Besides, Zhu Yuanzhang himself can't guarantee whether any of the eunuchs around him have been bribed. Bribing eunuchs to keep an eye on the emperor, originally
It is the basic operation of ministers in the past. With so many eunuchs, who knows which one has been bribed, so even the eunuchs dare not fully trust...
To be precise, the emperor had no one he could trust.
Otherwise, the emperor would call himself a loner, and they would really be a loner.
Can't trust anyone.
The emperor's service does not rely on trust, but on supervision and checks and balances.
Rely on power.
And what he is talking about with Yang Feng now is related to the future structure of the Ming Dynasty. In a sense, it is the future route of the Ming Dynasty. This kind of thing must be kept absolutely confidential.
"You want to establish a civilian government. This is correct. We all had a civilian government at that time.
You are indeed right to choose Confucianism.
After all, you have no other choice. If you compare the worst at this time, Confucianism is indeed the least bad. Compared with other messes, they are indeed the most suitable choice at the moment.
but.
You should not be exclusive.
Yes, you left checks and balances in place.
Use military generals to check civil servants, and use honors and nobility to check scholars.
But too little.
It does seem good to use nobles and nobles to check the civil servants, and to use civil servants to check the nobles. However, the nobles of any dynasty are always strong in the first generation, and then gradually weaken. After all, if they are not weak, the emperor will find it difficult to feel at ease. And the civil servants have always gradually become weaker.
Strong, after all, military commanders and nobles are rarely useful in peacetime, but the civil servants who govern the country are important, and the emperor is not afraid that they will rebel.
Then one trades off the other, and the balance is gradually broken.
And your current imperial examination system has completely reduced to Confucian scholar selection, and your civil servants are Confucian. In the end, the strong civil servant group has actually become a strong Confucian scholar group.
They became one voice speaking.
By the end of your second generation, you will have to start using eunuchs to make up for the lack of nobles.
But Xungui is getting worse and worse.
Your descendants had to gradually increase their reliance on eunuchs, until in the end the only option left was to use eunuchs to check and balance civil servants. This became the eunuch you least wanted to see interfering in politics, and it developed until it reached its peak, that is Wei Zhongxian. He
The emperor at that time was actually very smart. Although he was ridiculed by later generations as a carpenter emperor who lost his ambition by playing with things, he actually did not want to directly confront the civil servants, so he pushed Wei Zhongxian out to be a biting dog. Then he became a faint emperor who ignored the government affairs.
Let him sell his official position outside to ensure finance, and let him recruit his son to control the government to check and balance the Qingliu Group known as the Donglin Party.
In the final analysis, it was because he had no other choice.
You dug a hole for them from the beginning.
They can't jump out.
All the systems you establish now will eventually become ancestral systems that they cannot overthrow, and the ancestral laws cannot be changed.
Therefore, your choice is right, and your check and balance design is also right. The mistake is that if there are too few, it will be very fragile one-on-one. The triangle is stable. You need to support a non-Confucian group among the civil servants.
Split the civil service.
Establish a civilian government, but split the civil service, so that in addition to the Confucian civil service, there will be another civil service from other ideological systems who are powerful enough to check and balance. In this way, coupled with the group of noble military generals, your descendants can avoid the end like the original history.
He couldn't even kill a commoner who encouraged a civil uprising. Ge Chengcheng, the leader of Suzhou's anti-tax resistance and the culprit, was an ordinary Orihu, but after the emperor ordered his execution, he was treated as a hero in the prison and served until the emperor died.
He did not die, but was released in the end. The protection of officials at all levels, as well as the protection of local gentry, made it impossible for the imperial power to even decide the life or death of a commoner.
The civil servants sent by the emperor to oversee water transportation even dared to bribe thieves in prison, and framed the emperor's tax collectors as bandits and killed them.
This is the consequence of a dominant family.
Party strife was indeed serious in the late Ming Dynasty, but party strife did not affect the dominance of the civil servant family because they were all educated in the same ideological system.
They are all Confucians."
Yang Feng said.
He had to fundamentally confuse Zhu Yuanzhang.
"If I have other options, do you think I just like to let them dominate? The imperial examination was stopped in the fourth year of Hongwu and was not reopened until the seventeenth year of Hongwu. What I have been doing in the past ten years is not just looking for
One available?
I didn't find it.
I have been looking for it for more than ten years, and finally they are the only ones available."
Zhu Yuanzhang said angrily.
"That's because you just want a group of people to be slaves to.
That’s why you think they are the most suitable.”
Yang Feng said.
"snort!"
Zhu Yuanzhang snorted coldly.
"Just admit it, you don't want to find real talents to govern the country at all. You just want to find a group of slaves who can help you protect your family and protect your family from a legal standpoint. If you wear such glasses, then
Of course we can only see them, but are they really the only ones?
Are they really unique?
What do they have?
Reading and literacy?
As long as there are more schools open, anyone can read and write. In our time, there were no people who couldn't read and write. This was an education issue.
Are they more morally upright?
This thing is not an ideological issue. Confucianism does advocate famous officials in history and describe them as Confucianists, but how many of them are actually true Confucianists? Before the Tang Dynasty, there were all aristocratic families, and aristocratic families did learn Confucianism, but what about them?
Everyone learned, Confucianism was only part of the knowledge they learned. Other military sciences, arithmetic, engineering and even medical divination, they learned whatever was useful.
Then the Confucians point out that they have studied Confucianism and say that they are all Confucians.
It was only during the Song Dynasty that Confucianism became truly dominant.
Those loyal ministers and righteous men did not become loyal ministers and righteous men because they studied Confucianism, but they were loyal ministers and righteous men originally.
This is a matter of personal morality.
Likewise, there are many great Confucians who rebel against the country and surrender to the enemy.
What you are interested in is that they can give you a set of monarchs and ministers to solidify the imperial power, and then you can use this to make everyone accept your Zhu family's world, and from now on, they will surrender to you for generations and become your Zhu family's slaves."
Yang Feng said unceremoniously.
Zhu Yuanzhang snorted coldly, obviously very unhappy, after all, being told what he was thinking by this bastard.
"Of course, this is your Ming Dynasty's business. I am a bystander, but even as a bystander, I must remind you that to do so is to re-take the path that those dynasties have taken, and they have all fallen without exception.
Ever since Chen Sheng and Wu Guang called out the generals and princes Hou Ning, there has been no such family world in this land. People are just waiting for the decline of the dynasty, and then overthrow it and replace it with a new dynasty.
No one wants to be a slave forever.
We all have backbones.
The foreign tribes that later replaced you in the Ming Dynasty were more ruthless than you in this regard. Not only did they continue to respect Confucianism, but they also completely turned Confucianism into a slave family.
All civil servants and generals are proud to call themselves slaves in front of the emperor.
Their Confucianism no longer has ideas.
The only thing that can be done is to explain the dominance of imperial power according to Confucian classics.
Tell everyone to be the emperor's slave.
They even burned more than half of the books, leaving only those useful for enslavement. Even the scientific books were burned, and even some history books that had to be kept were heavily tampered with. But it was still of no use. In less than two hundred years, rebellions have continued.
Even the rebellion that almost ended in death was suppressed with the help of the Taixi people. But after that, it was not they who had the final say in the world, but the powerful Han ministers who took advantage of the suppression of the rebellion to rise. It was similar to the separatist rule of vassal towns. It all depended on
There was a heroine who was proficient in power, and it barely managed to survive for several decades. When the heroine died, it was immediately destroyed.
They brought enslavement to this point, and it lasted almost as long as the Ming Dynasty.
This thing is really useless.
What Confucianism can do, in fact, any other thought can do.
In that case, why don't you rely on them?
Explain your legitimacy?
Do you need it?
You are not one of those who succeeded by usurping the throne and bullying orphans and widows. It can be said that of all the dynasties, you are the most righteous in winning the country. You do not need any ideological explanation at all. It is enough for you to expel the Tartars and rebuild the country.
In this case, why not try to build a better system?
For example, the imperial examination.
Why only Confucian students are tested?
Why not divide it into multiple subjects, for example, set the current examination as liberal arts separately, and then take military subjects, engineering subjects, or even agriculture, medicine, and business subjects at the same time, so that all they get in the end are Jinshi, and they can all be officials, and it will be equally possible.
Promotion, thus forming a group of miscellaneous officials in addition to Confucian students, and the Confucian family is no longer the dominant one among civil servants.
What’s more, many things ultimately need to be done professionally.”
Yang Feng said.
This is his true purpose.
They deceived Zhu Yuanzhang into dividing the imperial examination into subjects, and then divided the power of Confucian students with Jinshi in miscellaneous subjects.
This is the most cruel.
And it also has the basis for implementation.
First of all, relying on military science will definitely get the support of the military general group. Now the children of hereditary military attachés are originally required to undergo an assessment and then confirm whether they will succeed in their duties. So just include them in the imperial examination and let them pass the martial arts Jinshi.
Craftsmen themselves have a channel to become officials in the field of maintenance, but now it is just included in the imperial examination and they are directly asked to take the engineering examination.
There is also medicine.
Doctors can also become professionals by practicing medicine.
Local medicine, Huimin Pharmacy, all the way to Tai Hospital, this is a line.
Now they are also included in the imperial examination, allowing them to become medical scholars.
No matter who is a Jinshi, he is a Jinshi.
They can all enter the officialdom, and then be promoted when they are promoted, but they will definitely be squeezed out by liberal arts scholars, or even discriminated against. After all, it is unbearable for them to have Confucian scholars and craftsmen side by side, but this is what they want.
, they will automatically form a group when they are excluded, and eventually form a bureaucratic group that competes with Confucian scholars.
Then the two groups check and balance each other.
These miscellaneous scholars are really useful, they are more useful than those pure Confucian scholars.
Moreover, the foundation of Confucianism is landowners.
After all, farming and reading is passed down from generation to generation.
However, the foundation of the general scholars is different, and they will inevitably become the spokespersons of industry and commerce.
That's it.
Emerging industrial and commercial groups can get real support.
"Let me think about it."
Zhu Yuanzhang sat there and said deeply.
"Your Majesty, do you still need to think about this? Let's not talk about anything else. We can even say that the three subjects of military service, engineering and medicine have always been there, but they are not in the imperial examination. Now they are changed to the imperial examination. At most, there is a difference in the number of Jinshi. For example
The liberal arts test is 200, the military test is 100, the engineering is 50, and the medical is 50. But no matter what the subject, it is the same as a Jinshi, and there will be no difference when becoming an official. Here we need to distinguish the difference between hereditary military generals and Wu Jinshi.
, Wu Jinshi is still a civil servant, but he is mainly based on the yamen of the Ministry of War, including other yamen related to the army."
Yang Feng continued to bewitch him.
Ministry of War, Military Preparation Road...
Of course, there is no military preparation road now, but now there are patrol patrols. The Yincha Division patrols the world's military preparations. There are more than forty roads. The deputy envoys of the Yingcha Division are dispatched to inspect the military preparations. Civil servants like this must first have sufficient military knowledge.
Just fine.
Therefore, they should serve as military scholars.
Of course, as a way to win over military generals, military officers must be selected by the military guards at the beginning. Each military post has its own school, and the students who go to school are basically the children of military officers. They select the candidates, and these candidates are admitted to the Jinshi. As for their hereditary
The assessment of military positions must still be based on the past. This hereditary system is the foundation of Zhu Yuanzhang's rule, and he will not change it easily.
Have to take your time.
But first we have to get the Military Scholars.
However, it is impossible for Zhu Yuanzhang to agree immediately. This reform involves too much and requires large-scale reforms in the current imperial examination system, which has just been perfected...
In fact, it's not perfect yet.
After all, if you can create both the North and South rankings, you can’t say they are perfect.
It would take a lot of courage to make changes in this situation.
But the key lies in whether Zhu Yuanzhang can give up his illusions about Confucianism. This is actually understandable. After all, emperors want to have a family that will last forever, and Confucianism is indeed the most suitable for them. It is normal for him to choose Confucianism. But Yang Feng
This does not mean that he should abandon Confucianism. Confucianism is still the main body of his civil servants, but the dominance of Confucianism will eventually endanger his imperial power, so he should patch the loopholes in this system.
Of course, Yang Feng made him think that it was just a patch for the vulnerability, but in fact it was not a patch if it really developed.
A new generation of ideas will be born.
A new generation of officials will also grow up.
At that time, how could Confucianism be able to hold on with its little ability? Future emperors would ultimately depend on who has the ability. They may not have Zhu Yuanzhang’s foresight. If officials with a background as a scholar in miscellaneous subjects show the strength of a remote Confucian official,