My younger brother Zhuge Liang

Chapter 786: In the name of benevolent governance, the powerful families were sold out and helped you count the money

How to match the stick with the sweet date and force the local powerful families to cooperate in the selection of officials and reforms, Zhuge Jin could not think of the specific "sweet date" for the time being.

But it doesn’t matter. They can first think about how to “lift the roof” and eventually force the wealthy and powerful families to accept a plan of “opening the window”.

Zhuge Jin was good at answering this question, because the imperial examinations in later generations had undergone so many rounds of gradual reforms. He knew how many loopholes there were in the early plans, how many ways there were to plug the loopholes, and how to exploit them before these loopholes were plugged... Zhuge Jin had plenty of ready-made answers to copy.

Therefore, everyone quickly brainstormed on this sub-topic, and Zhuge Jin was the first to think of a few points:
“If we want to make the aristocratic families not oppose this system of selecting officials through recommendation and examination, we can spread the news secretly and hint to the local tyrants that as long as they can buy out all the recommendation quotas reported by a county and ensure that the candidates who accompany them to take the exam are less educated than the relatives they really want to promote, then they may be able to successfully achieve their original intention.

As long as the reform can be passed quickly, the court will not immediately resort to more ruthless measures, and will not immediately open up the "admission quotas" of different counties in each state. It will still protect the interests of each county and ensure that the number of people recommended by each county and the number of officials actually appointed after the final assessment will still be allocated to each county, and there will be no competition between counties for the time being.

These hints would prompt local tyrants to quickly accept the current version out of fear and fear that the actual reforms passed in the future would be more disadvantageous to them. Because most of the tyrants in the world only have power within the scope of one county, they cannot guarantee their own interests across counties.

The hands of the noble families can reach further than those of the powerful. They are often connected to the central government and have connections. Even if the new law encourages cross-county competition, they may not suffer any losses. They may even be able to squeeze out more potential competitors who are not strong enough and want to grab quotas. "

Zhuge Jin's suggestion was just a typical example of the many tricks he thought of, and he could cite many similar methods.

However, this point alone was enough to refresh Liu Bei and several other civil servants' understanding.

What Zhuge Jin said will certainly not be difficult for future generations to understand. To put it bluntly, this is a hint that the local power cliques and the newly emerged imperial examinations are not perfect, and they may use "bid rigging" to avoid substantial damage to their personnel interests.

(Note: I won’t go into detail about how the bid rigging was done, because I have already written about it once in great detail in “Fooling Liu Bei”, and I cannot repeat myself and cheat old readers by paying for the manuscript. It would be unethical to do so.)
In other words, as long as you support this new law now, you will be able to find loopholes to avoid actual losses in the next ten or eight years.

At the beginning, what was lost was only the "reputation", which gave the court an opportunity to make a concession and first determine certain things at the institutional level. If the court wants to make further changes in the future, it will have sufficient "claims" and will no longer be judged as "arbitrarily changing the laws of ancestors."

However, if the local tyrants do not agree, Zhuge Jin will have to use another hand and cut the Gordian knot. After implementing the new law, he will secretly announce the method of plugging the "bid rigging" loophole within a very short time.

He believed that by then the aristocratic families and powerful people in the world would definitely have conflicts of interest and would engage in dog-eat-dog warfare. Although the aristocratic families did not like the new law, if the new law could help them seize some benefits from the powerful people, then they might be happy to see it happen.

This logic is a little difficult to understand and needs to be sorted out.

As mentioned before, the definition of "tyrants" is the powerful faction in each county. Their main method of blackmailing local officials is "If you don't give my family an official position, I will mess up the local area", which is based on threats.

"Aristocratic families" have high-ranking officials in the court in every generation. They can exchange interests with the prefects who recommend talents in a wider range through inducement.

Because the powerful have limited reach, there are very few powerful people who can have power across counties or states. Once the imperial court opened up the selection of talents among counties, it stipulated that "the seven or eight counties under the jurisdiction of a state shall have unified examinations and unified admissions for the selected filial and honest people, and the people in the counties with good results can snatch the official positions of the people in the counties with poor results."

Then those powerful people who can influence local officials within a county will be at a loss. If they use bidders with poor academic performance as their companions, the final result may be the annihilation of the entire county, and none of the candidates nominated by the county will win, and all of them will be used as wedding dresses by the neighboring counties with good academic performance.

Therefore, the powerful people definitely do not want "admission quotas to be opened up among multiple counties", and Zhuge Jin can use this to force the powerful people to submit as soon as possible, otherwise he will join forces with the aristocratic families to infringe on the interests of the powerful people.

Zhuge Jin was so sure that this move of "uniting the noble families to fight against the powerful" would definitely suppress the opposition once it was truly implemented, because he knew the development of history.

In fact, the Nine-Rank System that Chen Qun originally created in history was a typical example of "uniting the aristocratic families to fight the powerful." The Zhongzheng System is the same as the Recommendation System, in that the personnel selection officials in charge of personnel work recommend talents with good comprehensive qualities to serve as officials, and there is no difference at the level of "recommendation."

From this perspective, the Zhongzheng system is not worse than the Chaoju system; at most it does the same thing.

The biggest difference between the Zhongzheng system and the Chaju system of the Han Dynasty is that the person in charge of the Chaju system of the Han Dynasty was often the local county magistrate himself, and the magistrate could directly recommend virtuous people.

The Zhongzheng system was implemented by a special Zhongzheng official who was not a local official and had no connection with local political performance. No matter how bad the political performance of a county was, it would not affect the Zhongzheng official who was responsible for the selection work in that county.

As mentioned before, the greatest ability of the "powerful and powerful" is to threaten the prefect by "causing chaos in the local area and destroying political achievements" so that the prefect will nominate the person they want.

Once the recommendation of the imperial examiner is decoupled from the performance of local governments, the powerful will no longer be a threat to the recommender.

From then on, the examiners only accepted "bribes" and not "coercion". The advantage was that one unfair factor was eliminated, but the disadvantage was that another unfair factor became bigger, forming the actual effect of "monopolizing the source of unfairness".

Therefore, after the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the aristocratic families became increasingly powerful, and the interests of the powerful could not be directly reflected in the central court. They could only either hold back or take advantage of the troubled times to support local warlords, princes, and vassal states.

Because the local military leaders were also rough and crude, it was difficult for them to make deals with the noble families in the court, and finally they formed alliances with the local tyrants who were equally rough and could only negotiate money, food and force. Later, after the An-Shi Rebellion in the Tang Dynasty, the noble families took the upper-class route and controlled the court in Chang'an, while the local tyrants supported the warlords.

Therefore, Zhuge Jin is now going to use the noble families to fight against the powerful, which is definitely possible, although he does not want the powerful to be completely suppressed and the noble families to dominate. Zhuge Jin just wants to stir up trouble moderately, first forcing the powerful to stop when they see the good, and directly support the new law when they see such a benevolent policy.

If they don't support it, they will suffer more in the future, and the aristocratic families will absolutely support letting the powerful suffer this kind of suffering, after all, the aristocratic families are the beneficiaries.

Zhuge Jin had many other tricks like this to sow discord and divide opponents, so there is no need to list them all here.

In short, he just copied some ready-made answers from history and sorted them out roughly, which was enough to make Liu Bei slightly surprised, but also deeply reassured.

Sure enough, when this matter is handed over to Tzuyu, she can always think of ways to divide and disintegrate the opposition and defeat them one by one.

……

After discussing these issues, the key point remains:
The previous tactics of dividing opponents may more or less result in "the powerful becoming weaker, but the aristocratic families becoming stronger."

So, is there any way to give the people of the world a little sweetness in the end and at the same time suppress the aristocratic families a little?

Zhuge Jin had no good solution to this most difficult problem for the time being.

Because there is no ready-made historical answer to this point. And Zhuge Jin had sorted out and reviewed the previous content before, and his mind was already very confused.

If you insist on playing a game of chess with your own brain, and immediately play the opposing side after playing the affirmative side, with the left and right brain fighting each other, it is very easy to get schizophrenia.

However, everyone knows which direction to think about it - as mentioned earlier, this "sweet date after the hammer" is best linked to the brutal tactics unique to Cao Cao's reign before, and then Liu Bei can do the opposite and show kindness to the people in the process of abolition.

Moreover, it would be best if this sweet treat is related to the content of the reform, so that it does not appear abrupt or seem like a "deliberate exchange of interests."

You can even leak a little bit of information first, saying that you are going to give some sweet treats, and then think about what possible drawbacks may arise in the process of giving the sweet treats, and then "have to" introduce reforms. That would be more perfect and would not attract any hatred.

It's a pity that few people in this world could think of such a linkage, and the atmosphere in the venue soon became a little quiet.

Fortunately, today's event was to welcome Zhuge Jin, Guan Yu and others, and Liu Bei did not force them to come up with something solid right away, so it was no big deal if they didn't come up with any ideas, and they could just continue drinking and having fun.

Liu Bei very calmly urged Guan Yu to drink several more rounds, and even sang a song at the banquet himself. He also chatted with Guan Yu about whether the recovery of various parts of Yanzhou was going smoothly.

Guan Yu also talked about some of his experiences, but he did not mention much about the armed resistance of Cao's army. After all, the remaining combat effectiveness of Cao's army in the area was not enough in Guan Yu's eyes.

From the battle of Juancheng to the pacification of the three counties in central Yanzhou, the only thing that left a deep impression on Guan Yu was the will of Cao's army in the core area of Yanzhou to "resist to the end."

It also talked about Cheng Yu's cruelty, saying that when Cao's army collapsed and surrendered, and even welcomed Liu Bei's army, Cheng Yu indiscriminately killed the families of those who returned, and even wiped out entire families.

Although in recent years many princes have concentrated the families of elite troops and soldiers into residences, it is still very rare for them to punish and massacre the families as soon as the army surrendered, as Cheng Yu and Cao Cao did.

After hearing this, Liu Bei's attention was temporarily diverted and he stopped focusing on the reform. Instead, he criticized Cheng Yu from the bottom of his heart. Finally, he asked about Cheng Yu's fate and whether his body had been found.

Guan Yu said that Cheng Yu finally realized the severity of his sins, and when he was about to be annihilated by Zhou Yu, he chose to sink into the Yellow River holding the anchor stone.

Because the Yellow River carries a lot of silt and the riverbed is deep with silt, the anchor stones can sink very deep into the riverbed and cannot be found at all.

The body would not necessarily be tied to the anchor stone all the time - because after a person drowns, or before drowning, when they lose oxygen and become unconscious, their hands holding the anchor stone will naturally loosen, and it is impossible for them to hold on to the anchor stone until they die. Cheng Yu was in a hurry to sink into the river by just holding the stone, not by tying himself to the stone, so the body must have been buried somewhere else.

After the battle, Zhou Yu also used trawl nets to salvage enemy corpses, and he did fish up some enemy corpses that had sunk to the bottom of the sea, but it was after several days, and their faces were so rotten that they were difficult to distinguish, and their clothes and armor were mostly incomplete, so in the end, he could only let the matter go.

Liu Bei secretly felt sorry, but he didn't say anything. He just asked directly about the final result: "So how did you deal with these corpses in the end?"

Guan Yu stroked his beautiful beard and sighed, "If we can't identify the body, there's no need to humiliate the innocent. In the end, it will be just like when Dong Zhuo died, we tied a straw smock, wrote his name on it, and then displayed it to the public to announce his crimes."

Liu Bei nodded. This was enough. There was no need to worry about whether the body was real or fake.

Anyone who has watched the TV series Romance of the Three Kingdoms knows that after Dong Zhuo was killed by Lu Bu, Wang Yun had a straw man with the words "Dong the Thief" written on it made a scene in Chang'an for the people to vent their anger. Emotionally, this was a thorough treatment, and there was no need to pursue deliberate insults.

(Note: In the original text of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a wick was inserted into the navel of Dong Zhuo's corpse and set on fire. The burning of the Zabu people was only a treatment in the TV series. However, this measure was used in the late Han Dynasty to punish criminals whose bodies could not be found, which was indeed in line with the background of the times.)
Liu Bei and Guan Yu originally discussed these topics merely to tell some current news, vent their emotions, and use them as conversation after drinking.

However, Zhuge Liang on the side was fanning himself with a feather fan and thinking about serious matters. Even when he was drinking with his lord and seemed to be enjoying himself, his brain did not actually slow down his thinking speed.

At this moment, inspired by the topic between Liu Bei and Guan Yu, he suddenly had an idea.

Zhuge Liang quickly put down his feather fan and wine cup, and said, "My lord, I just came up with a plan. Coincidentally, it was inspired by the atrocities of Cao Cao and Cheng Yu."

Liu Bei and Guan Yu also stopped their boasting and gossiping. Liu Bei turned his head in surprise: "Oh? This can inspire you, sir? That's really... Let's listen to what you are talking about." Zhuge Liang did not keep them in suspense and said to everyone: "As everyone knows, since Dong Zhuo, when the princes of the world were in war, many of them took the families of their main troops to the cities where the princes lived and settled them.

If it was a powerful lord who controlled several states, such as the two Yuans and Cao Cao at their peak, they would at least bring the families of their elite soldiers to live together in the capital of a state or a hub city. Cheng Yu was facing an avalanche of defections from several counties in Yanzhou. The key reason why he was able to deter the remaining troops from fighting to the death was the threat of the hostages' lives.

Among all the princes in the world, Cao was the most adept at this method. He also summed up a system, which was called the "wrong service method" within the army. The purpose of the system was to make the soldiers of the main force serve in other states and counties instead of their hometowns.

In this way, even if they wanted to surrender to the enemy, they could not bring their families with them because their families were not in this state or county. This would be a case of being cautious and leaving their weak points in the hands of Cao.

Previously, the situation in the world was uncertain, and my lord could not openly oppose Cao Cao's "interpolated labor law" because our army more or less needed to concentrate the families of the soldiers. But now, Cao is about to be forced to lose all the prefectures and counties in Guandong.

In the future, Cao Cao will only have Heluo, Bingzhou, Guanzhong, and Xiliang. Even if he wants to "mistakenly serve", how much room will he have to make? If the lord wants to defeat Cao Cao, even if he does not rely on mistaking the soldiers, he can still defeat Cao Cao, and he does not need to worry that others will surrender to Cao Cao when the situation is slightly unfavorable, because everyone in the world has seen that Cao Cao has no future.

In this case, why don't you openly announce that you will never use the atrocity of the law of wrong labor to harm the people? With this foundation, it will be much easier for you to implement the subsequent reforms, and the obstruction will be greatly weakened. "

Liu Bei followed Zhuge Liang's thoughts and thought about it carefully for a long time, but he still couldn't fully understand the logic.

Liu Bei admitted that his camp also liked to concentrate the families of soldiers, but he did not concentrate them to the extent of "living across states and counties". So even considering the degree, Liu Bei was always more merciful than Cao Cao on this issue.

It's like when Guan Yu fought for Jingzhou in history, he went north to attack Xiangfan, but the families of Guan Yu's army were all in Jiangling. Jiangling was stolen by Lu Meng, and Guan Yu's army was defeated. But if we strictly follow Cao Cao's model of mismanagement, how can we only leave the families of the main force of Jingzhou in Jiangling? Isn't Jiangling the core area of Jingzhou? According to Cao Cao's mismanagement, Liu Bei should have taken the families of Guan Yu's soldiers to Chengdu!
The fact that Liu Bei did not bring Guan Yu's family to Chengdu shows that his trust in his soldiers far exceeded that of Cao Cao.

However, Liu Bei thought about it and felt that this matter was only related to warriors and ordinary soldiers, and had nothing to do with aristocratic families and powerful people.

How could a good policy that gave benefits to military personnel be exchanged for the concessions of the aristocratic families on the issue of selecting officials? These two things are not connected at all, it's too far-fetched.

Liu Bei could not help but sincerely ask for advice: "Announce the complete abolition of the law of alternate service. With our current victory over Cao Cao, our army can really afford it. Even if I promise to never use Cao Cao's atrocities of interstate service and holding family members hostage in other places, I am confident that I can defeat Cao Cao.

But what does this have to do with the reform of selecting officials? The aristocratic families all want to be civil servants and generals, and they don’t care whether the court is kind to ordinary soldiers. "

Zhuge Liang quickly explained: "This is just the first step of the preparation and introduction, just to make the Lord's subsequent series of measures coincide with the initial opportunity of 'abolishing Cao's atrocities'."

Liu Bei regained his anticipation and asked quickly, "What will happen next?"

Zhuge Liang: "My Lord, you should also know that in order to prevent officials from forming complex forces in the local area, our Han Dynasty once had the 'Three Mutual Laws'. It was not until the end of the Huan and Ling years, when the world was in chaos, that it gradually became in name only..."

When Zhuge Liang said this, he paused for a moment, waiting for everyone's reaction, and everyone soon understood.

The Three Mutuals System was a personnel system that was implemented for many years in the Eastern Han Dynasty. Later readers may not understand it, but people at that time were familiar with it.

In a nutshell, officials need to avoid certain places when they are in office. For example, people whose native place is in the state cannot serve as officials in the state.

Or after a marriage through alliance, family members of both spouses would have to avoid the prefectures and counties of the other party when serving as officials.

Then, if people from State A go to State B to serve as governor or provincial governor, people from State B cannot come to State A to serve as prefect or the like.

It is difficult to describe all the specific details at the moment, but in short, this is a system that requires officials to avoid the place where they are employed.

In later generations, there were many regulations that "local people cannot serve as county-level leaders in the county". If we really look into the origins, we can trace them back to this historical origin.

These systems themselves are of course good laws, and to a certain extent they have solved the problem of Eastern Han officials having long been entrenched in local areas and forming connections for personal gain.

Later, the world was in constant war and no one cared about this kind of thing, and the court was unable to do so.

Now Zhuge Liang brought up this old matter again, and judging from the direction of the wind, he was trying to reform the Three Mutual Laws, and used this as an opportunity to link "abolishing the old Three Mutual Laws" with "eradicating Cao Cao's atrocities."

Zhuge Liang continued, "If the court implements a new system for selecting officials in the future, for example, each county will still have the right to recommend candidates to the court, but the court must take an examination before deciding whether to formally appoint them.

By then, the court's original worry that "people from one state would return to their own state to serve as officials and form a powerful force that would be difficult to eliminate" would be slightly alleviated.

Those who were selected because they were favored by the prefectures and counties might not be able to pass the exams, and those who passed the exams had to be truly talented and knowledgeable. If the candidates for officials could not be decided by the local authorities, how could they completely collude?

Of course, indirect collusion is still possible, so the "three mutual laws" cannot be completely abolished, but their scope can be appropriately relaxed. For example, the original regulations prohibit the exchange of positions between two states, but now this level can be relaxed because the exchange of interests across states has become difficult to achieve after the new examination for selecting officials.

Alternatively, the rule that locals are not allowed to serve as officials in their own state can be relaxed to one level, so that they are not allowed to serve as officials in their own county, but can serve as officials in other counties in their own state. These measures will surely be supported by those who truly want to build their hometowns and improve their hometowns.

The reason why the court announced this reform was that Cao Cao's law of forced labor was too cruel, and he used his family members as hostages to force his soldiers to serve in the wrong states. If the lord wanted to correct the wrong, he had to go too far. If he wanted to abolish and reform Cao Cao's law of forced labor and show his leniency, he should relax the three mutual laws at the same time.

Not only will soldiers be able to serve in their own state in the future, but even officials who have passed the examination and are truly talented can serve in counties other than their own county, thus minimizing the restrictions on people leaving their homes while still preventing the emergence of local separatist tendencies.

At that time, when the lord promotes the method of selecting officials through examinations, it can be promoted as a "remedial measure that must be taken in order to prevent people from leaving their homes as much as possible and at the same time prevent them from developing separatist tendencies."

In other words, the lord is not asking the nobles and powerful people for anything, but first giving them good governance and grace, and then in order to make up for the fact that the local government will become too powerful after giving this grace, he has to add a restriction to this grace. "

The strategy mentioned by Zhuge Liang was still very cautious. He did not say that the Three Mutual Laws should be abolished directly, because the avoidance system for officials' places of employment certainly had its value.

This trick was still used 1,800 years later, but on a much smaller scale. The prefectures of the Han Dynasty were larger than the provinces of later times, but the avoidance of later times would never reach the provincial level, only the county level. A civil servant, when he was the top leader of a local government, would have no problem as long as he was not in the county where his native place was.

All this is obviously because the system is progressing, government affairs are becoming more transparent, and the selection and assessment of officials are becoming more transparent, so it is becoming more difficult to form factions at the local level.

Before the imperial examination system was established, the Han Dynasty might have had to avoid it on a state-by-state basis in order to avoid becoming too powerful.

If the imperial examination system was implemented, Zhuge Liang believed that it would be sufficient to limit it to the county level.

The resulting increase in the tail volume can definitely be fully offset by the reduction brought about by the increased transparency in official selection, and there will even be more reduction.

At the same time, the reputation of this reform was also good, as Liu Bei first showed favor to the people of the world. After showing favor, he found that new problems had arisen, so he patched up this favor.

At this point, everyone has gladly accepted the benefits. Do you still have the nerve to stop Liu Bei from patching the patch?
What's more, Liu Bei did not show favor intentionally. He did so because "he witnessed Cao Cao's atrocities and wanted to go against Cao." Liu Bei's starting point was the most just and benevolent.

So, this is the only way to deal with this matter. Don't even think about resisting.

After all these principles were explained, Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and other civil officials suddenly understood.

Zhuge Lingjun's wisdom is indeed extraordinary! He has thought of all the complicated system designs and incentives.

Among everyone present, Zhuge Jin was the most shocked.

The reason why he was shocked was not that he was not mentally prepared for how smart his second brother was.

On the contrary, he was the one among everyone present who knew best how awesome his second brother was. He knew his second brother too well.

He was shocked because he was the only one who knew about the regional avoidance system for official appointments in later generations.

He also knew that according to the general trend of historical development, as the selection of officials became more fair and transparent, the scope of officials' avoidance of the region where they served was indeed gradually narrowed. As long as it could effectively avoid the tail being too big to be removed and the transfer of local interests, this limitation itself was indeed a good thing.

For example, as I just said, "regional avoidance in later generations was eventually limited to the county level." This is something that no one else in the room could know, and only Zhuge Jin, the time traveler, knew.

This means that Zhuge Liang, based on his own reasoning and insights, deduced this trend, which is consistent with the general development direction of "the avoidance range becoming smaller and smaller" in the next 1,800 years.

Avoidance is not an end; it is only a means. Avoidance itself is inconvenient.

Recusation is to prevent the transfer of interests in personnel appointments and is a price that must be paid for this purpose.

As long as there is a way to cut off the transfer of benefits and achieve the underlying purpose, then this inconvenient means can be gradually used less and less.

Zhuge Liang had inadvertently grasped the general outline of the historical trend of personnel design, and had immediately put it into practice to guide the reform of the official selection/appointment avoidance system.

I am willing to limit the scope of recusation, but the price is that the people you nominate must first take an exam to prove themselves and clear themselves of the suspicion of being "interest transfer relations."

And if we trace back to the source, the whole world should blame Cheng Yu.

It was Cheng Yu's killing of the hostages that triggered the benevolent Liu Bei to reflect on a series of issues related to avoidance/stationing troops in other places/serving as an official in other places, which led to the long series of patches that followed.

"My second brother's ability to draw inferences from one example is really amazing... I knew the answer to the history newspaper in advance, but he deduced it himself..."

Zhuge Jin couldn't help but sigh inwardly.

(End of this chapter)