Late Ming Dynasty: So what if Emperor Chongzhen was inactive?!

Chapter 109 I sigh deeply and wipe away my tears, lamenting the many hardships of the people's lives.

How can we avoid deceiving superiors and subordinates and engaging in backroom deals? The answer is very simple: transparency in government affairs. Last year, Zhu Youjian decided to implement reforms and appointed Bi Ziyan as the reform minister. He then posted a yellow notice at the nine gates of the capital, which was tantamount to holding the court hostage and gambling with the court's credibility and his own reputation as emperor.

Don't you officials like to refute and reject proposals? What was originally a system for the emperor to check and correct shortcomings has evolved into a system to limit imperial power. These are unspoken rules among officials, but the common people are unaware of them!
The common people always felt that all the imperial orders came from the emperor: if they were doing well, it was because the emperor was wise; if they were bullied or suffered natural disasters and could not survive, the blame would be placed on the emperor.

The people would shout, "Are kings and nobles born with special privileges?" and "The emperor's throne rotates, next year it'll be my turn!" and then storm the capital, beheading the emperor. Zhu Youjian could not bear such injustice. Since he was to shoulder this burden, then based on the principle of consistency between responsibility and authority, he would also take the power into his own hands.

He directly proclaimed his decrees to the court and the public, essentially telling all officials: Think carefully before you oppose me. If you reject my orders, it's like changing your mind overnight, undermining not only the emperor's authority but also the court's credibility. Without the court's backing, you ministers are nothing!
Therefore, as long as it's not a life-or-death struggle, Zhu Youjian can bypass the central decision-making process by exploiting loopholes and make decisions with a single word.

Besides holding officials hostage, another benefit was letting the people know what the court was doing, preventing them from being deceived by lower-level officials. For example, the court stipulated the types and amounts of taxes, so if lower-level officials overcharged, the people at least had some leverage to argue against it and wouldn't be at the mercy of others.

Although the outcome will likely still be tragic, at least a crack has been opened, and a small change has been made. Why can't such a simple and effective system of government transparency be implemented? What is there to hide? Is it possible to lead the people by example, but not to let them know about it?!

Zhu Youjian issued an edict to initiate the first imperial examination for military officers in the Ming Dynasty. The edict was posted below the list of successful candidates in the civil service examination, ensuring its visibility. The edict briefly explained the rules of the imperial examination for military officers: regardless of background, military officers from all regions were allowed to participate in the provincial examination, and the imperial examination would be held after the provincial examination.

If the civil service examination was a general examination open to all, the military examination was a special examination for those with specific skills. Many people had no idea how to apply or what their qualifications were.

In earlier years, the military examinations selected sons of noble families; now, most of those selected are good-for-nothing children from civil officials' families who, unable to compete with others in the regular imperial examinations, turn to the military examinations.

After passing the imperial examinations through various underhanded means, these elites would enter prestigious military departments like the Embroidered Uniform Guard. Once the Embroidered Uniform Guard was full, they would then reach out to other imperial guards. After the Tumu Crisis, the nobility became incompetent and unable to defend their own territories, even resorting to "joining forces when they couldn't win," accepting bribes to help these privileged sons of the nobility find employment.

Over time, this has led to the current situation: the Embroidered Uniform Guard is almost crippled, and the Beijing Garrison is in a state of utter disarray.

In fact, government transparency is nothing new. Zhu Yuanzhang's "Great Proclamation" was a public declaration of the Ming Dynasty's legal system.

In addition, the emperor's orders were transmitted to government offices at all levels through institutions such as the Office of Transmission and the Six Ministries in the form of "imperial edicts" and "imperial decrees". Some important edicts were copied and posted in the capital and local areas for public display, such as major policy adjustments, disaster relief, and the results of the imperial examinations.

After receiving documents from the central government, local officials were required to post information concerning people's livelihoods, such as tax and labor service policies, judicial judgments, and imperial examination notices, in the form of "notices" or "posters" in the marketplace and in front of government offices, or disseminate them to the grassroots through the village system. For example, the annual tax quotas and corvée labor levies would be publicly posted in the villages, called "actual collection registers." While transparency in government affairs was possible when the court was honest and upright, it became difficult to enforce when the court became corrupt and the country declined. Judgments were not based on evidence or corresponding legal frameworks; they depended entirely on the whims of the officials. Whoever had a strong background, the most money to spend, or could afford a Shaoxing advisor could win the case.

In lawsuits involving ordinary people, regardless of right or wrong, the first thing to do is to beat them with a stick. If they don't know how to use money, it's considered disrespectful to the officials, and they'll be beaten to death. The government and the law only serve the powerful and wealthy. Ordinary people without money can't even think about it: paying money before filing a lawsuit, and if they suffer injustice, they can only swallow their grievances.

The cowardly chose suicide, while the strong-willed, driven to desperation, rebelled, only to be denounced as "traitors" by the court and ruthlessly suppressed, bearing the infamy even in death. The "actual tax register" became increasingly perfunctory, a mere scrap of paper, allowing the government to levy taxes arbitrarily, leading to severe resentment among the people.

Since the taxes could never be fully paid, people simply stopped paying altogether, leading to a surge in tax resistance and a growing hostility between the government and the people. The court's credibility collapsed, its public trust vanished, and social organization declined.

While the Manchu Qing dynasty squeezed every last drop of manpower from the people for war, the Ming court was still struggling with the question of "suppression or appeasement": if they suppressed the people, no one would farm or pay taxes, and the more they suppressed, the poorer the Ming dynasty became; if they appeased, they couldn't save the people's lives, and after eating the little bit of disaster relief grain given by the court, they could only rebel again.

Perhaps, even until the moment they stormed into Beijing, the rebels of the Ming Dynasty didn't believe they could succeed. They were simply hoping for amnesty from the court and a meager amount of food to fill their stomachs. Unfortunately, the court didn't even have that much food, and so the Ming Dynasty was indeed overthrown by these bandits.

But what happened after they conquered it? They experienced initial excitement, plundered the wealth of the powerful, and quickly became corrupt and decadent. Then they suddenly realized that even with all the money, they still couldn't find food. Because by then, the entire north had been scorched and barren, and it was basically impossible to grow any crops.

The North had its own levies, and the South had its own blood taxes. The gentry of Jiangnan were fond of keeping household slaves, with wealthy families often maintaining tens of thousands. Even though the laws of the Ming Dynasty strictly prohibited the "sell-out" of free people into slavery, in reality, local powerful figures and gentry used their power to force tenant farmers and the poor into slavery, a widespread phenomenon.

Landlords in Jiangnan often used "rent resistance" as a pretext to punish tenant farmers and their families into slavery. These landlords treated their slaves with extreme cruelty, leading to frequent slave uprisings in Jiangnan from the Tianqi to the Chongzhen era. Their main demand was "reclaiming the indenture," and they would attack their masters in groups, demanding that their masters hand over the indentures and restore their freedom.

They joined forces with small, self-sufficient farmers, driven to desperation by heavy taxes, to seek revenge against the powerful and wealthy. This was happening in a land of plenty.

Chen Qiyu, the Provincial Treasurer of Shaanxi, Hong Chengchou, the Governor of Shaanxi, and Sun Chengzong, the Governor-General of the Three Border Regions, submitted a memorial stating that Shaanxi was suffering from a severe drought, and the wheat seedlings were withered and scorched. They requested the imperial court to allocate disaster relief grain!
Zhu Youjian held his vermilion brush above the memorial, unable to write for a long time. Like the candidates who were stumped by him, he was conflicted and uneasy. He put down his brush and sighed softly: "Let Sun Chuanting transport a batch of grain back. I can't do anything more than that. You haven't done anything wrong, but I can't save you!!!"

Half of the four million shi of grain that Zhu Youjian stockpiled at the beginning of the year has already been distributed. Of the more than one million taels of silver in the imperial treasury, only 500,000 taels remain. There are still two months until the summer harvest, and it will be earlier in the south. However, the grain in the south is prone to getting stuck on the canals and then mysteriously moldy, turning into old grain that has been stored for many years and severely depreciating in value!
(End of this chapter)