Sky Curtain: The opening scene explains the four major cases of the Ming Dynasty plus the early Ming

"Family members, if the Jiajing New Deal was a fever reducer, the Zhengde Reform was starting from scratch, and Li Chen's Dazhong Era was a brief resurgence, then Wang Anshi's Reform was a real open-heart surgery."

Zhu Dijun drew a scalpel heavily on the whiteboard with a marker in his hand.

"The target of the surgery—the Great Song Empire!"

"The lesion of the surgery—three redundancies and two accumulations! Redundant officials, redundant soldiers, redundant expenses, plus accumulated poverty and weakness. These five words are the terminal diagnosis of the entire Song Dynasty!"

"Chief surgeon: Wang Anshi. Assistant: Emperor Shenzong of Song, Zhao Xu."

He dropped the marker and braced his hands on the podium.

Why did the Jiajing Emperor's reforms in the Ming Dynasty fizzle out? Because they were implemented through official channels and absorbed by civil officials at the implementation level. Why did the Zhengde Emperor's reforms fail even faster? Because they were implemented through secret agents, and civil officials directly staged a coup. Did Li Chen rely on his personal diligence to hold on? Once he died, it was all for naught.

"Wang Anshi saw through the mistakes made by his predecessors (although he lived 500 years before Jiajing). He wanted to take a path unprecedented in history—replacing strongman politics with institutional reform!"

"The Green Sprouts Act, the Market Exchange Act, and the Exemption from Corvée Labor Act he enacted were essentially all ways for the state to use financial tools to seize profits from powerful and wealthy merchants. This isn't just about killing a few corrupt officials; it's about rewriting the entire rule governing the distribution of wealth in the Song Dynasty!"

Zhu Dijun grabbed the pointer and forcefully drew a line on the screen.

"When Jiajing investigated estates, he targeted the illegally seized portions. Wang Anshi, on the other hand, targeted the legally owned portions! He wanted the state to directly reach into the pockets of landlords and merchants, extracting money proportionally!"

"How devastating is that? To give you an analogy, the Jiajing Emperor's New Policies were like asking you to return what you stole. Wang Anshi's reforms were like telling you directly that for every hundred dollars you earn, you have to give thirty to the state. Which do you think would be more devastating for those with vested interests?"

A wave of realization instantly flooded the screen.

"I get it! No wonder Sima Guang risked his life to abolish the New Laws! This shook the very foundations of the entire landlord class!"

"Was Wang Anshi promoting state capitalism in the Song Dynasty?"

Zhu Dijun's fingers flew across the keyboard, and a timeline of Wang Anshi's reforms unfolded on the screen.

"In the second year of the Xining era, Wang Anshi was appointed prime minister, and the reforms were fully launched. The Green Sprouts Act, the Equal Transportation Act, the Market Exchange Act, the Exemption from Corvée Labor Act, and the Square Field Equal Tax Act were rolled out one after another. Emperor Shenzong of Song held out behind the scenes, withstanding the fierce backlash from the conservatives led by Sima Guang."

"Attention, family members! There's a detail here that's strikingly similar to the Zhengde Reforms—personnel selection!"

"Wang Anshi was too impatient. He wanted to see the effects of national prosperity in a short period of time. This led to fatal problems in his selection of officials. A large number of opportunists infiltrated the reform team. The most typical example was Lü Huiqing, who later directly betrayed Wang Anshi!"

"How do these speculators implement the new law at the grassroots level? They force-feed it! They increase exploitation! The Green Seedling Law was originally meant to allow farmers to borrow low-interest loans from the state during the lean season, but at the local level it has become mandatory lending! You have to borrow even if you don't need the money! And then the interest snowballs, forcing you to repay it at breakneck speed!"

Zhu Dijun slapped the whiteboard.

"What is this the same as? It's exactly the same as the tax reforms of the Jiajing era turning into increased exploitation at the grassroots level! It's exactly the same as the rice levy of the Zhengde reforms turning into extortion at the local level!"

"The top-level design of reforms may be for the good of the country, but as long as the implementers are bureaucrats cultivated by these vested interest groups, the new laws will inevitably be distorted in their hands! Because they don't need the reforms to succeed; they only need the reforms to be distorted in implementation, and then use the distorted results to attack the reforms themselves!"

He drew a huge circular arrow on the whiteboard.

"The emperor pushes for reforms → civil officials sabotage the implementation → reforms fail → civil officials say, 'See, the emperor is making a mess of things' → the emperor's political credibility collapses → the next emperor is forced to return to the old path of civil official governance → accumulated problems continue → the next emperor pushes for reforms again → civil officials sabotage again → another failure."

"This is the ultimate vicious cycle of China's feudal dynasties over the past two thousand years!"

Zhu Dijun slammed the chalk in his hand and smashed it.

"What was the most tragic aspect of Wang Anshi's reforms? It wasn't that he was dismissed from his post as prime minister. It was that even after his dismissal, Emperor Shenzong continued to insist on reforms! Emperor Shenzong personally promoted the Yuanfeng Reforms, attempting to solve the problem at the level of the official system. He never gave up until his death."

"But when Emperor Shenzong died, the young Emperor Zhezong ascended the throne. Empress Dowager Gao appointed Sima Guang, who abolished all the new laws within a year. The achievements of twenty years of reform were wiped out overnight."

Zhu Dijun lowered his voice.

"What's even more disgusting is what came next. After Emperor Zhezong assumed power, he wanted to restore the New Laws and launched the 'Shaosheng Shaoshu' reform. But by this time, the reforms were no longer reforms; they had become pure political purges. When the New Party came to power, they ruthlessly persecuted the Old Party, and when the Old Party came to power, they ruthlessly persecuted the New Party. Wang Anshi's ideals of enriching the country and strengthening the military were completely reduced to a fig leaf for factional strife."

"A surgery that should have saved the country turned into two groups fighting over the scalpel and stabbing each other. The patient, the Great Song Dynasty, lay on the operating table bleeding for fifty years, only to be met not with recovery, but with the iron hooves of the Jin army crushing Bianliang City."

The era of Hongwu in the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang remained silent for a long time.

He didn't fly into a rage like before, nor did he slam his fist on the table or yell at anyone. He simply sat quietly on the dragon throne, watching the endlessly spinning, looping arrow in the sky.

"Biao'er".

He finally spoke, his voice incredibly hoarse.

"Your subject is here."

Zhu Biao stepped forward.

"We've fought wars our whole lives and killed people our whole lives. We thought that if we killed all those who deserved to die, our descendants would be able to sit on the throne and secure the country."

Zhu Yuanzhang's eyes revealed deep weariness. "Now it seems that killing people won't break this vicious cycle. I can't kill Zhu Houzhao, I can't kill Zhu Houcong, and I couldn't even kill Wang Anshi from five hundred years ago."

"Because you can kill all the officials, but you can't kill all the seeds of officials. The entire scholarly class is their seed. If you cut off this batch, another batch will immediately grow in the examination hall. The new people who grow up will enter that rotten bureaucracy, and within three years they will be just like the old ones."

Zhu Biao listened quietly, sweat beading on his forehead.

Modern live streaming room.

Zhu Dijun leaned back in his chair, twirling the marker between his fingers twice.

"Family members, if you look at the four reforms spanning five hundred years—the Jiajing Reforms, the Zhengde Reforms, the Great Zhongzhi Era, and the Wang Anshi Reforms—together, you will discover an extremely terrifying comparison table."

A four-column table pops up on the large screen.

"Tiger Head - The four reforms all started swiftly and achieved remarkable results. Why? Because the crisis forced the emperor or reformers to exert absolute political pressure in the early stages, which they could leverage to their advantage."

"The tail end of the reforms—all four reforms ultimately stalled or even regressed. Why? Three reasons: entrenched interests, as the reforms deepened, they touched the core vested interest groups. The policies collapsed with the death of the leaders, and all the achievements were built on the shoulders of one or two strongmen. The implementation deteriorated, and good policies became new tools for exploitation at the grassroots level."

Zhu Dijun stood up.

"The Jiajing New Deal—a fever reducer, treating the symptoms but not the root cause. The Zhengde New Deal—overturning the table, being pinned to death on the table. The Great Zhongzhi Era—a final burst of energy, the person dies and the lamp goes out. Wang Anshi's Reforms—open surgery, the surgeon is driven away, and the patient dies on the operating table."

"All four roads are dead ends."

He walked up to the big screen and pressed his finger on the spinning, endless arrow. The arrow stopped.

"Is there any way out?"

The live stream went silent.

Zhu Dijun returned to the podium and tapped his fingers on the table.

"Family members, the answer to this question is too broad, too broad to be contained in this episode. But I can give you a starting point."

He wrote the last line on the whiteboard.

"One specific measure of Wang Anshi's reforms was called the Baojia system. It trained civilian militias, with ten households forming a Bao and fifty households forming a large Bao. On the surface, it was to save on military expenses by building up the militia, but in reality, it was an attempt to establish a grassroots organizational network that bypassed local officials and was directly controlled by the central government."

"He realized this five hundred years ago—the root cause of reform failure lies not in top-level design, but in grassroots implementation. No matter how good your policies are, they will fall apart when they reach the county government. If you replace the county magistrate, the new one will be assimilated within three months."

"There is only one way to solve this problem—to establish a completely new grassroots organization that does not rely on the traditional bureaucratic system."

Zhu Dijun's voice suddenly stopped here.

He didn't say anything more.

He simply glanced meaningfully at the camera, a cryptic smile playing on his lips.

"This path was not successfully traversed by Wang Anshi, Zhengde, or Jiajing. Throughout the entire feudal era, no emperor successfully traversed it."

"But five hundred years later, someone made it work."

The screen suddenly went black.

All the emperors in the myriad worlds of the Great Ming Dynasty raised their heads at the same time.