As the most basic administrative institution in the Ming Dynasty, the advantages and disadvantages of county government are directly related to the survival of state power.
At the root of the Ming Dynasty, Gu Yanwu, a famous thinker in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, once emphasized that the extreme corruption of the county government in the Ming Dynasty led to a great peasant uprising in the late Ming Dynasty, which eventually led to the fall of the Ming Dynasty.
With this as a background, he wrote the classic "Treatise on Counties".
The study of the county system in the Ming Dynasty is the key to the study of the Ming Dynasty, because it is an important window to understand the society, politics and economy of the Ming Dynasty. The number of counties in the Ming Dynasty was large, divided into upper, middle and lower three classes and complex and simple, and the promotion and demotion of county officials were related to the geographical location of the county and the amount of land dues.
The supreme governor of the county is the magistrate, and its subordinate officials and subordinate officials have the county governor, the main book, and the canonical history. Therefore, an in-depth study of the Ming Dynasty county system will help us better understand the history and culture of the Ming Dynasty.
In the Ming Dynasty, the responsibilities of the county officials were heavy, in addition to knowing the county as the head of a county, in charge of major policies such as enlistment and annual meetings, the county secretary and the chief secretary were also indispensable assistants. The county magistrate is the deputy of the county magistrate, assisting the magistrate in handling government affairs, and the chief secretary is in charge of the county's book affairs.
In addition, the canonical history is responsible for patrolling the small things such as civil thieves and fights. The specific affairs in the county need to be handled by the officials, Wanping County usually has 38 officials, divided into seven rooms such as the officials' rooms and household rooms, corresponding to the six departments and the delivery room.
The county officials of Liufang are the ultimate executors of state administration and have a great influence on the quality of county administration. In addition to the official county officials and servants, there are also miscellaneous servants. They are signed by the county officials to recruit locals to fill their posts, and the funds are settled by the county, and it is up to the county officials to decide whether they will stay or stay.
In general, the duties of the county officials include, but are not limited to: taking charge of major policies such as enlistment and annual meetings, assisting in handling government affairs, patrolling and arresting civil thieves and fights, and supervising the execution of county officials and miscellaneous servants in the six rooms.
These duties reflected the important position of county officials in local governance during the Ming Dynasty.
In the seventeenth year of Hongwu (1384), Zhu Yuanzhang clearly ordered that the state and county officials should promote morality, raise the people, distribute the service fairly, solve poverty, review grievances, prohibit thieves, and regularly order the governor to warn the people, promote filial piety, do their best to farm, and prevent crime.
The state and county officials should perform the township drinking ceremony, let people understand the relationship between the noble and the low, and check their good and evil deeds at the end of the year and give praise or punishment. Government officials should balance government decrees, examine the achievements of subordinate officials, give courtesy to those who govern well and are praised by the people, and give legal sanctions to those who are improper in governance and harm to the people.
Officials should publicize morality, assess the ability of prefecture and county officials, understand the customs and habits of the people, discover corruption and malpractices, and report and deal with them to their superiors. Death penalty cases are reported to the Criminal Department for conviction by the Chief Secretary of the Police, while other cases are handled by the local government.
The trial of the case shall be detailed, fair, and without delay. Civil lawsuits should be filed from the bottom up, and no appeals from higher levels are allowed. In terms of the selection of county officials, most of the Zhengyin magistrates of Ming Dynasty counties were born in the imperial examination.
The proportion of people from the county is as high as 773%, and the proportion of Zhixian who was born in Jinshi is only 227%。Although the magistrates from Jinshi have a higher status and are promoted quickly, their promotions often focus on political performance rather than qualifications, and even those from Jinshi cannot avoid the fate of being sent to other counties.
The county system of the Ming Dynasty had many drawbacks, some of which were quite serious. First of all, the ratio of county officials to county officials in the Ming Dynasty was extremely unreasonable, and the four people had to deal with the orders and inspections of the six higher ministries and the provinces and governments, as well as effectively rule the hundreds of thousands of people in the county in various aspects such as "money and grain", "criminal name", "school", "weathering", and "production", but in fact they were not competent.
As a result, county government is often controlled by the masses, resulting in a chaotic situation in which the administrator has no power and the powerful are not the administrative decision-makers. Secondly, the Ming Dynasty inspected the county officials' political achievements and urged the first department, which was actually to force the officials and the people.
County officials across the country are busy day and night, regardless of the life and death of the people in order to complete the task of recruitment. By the middle of the Ming Dynasty, most of the fields in the world had been reduced by half, and they were embezzled by bureaucratic gentry and landlords through means such as "flying and sprinkling" and "trickery".
Although the land was lost, the land endowment could not be reduced, and the magistrate pushed the loss onto the peasants, and within a year, hundreds of families went bankrupt. Zhang Juzheng reformed the pursuit of the gains of Tian Fu, and added an item of "bringing levy" to the examination law, which made Li Le, who had been a state and county official for a long time, dissatisfied.
He believed that the expropriation was an exploitation of the common people and intensified the class contradictions, because these officials falsely reported the number of fields and the amount of harvest to the common people who did not have so much land and grain, and the superiors did not verify and verify it, so they made the false amount into a fixed amount and stipulated that the peasants should pay this amount every year.
In the Ming Dynasty, the management of county officials became more and more serious, and the exploitation of the common people by officials below the county level became more and more severe, and the darkness and corruption of the litigation process also made the common people often face the situation of family ruin in lawsuits.
Although some ** claim to be fair and honest and ask for the people's lives, their practice is often only to safeguard the interests of the landlord class and openly tear off the veil of "fair justice".
The power of life and death of prisoners in prison is completely controlled by county officials and jailers, who also use it to extort prisoners' families in a variety of ways. These phenomena reflect the deep-seated problems of Ming Dynasty society and require us to think deeply and solve.
Li Le saw a heinous scene in Wucheng County during the Wanli period, where the county magistrate Jiang used the method of "starving to death" as a non-trial method when punishing prisoners, which was really a confusing case handled by the government.
Not only that, but the hellguards even let the prisoners die before they could answer the light punishment such as the rod, in order to solicit bribes. What is even more distressing is that the county government of the Ming Dynasty was full of multiple leaders from ** and localities, including the "Article" of the Six Ministries and the Monastery that directly intervened in local government affairs, the "block" of the province and the government as the top boss of the county, and the "ministers" of various imperial histories.
Bullish leadership is not a good thing, but it brings more trouble. The government is the direct superior of the county, and is not only responsible for the evaluation of county officials, but also controls all aspects of the county's money, food, and criminal names.
Therefore, the prefect can be said to be the most feared superior of the prefect. Hai Rui once said: "The county is unified in the government, and the old practice must be consulted if there is a small reason." This means that the prefect often ignores political affairs and goes to the prefect when he has time.
The prefect** is also often one-third of the total amount of bribes paid to superiors by the prefect. Every Hajj year, Chun'an County will send 240 taels of silver as bribes according to regulations, of which 90 taels are used to bribe government officials.
In addition to being directly subordinate to the prefecture, there were many articles in the Ming Dynasty that were directly inserted into the county, for example, the two divisions of the province had separate guarding roads and separate patrol roads, which crossed the prefecture-level administration and directly intervened in the county-level administration.
The establishment of the sub-patrol road began in the fifteenth year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang believed that "I am afraid of being greedy and lawless, so I set up a patrol in the prefecture and county of Zhili according to the imperial history", and the areas outside the Zhili were assigned by the judges.
Each county has its own tasks, and during the Hongzhi period, it was stipulated that "the cloth should be divided into two divisions and officials in charge of patrolling and patrolling in February every year, and returning to the division in mid-July, and it must be traversed to belong." ”
The sub-patrol road is responsible for "the first dirty officials, stupid government harming the people, and all things that promote profit and eliminate harm", while the sub-patrol road is in charge of "grain storage, tuntian, Qing army, post transmission, water conservancy, and people's care".
The Complexity and Multiplicity of County Administrative Power in the Ming Dynasty The county administrative power in the Ming Dynasty was not only subject to the intervention of the government, the sub-patrol, and the separate guard, but also the direct intervention of the patrol according to the imperial history.
The Imperial Governor is responsible for intervening in all county-level political, military, judicial, taxation, financial management, education, customs, and other affairs, and has the power of impeachment. Therefore, from the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the power of the patrol according to the imperial history exceeded that of the sub-patrol and the division of the two provinces, and was regarded as the superior of the county official.
In addition to these interveners, the Ming ** also often sent the governor, the Qing army imperial history, the salt imperial history, the customs imperial history, the tea imperial history, the study of the imperial history, etc., they appeared as a messenger, and the officials of the prefectures, prefectures, and counties would personally greet and entertain them.
Due to the complexity of the identities and powers of these patrol officials, and sometimes even the key officials are not clear, the local officials of the state and county often try their best to stammer and entertain them when facing these "mothers-in-law".
In addition, the post delivery system of the Ming Dynasty also had a negative impact on the county administration, and the past tolerance officials were often mixed with counterfeit goods, which brought difficulties and challenges to the county administration.
In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the management of official seals was chaotic, and there was a phenomenon of "issuing without paying", and the gentry frequently borrowed from each other. And the officials who went out to patrol could even rely on the permission of the "Da Ming Law" to extort the prefect and the governor.
These ** reception fake officials are respectful and respectful, but in fact they are ridiculous. Xue Yunsheng explained that the reason why it is stipulated that tolerance personnel cannot bully the magistrate is because they have a lower position and have committed fewer crimes.
However, the permission of the Ming Law actually led them to exploit the county freely, because the county system is an important place for money to be accumulated. By the end of the Ming Dynasty, many wise people had realized that if the disadvantages of the county system were not resolved, it would directly threaten the survival of state power.
Zhao Nanxing, the secretary of the Ming Dynasty, called for reform, believing that the two most serious of the four evils were the drawbacks of the county system. He pointed out that the rampant filth of the government has caused people's livelihood to suffer and social turmoil.
He called on people to put aside their selfishness and work together for the future of the country in order to achieve the goal of saving the country from danger. However, his call was not echoed by the majority of officials, and eventually led to a great peasant uprising at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the fall of the Ming Dynasty.
This is a warning about history, reminding us that we should have the courage to reform, oppose corruption, pay attention to people's livelihood, and strive for the prosperity of the country and the happiness of the people.