Why did the Ming Dynasty fall?
In the eyes of historical researchers and enthusiasts, there are many opinions on this topic. Most will focus on military, political, and climatic ......, but relatively little attention has been paid to the collapse of the ideological sphere. But from my personal point of view, even if this is not the biggest reason, it should be an important reason, or even a deeper reason.
The Ming Dynasty, especially the middle and late Ming society after Zhengde, was an era of great changes all over the world at the same time. Although the countries of the East and the West have different development trajectories and huge differences in social processes, they all share the same thing.
Ten. Around the 6th and 17th centuries, they each entered a turning point in history.
In the context of the city-state form, although there are scattered bright spots in the West, it will inevitably enter a bottleneck because of the narrow geography and market. Relying on the triangle ** and eastward expansion, it became the only exit, thus opening the age of adventure and barbarism of the Great Voyage; After a brief reunification with Toyotomi Hideyoshi during the Warring States period, Japan entered the Tokugawa period, which was stable for a long time. Because of the special status of the silver-producing country, it has an ambiguous relationship with the West, both direct and indirect, and also at war with the West; And the reason why the two did not have a comprehensive head-on conflict was because they had a huge Ming Dynasty in between.
At this time, the internal changes of the Ming Dynasty were more complicated than those of the small Western countries that were independent of each other and Japan, which was still weak. From the institutional point of view, the Shang dynasty of the Zhou Dynasty was the turning point that completely replaced the theocracy of the secular world that lasted to this day, the unification of the Qin and Han dynasties was the turning point that replaced the patriarchal feudal system, the imperial examination of the Sui and Tang dynasties was the turning point that replaced the aristocratic system, and the Song and Ming dynasties went further, which was the awakening turning point of the citizen class and commercialization, and the middle and late Ming Dynasty evolved this turning point to the extreme.
The decline of imperial power has been irreversible, and the two generations of traditional strong emperors in the early Ming Dynasty abolished the prime minister system, but unexpectedly promoted the development and prosperity of the new management system of the cabinet system. Although the cabinet system of the Ming Dynasty has not been legalized, the form of this collective group standing in charge of administration and the monarch being in charge of the overall situation is very close to the later constitutional monarchy.
And these changes in the East and the West have developed separately without communicating with each other; The politics of the Ming Dynasty changed like this, and the economy was very different from before. The rise and fall of dynasties in ancient societies always could not avoid land annexation, but in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, due to the influx of **, the thriving development of handicraft farms in the southeast, investment in commerce and factories, has gradually replaced the traditional single land income. And this group of upstarts who integrate government and business also occupy important positions in the court, and even the cabinet.
However, because of their huge selfish interests, they did not want the imperial court to expand commercial taxes. As a result, the originally abundant commercial tax revenue could not come up, and the increasingly barren agricultural tax was decoded layer by layer, and the peasant uprising at the end of the Ming Dynasty was of course inevitable; The most influential and influential development of the government, business, and chaebol was the questioning and overthrow of the mainstream values of traditional Confucianism represented by the Zhuzi Doctrine, and the development of the private newspaper industry, which was born in the first place.
There is no doubt that history will move forward. However, for the sake of the basic survival interests of the vast majority of people, relatively stable development is still the best choice.
However, just like the society of the middle and late Ming Dynasty, while completely overthrowing the basic moral restraint system, it was also unreservedly and fully liberalized, no matter whether there is virtue or not, and what the cultivation is, everyone can have unlimited rights to speak to themselves and call themselves saints, and what is obtained is inevitably a temporary prosperity, and what is buried is the irreversible merger of interests, the overflow of selfish desires throughout the country, and the complete out-of-control collapse of society. It can be said that this is the deepest straw that crushed the Ming Dynasty, which was originally full of hope and should have been a healthy small ** big society.
Military and political corruption is a common problem in every dynasty, and climate is also an irresistible objective factor, but the chaotic disorder and tearing apart of the Ming Dynasty are the only ones in the Ming Dynasty, and this is also the new topic that Ming China must face when the society developed into the 16th century. This rift included the traditional doctrine in China and the reformists represented by Wang Yangming, as well as the Taizhou School and the Crazy Zen School, which gradually became radical and paranoid and advocated doing whatever they wanted, and the ...... of Western missionaries such as Matteo Ricci to participate in the struggle for values within the Ming Dynasty in order to take root in China and preach to China
In fact, the history of the Middle and Late Ming Dynasty is the most worthy of study and attention by later generations. Only in this way can we more comprehensively review Chinese society under the great changes at an inflection point. But as Hegel said, "The only lesson that history teaches is that people never learn any lessons from history." "In the same way, can we really learn from history?
Difficult. Even if there were, it was a very small part, and the other part of the people who did not understand it and grew up to understand it. And the torrent of grasping the trend of history and guiding the steady development of society is the great public. The public is not derogatory, but the blind obedience of the public is not desirable.
If it is said that it is history that has nothing to do with itself, in fact, it is not the contemporary of later generations? It is said that it is far away from the court and the country of the people, but there is no truth under the nest, and how many people can really understand it? The collapse of people's livelihood and the fate of the mustard...If you don't immerse yourself in it, most of them are just watching the building tilt and stay out of the way.
The supreme leaders of the middle and late Ming dynasties failed to come up with plans and solutions in the face of new problems, and I hope that future generations can learn from them, for the sake of the public, but also for ourselves. ▲