Author: Wu Si
Sun Piyang, the press of Fudan University, was appointed as the official minister in the 22nd year of Wanli of Ming Dynasty (1595), at the age of 62. His duty is to assist the emperor, select officials with both ability and political integrity and put them in appropriate posts. Sun Piyang ranked first among the six ministers of the Central Committee in the Ming Dynasty. There was no prime minister in name in the Ming Dynasty, and the head of the six ministers was simply the biggest official in name. Sun Piyang is an honest and upright man. The 224th volume of Ming History says that "Piyang is very persistent, and no one dares to be private". In retrospect, this stubborn old man from Shaanxi sat in his office all day with a straight face, and thousands of bureaucrats who were good at gaining jobs were afraid to strike up a conversation with him. It is worth noting that this Mr. Sun created the "lottery method" after he became the official minister. Since then, the arrangement of cadres in the Ming Dynasty has changed, and officials, whether they are talented or stupid, have to draw lots for posts by luck. A clever and decent etiquette entrusted the emperor with the important task of selecting talents and appointing talents to a pile of bamboo sticks. What happened to him?
According to the records of the Ming Dynasty, Sun Piyang was not afraid of anyone but eunuchs. Thousands of civil servants in Qian Qian dare not ask Sun Piyang to enter through the back door, but eunuchs dare. The eunuch endlessly asked him to arrange a well-paid job for his cronies. Sun Piyang didn't arrange it, refused and dared not, so he invented the method of drawing lots to prevent those eunuchs from entering through the back door. Sun Piyang has good intentions.
Eunuchs are of course not as big as Sun Piyang in name. Sun Piyang is a second-class official, the leader of eunuchs, that is, eunuchs who serve as eunuchs, but he is a four-level official, four files behind Sun Piyang. And eunuchs are not allowed to interfere in political affairs. Similarly, there was no prime minister in the Ming Dynasty. In the early days of the People's Republic of China, three prime ministers living in the same place seemed unreliable. Zhu Yuanzhang killed them and then abolished the prime minister system. Therefore, Sun Piyang only needs to be directly responsible to the emperor, and he has no fear of anyone but the emperor himself, but this is not the case.
Zhu Yuanzhang's abolition of the Prime Minister is tantamount to forcing his descendants to personally manage the country. This is the idea of self-employed. This idea cannot accommodate the emergence of professional division of labor, nor does it admit that there are experts who are better at management and are willing to manage.
This system prohibits outsiders from interfering with the institution. What about the emperor it provides? Obviously, the Crown Prince, who grew up in the deep palace, must have a superficial understanding of the actual situation of the people. Confucian education in China is also an education to suppress evil and promote good in the Spring and Autumn Period, telling students what the ideal model looks like, why it is ideal and so on. Teaching is far from the actual situation. In other words, a scholar full of dogma and ideals is the best leader that this system can provide. This is only a moral and incompetent senior manager, and it is more likely to encounter an immoral and incompetent manager, a black sheep who lacks ideals and brains. Both emperors lacked the ability to manage the country, and they needed some assistants to help him deal with the complex problems raised by the six heads of state.
In practice, the emperor's examination papers, such as Sun Piyang's paper, must first be read by the cabinet university-the emperor's secretary, draw up treatment opinions for the emperor, and put a small note before the paper, which is called the quasi-ticket. When the draft paper was presented to the emperor, the emperor dictated his will with reference to the opinions of the university students, and the eunuch took a red pen to record it. This is called batch red. No matter what the nominal provisions are, the person who submits the paper is not as powerful as the person who reads the paper and puts forward suggestions for treatment; The proposer of suggestions is not as good as the one who writes instructions in red pen-especially when the emperor is lazy and easy to fool. For example, Zheng De likes joking, so eunuch Liu Jin took this letter home to discuss with relatives and friends. Li Dongyang's record is also difficult to distinguish between true and false.
So, unconsciously, the court decision-making, officials advance and retreat, are in the hands of eunuchs. To put it simply, there must be a gray power group in the Ming Dynasty. This group has the ability to let the defenders of the formal system make way for them. Sun Piyang didn't want to give way, and he didn't dare to offend eunuchs, so he had to give way. As a result of the contest between the two sides, Sun Piyang took the lead in giving up the power of arranging cadres in his own hands, giving up the distribution right of the fat job, and canceling the claim right of the fat job. No one can arrange cadres according to their own standards, and everything is decided by the luck of the bamboo pole and the parties. After the establishment of the lottery system, the back door of the official department was blocked, and people at that time praised Sun Piyang for his impartiality. In this kind of praise, we can also feel the seriousness of favoritism and malpractice in personnel arrangement or distribution of vacancies.