"Learning and Excellence" is the ideal of life of ancient Chinese literati, and the life path of ancient literati is mostly carried out with this axis. Unlike scholars in the West, the literati of ancient China had a close relationship with the "scholars", and the "scholars" no longer simply referred to people who could do things, but more specifically referred to those who were worried about the country and the people who were "willing to be in the Tao" and "can carry out their perseverance", and who had the ideals and ambitions of the homeland. Since then, "shi" no longer refers only to the title of the profession, but to the "zhi shi", their greater responsibility is to promote the Tao, "Zhi Dao", and only "Shi" can undertake this mission.
Therefore, in addition to making a living, the literati "entered the army" and also had the responsibility, maintenance and inheritance of morality. That is to say, the ancients believed, "morality, meritorious service, and speech." But this ideal is often difficult to achieve, so that the career is bumpy and even degraded.
Most of the degraded officials during the Tang and Song dynasties were intolerable to those in power because of palace struggles, or because of political disagreements, or because of their uprightness, or because they angered the powerful, and being degraded and exiled became an unavoidable tragedy in the lives of some scholars.
Distribution of degraded officials in The Tang and Song dynasties
In the Tang and Song dynasties, Lingnan is referred to as Lingbiao and Lingwai, which is equivalent to today's Guangdong, most of Guangxi, Hainan and some areas in northern Vietnam. According to statistics, there were 568 people who were demoted to Lingnan in the Tang Dynasty, and 470 people who were demoted to Lingnan in the Song Dynasty, of which nearly 400 were exiled, more than 700 people were demoted and resettled, more than 50 people (families) were relatives of the emperor and the state, more than 70 people (times) were prime ministers, and a large number of high-ranking officials and celebrities.
I. Distribution of Degraded Officials in Lingnan in the Tang Dynasty
Examine the process of degrading officials and the distribution of their demotions. From a geographical point of view, Lingnan Province, Qianzhongxiao, and Jiannan Province are the main areas where Liugong is distributed, and Lingnan Province, Jiangnan East-West Province, and Shannan-Dong-Dong-Dao are the main areas for degrading officials. This distribution shows that the government follows the characteristics of "punishing officials in the south" when punishing officials in exile.
Officials who committed serious crimes were mostly relegated to Lingnan Province, with the aim of "abstaining from squatting". Some degraded officials were demoted to Lingnan several times, and this situation is generally divided into two types, one is to degrade Lingnan and then be recalled, and then degrade Lingnan, such as Li Yong, because of his good relationship with Zhang Kam, was demoted to Fuzhou Sihu, "Tang Long's first year, summoned zuotai hall to serve the imperial history, and degraded the cliff state Shecheng Cheng. "The other is to descend from one place in Lingnan to another place in Lingnan, such as Yuwen Rong, first degrading Zhaozhou, and for several years outside the ridge, with flow rock states.
According to the above statistics, the number of degraded officials in Lingnan in the Tang Dynasty reached 653, in fact, this number should be less than the actual number of degraded officials in Lingnan in the Tang Dynasty. Because of the Wu Dynasty's Heavenly Dynasty's "Dai wu Liu" incident, in order to gain Wu Zetian's attention, the ku official Lai Junchen interpreted the "Liu" in the proverb as "liu" according to the proverbial "dai wu liu", that is, a streamer. Believing this explanation, Wu Zetian sent the cool official Wan Guojun to Guangzhou to censor the displaced people and "killed more than three hundred people in one dynasty" in Lingnan.
Second, the distribution of degraded officials in the Lingnan of the two Song Dynasties
First of all, the number of yuan evil state army was relatively large, and the far evil state army was "Nan'en, Xin, Xun, Mei, Gao, Lei, Hua, Bin, Rong, Qiongzhou, Wan'an, Changhua, Jiyang army" and ". Nan'en Prefecture was enzhou in the Tang Dynasty, and in the eighth year of the Song Dynasty, because Beizhou in Hebei was called Enzhou, the original Enzhou was renamed Nan'enzhou. Even though Nan'en ranked first in the Far Evil State Army, there were not too many derogators who really belittled and assigned to the area.
Second, there are relatively few degraded officials with special geographical locations. For example, the number of degraded officials in Jiedu Prefecture, the Qing Navy in Guangzhou, the Jianwu Army in Yongzhou, the Qingyuan Army in Rongzhou, and the Ningyuan Army in Rongzhou were small, and very few people were demoted to the region because of party strife; the prefectures that were upgraded to prefectures, such as Duanzhou Zhaoqingfu, Kangzhou Deqingfu, Yizhou Qingyuanfu, and Guizhou Jingjiangfu, also had fewer degraded officials: Pingzhou and Guanzhou, which were adjacent to ethnic minority areas, had almost no degraded officials because of their important military and enveloping status.
Third, the more economically backward the state army, the more degraded the officers, and conversely, the more the better developed areas degraded the officials. Guangzhou in the Song Dynasty became the most economically developed state on Guangnan East Road after the Southern Song Dynasty, and the coastal areas of eastern Guangdong, which were previously regarded as fearful by the Tang Dynasty scholars, were fully developed in the Song Dynasty, and the number of officials and eunuchs was significantly reduced compared with the Tang Dynasty, mainly by placing few editors.
Guangnan West Road, on the other hand, borders Yidong to the west and the sea to the south, with dense forests and plagues. Hainan Qiongguan is surrounded by the sea on all sides, and The Limu Mountain runs through it, which is even more evil. Therefore, on the Guangnan West Road, except for Guizhou and Guixi Ruyuzhou, Pingzhou, and Guanzhou, the rest of the prefecture army was a region where the demotion of officials was more concentrated.
The political reasons for the demeaning of officials in Lingnan, Tang and Song Dynasties
First, the defeat of the political struggle
The reason for this fact is obvious. The famous Zetian seizure of power, the restoration of Emperor Zhongzong, the Yongzhen reform, the Niu-Li party struggle, and the change of Ganlu, most of the losers of the struggle were relegated to poor and barren land, and many of them went to Lingnan. For example, in the Niu-Li Party dispute, first the Niu Party lost, Li Zongmin was exiled to Fengzhou, and the Niu Monks and Children degraded "following the history of the governor"; after the Niu Dang defeated the Li Dang, the Li Dang was demoted, Li Deyu was demoted to "Sima of Chaozhou", and later demoted "Yazhou Sihu to join the military".
Similarly, the phenomenon of party strife runs through the political history of the two Song Dynasties, and therefore the most concentrated in Lingnan. The emperor wanted to use "mixing different theories" as a means for his courtiers, but many ministers went so far as to openly put forward the "theory that gentlemen have a party." Party rivalry became a major feature of Song Dynasty politics, the dispute between Lu Zhao, the dispute between Kou Ding, the dispute over the New Deal, the dispute over the "Pu Discussion", the dispute over changing the law, the dispute over "change" and "Shaoshu", "Jianzhong" and "Party Ban". Even the Southern Song Dynasty was constantly arguing around war and peace. Every political struggle will have losers, and most of the defeats will be reduced to Lingnan.
2. Guilty of words
Although the Tang and Song dynasties were relatively enlightened, after all, it was still a monarchy, and being convicted of words was an inevitable product of its system. The end, of course, is to be degraded and exiled, and Gao Yi "wrote to say that Wu Sansi father and son will be rebellious", and the result was "outside the mountain of the flow". It is guilty to say the wrong thing, and it is also guilty not to say it. If there is a form that does not play or does not act, it must also be dealt with, and Cui Renshi does not play, "Emperor Taizong took renshi as a reckless person, so he was sent to Gongzhou."
Generally speaking, the Song Dynasty was the best era for the literati to open up the way of speech. At the beginning of the founding of the country, it made an iron coupon: "No one shall kill a scholar or a doctor or a person who has written to him for advice." Emperor Renzong reused the counselors for life, opening up an atmosphere of enlightenment and democracy, even if the counselors offended Long Yan, they could be used later, even if they were occasionally wrong, they could be more tolerant. But after all, this is related to the personal cultivation of the emperor, the basic monarchy is still there, and it is inevitable that the crime will be completely avoided.
3. Bribery and perverting the law and dereliction of duty
The Tang Law stipulates that "those who pervert the law ... Thirty horses plus the stream, "officials can be included in the list of corrupt and perverted laws because of corruption, bribery, etc." For example, Dang Renhong, whose people were very greedy, during his tenure as the governor of Guangzhou, the embezzlement reached more than one million, and then he was denounced and deposed by the government as a Shuren, "Migrating to Qinzhou." "There are also those in the Song Dynasty who have been exiled to Lingnan because of unfavorable military operations. This mainly includes three types: one is the failure of the war due to ineffective command of the war, the second is the lax management of the army, and the third is to shake the hearts and minds of the army.
4. Consecutive sittings caused by relatives and friends
This is a category in which the number of degraded officials in Lingnan is relatively large, one is because their families are involved in crimes or are involved in exile by the same party; one is kind to criminal officials or they are friends who interact with each other; one is because they rescue their new friends or the same party; and more arrogantly, they are because they have exchanged letters with degraded officials and attract who is derogatory. In the Song Dynasty, the main crime of conspiracy to commit consecutive sittings was the felony of conspiracy to rebel and endanger social welfare, which was smaller than that of the Tang Dynasty.
The cultural reasons for the demeaning of officials in Lingnan during the Tang and Song dynasties
Reading through the history of the Tang and Song dynasties, lingnan degraded officials, although the apparent political reasons are different, the deep reasons for the demeaning are only two aspects in this article: on the one hand, it is not clear "who is the jun" and "what the jun is"; on the other hand, it is to forget that you are a subject.
First, the vagueness of the perception of "kings"
Most of the degraded officials naively thought that they had encountered the Ming Emperor and the Holy Lord, and that it was the Son of Heaven who sat on the dragon chair, so they had the wind and disease of Emperor Gaozong of Tang, and the derogatory exile of the princes and the eldest grandson Wujie and Chu Pudao during the dictatorship of the Empress Wu, they did not know that the "Jun" sitting on the dragon chair was a vested group, not an individual.
China's absolute monarchy was not only the only viable constitutional form of political governance in ancient agrarian China, but it did not operate on the basis of the emperor alone, the emperor was only an indispensable component of this elite palace system. Without the existence of an emperor (imperial power), the entire institution would not be able to function, and would even be extremely unstable.
The courtiers of the former emperors were not considered for the talents of the courtiers, only whether they were their own people, and if not, they were expelled. In addition, because of the existence of hierarchies and the transformation of roles, everyone feels natural. Even the founding monarchs have the experience of serving the people for a long time, and the hereditary kings also have to go through the stage of being sons of man and being subjects, and all emperors go through the process of going from subject to king.
The political elite of the Tang and Song Dynasties went in and out of the temple, the ups and downs of the eunuch's career, and when they looked into it in detail, it could not be said that they did not understand "who jun" and "what jun is", but because some kind of concept or Taoist system had to do it, or had to do it, the upright scholar must be "the way under the world is seen, and the lack of tao is hidden", and the instability and high risk of political expectations often force out those more decent political elites.
If in the current society, the problem of "one son of heaven and one courtier" is rarely solved, the officials of the previous government can retire and go to other professions to work, can continue to realize their own life value, and can also maintain their own material life.
But this is not the case in ancient China, "When Houmen entered the deep sea, it was not only that they could not extricate themselves from immersion in it, but that once they left, they often had no other career choices, and psychologically, they thought that they had been sentenced to death, and they could not serve the country from then on, and their ideals and ambitions were gone, and this blow was heavy."
Second, forget the identity of the "giant"
The essence of the social structure of the "power-to-power dependency" type with the generalization is that power determines everything, and the relationship between the authority and the obedient is essentially a personal dependency relationship, that is, the master-slave relationship. Most of the political elites of the Tang and Song dynasties were promoted through the imperial examination system, although this process was accompanied by the party struggle between the disciples of the door valve and the cold door, but in the final analysis, Lizi was only a "migrant worker" of the royal administrative organs, and his role should first be to implement government decrees and department management, and no post stipulated that the courtiers also had the political obligation of "serving the emperor with morality".
But political elites who are familiar with Confucian classics tend to ignore this problem. In this way, the scholars play two roles: in social life, they are the subjects of the monarch; in the field of ideology and culture, they are rational and moral subjects. This has led to their dual personality: the Confucian tradition of "treating the Emperor with the Tao, and the Tao is higher than the King" will make some political elites speak out in righteousness, be slanderous, and practice "literary death advice, martial death battle".
Under the imperial dictatorship, fundamentally speaking, the emperor is not necessarily an elite, he only has the ability to make decisions, as long as he puts this bureaucratic system machine into operation, his duty is more symbolic and refereeing role, excessive power is often the result of the opposite, but the imperial power is reflected in the employment of people, especially the key position, the emperor in order to ensure a certain authoritarian, will inevitably use their own people, which is also the principle of order under the dictatorship.
In order to maximize the control of the situation, the emperor did not let his courtiers form alliances against him, but acquiesced to or even encouraged them to engage in internal strife, so as to show their authority. But everything must pay attention to the heat, can not overheat, must not delay the right thing, and so on.
Therefore, party strife and factional conflicts became a trick to consolidate the imperial power of the Tang and Song dynasties, the more fierce the party struggle, the greater the contradiction between the courtiers, the stronger the desire of the courtiers to get the support of the imperial power, and the stronger the dedication to the imperial power, some of the courtiers forgot their identity as "migrant workers", forgot that they were only policy implementers and department or regional managers, the party was different, and even raised their own or small groups' will to the temple, which eventually led to the tragedy of degrading officials and eunuchs.
If the status and identity are blurred, it will cause tragedies among the courtiers, especially some eunuchs and zaifu, and there are more officials who are attached to them, so they forget their status as slaves and despise the imperial power.