Yingtianfu City Forbidden City.
Before the Renwu Dynasty, the maintenance level of the Yingtianfu Forbidden City had always been problematic.
The main reason is that there is no royal family living in the Forbidden City, and the royal family themselves do not have much money to maintain it.
The owners can't come up with enough money, and supervision isn't in place, and eventually problems are sure to arise.
After the Renwu Dynasty, the royal family had enough money and the overall management level improved to a higher level.
Several Forbidden City have been built overseas. Of course, the original Longxing Land and Yingtianfu Forbidden City must be well maintained.
Zhu Jingyuan took his family to Yingtian Mansion, and of course they moved directly into the Forbidden City.
On the day of entering the city, the first thing to do is to visit the elders.
Grandpa, grandma, father, mother, and aunt are all here.
Zhu Jingyuan also brought a large family with him, including six concubines of the Ming princes and concubines of the Dashi king, and eight wives of the Dashi king.
and five boys and four girls, a total of nine children.
Liu Muyun and Yu Muxue each have a son and a daughter.
Chunxiang has a son and a daughter, Dongmei and Xiahe each have a son, and Qiuyue has a daughter.
But this is only what is already being born.
Now Liu Muyun and Yu Muxue are pregnant with their third child.
Wang Ya, Zhu Jingyuan's concubine in Xintianfu and the steward of Zhu Jingyuan's harem, finally turned twenty last year. After a period of hard work, she is now pregnant.
Qiuyue, who has only one daughter, also received special care from Zhu Jingyuan, and is now pregnant again.
Several other princes' concubines, as well as other wives, will also turn twenty years old in the past two years.
The key is that Zhu Jingyuan himself is already 22 this year.
Even if we follow tradition, children born after this year will have no flaws in their inheritance rights.
So Zhu Jingyuan will start to completely let go of his hands from this year on.
Zhu Jingyuan needs to cast a wide net and have more children before he can choose a good enough heir.
Therefore, in another two years, Zhu Jingyuan's number of children may double again, and may directly exceed twenty.
Zhu Zhongliang and Zhu Jingyuan have been separated for two years, and his father Zhu Jianyan has been separated for seven years.
Finally seeing Zhu Jingyuan, the most important child, again, I felt a little excited.
Especially Zhu Jianyan, when he and Zhu Jingyuan separated, Zhu Jingyuan was only a fifteen-year-old boy.
Now he has become a tall young man of twenty-two years old, with only a few traces of his original appearance remaining between his brows and eyes.
Zhu Jianyan stared at his most peculiar son for a long time.
However, Zhu Zhongliang and Zhu Jianyan, father and son, were both emperors after all. Although they were quite excited, their external performance was not very obvious.
He just patted Zhu Jingyuan on the shoulder with a smile, and then went to recognize Zhu Jingyuan's children happily.
Only Liang Yunying, a mother, looked filled with tears when she saw her son again after five years.
Liang Yunying held Zhu Jingyuan's hand and talked intermittently for a while, comparing Zhu Jingyuan's height several times.
Then Zhu Jingyuan was asked to introduce the women and children around him.
Zhu Di You and Zhu Di Pu, whom Liang Yunying hugged at the time, are now five years old and will begin to receive royal education in the next two years, but they don't know this biological grandmother at all.
After introducing Zhu Jingyuan's child, Liang Yunying took a child from a maid who could already run:
"This is your younger brother, Jingqi. He is four years old this year. Qier came to call his brother..."
Zhu Jingyuan had already seen this child and felt very surprised and strange.
When your own parents come to see you, why are you bringing another person's child?
The key is that this is not introduced by his father, but by himself.
After hearing his mother's words, Zhu Jingyuan looked at the little kid in front of him who called him brother, and his mind got stuck for a moment:
"Jingqi... is my brother? Is he his biological brother from the same mother?"
Liang Yunying nodded lightly:
"Well...your biological brother..."
Zhu Jingyuan was immediately shocked and said almost instinctively:
"You were already so old at that time, how dare you have a second child... What if something happens..."
Liang Yunying said a little embarrassed:
"It was an accident, but since I'm pregnant, I can't let it go. After all, it's my own flesh and blood. Fortunately, everything went very smoothly in the end. Your mother's body and bones are still okay..."
Zhu Jingyuan had nothing to say. This accident was definitely an accident.
Calculating her age, she should have been conceived not long after her mother went to Dashi Country and returned to the capital.
My father was forty-seven years old at the time, and my mother was thirty-six years old at the time. As a result, she gave me a younger brother.
The key is that his father is the emperor. When his mother is thirty-six years old, the two of them can still cause accidents.
I can only say that the relationship between the two of them is really okay, but I don’t know if there is any reason for it.
Could it be that his parents were thinking about having another child with the same talent?
The noisy family affairs have been going on for most of the day.
Until evening, the family ate together and then went to rest separately.
The next morning, Zhu Jingyuan met alone with his grandfather and father for a secret talk.
In the emperor's study room in the Forbidden City, there is a small isolated conference room.
There was a small round table with three armchairs around it. There were no outsiders in the room and no record-keeping staff at all.
Zhu Zhongliang sat in the middle seat. After watching his son and grandson sit down, he stared directly at Zhu Jingyuan and asked:
"You said that with the continued development of industry and commerce, private manufacturers and capital forces will make peace with the bureaucracy.
"Are there no peace talks between the two sides now? Which of the main officials in the court does not represent various interests?
"Just like before the Renwu Dynasty, weren't the gentlemen who talked eloquently in the court also representatives of scholar-bureaucrats from all over the country?"
Zhu Jianyan and his father also discussed it, so he directly added at this time
“The current situation is just that the scholar-bureaucrats have changed from controlling land and tenants to controlling factories and workers.
"The imperial court... the bureaucracy, or the civil service system, is not a completely independent system. They are just representatives of the scholar-bureaucrats.
"The social resources and factories controlled by the royal consortium will continue to check and balance these new groups of scholar-bureaucrats in the same way that the emperors and emperors once checked and balanced the landlord groups, right?"
After industry and commerce replaced agriculture and became the foundation and main body of society, the identities and roles of manufacturers, owners and shopkeepers gradually replaced the scholar-bureaucrat class in agricultural society and became the de facto lowest-level managers.
The most direct "law" that workers face is not the law enacted by the court, but company management regulations.
Just like farmers and tenants in the agricultural era, most of the time they had no contact with the law or the officials in the city. Most of the time they were managed and controlled by the squires in their own villages.
Workers have to work in factories or businesses to earn income to survive. Of course, the interdependence between them will become closer and closer, and it will become increasingly difficult for the court to directly intervene.
Just as it was the norm in the agricultural era that imperial power did not go to the countryside, concealing population and output was the talent of scholar-bureaucrats.
Can the imperial power in the industrial age truly "disband the company"?
The scholar-officials in the agricultural era controlled a large number of people and land for production. They used their status and various methods to evade taxes and corvee, find and cultivate spokespersons within the bureaucracy, and provide shelter for their families.
They are country sages and gentry, and they are great benevolent people.
The scholar-bureaucrats in the industrial era controlled a large population and factories for production, used various methods to reasonably avoid taxes, and found and cultivated spokespersons within the bureaucracy.
They are successful people and philanthropists.
Therefore, in the view of Zhu Zhongliang and Zhu Jianyan, the current situation has not fundamentally changed compared to the previous agricultural era.
The royal family had imperial estates in the agricultural era, and royal consortiums in the industrial era.
Emperor Shizu had already prepared backup plans.
So the two emperors didn't think there was any big problem here.
Then Zhu Jingyuan asked a question that he had been thinking about for a long time:
“Emperor Sejo created the imperial estate to check and balance the landlord class, and the royal consortium to check and balance private capital groups.
“But the essence of checks and balances is to compromise with each other so that both parties can obtain an acceptable distribution of benefits.
“And this platform for compromise and negotiation was the Ming court and bureaucracy.
“It is best for this system and platform to be subordinate to the emperor, because the emperor himself is a relatively neutral individual.
“Even if you disobey the emperor, you must at least remain relatively neutral.
“The boundaries between a certain bureaucrat who represents the interests of certain groups and a certain bureaucrat who is the spokesperson of a certain group may not be very clear, or they may be mutually transformable.
“But the performance of these two situations are absolutely two completely different states.
“This is about the priority between the bureaucrat and the group he represents, who is the decision-maker and who is the dependent.
“If it is dominated by bureaucrats, and the status of bureaucrats is determined by the emperor, then the bureaucrats are the emperor’s subordinates.
“The group corresponding to the bureaucracy can only obey the will of the bureaucracy and indirectly obey the will of the emperor.
“Bureaucrats can only strive for more legitimate interests for the groups they represent without violating the emperor’s will.
“This was a long-standing logic of coordination and compromise before the Renwu Dynasty and throughout the agricultural era.
“If the group represented by bureaucrats is the main group, then the situation is completely reversed.
“By that time, the bureaucrats were no longer the emperor’s subordinates.
“The honor and status of members of the bureaucracy is no longer determined by the emperor, but by the capital group he represents.
“When the emperor’s interests are opposed to the capital he represents, the bureaucrats will become the emperor’s enemies.
“The bureaucracy will distort or even oppose the emperor’s will and use all feasible means to obtain benefits for the represented groups.
“This can even include deposing the emperor or even directly rebelling.
"This is the bourgeois revolution.
“The most critical reason for the success of the bourgeois revolution is that the bureaucracy did not cooperate with the emperor’s suppression.
“Even cooperate with the capitalists to rebel, otherwise the capitalist class may not know how to rebel.
"The anti-king in ancient times, even the most direct one, is our Emperor Taizu. After his power in Jiangnan began to take shape, original scholars began to come to join him.
“The bureaucracy, which is the elite group representative of the entire country and ethnic group, is definitely a force that cannot be ignored.
“With the development of science and technology and the popularization of education, the size of this group will continue to expand over time, and their influence will become more and more important.
“Whichever side they stand on is likely to win the final victory.
“The group power of manufacturers and owners in the industrial era far exceeds the power of the landlord group in the traditional agricultural era.
“The key is that as technology continues to innovate, the scale continues to expand, and it will continue to expand.
“They are eroding the bureaucracy of the new era at a speed that is unmatched by the agricultural era.
“The process in which the bureaucracy is eroded by private capital and completely reconciled is the process in which the national elite group changes from the emperor’s supporters and ministers to the complete spokesperson of the bourgeoisie.
“The obvious example is Britain and the former Netherlands.
“The original king of England was killed in the revolution, and the new king was invited by the bourgeoisie. When he succeeded to the throne, he gave up a lot of authority and gradually degenerated into a nominal leader.
"In our Ming Dynasty, it was like the era of Chongzhen. The bureaucracy refused to cooperate with Lord Weimiao (Chongzhen) and was unwilling to follow the requirements of Lord Weimiao to resist internal and external enemies.
“Even if we now have a royal consortium, the royal family itself has enough power to suppress it on its own.
“But what is the result of a complete break between the bureaucracy and the royal family?
“At least a civil war to retain the emperor or not.
“Just like when Emperor Shizu rebuilt the Ming Dynasty, it was essentially a civil war to defeat and regain control of the bureaucracy.
“Now the royal family already controls a certain amount of power, and it’s not as difficult as Emperor Shizu starting from scratch.
"However, even if the royal family can win, the power of the royal family will expand to an even more terrifying level, and then there may not be other forces that can check the royal family.
“The power controlled by the Ming court is also huge, and the entire war process will definitely cause immeasurable huge losses, which will damage the common interests of the entire country and all Ming people.
“Whether the royal family takes control of the situation again or the bourgeois rebellion succeeds, the balance of power between our entire Ming Dynasty and the Taixi people will change dramatically.
"I think we should prepare in advance to prevent the situation in Ming Dynasty from slipping into this state."
Zhu Jingyuan had been brewing for several months and said this long paragraph in one breath. After finishing speaking, the two generations of emperors fell into deep thought.
After a long time, Zhu Zhongliang extracted the core meaning of Zhu Jingyuan and further confirmed to Zhu Jingyuan:
"Jingyuan, do you mean that the Ming Dynasty's bureaucracy will quickly transform into the spokesperson of private capital with the rapid and leap-forward development of industry and commerce?
“After the bureaucracy lost its neutrality, the court and the bureaucracy lost their role as a coordination platform, causing the emperor and royal family and private capital groups to shift from compromise to confrontation?
"Just like during the Chongzhen Dynasty, the entire civil service system did not obey the requirements of Master Wei Miao and did not maintain the healthy operation of the court. The court became a platform for factional confrontation.
"The key is, do you think the reason why the bureaucracy has lost its neutrality is that the bureaucracy itself is not strong enough? The speed and magnitude of the growth of power in all aspects are far lower than the expansion rate of private capital and royal capital?
“So your idea is that we now need to find ways to control this changing trend, and strive to prevent the bureaucracy from continuing to transform into spokespersons of capital, so that they can continue to maintain a relatively neutral stance?
"The specific plan won't be to give the bureaucracy greater privileges, higher status and the most direct salary and benefits, right?"
(End of chapter)
