“Scholar-bureaucrat”

Author: Wang Zixu

“Scholar-bureaucrat”

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 no royal family lives in the Forbidden City, and the royal family themselves don't have much money to maintain it.

The owners can't come up with enough money, and supervision isn't in place. Eventually, problems will inevitably arise.

After the Renwu Dynasty, the royal family had enough money and the overall management level improved to a higher level.

Several Forbidden Cities 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, possibly exceeding 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 made me feel 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 eyebrows.

Zhu Jianyan stared at his most peculiar son for a long time.

However, Zhu Zhongliang and Zhu Jianyan, father and son, both became 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, talked intermittently for a while, and measured 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 would you bring another person's child?

The key is that this is not introduced by my father, but by myself now.

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, and 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 imperial 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 also discussed it with his father, so he directly added at this time

"The current situation is just that the scholar-officials 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 normal for imperial power not to go to the countryside in the agricultural era, 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 good people.

The scholar-bureaucrats in the industrial age 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.

In the agricultural era, the royal family had imperial estates, and in the industrial era, there was a royal consortium.

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 royal estate to check and balance the landlord class, and created 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.
To be continued...