Chapter 220: Zhu Youjian's Way of Governing the State

Once the Shaanxi matter had been assigned, Zhu Youjian put it out of his mind.

That was something to discuss in detail face-to-face only after the Shaanxi team members were confirmed.

After working out a preliminary strategy, he would then gradually widen the circle, transferring and bringing in a larger group of personnel to join the discussion of the matter.

This was precisely the working model by which he currently drove the entire empire forward.

Centralize authority and gather affairs → preliminary screening of personnel → preliminary decision.

Centralize authority and gather affairs again → expand personnel again → final decision.

The capital's New Policies, the Court of Colonial Affairs, and the various groups within the Secretariat were all products of this model.

Zhu Youjian would first take affairs scattered throughout the Ming system and, through formal or informal organizational restructuring or personnel appointments, gather them into one place.

Then he would pool ideas and, within the broad direction he set, have the Secretariat or a small number of ministers form a preliminary implementation plan.

Taking the preliminary plan, he would bring in more personnel for discussion, then improve the plan and confirm the final executors.

Afterward, he would follow up on the development of the entire matter through red-and-green rewards and punishments, progress tracking, and the like.

And his own energy would be drawn away from this direction and turned to another.

In the whole process, some matters were initiated by him, some by ministers below, but all basically followed such a procedure.

In fact, this was not the normal "Emperor" model.

It somewhat resembled a "Prince Regent" or "Chancellor" model.

But the advantage was that he truly possessed a chancellor's ability, and there was no dog emperor above him watching his neck.

However, this model could not last long, nor should it last long.

Zhu Youjian had already recognized this problem and had begun gradually delegating a great deal of the thinking and decision-making work downward.

For him, setting aside the unavoidable push on concrete affairs in the opening phase, only three things were eternally most important:

Grasping the core strategic direction, spreading advanced methods and theories, and establishing a rational system for talent selection and for reward and punishment.

As long as these three points held steady and unmoving, slowly and naturally, the realm's talent and resources could all be gathered onto the roaring war-chariot of the New Policies, and this rotten realm could be rebuilt anew.

As for involving himself so concretely in specific affairs in the early stage—

Well, who was to blame that the working habits and working methods of Ming people were all utterly impossible for him to adapt to?

Ruler and minister, ruler and minister — naturally the minister must accommodate the ruler, not the ruler accommodate the minister.

Zhu Youjian picked up the teacup at his hand, took a sip, and only then opened the topmost memorial.

"Results of the First Beizhili Clerical Examination Admissions."

With a single glance at the summary, his brows lifted involuntarily.

Two hundred and fifty-one people.

There were actually two hundred and fifty-one people who had all written "current-affairs policy essays" on examination cell patrolmen engaging in malpractice.

This number was somewhat higher than he had anticipated.

The list set out in detail the subject scores of these two hundred and fifty-one examinees.

Generally speaking, their scores in Classics and Arithmetic were decent, mostly above twenty.

But in Law, Current Affairs, and Public Administration, the scores were far uglier, many barely scraping past ten.

As for the logic paper, the results were even more polarized.

Most either got a perfect thirty, or else zero.

Zhu Youjian's gaze moved slowly down the list, and finally stopped on one name.

He lifted the vermilion brush and drew a light horizontal line beneath that name.

"We will draw the line here."

"The first hundred names are sufficient. Thirty will be assigned to Shuntian Prefecture; the rest will be held in reserve for the Beizhili New Policies."

He handed the memorial to Gao Shiming, who stood in attendance beside him.

"Companion Gao, deliver this to the Ministry of Rites now. Have them copy it out before the hour of the Horse and post the public notice."

Gao Shiming bowed and received it. Out of the corner of his eye, his gaze swept swiftly over the place where the Emperor's vermilion brush had drawn the line.

The hundredth name: Qian Changle, total score one hundred and thirteen points.

Classics twenty-four, Arithmetic thirty, Law twelve—

He looked no further, turned at once, summoned a junior eunuch, gave a few low instructions, and the junior eunuch, bearing the memorial, hurried out.

Only when Gao Shiming had returned to his side did Zhu Youjian speak again, his voice carrying a note of casual ease.

"We see that Ni Yuanlu wrote at the end of the memorial that the score compilation for all papers, and the collation of those current-affairs issues, can be submitted the day after tomorrow?"

"Is he planning to pull another two all-nighters?"

Zhu Youjian's tone sank.

"Tell him: request denied."

"Let him submit the report five days from now."

"Also, send a junior eunuch over to the Secretariat right now and chase him home to sleep. He can come on duty tomorrow!"

At these words, a smile appeared on Gao Shiming's face. "Your Majesty speaks truly. Secretary Ni's dark circles are indeed deepening by the day. This slave will go give the order at once."

Zhu Youjian nodded, then added, "Also, urge the Ministry of Personnel to draft the officials' leave regulations for us as quickly as possible. Apart from the regular ten-day rest, we will uniformly grant all officials participating in the New Policies an additional two days of leave. You arrange it — have them take their leave in batches as soon as possible."

The smile on Gao Shiming's face deepened, and he bowed. "Your Majesty's benevolence is truly a blessing to your ministers."

At these words, Zhu Youjian merely nodded lightly and said nothing.

Benevolence?

Within this, there was admittedly some — a trace of pity? — from one beast of burden of a later age toward the beasts of burden of this age.

But more of it was considered from a rational standpoint.

After all, without proper rest, how could one work efficiently?

From the day he ascended the throne, every single thing Zhu Youjian did he strove to make absolutely foolproof, absolutely controllable — he wished he could use the force of thunderbolts to utterly blast every problem to pieces before it even appeared.

From the day he ascended the throne, every single thing Zhu Youjian did he strove to make absolutely foolproof, absolutely controllable — he wished he could use the force of thunderbolts to utterly blast every problem to pieces before it even appeared.

Because he knew better than anyone that continuous, unbroken victory was the best means in this era to rally men's hearts!

That local strongmen and entrenched clans and underlings would pay lip service to the new policies while secretly resisting?

Why wait until such things happened and then scramble to deal with them?

He was not acting in a television drama — why bother with disguising himself to go among the people, or merging with imperial armor?

The ancients said: the expert warrior achieves no dazzling merit.

Better to dissolve chaos in the unseen than to crush it with thunderous force.

That was why Zhu Youjian had every extreme measure and every grim outcome listed out, printed on the examination papers, and conducted a "political breeze" across the entire Northern Metropolitan Region.

Do not ask whether this will work.

What if it works three times out of ten? Two times out of ten? Even one time out of ten?

Once the Hanlin Academy had finished sorting out the resistance and problems encountered during Zhang Juzheng's reforms,

he would launch an even more intense "breeze" campaign to intimidate every fox and rat lurking in the walls of the Northern Metropolitan Region.

Zhu Youjian would thoughtfully help these "wall foxes and gutter rats" by categorizing their predecessors' methods from fifty years ago, item by item, neatly organized, printed into pamphlets and distributed.

And thoughtfully append to each method a warm, caring note:

— Dear friend, doing it this way won't get you the death penalty; we suggest you gather a crowd of over three hundred, or find a few friends to chip in together.

And that was not all. As the new policies rolled out, Zhu Youjian had a great many other measures prepared to ensure their success rate — they were simply still in the planning stage.

After all, this Northern Metropolitan Region new policy, unlike the Battle of Qingcheng, was a war that permitted no failure!

Should the new policies suffer a setback, the morale and spirit he had forcefully roused would suffer a setback as well.

Those new-policy officials he had gathered around him would also see their convictions waver.

This grand scene of blazing oil and brocade flowers would crumble to nothing in an instant — and might even, like Shaanxi, become the first domino tile.

When the time came, the history books might even record a line: The Ming's fall truly began with the new policies.

And then he, Zhu Youjian, would truly have no words to defend himself.

Therefore — public opinion, popular sentiment, rewards and punishments, cadre building — every tool that could be used, he would not let a single one slip.

All for the sake of absolute certainty.

And yet, Zhu Youjian was not a god after all.

There would always be matters that slipped beyond his control.

This "collective memorial" stirred up by the leave-of-absence affair was precisely such a case.

On the surface, the entire civil and military court was concerned for His Majesty's dragon body, their words earnest, their sentiments sincere.

But behind that, was there perhaps hidden a hint of the notion of "uniting the many to coerce the sovereign"?

His first rejection had been because he genuinely felt he was not tired.

Was an emperor's 996 the same thing as a corporate drone's 996?

His office was right next to his bedchamber, and he did not need to comb through endless data to write a report that might be casually rejected.

His work output was more a matter of the quality of his decisions, not the quantity.

Yet he had not expected that when the first memorial failed, a second would follow, and then a third would rise.

A small ripple had swelled into a great event sweeping the entire court.

This was something he had never anticipated.

And it jolted him slightly awake from the earlier joy of seeing the court filled with righteous men.

Although in the end he borrowed force to deflect force, easily quelling the disturbance, and even turned it around to harvest a wave of goodwill — a move that could be called killing three birds with one stone —

but —

what if?

What if next time, this kind of "consensus" that he could not fully foresee arose around major matters — promoting the new learning, purging the princedoms, or even an expedition against Japan?

He was, after all, not a true man of the Ming dynasty; he could never one hundred percent model the thought-patterns of a Ming scholar-official.

This was what truly put him on guard.

And it was precisely for this reason that the grand Northern Metropolitan Region Clerical Election had come about!

At first, this was merely a routine supplementary examination conducted by Wang Zhaodui, the Judge of Shuntian Prefecture, after he had purged the old yamen clerks.

Such an examination was already standard procedure in the Great Ming, utterly devoid of novelty.

Even when he, Zhu Youjian, had wielded his brush to have the Ming Times publish the matter and broadcast it far and wide, it had initially drawn only a few hundred registrants.

Not to mention Zhu Youjian — even Wang Zhaodui, who had pushed the matter, probably did not take it to heart.

But that "leave-of-absence disturbance" had made Zhu Youjian keenly aware of the latent risk of civil officials forming a united bloc.

He had to gradually open up and support more diverse groups around himself, to dilute this excessively overwhelming influence.

And the clerks — that critical group connecting upward to the civil officials and downward to the common people — were the key target he chose!

That was why he had intervened at the last moment, personally serializing several articles in the Ming Times expounding the importance of clerks, forcefully whipping up this originally unremarkable examination to the point where it now commanded the attention of the entire realm.

This was the reason why the "Shuntian Prefecture Clerical Examination" had suddenly become the "Northern Metropolitan Region Clerical Examination."

As for the cheating incident in the examination cells, that was an even more meticulously designed case of "eating one fish three ways."

First, he used it to once again probe the stances of the various ministers at court.

After all, such Legalist methods were profoundly at odds with Confucian aesthetics.

In the discussions and disputes over this matter,

who spoke out impartially, and who set aside principle to simply comply — all became crystal clear.

To Zhu Youjian, the impartial were not necessarily bad men, and the compliant were not necessarily good men.

But what mattered was this: they were two groups, and two groups of roughly equal size — that was enough!

The second consideration was public opinion.

What kind of story spreads fastest to every corner of the land?

The exaggerated, the explosive, the one that upends common sense, the one that can be summed up in a single line!

Zhu Youjian was all too familiar with this theory. In the world today, no one could possibly be more adept at manipulating public opinion than he was!

Talk about "the Emperor values the subofficial clerks," talk about "the clerks are the new ladder to the heavens," talk about "the clerks are the key to the New Policies' success."

Even if you said it a hundred times, a thousand times, it would be useless.

Content so dense with information only grows weaker the farther it spreads.

Within the capital it might hold, but by the time it reached Daming Prefecture, probably no one would pay it any heed.

But a story of "one exam deciding life or death, the Emperor himself promoting the chosen" — that would sweep through both capitals and all thirteen provinces in the shortest time imaginable!

A thousand reasoned arguments can never match a single cry of "together we shore up the falling heavens," can never match the unforgettable image of a "beheaded Vice Minister."

And the final purpose was even more hidden, even harder to speak of to others.

Once someone passed the examination and became a clerk, did that make him one of Zhu Youjian's men?

Hard to say.

The chief examiners were Junior Compilers from the Hanlin Academy, and after selection the clerks would be assigned to Shuntian Prefecture or even Northern Zhili to serve.

From a subofficial clerk outside the formal ranks all the way up to him, the Emperor — who knew how many grades lay between them.

How to make them feel that it was the Emperor himself who had changed their fate?

How to plant in their hearts a seed — that they were "disciples of the Son of Heaven"?

Precisely by relying on this kind of dramatic legend, this tale of "the Sovereign personally promoting" them!

Compared to these three enormous advantages —

the so-called loss of fairness, the so-called decline in clerk quality, the so-called damage to His Majesty's image — such flaws were not even worth mentioning!

Where in this world is there any affair that is perfect in every way? In the end, it is all a matter of trade-offs and balance.

He, Zhu Youjian, reckoned this bargain was well worth making!