Chapter 758 Anti-Corruption

Establishing a system similar to that of the Independent Commission Against Corruption in Hong Kong and Singapore? Feng Yunshan was a little hesitant.

In fact, he also knows that this Independent Commission Against Corruption system is already the most incorruptible and effective system in the history of later generations to prevent corrupt officials. Before the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), Hong Kong was a corrupt society, but just a few years after the establishment of the ICAC, Hong Kong has become one of the most corrupt places in the world.

Feng Yunshan is worried about the current level of development of the Chinese Empire, illiteracy is everywhere, and the development level of the people who have just struggled to make ends meet.

You must know that the important thing in the system of the Independent Commission Against Corruption is the supervision mechanism, and the main body of supervision is the ordinary people, and the people must have this awareness and quality. Not only should the officials of the Independent Commission Against Corruption be of high quality, but also the officials should be of high quality, and the common people should also be of high quality, and all three are indispensable. That's why the ICAC can only be implemented successfully in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, which are wealthy and small.

And in a situation like the current situation of the Chinese Empire, what kind of anti-corruption office to do, Feng Yunshan feels that it is not mature. However, before there was no other good way, he still decided to try, of course, just to apply the concept, many specific practices, or combined with the actual situation at the moment.

In fact, it is not a complete reference to the system of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, and the original Manchu Metropolitan Procuratorate was actually a relatively complete supervision system. But because the entire Manchu Qing Dynasty was corrupt, the whole root was rotten. As a supervisory official, the Imperial Historian of the Imperial Procuratorate not only lost the power to inspect the local area since the Song and Ming dynasties, and fell into increasingly cumbersome procedural affairs, but also almost lost the power of the officials of the Imperial Procuratorate to "hear about things". As a refutation official in the matter, not only was he included in the Metropolitan Procuratorate in terms of management, which was regarded as the imperial history, but also in the actual operation of government affairs, he no longer had the actual right to refute. After the establishment of the system and the Military Aircraft Department, major military and political affairs were highly secret, and it was generally difficult for outsiders to be represented.

This is also the reason why the Gansu Fraud Case that broke out during the Qianlong period, such a large group corruption case, the Metropolitan Procuratorate did not know anything, and finally had to test Qianlong himself to find out.

In any case, Feng Yunshan finally decided to set up a separate Ministry of Supervision in the Chinese Empire, independent of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior.

The newly established Ministry of Supervision was only accountable to Emperor Feng Yunshan. It is relatively independent and less susceptible to interference from other officials and yamen institutions. Under the Ministry of Supervision, there are three institutions: the Anti-Corruption Department, the Corruption Prevention Department, and the General Department.

The Anti-Corruption Department, as the name suggests, is the most important agency for the entire Ministry of Supervision, which investigates corrupt officials. The main responsibility of the Anti-Corruption Division is to receive reports from the public about corrupt officials and to investigate suspected corruption crimes.

The Corruption Prevention Division (CPD) inspects the daily practices of officials at all levels to reduce the possibility of corruption.

The General Division, on the other hand, focuses on anti-corruption propaganda, coordinated investigation of corrupt officials, and education on the integrity of officials. Among the comprehensive divisions, the most important measure is to set up a report box, which is placed at the east gate of each county town and above, and is regularly collected and sorted by the officials of the anti-corruption department every month, so that anyone can report corrupt officials, and the Ministry of Supervision will keep the whistleblowers confidential and protected. The General Department forwards the information received to the Minister of Supervision for review and then to the Anti-Corruption Division for verification by investigators.

Since the Ministry of Supervision is directly under the jurisdiction of the emperor, the officials of the Ministry of Supervision have the same power as the sword of Shang Fang, and their power is enormous; in order to prevent the Ministry of Supervision from having too much power, Feng Yunshan also stipulated that the Ministry of Supervision can only investigate and investigate corrupt officials, but cannot deal with corrupt officials on the spot. The Ministry of Justice is still responsible for dealing with corrupt officials.

Moreover, Feng Yunshan also drew on the experience of later generations to strengthen anti-corruption propaganda. After all, what shocked the hearts of the embezzlers the most was the exposure of the public and the pressure of public opinion on the entire civil society. Feng Yunshan stipulates that all reported major corruption cases, especially those officials at or above the prefect level, should be reported to the Ministry of the Interior for record, in addition to being examined by the Ministry of Supervision. If it is found that there is serious corruption, it will not only be publicized at the local city gate, but also widely publicized in the place of origin of the corrupt official, so that the entire family of the corrupt person will be disgraced. Therefore, the cost of corruption is quite large for the good-looking scholars of this era.

In the latest issue of Nanfang Daily in the autumn of the third year of the Taisheng Dynasty of the Chinese Empire, a report was prominently published on the front page of the newspaper "The Emperor Strikes Hard, and the Imperial Court Sets Off a Wave of Anti-Corruption".

This article was published on the front page of the most important "Nanfang Daily" in the Chinese Empire, and it can be said that it was the mouthpiece of the empire, and all officials, readers, and businessmen who often read the newspaper knew that the empire was only possible because of a major change.

Sure enough, in the newspaper article, the first thing was to discuss the hatefulness and harm of corruption, clarify the importance of anti-corruption and anti-corruption, and propose that the imperial court should issue two decrees, the "Regulations on the Management of Imperial Officials" and the "Regulations on the Prevention of Corruption and Bribery in the Empire", which not only require imperial officials to study, but also to be read carefully by those who are good and about to enter the office, and clearly include them in the latest training courses for newly elected officials.

In the next two or three issues of Nanfang Daily, a person who signed the pseudonym "Bao Butang" published articles in the newspaper one after another, reporting on anti-corruption and anti-corruption articles at length, which shook the world.

The first is to publish a major case in the era of Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty: the Guo Huan case. According to the newspaper, in the eighteenth year of Hongwu, Yu Min and others accused Li He and Zhao Quande, officials of the Beijing Chengxuan Political Envoy Department and the Punishment and Prosecution Department, and colluded with Guo Huan, the household servant, and others for corruption and fraud, and embezzled official grain. Zhu Yuanzhang seized the clues and ordered the Criminal Department and the Metropolitan Procuratorate to strictly investigate. As a result, the case implicated Zhao Mao, the secretary of the Ministry of Rites, Wang Huidi, the secretary of the Criminal Department, Wang Jie, the squire of the Ministry of War, and Mai Zhide, the squire of the Ministry of Works, and many officials of the political envoys, and the embezzled and stolen money was converted into more than 24 million stones. After the case was clarified, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered Zhao Mao, Wang Huidi and others to be abandoned on the street; Guo Huan and other six ministers and officials below the level of local political envoys were executed; Tens of thousands of officials implicated in the crime were arrested and imprisoned, and severely punished. Nearly 100,000 lower-level officials and tycoons involved in this case were executed by raiding their homes, which can be described as a shocking case.

As soon as this issue of Nanfang Daily came out, everyone who read the newspaper, especially the imperial officials, was secretly suspicious. Everyone knows that this "Nanfang Daily" is the official newspaper of the empire, the mouthpiece of the emperor, as soon as such an anti-corruption story comes out, it is obvious that it conveys a kind of wind direction, taking the anti-corruption incident of Zhu Yuanzhang, the most severe and fierce emperor in the world, as a typical example, all of which convey a message: Today's emperor is going to be like Zhu Yuanzhang, who has dealt a dead hand to corrupt officials!

Sure enough, in the next few issues, "Nanfang Daily" successively published the transformation process of Jiang Youfu, Feng Zhenlin, and Zhang Suimou, and directly announced the results of the disposal, and made the identities of the three clear one by one, and the minimum punishment was beheading.

It seems that it is certain that the imperial court has embarked on a large-scale anti-corruption campaign.

In particular, local officials and tea merchants in Fujian, Zhejiang, Yunnan, Sichuan, Hunan, and other major tea-producing provinces were shocked into a cold sweat after reading the incident in the "Nanfang Daily" in which Feng Zhenlin and foreigners betrayed tea seedlings. On the one hand, he was disdainful of Feng Zhenlin, and on the other hand, he was very worried about the outflow of tea seedlings, and they wrote petitions one after another, demanding that the culprit be severely punished and the tea seedlings recovered. At the same time, tea merchants, in particular, specially warned tea farmers everywhere that they must not let the tea seedlings passed down by their ancestors go out.

Feng Yunshan did not know how much of a reaction the newspaper would cause, but he knew that the sword of severe punishment hanging over his head could not stop officials from becoming corrupt. Among them, there is also a saying that high salaries are incorruptible. Therefore, he asked the Ministry of the Interior to privately announce among officials at all levels that the income of all officials of the Chinese Empire would be adjusted, and after the adjustment, the income of the government would be nearly double that of the original one, and although the expenditure would be much higher, at least it would prevent some officials who were forced to be corrupt because of their poverty.

As for these expenditures, they can be afforded in today's economically powerful Chinese Empire.

As a result, the imperial officials were jubilant, rejoicing in the growth of Yulu, but also feeling the pressure on their shoulders.