For hundreds of years in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, the Son of Heaven declined, and the etiquette collapsed.

After the death of Qin, feudalism was abolished, counties were placed, and aristocratic politics and feudal system began to withdraw from the historical stage.

The merger of bloodlines and politics has come to an end, and a commoner can take advantage of the situation to replace the First Family with a sacred origin.

The super-stable structure of China's feudal society began with Dong Zhongshu in the Han Dynasty.

Dong Zhongshu eventually became the master of almost all the ideological resources of the Spring and Autumn Period, fusing the essence of Legalism, Taoism, Yin and Yang, etc. into one furnace. Then he deposed the hundred schools and slowly rooted the Confucian way into the brain of every Chinese, including the emperor.

The Confucian way laid the most important foundation for the "super-stable structure of Chinese feudal society".

The Han view of the Qin Dynasty collapsed, in order to make the imperial bureaucracy get rid of the tragedy of the fall of the Qin Dynasty, and actually sat big, became the coveted "millennium kingdom", and carried out a series of reforms on the "imperial power [***]ism", in this process there was a "constitutional monarchy" flavor, and for more than 2,000 years, China's feudal society has not walked out of the shadow of "constitutional monarchy".

It is not enough to just add the rule of virtue to [***].

Under the criticism of "[***]ism", which we often put in one word, those who observe history should see that the absolute [***] has never been seen in history, just as the absolute boiling.

When I was young, I naively thought that the emperor could kill whoever he wanted, do whatever he wanted, and marry beautiful women when he saw them (this seems to be not difficult to achieve, and it is also what I envy the most). Looking at history later, it was far from being like that. Otherwise, the Wanli Emperor would not have struck in front of the courtiers for twenty years (Huang Renyu, "The Fifteenth Year of Wanli"). It is said that the Chinese tradition is [***]ism, but relative to Europe.

Under the premise that the basic principle of imperial power [***] doctrine remained unchanged for 2,000 years, Dong Zhongshu exhausted himself and completed the Confucian constitutional monarchy of the imperial bureaucracy.

The general outline of the constitutional monarchy: "Submit the people and stretch the king, bend the king and stretch the sky, and the righteousness of the Spring and Autumn Period."

The theory of divine authority of the monarch has made the ruling power in this imperial bureaucratic system supreme, and the emperor has become the lord of the Ninety-Five, the son of heaven, and the high priest, and from then on the monarch is the subject of the platform, these are the contents of "bending the people and extending the king", but the second question "bending the king and extending the sky" shows the essence of "constitutional monarchy".

In the early days of constitutional monarchy, the constitution was often used to restrain the monarch, and China's feudal constitution existed in heaven and in the Tao.

Confucianism has a mystical interpretation of the "heaven" of "natural law". The de facto limitation of the monarchy's power is constituted in the following ways:

First, the theory of celestial and human induction.

Second, the theory of the three unification cycles

Third, the theory of catastrophe

Fourth, the three outlines and five permanent theories

Fifth, the theory of separation of powers

On the one hand, the theory of divine authority of kings establishes the absolute authority of kings, and on the other hand, it hangs an invisible and silent "heaven" above the king's head.

As can be seen, China is not without a so-called "constitutional monarchy"

The political system envisaged in the New Song and Ming Dynasty has no basis in reality, although I love to read these two books as much as many people. Huang Renyu once said that China "cannot be managed by numbers.

With the abolition of feudalism and the establishment of counties and counties, aristocratic politics and feudalism began the process of withdrawing from the stage of history.

However, the sphere of influence of the patriarchal family has not shrunk.

After the centralization of power in the Qin and Han dynasties, the bureaucracy lost its economic strength and local autonomy under the feudal system (this is the current direction of the clumsy work "Heroes of Mountains and Rivers", but it has been criticized by many readers), but in civil society, it has formed a confrontation with the political state with the strength of the patriarchal family.

A considerable part of the affairs that fell within the realm of public power in modern society remained within the family and were not ceded to the emperor.

Although the political state has been constantly moving down the political power, it has never been able to reach below the county seat, and when the centralization of power and the centralization of monarchy is rampant in the world, the degree of local autonomy in fact has always been quite high.

In fact, there have always been three main forms of power in China's feudal society: political power (imperial power), clan power (local autonomy), and husband power (private law space), which has the meaning of separation of powers.

However, during the 2,000-year feudal period, the imperial power was unable to carry out limited expansion of the two powers. For example, the judicial power within the clan was a major obstacle to the budding capital of the Song and Ming dynasties. Because of the existence of "patriarchy", in ancient Chinese society, individuals often participated in social activities as within the family, rather than as citizens, and naturally there was no such thing as privatization of the property of family members.

A large number of individual rights and a large amount of property are limited by the "family trial" and cannot be transferred to the jurisdiction of the public courts.

Although the imperial power has supreme authority in state affairs, it cannot enter the realm of private affairs, so it cannot form "private law".

Although the Song Dynasty began to intervene in the judicial power within the family, such as the prohibition of blood revenge and ancestral court trials, until the end of the Qing Dynasty, the judicial power within the family has always played a pivotal role in judicial practice.

In the later period, the "constitutional monarchy" often appeared in the form of a "virtual monarchy parliamentary system", but Dong Zhongshu had insight into everything two thousand years ago.

During the feudal period in China, the monarchy has always been dazzling, so the "relative power" relative to the monarchy has to be discussed.

Dong Zhongshu said that "the monarch and the minister are separated", the king takes the law from the "sky", and the people and ministers take the law from the "earth". Those who take the law from heaven must "raise their position" and "hide their form", and those who take the law from the earth must "violently show their form and show their feelings".

"The separation of the monarch and the minister" is to implement the separation of ownership and management rights, throw the emperor high on the throne, hand over the management of state affairs to professionals, and form the management with incompetent Confucian students.

The meaning of "constitutional monarchy" depends technically on the strength of the "relative power" in each period, and it can also be said that the technical and practical embodiment of "constitutional monarchy" is the bureaucratic system corresponding to the emperor.

The history of Chinese feudalism can be said to be the history of the struggle between monarchy and power on a macro level. Of course, there are too many resources that the monarchy can rely on, and the power of the prime minister is often beaten to the ground. However, when the power of the prime minister is extremely weak, it is a time of social turmoil.

Mentioning this reason, I have to talk about how the monarchy usurped the relative power.

The monarch's power is usurped for power, with the help of three things: the clan domain, the eunuch is in charge, and the relatives are rampant. The emperor could not manage the affairs of the state himself, and had to govern the country without relying on his own brothers, nephews, eunuchs, or maternal uncles and cousins without the help of professional management (bureaucracy). In this way, the huge and cumbersome state system artificially pushed the emperor to the brink of collapse.

However, in the Song Dynasty, there were no relatives, clans, or eunuchs, in fact, that period, as described in the "New Song Dynasty", was the period when the meaning of "constitutional monarchy" was the strongest. Wang Anshi's reform of the law and the strengthening of the state's intervention in the social economy can be seen as a large-scale expansion of the state's power over the clan power. Although it is said that since the Han Dynasty, Wang Anshi has been destined not to succeed, but his efforts have made it possible for Chinese society to turn around, which is not as unbearable as the "New Song Dynasty" said.

But why did the Song Dynasty decline to the point of decay, which is heart-wrenching.

Reading the story of Song Taizu, Chang Sheng is touched, and it is often said that if the day is false for more than ten years, the Song Dynasty will not end like this. Later, on closer thought, it was just wishful thinking.

The "constitutional monarchy" of the Song Dynasty lacked a very important factor, which is probably the reason why the "constitutional monarchy" will never succeed.

Gate valves.

Since the Sui and Tang dynasties, the gate valve has declined, making the gate valve politics a historical term since the late Tang Dynasty.

There is always a congenital defect in restricting the monarchy's power with a bureaucratic system composed of incompetent Confucian scholars, and in this case, China's strength can only depend on the personal quality of the emperor.

Of course, this is extremely demanding, if I marry a wife like Yan Rufan Bingbing, let me get up at five o'clock, don't listen to my wife, and don't take care of my brother-in-law, it's simply impossible.

Li Shimin and his ilk are simply outliers, and the early Tang Dynasty can also see the shadow of gate politics.

The heyday of gate valve politics was the darkest period in history, the two Jin Dynasty and the Northern and Southern Dynasties, so there was no good impression of gate valve politics. However, I still have to say that the gate valve is an indispensable element of the "constitutional monarchy", but it is necessary to control the degree of goodness, and let the gate valve participate in the bureaucracy rather than control the bureaucracy.

The gate valve gradually died out from the Sui and Tang dynasties, and it happened to reach that degree at the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, so that the monarchy and the power reached a perfect balance.

If the monarchy cannot be secularized (not to let the emperor be the son of God), the structure of the relative power is a very important issue, especially in an era when a small number of people are educated, the stability of the relative power structure means the practical significance of the "constitutional monarchy", and the society is relatively stable. Of course, there are still many problems to be solved about the structure of relative power and the patriarchal system.

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