The Forbidden City of Tianfu City.

Before the Renwu Dynasty, the level of maintenance of the Forbidden City in Yingtianfu had been very problematic.

The main reason is that there is no royal family living in the Forbidden City, and the royal family itself does not have much money to maintain.

The owners can't come up with enough money, and the supervision is not in place, and in the end there must be frequent problems.

After arriving in the Renmu Dynasty, the royal family had enough money, and the overall management level also rose a notch.

Several Forbidden Cities have been built overseas, and the original land of Longxing, of course, should be well maintained.

Zhu Jingyuan took his family to Yingtianfu, and of course lived directly in 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 grandmother all came.

Zhu Jingyuan also brought a large family, six concubines of the Ming prince and the concubine of the king of the Great Food, and eight wives of the King of the Great Food.

and five boys and four girls for a total of nine children.

Liu Muyun and Yu Duxue each have a son and a daughter.

Chunxiang has a son and a daughter, Dongmei and Xia He each have a son, and Qiuyue has a daughter.

But this is only already being born.

Now Liu Muyun and Yu Duxue are pregnant with their third child in their wombs.

Zhu Jingyuan's concubine in Xintianfu, and Wang Ya, who is also the steward of Zhu Jingyuan's harem, finally turned 20 years old last year, and after a period of hard work, she is now pregnant.

Qiu Yue, who has only one daughter, was also specially taken care of by Zhu Jingyuan, and now she is pregnant again.

Several other princes and concubines, as well as other wives, will also turn twenty years old in the past two years.

The point is that Zhu Jingyuan himself is 22 years old this year.

Even if it is in accordance with tradition, the children born after this year will not have any flaws in the inheritance.

Therefore, Zhu Jingyuan will begin to completely let go of his hands and feet from this year onwards.

Zhu Jingyuan has to cast a wide net and have more children, and then he can choose a good enough heir.

So in two years, Zhu Jingyuan's children may double again, and there may be more than twenty.

Zhu Zhongliang and Zhu Jingyuan have also been separated for two years, and their father Zhu Jianyan has been separated for seven years.

When I finally saw Zhu Jingyuan, the most important child, I was a little excited.

Especially Zhu Jianyan, when he was separated from Zhu Jingyuan, Zhu Jingyuan was only a fifteen-year-old and a half-year-old child.

Now he has become a tall young man of twenty-two years old, and only a few traces of the original are left between his eyebrows.

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

However, Zhu Zhongliang and Zhu Jianyan, father and son, after all, are both emperors, although they are quite excited, their external performance is actually not very obvious.

just patted Zhu Jingyuan's shoulder with a smile, and then happily recognized Zhu Jingyuan's children.

Only Liang Yunying, as a mother, saw her son again after five years, and the whole person looked teary-eyed.

Liang Yunying took Zhu Jingyuan's hand, chattered intermittently for a while, and measured Zhu Jingyuan's height several times.

Then let Zhu Jingyuan introduce the women and children around him.

Liang Yunying held Judy Uranium and Judy Plutonium at the beginning, and now they have reached the age of five, and they will start to receive the royal family's storage education in the past two years, but they don't know this grandmother at all.

After introducing Zhu Jingyuan's child, Liang Yunying took over a child who could already run from the hand of a maid:

"This is your younger brother, Jingqi, who is four years old this year, Qi'er came to call his brother......"

Zhu Jingyuan had already seen this child, and he felt very surprised and strange.

When your parents come to see you, what do you do with another person's child?

The point is, this is not my own father to introduce, but my own current introduction.

After hearing his mother's words, Zhu Jingyuan looked at the little kid in front of him who called his brother, and his mind was a little stuck for a moment:

"Jingqi...... Is it my brother? Is it the younger brother of the same mother? ”

Liang Yunying nodded lightly:

"Hmm...... Your own brother ......"

Zhu Jingyuan was immediately shocked, and said almost instinctively:

"You were so old at the time, how dare you have a second child...... What if something happens......"

Liang Yunying said a little embarrassed:

"It's an accident, but since you're pregnant, you can't help it, after all, it's your own flesh and blood, fortunately, everything went very well in the end, and your mother's body and bones can still ......"

Zhu Jingyuan has nothing to say, this accident is really an absolute accident.

Calculating the age, this should have been conceived not long after his mother went to the Great Food Country and returned to Jingshi.

My father was forty-seven years old at the time, and my mother was thirty-six years old at the time, so I gave myself 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 have an accident.

can only say that the relationship between the two of them is really okay, but I don't know if there is a reason for it.

Could it be that his parents are thinking about whether they can have another child with the same talent?

The noisy family affairs have been tossed for most of the day.

In the evening, the family ate together and then went to rest.

The next morning, Zhu Jingyuan was alone, with his grandfather and father, and the three of them met separately and had a secret talk.

In the imperial study of the emperor of the Forbidden City, a small conference room was isolated separately.

A small round table with three hoop chairs around it, and there were no outsiders in the room, and there were no recording personnel at all.

Zhu Zhongliang sat in the middle position, watched his son and grandson sit down, and then stared directly at Zhu Jingyuan and asked:

"You say that as industry and commerce continue to develop, private manufacturers and capital forces will make peace with the bureaucracy.

"Is there no peace between the two sides now? Which of the main officials of the court did not represent a variety of interests?

"It's like before the Renwu Dynasty, the gentlemen who talked eloquently in the court weren't all representatives of scholars and doctors from all over the world?"

Zhu Jianyan and his father also discussed it, so he added directly at this time

"The current situation is that the scholars have changed from controlling the land and tenants to controlling the factories and workers.

"Imperial Court ...... The bureaucracy, or civil service, was not a completely independent system in the first place, but was originally a representative of the group of scholars.

"The social resources and factories controlled by the royal consortium will continue to balance these new groups of scholars and doctors, just as the former imperial village used to balance the landlord group, right?"

After industry and commerce replaced agriculture and became the foundation and main body of society, the identities and roles of the proprietors and shopkeepers of manufacturers gradually replaced the scholar class in the agricultural society and became the de facto most basic managers.

The most direct "law" that workers face is not the law enacted by the imperial court, but the regulations governing the company.

Just like the peasants and tenants in the agricultural era, most of the time they did not come into contact with the law and the officials of the city, and most of the time they were managed and controlled by the squires of their own villages.

The workers had to work in factories or trading houses in order to earn an income to survive, and of course their interdependence became more and more interdependent, and it became more and more difficult for the imperial court to intervene directly.

Just as it was the norm for the imperial power not to go to the countryside in the agricultural era, it was the talent of the scholars to conceal the population and output.

Can the imperial power in the industrial age really "go down to the company"?

In the agrarian era, the scholars controlled a large number of people and land for production, evaded taxes and forced labor by identity and various means, sought and cultivated spokesmen within the bureaucracy, and provided shelter for the family.

They are the sages and gentry of the country, and they are great benevolent people.

In the industrial age, the scholars controlled large populations and factories for production, avoided taxes in various ways, and sought and nurtured spokesmen within the bureaucracy.

They are successful people and philanthropists.

Therefore, in the view of Zhu Zhongliang and Zhu Jianyan, the current situation has not changed substantially compared with the previous agricultural era.

The royal family had a royal village in the agricultural era and a royal consortium in the industrial age.

Emperor Shizu has long been left behind.

So the two emperors didn't think there was anything big wrong with this.

Then Zhu Jingyuan asked the question he had been thinking about for a long time:

"Emperor Shizu created the Huangzhuang to balance the landlord class, and created the imperial consortium to balance the private capital group.

"But the essence of checks and balances is to compromise with each other so that each side gets an acceptable distribution of benefits.

And this platform for compromise and negotiation is the Ming court and the bureaucratic system.

"This system and platform should be able to obey the emperor, because the emperor himself is a relatively neutral individual.

"Even if you don't obey the emperor, at least you have to be relatively neutral.

"The boundaries between a certain bureaucrat representing the interests of a certain group and a certain bureaucrat being the spokesperson of a certain group may not be very obvious, or they may be translatable to each other.

"But the performance of these two situations is definitely two completely different states.

"It's a matter of priority between the bureaucrat and the group he represents, who is the decider and who is the dependent.

"If it is dominated by bureaucrats, and the status of bureaucrats is determined by the emperor, then bureaucrats are subordinate ministers of the emperor.

"The group corresponding to the bureaucracy can only obey the will of the bureaucracy and indirectly obey the will of the emperor.

"The bureaucracy can only fight for more legitimate interests for the group it represents, without going against the will of the emperor.

This was a long-standing logic of coordination and compromise before the Renmu Dynasty and throughout the agricultural era.

"If it's a group of bureaucratic representatives, it's the other way around.

"By that time, the bureaucracy was no longer a subordinate of the emperor.

"The honor and status of the members of the bureaucracy are no longer determined by the emperor, but by the capitalist group he represents.

"When the interests of the emperor are opposed to the capital he represents, the bureaucracy becomes the enemy of the emperor.

"The bureaucracy would distort and even oppose the will of the emperor, using all available means to obtain benefits for the groups it represented.

This can even include the deposition of the emperor or even outright rebellion.

"This is the bourgeois revolution.

"The most crucial reason for the success of the bourgeois revolution was the failure of the bureaucracy to cooperate with the emperor's repression.

"Even rebel with the capital, otherwise the bourgeoisie may not know how to rebel.

"The ancient anti-king, even the most direct, let's just say that our Emperor Taizu, after the power in Jiangnan began to take shape, there began to be original scholars to defect.

"The bureaucracy, that is, the representatives of the elite groups of the entire country and ethnic group, is definitely a force to be reckoned with.

"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 significant.

"Whichever side they stand on, there is a chance that they will win in the end.

"The power of the group of factory owners in the industrial age far exceeds the power of the landlord group in the traditional agricultural era.

"The key is that it will continue to expand as technology continues to innovate and scale up.

"They are eroding the bureaucracy of the new era at a rate that is unmatched by the agricultural era.

"The process by which the bureaucracy was eroded by private capital and completely conciliated was the process by which the state elite changed from supporters and ministers of the emperor to outright spokesmen of the bourgeoisie.

"The model on the surface is England and the Netherlands.

"The original king of England was killed in the revolution, and the new king was invited by the bourgeoisie to take the throne and at the same time relinquished much authority and gradually degenerated into the nominal leader.

"In our Ming Dynasty, it was like the era of Chongzhen, the bureaucratic system refused to cooperate with Lord Weimiao (Chongzhen), and was unwilling to resist internal and external enemies according to the requirements of Lord Weimiao.

"Even if we have the royal consortium now, the royal family itself has enough power to carry out the crackdown 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 keep 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 imperial family already controls a certain amount of power, and it is not as difficult as Emperor Shizu started from scratch.

"However, even if the royal family can win, the power of the royal family will swell to an even more terrifying level, and there may not be other forces that can balance the royal family at that time.

"The power controlled by the Ming court is equally huge, and the entire war process will definitely cause immeasurable 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 and Taixi people will change dramatically.

"I think we should be prepared in advance to avoid the situation in Daming from sliding into this state."

Zhu Jingyuan brewed for a few months, and said such a long paragraph in one breath, and after finishing speaking, the two generations of emperors fell into deep thought.

After a long time, Zhu Zhongliang extracted Zhu Jingyuan's core meaning and further confirmed to Zhu Jingyuan:

"Jingyuan, do you mean that the current bureaucratic system of the Ming Dynasty will rapidly change to the identity of the spokesperson of private capital with the rapid leapfrog development of industry and commerce?

"After the bureaucracy loses its neutrality, the imperial court and the bureaucracy lose their role as a coordination platform, leading to the emperor and the imperial family and the private capital group from compromise to confrontation?

"Just like during the Chongzhen Dynasty, the entire civil official system did not obey the requirements of Master Weimiao, nor did it maintain the healthy operation of the imperial court, and the imperial court became a platform for factional confrontation.

"The point is, do you think the reason the bureaucracy loses its neutrality is that the bureaucracy itself is not strong enough? The speed and magnitude of the growth of power in all aspects are much lower than the expansion rate of private capital and royal capital?

"So your idea is that we now have to find a way to control this trend and try to prevent the bureaucracy from continuing to transform into a spokesman for capital, so that they can continue to maintain a relatively neutral posture?

"The specific plan is not to give the bureaucracy greater privileges, higher status and the most direct remuneration and benefits, right?"

(End of chapter)