Chapter 40 Section VII Illiterate Ruling the Country

Wei Zhongxian's qualifications as a farmer, toilet dumper, and catering manager are too pale for a great politician who has the full power of the empire.He lacks basic cultural literacy, and does not have any political experience and political wisdom.All his capital is nothing more than "being able to take responsibility" and "having a good memory". If he had a little self-knowledge, he wouldn't have taken on this scorching burden.Although he has great ambitions, it is impossible for the world he governs not to lead to unprecedented chaos.Today's Miao Di talked about the following things in "Research on Wei Zhongxian's Dictatorship":

At the beginning of the sixth year of Tianqi (AD 1626), the Ministry of War requested to promote Zhenluguan and transfer Dong Jie to be a guerrilla general.After listening to the memorial, Wei Zhongxian was pleasantly surprised to find the "flaw" in it: from the promotion to the guerrilla general, there is still a rank of general secretary. Why didn't he go through this rank and directly promote it?There must be something wrong here, maybe it's a major fraud case!He was very proud of his "insight" and immediately issued an order to question him. The Ministry of War immediately gave an explanation: because there are actually fewer senior officers in the capital, they are generally promoted directly to guerrilla generals. This has been a practice for decades and is well documented.But since Wei Zhongxian considered it a major case, how could he let it go casually, and he forced the official who was in charge of the military officer's promotion to be a civilian.

The Minister of the Ministry of War explained the situation again. Wei Zhongxian not only refused to admit that he was not familiar with government affairs, but ordered the Ministry of War not to leapfrog promotion in the future, and changed the system that had been effective for many years. It was really dumbfounding. Pretend to understand if you don't understand, and use mistakes to cover up mistakes. This is a common phenomenon when Wei Zhongxian was in power. Once, Li Hengmao, an official of the Ministry of Rites, used the phrase "Cao Erzhen organizes troops in Shandong" in a memorial, which was caught by Wei Zhongxian.Since Cao Erzhen had just bought Wei Zhongxian's joints and became the governor of Shanxi not long ago, it was undoubtedly wrong to say that he "reorganized troops in Shandong".

Wei Zhongxian seized this clue just to prove his shrewdness. If Li Hengmao immediately admitted his mistake and praised Wei Zhongxian again, nothing would happen.Unexpectedly, Li Hengmao felt aggrieved and wanted to write a letter to defend himself, saying that Cao Erzhen was originally the political envoy of Shandong. Although he had been promoted, he did not take up his post. This ignorant defense made Wei Zhongxian furious, and Li's official status was cut on the charge of "disrespect".Li's good future was ruined by such an inexplicable misunderstanding. Due to the lack of minimum political experience, Wei Zhongxian often finds ingenuity when solving government affairs problems, which makes people dumbfounded.The war in Liaodong was urgent and horses were urgently needed. Wei Zhongxian came up with a trick for this: the senior ministers of the Ming Dynasty had the privilege of riding horses in the palace, but these people had to donate a good horse to the emperor every year.

Wei Zhongxian then gave hundreds of eunuchs the privilege of riding horses in the palace at once, and then continued to send orders to enter the horses.In this comedy scene, Wei showed the cunning of a small farmer. However, the few hundred horses in this area are useless and make people laugh in vain.