This Week in China’s History: January 30, 1380
Since 2012, Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 has defined China’s politics and government. As head of the Communist Party, this is to be expected, but as countless observers and analysts have described, Xi’s power has exceeded most of his predecessors in that role. As he has accrued power, Xi has done away with term limits on his position. And while the leadership of the CCP has never been popularly elected, Xi has reversed a decades-long trend increasing the number of people involved in succession decisions so that his is, as far as outside observers can tell, the only opinion that matters.
But of course, Xi is not the first to centralize power, nor even the most successful. When the topic of political power in China arises, the conversation often turns to the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhū Yuánzhāng 朱元璋, the Hongwu emperor. Coming to the throne in 1368, having overthrown the Mongol Yuan dynasty, Zhu set about consolidating power. And a dozen years later, he chose violence to protect his power, executing the second-most powerful person in his government for allegedly plotting with foreign rivals to bring down the young Ming dynasty. But the execution of Hú Wéiyōng 胡惟庸 was just the first of perhaps 50,000 in what historian Tim Brook calls “the most horrendous bloodbath of civilian violence to date.”
An emperor’s power is a curious thing. By some measures, China’s emperors were the most powerful men in the world, ruling over hundreds of millions of people in some of the largest empires the earth has known. Yet the very scale of that power limits it: no one can directly govern any state, especially one the size of China. Though the emperor may have been the Son of Heaven, rhetorically, his power is almost immediately mitigated by the bureaucracy. Far outnumbering the emperor, and even the imperial staff, the bureaucracy transmitted the emperor’s power across the empire.
At least in theory. Tension between the emperor and the bureaucracy was a persistent feature of China’s elite politics. Philip Kuhn’s book Soulstealers did a masterful job describing this dynamic in the Qing era, when a paranoid emperor ordered a literal witch hunt. And when it came to paranoid emperors, few could rival the Ming founder.
In 1380, the Hongwu emperor focused his insecurities on Hu Weiyong.
You will generally find Hu identified as prime minister, though his office — zaixiang — is translated variously as not only that but also chancellor, grand chancellor, chief councillor, and several other titles. It extends back as least as far as the Qin dynasty, when the post was established to oversee the civilian bureaucracy. As with many aspects of imperial Chinese government, a long history ought not be confused with changeless institutions. The post varied in powers, responsibilities, and even title throughout the imperial era, but often its main role was as head of the secretariat, one of the main organs of government, responsible for many aspects of policy formation.
Zhu Yuanzhang reestablished the chancellor as head of the secretariat when he founded the Ming, reversing the practice of the Mongols that preceded him. By 1373, Hu Weiyong was in that post, making him the head of China’s bureaucracy.
What happened then is difficult to know for sure, in part because what followed included a purge of the archives and records surrounding the case. Historian Edward Farmer describes Hu as “a brash and somewhat reckless man [who] apparently overstepped the powers of his office,” but notes that it is “impossible to determine exactly what crimes he committed or why he was put to death.” Hu was in a position to redirect correspondence intended for the emperor and to control the flow of information to, and through, the bureaucracy. Suspicions arose that Hu was using this position to plot against the emperor.
At the center of Hongwu’s suspicions was what is often called the tribute system, a misleading label for how diplomacy and trade was conducted in East Asia. What official Chinese sources called “tribute missions” were collections of diplomats, merchants, and officials from various countries that called at the Chinese capital to establish and/or develop commercial and political relationships. Among the states that made such missions to China in the early Ming were Champa (central and southern Vietnam) and Japan.
Receiving these missions was an imperial responsibility. When Hu apparently not only received a mission from Champa but failed to report its arrival, the camel’s back was broken. Hu was accused of plotting with Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, and perhaps even Mongol accomplices to overthrow the Ming and place himself on the Chinese throne. Brook writes that the charges, “woven from thin shreds of errors and suspicions, many have had a basis in fact, but it played into the paranoia of someone newly on the throne.”
Brook assigns the real threat that the Hongwu emperor perceived not to Hu Weiyong himself, but to the office of chancellor: “As the head of the civil bureaucracy, [the chancellor] had the power to make appointments, and therefore could place his supporters in all the important posts, effectively building an entire administration that was staffed independently of the emperor’s choices.”
Hu Weiyong was executed, but this was just the start. The office of chancellor was eliminated “at one stroke,” Farmer writes, “removing the one office that could serve as a voice of the officials.” The emperor’s restructuring of government “suited his own view and enhanced his personal control. If high officials could not be trusted he would manage the bureaucracy directly from his palace.”
The emperor was not content to remove the possibility that a bureaucracy could be appointed without his control or consent; he was determined to remove those individuals as well. In the immediate wake of Hu’s execution, Zhu embarked on a purge to remove anyone associated with Hu Weiyong. Farmer writes that “investigations into the alleged conspiracy spread through the government as thousands of officials and their families came under suspicion and were executed,” some 15,000 people in Zhu’s own estimation. For more than a decade, purges continued sporadically, leading to the deaths of more than 50,000 people. Although Zhu Yuanzhang claimed to have liberated China and its culture from the control of the Mongols, the purges of the 1380s “inflicted a far greater trauma on the educated elite than anything the Mongols had ever done,” in Tim Brook’s words.
Beyond the suffering inflicted on tens of thousands of people, the Hu Weiyong purge fundamentally reshaped Ming government, concentrating power in the person of the emperor.
It would take several decades, but eventually the pendulum swung slightly back toward the bureaucracy. As noted earlier, no emperor can rule an entire state directly or personally. Institutions, with different names and somewhat diminished power, re-emerged, providing some limits on imperial power.
It is worth considering that the centralization of power — whether in China or elsewhere — seems to ebb and flow, diminishing just when it seems at its strongest. Of course, this is cold comfort to the many victims of authoritarian rule and executive paranoia throughout history.
This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.
