Hongwu Emperor

Hongwu, Chinese emperor from 1368 to 1398.

Among the Chinese populace there were strong feelings against the rule of "the foreigners" under the Mongol Yuan Dynasty which finally led to a peasant revolution, led by Hongwu, that pushed the Yuan dynasty back to the Mongolian steppes and established the Ming Dynasty in 1368.

Hongwu, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, was one of the only two dynasty founders who emerged from the peasant class. The other one was Han Gao Zu of Han Dynasty. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping are two other peasant revolutionaries to rule the world's most populated nation.

Hongwu Emperor

Under Hongwu, the Mongol bureaucrats who had dominated the government for nearly a century under the Yuan dynasty were replaced by the Chinese. The traditional Confucian examination system that selected state bureaucrats or civil servants on the basis of merit and knowledge of literature and philosophy was revamped. Candidates for posts in the civil service or the officer corps of the 80,000-man army, once again, had to pass the traditional competitive examinations in the Classics. The Confucian scholar gentry, marginalized under the Yuan for nearly a century once again assumed its predominant role in the Chinese state .

Hongwu increasingly concentrated power in his own hands and abolished the Imperial Secretariat, which had been the main central administrative body under past dynasties, after suppressing a plot for which he had blamed his chief minister. When the emperorship became hereditary, the Chinese recognized this and established the office of prime or chief minister. While incompetent emperors could come and go, the prime minister could guarantee a level of continuity and competence in the government. Hongwu, wishing to concentrate absolute authority in his own hands, abolished the office of prime minister and so removed the only insurance against incompetent emperors. Hongwu was succeeded by his son, but his son was soon usurped by Cheng-tsu, who ruled as the Emperor Yung-lo from 1403 to 1424 (Yung-lo was responsible for moving the capital back to Beijing).

The emperor's role this became even more autocratic, although Hongwu necessarily continued to use what he called the Grand Secretaries to assist with the immense paperwork of the bureaucracy, which included memorials (petitions and recommendations to the throne), imperial edicts in reply, reports of various kinds, and tax records.

The early Ming dynasty is characterized by rapid and dramatic population growth, largely due to the increased food supply and Hongwu’s agricultural reforms. Population probably rose by at least 50 percent by the end of the Ming dynasty, stimulated by major improvements in agricultural technology promoted by the pro-agrarian state, which came to power in midst of a pro-Confucian, peasant’s rebellion.

The role of state support is the focus of much of this debate on the official downgrading of commerce. Hongwu laid the foundations for a state disinterested in commerce and more interested in extracting revenues from the agricultural sector. Perhaps because of Hongwu’s background as a peasant, the Ming economic system emphasized agriculture, unlike that of the Song dynasty, which had preceded the Mongols and relied on traders and merchant for revenues. Neo-feudal land-tenure developments of late Sung and Yuan times were expropriated with the establishment of the Ming dynasty. Great landed estates were confiscated by the government, fragmented, and rented out; and private slavery was forbidden. Consequently, after the death of Yung-lo, Hongwu's successor, independent peasant landholders predominated in Chinese agriculture. These laws might have paved the way to social harmony and removed the worst of the poverty of the Mongol era. The laws against the merchants and the restrictions under which the craftsmen worked, remained essentially as they had been under the Sung Dynasty, but now the remaining foreign merchants of Mongol time also fell under these new laws, and their influence quickly dwindled.