The Ming Dynasty was the era with the most “spy agencies”, the most rampant spy agencies and the darkest society. So, did Zhu Yuanzhang, the emperor Taizu of the Ming Dynasty, create the “spy system” of secretly spying on information and supervising officials and people?
In fact, this is a bit of a “compliment” to Zhu Yuanzhang and the Ming Dynasty.
Those who have read the annals of the Three Kingdoms can easily find that the “school affair” set up by Cao Cao, the founder of the state of Wei during the Three Kingdoms period, is a spy agency similar to the eastern and Western factories of the Ming Dynasty. Everyone knows that Cao Cao is suspicious and does not trust anyone. In order to know whether the ministers and the people were loyal to him in time, he spread his eyes and ears and probed into the secrets, which was also very consistent with his treacherous, cruel and resourceful psychology.
According to the annals of the Three Kingdoms, in the first year of Jian’an, Cao Cao worshipped Sikong (an official of Three Princes). In the third year of Jian’an, he returned to Xuchang and first set up a military division to offer a toast (Sikong’s subordinate was also the beginning of Cao Cao’s official establishment). Later, a special kind of official “school affairs” appeared. The first leaders of the school affairs were LU Hong and Zhao da.
As for how they do what they want, abuse power and harm innocent people, there is not much ink in ancient books, but there is a proverb circulating in the army at that time: “not afraid of Cao Gong, but afraid of LU Hong, LU Hong is OK, Zhao Da kills me.” This is the same as the creepy psychology of officials and people in the Ming Dynasty when they heard the bad names of Wei Zhongxian and Liu Jin, which is enough to explain that Cao Cao’s “spies” are people who are worried about ghosts.
Cao Cao’s FA Cao Chuan (equivalent to the current Supreme Court judge) Gao Rou once advised Cao Cao about the serious damage to the government and system of the “school affair”: “try to divide duties and have their own departments. Setting up the school affair today is not the purpose of the upper and lower authorities, but also the purpose of many people. They hate being abusive and should be prosecuted.” Cao Cao replied, “I’m afraid you’re not as good as I am. If you want to be able to stab and identify all things (you can detect everything big or small), so that the sage can do it, you can’t do it.”
Cao Cao said frankly, if you spend all your energy on “stabbing”, can a virtuous gentleman do it? This shows that these school affairs were carried out with the tacit consent of Cao Cao, but Cao Cao did not treat them as human beings at all, at least not treat them as virtuous gentlemen. This is also the biggest difference between Cao Cao’s attitude towards “spies” and that of the rulers of the Ming Dynasty, or honest judges like Gao Rou would also be secretly plotted by spies.
According to historical records, over the years, tens of thousands of cases of officials and civilians were spied by the school and secretly arrested. Gao Rou and others always asked to check the truth and truth and return justice to the people. From these records, the “unjust, false and wrong cases” framed by the “spies” of the Wei Dynasty are not inferior to the cases framed by the Ming Dynasty Chaodong, Xichang and the royal guards.
In the setting of “spies”, the descendants of Cao Cao and the descendants of Zhu Yuanzhang are the same, becoming more and more rampant. When Cao Fang, the fourth generation of Cao Wei, took over the throne, the power of the school was no less than that of the East and West factories of the Ming Dynasty. They went up to inspect the palace temple and took pictures of the public department. The law was made in the pen and the prison was made under the door. It was not until Sima’s dictatorship, considering that the school affairs were all old people of the Cao Wei Dynasty, that he made an order to revoke them.