Just like the Mongols, the barbaric conquest of Ming rulers would be a brutal one. "Court beatings" is just one example. This barbaric form of punishment entailed the beating of courtiers with a plank inside the court hall—this kind of thing only the most barbaric of rulers would think of. Not only was it physical torture, but it also robbed courtiers of their dignity and individual spirit.
Though court beatings were a defining characteristic of the Ming Dynasty, they were actually devised much earlier as a punishment for civil ministers in the Yuan Dynasty (1206-1368). Historian Wu Han examined the history in his Court Beatings. He found that the brutality of court beating stained China's biographies of famous characters, such as A Biography of Sengge in the Yuan History, A Biography of Zhao Mengfu, and A Biography of Chen Tianxiang.
From Yuan to Qing, from court beatings to self-debasement—this is the essence of China's intellectual reality. Their oppression and persecution would place an unthinkable barrier to the advance of this civilization. Their spirits beaten flat, their humility destroyed, China had robbed itself of its own great thinkers.
China's conquering emperors all share some common ground: their cunningness, narrow-minded obsession and suspicion of potential contest for their throne. The founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang had a particularly psychopathic obsession with this. As a dynasty built on the rule of a ethnic minority group, the Ming was concerned not only with cracking down on domestic dissidence, but also with the greater threat of Japanese pirates' invasion from the south and Mongolian invasion from the north.
In an attempt to prevent foreign aggression, four years after his rise to the throne, Zhu Yuanzhang issued an imperial order for the forbiddance of coastal residents going out to sea, banned unauthorized communication with bordering nations and the private transport of goods from Guangdong, Guangxi, Zhejiang and Fujian to the outside world…
The paradox and absurdity of Chinese totalitarianism is that on one hand, dictators never spared any effort to make their total authority obvious to the entire kingdom, on the other hand concerned with the stability and longevity of their dictatorship. An ancient proverb states "petty thieves are put to death, but thieves of nations become noble; the winner takes all…" In fact, they know that all are robbers by nature. No one person has God-given authority of rule, so in order to protect one's loot, military strength and suppression become a necessity. The economy, technological development and the nation's fate are but luxuries in the face of authoritarian power struggle. And so, the hallmark of China's dictators became an ideology of flattering the outsider and of domestic oppression.
Zhu Yuanzhang cast aside concerns for the livelihood of coastal residents, locking China's doors. Emperor Yongle (1360-1424) gambled tens of thousands of civilian lives in his eunuch Zheng He's seven voyages. These two acts appear contradictory, but both share a common goal—to consolidate the authority of imperial rule.
In 1405, Zheng He lead a fleet of some 208 vessels from the city of Taicang in Jiangsu Province, the first in a series of countless journeys to distant lands.
The seven voyages of Zheng He did not play much of a role in the advancement of society, other than putting his name into the history books. It was just as if the Chinese nation had dreamt of a mystical voyage, waking up to realize nothing remained. Even Zheng He's own logbooks were destroyed. To this very day, people still debate over the purpose, if any, of this series of expeditions. Many believe it was simply a series of meaningless journeys, set off course and lost at sea.
Zheng He's first point of business upon arrival at any nation was also his most important one—to make heard by kings, tribal chiefs and even people completely unconcerned with rule, the cry of Zhu Di's empire. And after that, he would exchange gifts of the imperial court in return for "tribute," feeding the empire's hunger for appraisal. Every journey saw boats stacked with gold, silver, bronze, china, silk and other precious commodities leave the shores of China, sparing no cost in their "gifts" to outer nations. This series of trips, delivering gifts to any nation that would accept them, would later receive the esteemed title of "the economy of imperial tribute" . The only problem is that, in forgetting the value, production cost and profit or loss in an exchange of goods, is the meaning of "trade" not lost?
A large fleet of hardships untold and countless journeys failed not only in opening a passage of free ocean trade, but also in bringing any physical or intellectual wealth to the Ming empire. Director of the Bureau of Equipment and Communications of the Ming Dynasty Liu Daxia questioned the legitimacy of these endeavors: "We waste a wealth of grain and silver, we send countless men to their graves. Even if they bring back precious treasures, wherein lies our national interest?" With hindsight on our side, we can see today that the most regrettable aspect of Zheng He's "philanthropy" is that his fleets only navigated the Indian Ocean around the backwaters of Southeast, West Asia and East Africa, completely missing the Cape of Good Hope and an acquaintance of chance with the rapidly developing West. The rehabilitation of this boasting of strength and soliciting for worship was actually poisonous, hypnotizing the empire into an even deeper obsession with "superiority."
