Ruling the Ming Dynasty Through Corruption

Kakuei Tanaka, nicknamed "Kin Taiko" 🤭, did a decent job, at least better than those later abstract figures. During his tenure, he used the funds obtained through corruption as his own private treasury to lubricate administration, turning the network of corrupt interests into his own power network, thus indirectly controlling a certain amount of financial and political power. Now, Shigeru Ishiba considers himself Tanaka's successor 😅.

Just from your synopsis, I get the feeling that the protagonist will either establish a capitalist society and transform the emperor into a constitutional monarchy like Great Britain, or he'll be destined to float on the sea. Otherwise, even if you survive, your whole family will die. Offending corrupt scholars and censors won't end well for you.

The practices in the financial world were nothing short of exploitative in feudal times.

The Ming Dynasty's rule by corruption was fundamentally impossible. The prerequisite for such a system is that everyone must know when to stop. But if someone at the top embezzles one tael of silver, everyone below has to pay 100 taels in the process. Ordinary people simply cannot withstand such exploitation. Even an industrial revolution to increase productivity wouldn't be enough.

If the protagonist doesn't become emperor, then he will definitely carry out a comprehensive reform to limit the emperor's power. It's useless if the protagonist simply copies technology from later generations and adds a few reforms. If a country wants to produce a large number of original inventions, it must undergo systematic changes in many aspects, including its ideological foundation…

The biggest problem with finance in ancient times was preventing capital from flowing into land. While the Dutch East India Company became Europe's most successful investment due to its annual dividends of over ten percent, Chinese landlords could achieve annual profits several times higher through land rent collection and lending. Given such high profit margins, capital flowing into land was inevitable.

The mountains and fields are inevitably bare; there's no way around it, trees grow slowly, and even now they can't do without them.

The Ming Dynasty truly needed saving. Most of its emperors were good people, far better than those of other dynasties. However, they were held hostage by civil officials. While the emperors were kind, they lacked political acumen and the means to seize power. All they could do was allow the dynasty to languish in its later stages.

Finally, the financial world has also time-traveled.

In the mid-Ming Dynasty, ships from Japan came to plunder the southeastern coast. Such niche vocabulary. Our waves are several meters high. The East China Sea swallows ships. How advanced is Japan's shipbuilding industry? Where did the Japanese steal so many large logs? I can only say one thing. Those historians who wrote those history books must have never seen the waves of the East China Sea... Did they think they could just drive there with their eyes closed?