Its Gaining & Guarding

A leader will lose every thing even his life, if he loses his leadership. Thus, the research on the safety of leadership is rightly an important study category in the domain of the Study of Leadership (SOL). Kingship, applied by ancient kings, is the upmost form of classic leadership as well as an arena of the most intense fighting for leadership. In ancient China, kings' practice of gaining and guarding their kingships had been richly storing up without letup during thousand years in the last. Such practice, as a whole, is a typical sample for similar research in the world. Reality-oriented study is a kind of research path by which theory can be extremely aligning with practice. With these fundamental understandings, this PhD final dissertation (the paper, in short) is designed to, by drawing existent academic achievements from multi-disciplines and using them under the perspective of SOL, carry out a reality-oriented study of multi-generational practice of kingship's gaining and guarding in ancient China.It is the paper's last opinion that kingship's gaining-&-guarding (power-struggle, in short) is a complicatedly immaterial systems engineering. It involves 'taking power before taking title' and 'five preparations for power-struggle'. So, the paper initially constructs its doctrine of professional power-struggle (DPPS). By this way, leaders will be advised to concern the'multi-accident area', where the harmony of his core team may be jeopardized, and try to avoid power-struggle crisis in advance, rather than doing nothing until the crisis coming true.The paper argues that the historic value of kingship is that it had been a supreme reining-form of organized civilization course. History proved that there would be no a continuable organized civilization course if there was no continuable kingship. Although kingship, as a form of classic leadership, has nowadays turned into a historic story, yet its initial function and/or original logic of 'reining a civilization course to go ahead in an organized way' is rightly transformed into and surviving with a modern form of supremely collective leadership. In the future, this initial function of kingship will have been presenting abidingly, unless civilization no longer demands an organized development.The paper also argues that a basic contradiction involved in kingship is the contradiction focusing on 'whom does the power belong to' and occurring between a head-of-state and his vital ministers. In this contradiction, the head-of-state is certainly the primary part of contradiction. Such argument is illuminated by Chapter Yi-Ji in The Book of Shang. It says,'wise king, nice ministers, and then fair everywhere'(元首明,股肱良,庶事康).By thoroughly reviewing The Volumes of Twenty Five Histories (including The History of Dynasty Qing清史稿), what can be found is that no any word of this sentence (in Chinese characters) was changed in more than two thousand years. Over time, kings tried to settle this problem, but unfortunately, the result was often reverse:many of them were settled by the problem itself. Plenty of historic evidences show that, in the abnormal death of king, many vital ministers directly or indirectly played the role of pushing their king into a lethiferous position; while, in the abnormal death of vital ministers, kings' action can be summarized of 'any one who covets kingship, no matter enemy or friend, should be killed with no assoiling'.About elements applying for identifying a basic contradiction, the paper argues that they are:The subjective: With the change of subject from one to another during a research, people will have various identification of basic contradiction of same thing. In other words, a single thing does not involve a singly basic contradiction only.The original:Under a given subject during research, a basic contradiction is the targeted thing's most primary and most thorough contradiction and, consequently, from which plenty of sub-contradictions are derived.The holographic: A basic contradiction should be the contradiction presenting, with a holographic method, among all things in a single category.'Holographic', here, means a basic contradiction must be ubiquitous in any place, frequent in any time and visible in each thing in in this category.The eternal:Basic contradiction never disappears, unless the category of those things disappears in preceding. For example, the basic contradiction of'to-be or not-to-be'never disappears, unless the phenomenon of life has disappeared first and already.Normally, a contradiction, if simultaneously having these four elements, can be identified of a basic contradiction. However, in the research on interpersonal contradiction, a supplementary element should be paid attention, that is the harmful (or, the fifth element). In the research on the basic contradiction of kingship, harmfulness achieves its extreme status—that is to say, the lethiferous—and presenting, in this paper, as the abnormal death of king.Contradiction between leader and be-leaded person has been always the basic contradiction researched by SOL. From this perspective we can see that, between a head-of-state(leader) and his vital ministers(be-leaded), their contradiction has five elements mentioned above at same time. Thus, this contradiction is identified, by the paper, of a basic contradiction of kingship.Further argument is that although practice of kingship composes of plentiful meanings, yet its vital meanings can be summarized into four implications, which are, respectively, understanding a kingship, gaining a kingship, running a kingship and guarding a kingship. Strongly historical evidences show that, both in the advantage of leadership-ability and in the feature of leadership-manner, multi-generational kings'individuation performs either in one of the implications or in some of these four implications, and consequently, bringing up a picture of different king experiencing a different kingship condition. However, the issue of kingship's gaining and guarding is the most concerned and most common topic for the most kings. So, kingship's gaining and guarding become the core of the paper.The paper demonstrates a reality-oriented research. The 'reality-oriented', means facts those exist and/or existed in a real time and a real situation and, further, basing on these facts, setting up a correctness benchmark for a certain specialized research. In this paper, the implication of the reality-oriented is broken down into three parts:Real case:The historic record, with an undisputed credibility in academy, of kings' practice about their kingship's gaining and guarding in ancient China.Real efficiency: Focusing on practical efficaciousness in multi-generational kings'experience, rather than on multi-generational scholars' idealistic perfectness from their fancying.Real value:Subliming historical experience form multi-generational kings'practices and turning them into valuable advices for the leadership practice in today's world.So the'value', here, means these advices must be strongly useful in a real situation and getting effect instantly. Such meanings will be applied for demonstrating the paper's academic hypothesis:team is the threat to kingship.Three categories of doctrine involved in SOL lay the paper's theoretic foundation, which are the doctrines of leadership-power (DLP), leader-team (DLT) and of leadership-ability (DLA). In the paper, however, DLP is designed to focus on kingship, DLT on the supreme authority-board and DLA on king's capability and skills for how to lead his supreme authority-board.A necessary declare is that due to limited information-involing capacity of a PhD final dissertation, it is impossible for this paper to cover everything in a one-off way. For this reason, kingship-related research on the comparison between China and the rest of the world has to be cut off, as a whole, from this paper; maybe do it in the future.The final Words for this abstract are, as an overseas Chinese student, in the 21st century, who returns to his motherland for knowledge seeking, this paper also presents his Chinese sentiment that he has being abidingly holding wherever he was, is and will be.