A Study On The Assessment And Reward And Punishment Of Civil Service System In Ming Dynasty

The systems of evaluation, rewards and punishment for the civil officials of the Ming Dynasty play an important role in the political life. It has an indispensable effect to strengthen the evaluation and punishment for the civil officials on ensuring the quality of the officials, improving the administrative efficiency, and consolidating the national power. So it is an extremely important problem for the rulers of the Ming Dynasty and is also a significant content in the research field of the history of the Ming dynasty to establish a set of effective evaluation and rewards and punishment systems. Through a detailed study of the Ming Dynasty’s evaluation as well as rewards and punishment systems for the civil servants, we can get a further and comprehensive understanding of the development and evolution of the Ming Dynasty’s bureaucracy.The evaluation system became more complete and more systematic on the basis of the previous generation. It mainly includes test full and examination, they go together,and the Examination Rules made by Zhang Juzheng. But during the middle and late period of Ming Dynasty it had been abandoned due to the emperor’s negligence to the government and official corruption.The officials would get the reward and punishment according to the evaluation results, which could achieve the purpose of awarding the excellent and punishing the bad. The ruler also attached great importance to the system of rewards and penalties, and there were dozens of reward and punishment measures, which could encourage the civil officials. The "Eight Examination Cases" was regarded as the standard of punishment, which was quite severe, but could play a role of warning the civil officials.Through the research, we can summarize some characteristics:which lies in three aspects---the absolute monarchy featuring the emperor’s great attention to the examination and personal involvement, the variety no matter in the methods of evaluation or the measures of reward and punishment, and the extensiveness of the evaluation, rewards and punishment systems, featuring the numerous assessment institutions, a huge number of people and a wide range.The impact of the assessment, reward and punishment systems on three aspects, which are the social and political context, the officials themselves and the inheritance of the systems. The civil servants were quite likely to constantly improve their accomplishments and enhance their governing competence and bring benefit to the civilian in order to get the rewards, which would promote the development of social politics. Also, it was inherited by the Qing dynasty because of its completion.