The Field Of Public Opinion:from The Selection Of The News And Events For Publicity To See The Game Of Political Discourse In The Ming Dynasty

The Ming Dynasty tried to construct a Hongwu-style state power structure centered on absolute imperial power.Under the highly autocratic centralization regime,public opinion in the early Ming Dynasty was dominated by base and superstructure,and in the operation of the totalitarian political system to adjust to the base and superstructure “Supervision of public opinion” as the leading mode of public opinion communication: the government level not only has a strict and complete set of procedures for receiving,delivering,auditing,and reporting official documents,but also has a strict and complete,the central government strictly controls the copying and distribution of the newspaper,and the content of the news must be checked by the monarch,which shows the supreme will power of the imperial power.Once the paradox of Hongwu-style imperial power reaches its peak,it will inevitably fall back and relax.In the early Ming Ruling class,through a series of institutional arrangements,a set of channels for the dissemination of public opinion was carefully designed to meet the needs of authoritarian politics,and a series of supervisory and regulatory measures were adopted to guide the dissemination of public opinion,thus in the initial stage has created the good public opinion environment,alleviates the social contradiction,the consolidation rule.However,the inherent contradictions between “Inner court” and “Outer court”,“Centralization” and “Decentralization”,which always exist in the central administrative system,also release the tension for the public opinion,at the same time,it also laid the foundation for the transformation of the political system.The change of the political situation and the improvement of the government affairs operation in the middle and late Ming Dynasty led to a long-term dynamic evolution process of the official documents operation procedure in the news link of the Di Bao,along with the rise and fall of the imperial power politics,make Hongwu dynasty later ancestor system is broken through unceasingly.In order to avoid heavy administrative burden,the official document operation procedures of the central government will inevitably deviate from the track set by Hongwu Emperor,and the number of departments and personnel it passes through will increase,making the procedures more cumbersome,not only the decision of the emperor’s personal will,but also the constraints of those in power,the office of transmission,the Silijian,and the cabinet may block the transmission of the imperial edict,naturally,the malpractice of being good at reporting to the press and spreading it to the outside world arose,which also laid a foreshadowing for the publication of the official residence newspaper.However,as the main body responsible for handling and issuing the decrees,the final adjudication power of the specific affairs is still in the hands of the emperor,the imperial power can still exercise its absolute power by specially instructing “Not to report” or detaining the inner court to neither discuss nor approve when the imperial exhibition plays,which shows the imperial power’s strength in the process of political discourse game,it marks the beginning of the formation of the management mechanism of public opinion in the Ming Dynasty.The influence of politics on the media is the influence of political system on the reform of the news system.The Di Bao of the Ming Dynasty was an official newspaper issued within the bureaucracy,its distribution and management were closely related to the central political system of the Ming Dynasty and played a key role in the expression of public opinion in the centralized society.The political discourse game between the imperial power and the scholar-officials,which revolved around the principle of“Political unity” and “Moral unity”,was the key to the development of the Di Bao in the Ming Dynasty,since Di Bao is the carrier of expressing the political views and attitudes of the scholar-officials in the Ming Dynasty,it naturally has the function of political supervision.In the late Ming Dynasty,when public opinion was growing,when Wanli Emperor adopted such passive and uncooperative methods as “Not reporting”and “Liu Zhong” he resisted the attempts of the bureaucratic group to achieve political checks and balances by relying on advice,when breaking the normal mode of political operation of the integration of monarch and subject,the scholar-officials also broke the convention and appealed to the public opinion and fair criticism for the matter of “Not reporting”.In fact,the bureaucratic group of the Ming Dynasty scholar-officials insisted on the smooth feedback of the palace newspaper,almost always accompanied by the Ming Dynasty emperor’s passive “not reporting” phenomenon.In the face of the declining imperial power and the increasingly inefficient operation of the regime in the late Ming Dynasty,the news in the palace newspaper also broke through the tight control of the imperial power,and some scholar-officials took the world as their own responsibility,because of the demand of “Public consultation” of government affairs and the recognition of political role,the key meaning of “Liu Zhong” and “Not reporting” is to make public right and wrong in the world,and to know what to do.It not only showed the multi-media ecology between the base and superstructure and the scholar-officials,but also laid a rational foundation for the communication of public opinion in the later ages.