How to evaluate Liu Bang and Zhu Yuanzhang?

As two successful examples of "grassroots entrepreneurship" in ancient China, the topic "Who is better, Liu Bang or Zhu Yuanzhang" is meaningless at first glance, but if we compare it carefully, there is a lot of thinking in it.

But having said that, there are still many differences between them. Who are they "better"? You have to see these differences.

First, Zhu Yuanzhang is obviously more difficult than Liu Bang in terms of success.

Although they were all born in poverty, before Liu Bang raised the flag to revolt, he finally became a curator and had many brothers in his hand. So after the rebellion, I became familiar with it and quickly pulled up the team. Zhu Yuanzhang is an authentic grass-roots farmer. Before he made up his mind to rebel, he begged for food for many years in the troubled times at the end of Yuan Dynasty. Even compared with Liu Bang, he is the grassroots at the bottom.

What is more difficult than this birth condition is the entrepreneurial condition. Of course, there were many "heroes" in the troubled times of the "Chu-Han War" in which Liu Bang lived. However, the "troubled times" of Zhu Yuanzhang's life were even more chaotic, from Chen Youliang and Zhang Shicheng around Zhu Yuanzhang to the "thin camel" Yuan Dynasty, all of which were hard to chew. If Liu Bang and Xiang Yu's "Chu-Han hegemony" is a struggle for hegemony, then Zhu Yuanzhang's imperial road is from "qualifier" to "knockout", a first-class fight.

What is more difficult than this environment of "ruling the world" is the situation of "ruling the world" after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Although they all suffered from war, the situation of founding the country in the early Ming Dynasty was much more difficult than that in the early Han Dynasty. In addition to the sharp decline in population and economic depression, after nearly a hundred years of "herding sheep" in the Yuan Dynasty, corruption and perniciousness spread everywhere in the early Ming Dynasty. Moreover, although the Yuan Dynasty fled to the north, the Northern Yuan, who retreated to Mobei, still occupied a large territory from Mobei to Yunnan, and also robbed most of the gold and silver in the northern treasury, and "there are no fewer than one million people who lead the bow." The country's internal affairs and diplomacy are difficult, but the war has to continue.

In such a dilemma, if Zhu Yuanzhang just "has a Liu Bang in his heart" or simply copied Liu Bang's routine of governing the country, such as "inaction" and "kissing", these more intractable problems could not be solved at all. The newly laid Daming Jiangshan will become a short-lived regime.

Therefore, this is the second difference between Zhu Yuanzhang and Liu Bang. Zhu Yuanzhang is far stronger than Liu Bang because of his strategic execution.

Speaking of the difference between Liu Bang and Zhu Yuanzhang, military fans of later generations often say that Zhu Yuanzhang's military talent is much stronger than Liu Bang's. Indeed, judging from the "hard-core requirements" such as commanding troops and strategic deployment, Zhu Yuanzhang is obviously close to the realm of "more is better", which is better than Liu Bang, who led the army by 100 thousand. But to achieve great things, what is more important than military command ability is strategic execution.

The successful experience of Liu Bang and Zhu Yuanzhang is a strategic plan superior to that of his contemporaries: in the Chu-Han War between Liu Bang and Xiang Yu, Liu Bang and Xiang Yu seized the Sanqin from the "darkness" and seized Xingyang, the land and water hub of the Central Plains, and then detoured to destroy the heroes. Every step he chose was stuck in Xiang Yu's death hole. Zhu Yuanzhang's success is even more so. Whether it is the brand-new Northern Expedition strategy of "taking Lu Yu first, then taking metropolis" or the iron fist storm of concentrating the whole country's efforts on agriculture and zero tolerance for anti-corruption after the founding of the People's Republic of China, it is extremely accurate step by step.

But in terms of execution, Liu Bang's biggest problem is that "it's not people who fly". Chen Ping, his counselor, commented that Liu Bang was "slow and polite", and the actual "air show" was obviously worse than this. He once used a Confucian scholar's hat as a urinal and rode naked on a counselor to feed him. At the critical moment of major battles, this "flying" style has also broken major events more than once: after capturing Pengcheng, it "flew" for a while, and was immediately smashed by Xiang Yu's 30,000 fighters, and 560,000 troops lost their blood. During the Northern Expedition to Xiongnu, he was released again, and was almost surrounded by people in Dengbaishan, unable to get up or down. ...

And this kind of "flying" problem, Zhu Yuanzhang will not have. In the era of farmland, he was "careless in everything" and a standard "workaholic" figure. Even if the war is urgent, you can't stop reading and studying every day. When he was young, he was only proficient in writing and pen and ink. Through regular "getting along with the scribes day and night and talking about history", he is full of pen and ink in middle age and has a very high level of poetry and prose. Live frugally all your life. Even if you later ruled the world, food and clothing in the palace are still very simple.

It is particularly worth mentioning that Zhu Yuanzhang was forbidden to celebrate his birthday for more than ten years after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Because every birthday, he will think of his family who died in the famine at the end of Yuan Dynasty. Faced with the misery of all walks of life in the early Ming Dynasty, he had no intention of "celebrating his birthday" because he was bent on "making the people well fed and clothed". It was not until the fifteenth year of Hongwu that Zhu Yuanzhang, who enjoyed a bumper harvest, fully resumed agricultural production in the Ming Dynasty and celebrated his birthday.