Why did the high salary system implemented for officials in the Northern Song Dynasty to maintain integrity end in failure?

This system in the Northern Song Dynasty was only for civil servants. This would only make the civil servants dominate, and eventually the court would be destroyed by internal corruption. 01. The Northern Song Dynasty’s high-tech policy of promoting integrity was only aimed at civil servants.

The rulers of the Northern Song Dynasty learned from the lessons of previous dynasties and decided to use culture to govern military affairs to improve the status of literati and degrade the status of military men. The officials of the Northern Song Dynasty also made great efforts to implement this strategy, and they proposed many auxiliary strategies for this purpose. They first encouraged people to study and take the imperial examinations, and then increased the number of imperial examinations to increase people's chances of passing the examinations. There are more people winning the election, and there are obviously not enough official positions.

The Northern Song Dynasty established new civil servant positions for this purpose. In fact, what could be done by one person in the past was now done by six or seven people. In order to win over literati and civil servants, the Song Dynasty paid them very high salaries. In addition, these officials are given other income. This kind of treatment is simply too good to be good. But people's desires will only get bigger and bigger. Once they become officials, their power will increase and there is no one to check and balance them, so they want more and more things. 02. Serious corruption among civil servants is the direct cause of the failure.

Of course, some military attachés were also influenced by the high-tech strategy of cultivating integrity. At that time, the military attache was a joke in the Northern Song Dynasty. He had to walk with his head down in front of civilian officials. With the accumulation of time, the civil servants gradually took control of the government and formed a literati group. At this time, it was not necessarily easy for the officials to speak. After civil servants took power, they began to seek personal gain. Embezzlement of public funds and corruption were all basic operations.

In the Song Dynasty, if you were a civil servant and took some public things from time to time, no one would say anything about you, and even the officials would not say anything if they knew about it. If that's all, that's okay. But these civil servants carried out corruption to the end, bribing superiors from subordinates, embezzling the court's disaster relief food and money, and preying on the common people. The reason why there were so many peasant uprisings in the Northern Song Dynasty was that most of them were due to natural disasters and food relief funds were not implemented. These civil servants also put their hands into military pay. The more famous thing is that they lied about their establishment and then ate their pay. Therefore, what Gaoxin raised Lian in the Northern Song Dynasty was a group of vampires, and they were slowly sucking the blood of the Northern Song Dynasty.