Studies In Cao Cao's Think-tank

The Three Kingdoms is a time of warlords, talents and heroes. Whether the leaders of the Three Kingdoms such as Caocao, Sunquan, Liubei or their brain trusters Zhu Geliang, Zhangzhao, Xunyu are all having an everlasting fame and distinctive characteristics, which set the history with their intelligence. The research of the Three kingdoms' brain trusters and their personnel system would help us discuss the Three kingdoms' history from a new aspect. Caocao, whose brain trusters helped him realize his political, military and economic prosperity, was an outstanding historic character. He united the northern China, who was well-known for his excellent exploits. Caocao's personnel system of Meritocracy broke through the China's personnel tradition and helped so many talents to recommend their service to the county. It still has great value for us to study.Because Caocao is the villain of the piece, his brain trusters, although with great meritorious contribution, have been neglected by the authorized history. On the contrary, Zhu Geliang has been well-praise. Besides historical materials in the books such as Hou Han Shu, San Guo Zhi, Jin Shu and other ancient books, few of the academic circles have presented articles about Caocao's brain trusters, let alone specialized academic books. Most of them are research papers limited on certain aspects of personnel management, personnel system, which are far from enough. This article selects related ancient books and materials about Caocao's brain trusters and current books discussing this issue from different aspects, and tries to give a full analysis bout the source of Caocao's brain trusters and the relationship between his historical exploit and himself.This article adopts Fernand Braudel's long-term view of history to analyze the source and political background of Caocao's brain trusters and tries to reveal the historical origin and interrelationship between Caocao and his brain trusters. It tries to demonstrate the reasonableness of Ruying Group's and Jiaopei Group's becoming Caocao's brain trusters because of their similar origin. Caocao altered the talents recommendation system for political reasons and offered talent-seeking request on the basis of Meritocracy for three times. The policy attracted many talents to pledge their loyalty to the Han Administration and also helped Caocao later rubout many talents because of political disagreement. All the above is a new viewpoint of this article to the research of Caocao's brain trusters. This article also argues that Caocao's brain trusters put forward many surprising stratagems politically, militarily and economically to help Caocao unite the northern China and exerted their historical efforts for northern society's stableness and economic development for decades. It is still worthy of drawing lessons from Caocao's political resolution of talents recruit policy without restricted patterns and his management of no doubt towards recruited talents, of making best use of talents, of awarding talents according to contribution.