The emperor’s grand wedding in 1578 was hardly a momentous event. At the time the emperor was just fourteen and the empress thirteen. Empress Wang was the daughter of a commoner, and Wanli married her entirely in accordance with the wishes of the Empress Dowager Cisheng… She enjoyed every honor within the palace, yet she lacked the happiness an ordinary wife could have. In reality, she was merely an appendage of a system… But she also left people another kind of memory: she frequently had palace maids flogged, and many died under the rod.
— Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance (《万历十五年》)
Reading this passage about Empress Wang in 1587, A Year of No Significance, I kept the page open in my hand for a long while.
This isn’t a simple palace gossip tale of an “evil empress abusing palace maids.” It’s an iron law of power running through a thousand years, hidden by Ray Huang in this unremarkable detail, written in an extremely restrained style: those who fawn upward will surely abuse downward—this is never a matter of personal morality, but a deformed compensation inevitably bred within a top-down power structure.
1. Restoring the Facts: Her “Fawning Upward” and “Abusing Downward” Are Two Sides of the Same System
Empress Wang—later posthumously titled Empress Xiaoduan, born Wang Xijie—was the longest-reigning empress in Chinese history, occupying the central palace for a full 42 years. Her life perfectly confirms the underlying logic of that saying: all the self and dignity she handed upward in flattery would ultimately, following the ladder of power, pour down doubled onto those even weaker at the bottom.
(1) Extreme “Fawning Upward”: Living Her Life as the Perfect Appendage of the Ritual System
Empress Wang’s posthumous title of “Xiaoduan” (Filial and Proper) didn’t come for free. Her whole life she precisely catered to the top rules of the imperial system, fulfilling Confucian ritual requirements for a “virtuous empress” to impeccable perfection:
- Toward Empress Dowager Rensheng, she was utterly respectful, keeping to a daughter-in-law’s duty, assisting her down from the palanquin, paying morning and evening respects, with every courtesy exactly in place;
- Toward Emperor Wanli, she was forever gentle and virtuous—even though Wanli favored Consort Zheng his whole life and showed her only formal emperor-empress respect with no trace of marital affection, she never showed jealousy or complaint;
- Toward the palace consorts, she kept to an empress’s duty, leading them to worship at the ancestral temple and perform rites, managing the palace’s institutional procedures flawlessly.
But behind this perfection was her total self-castration. As the original text says, she enjoyed every honor in the palace, yet didn’t even have the happiness of an ordinary wife. Within the imperial power system she had no real authority and no irreplaceable value. Her only capital for survival, the only sense of security she could grasp, was the top power’s recognition of her “compliance.” She had to cater to the rules to the extreme and flatter the upstream of power, turning herself into an appendage of the system, in order to keep the empress’s seat.
(2) Extreme “Abusing Downward”: Pouring All the Suppressed Rage onto the Weakest Palace Maids
The late-Ming writer Shen Defu’s Wanli Yehuobian · Palace Chambers clearly records: “The central-palace Empress Xiaoduan, of a hasty and fierce temper, treated her palace maids unpredictably, and the dead were many.” In plain terms: Empress Wang had a violent, harsh disposition and flogged her palace maids at the slightest provocation, and many died directly under the rod.
These two things were never separate. As gentle, humble, and self-suppressed as she was before the empress dowager and the emperor, so was she violent, harsh, and unbridled before the palace maids who had no capacity to resist.
Upstream of power, she was utterly weak: the emperor didn’t love her, she had no son to back her, and amid the treacherous palace she had nothing but the empty shell the rituals granted her as “empress.” She handed all her emotions, dignity, and self upward, not daring to voice a single complaint, and all her grievances, suppression, and rage found no outlet.
Only before the palace maids—lower than her, their lives entirely in her hands—did she possess absolute, unrestrained power. Only here could she recover, doubled, the dignity she’d lost upstream, and vent all the suppression she’d endured upstream.
2. The Underlying Iron Law of “Fawning Upward Means Abusing Downward” Has Not Changed in a Thousand Years
From Empress Wang, to today’s middle managers in the workplace who fawn on the boss and torment subordinates, to bureaucrats in officialdom who grovel to superiors and boss around inferiors—this logic has never changed. Its core is three irrefutable rules:
(1) A Single Source of Power Determines That “Fawning Upward” Is a Necessity for Survival and “Abusing Downward” Is a Zero-Cost Vent
For those who fawn upward, all their status, power, and security come entirely from the recognition of the upper level, not the support of the lower level.
Empress Wang’s empress seat came from the emperor’s and the rituals’ recognition, and had nothing to do with whether the palace maids lived or died; those middle managers in the workplace who only know how to flatter get their positions from the boss’s trust, and it has nothing to do with subordinates’ lives or feelings.
They need only be accountable upward; there’s no need to be accountable downward. Fawning upward is their only means of keeping their position, while oppressing downward is their only channel for venting emotions and recovering dignity—at almost no cost.
(2) The Compensation Mechanism of the Personality: However Much You Shrink Upward, You Must Recover Downward
All flattery is, in essence, the shrinking of the personality and the suppression of the self.
When a person before a superior must lay down self-respect, cater and flatter, swallow their pride, and even abandon their own principles and bottom line, they will inevitably develop a severe psychological imbalance. This imbalance can’t be resolved by resisting upward—otherwise they wouldn’t have chosen to fawn. The only solution is to compensate by seeking it from a weaker group. However much anger they’ve suffered and face they’ve lost upstream, they must recover it downstream by oppressing others. As lowly as Empress Wang was before the emperor and empress dowager, so was she brutal before the palace maids; as servile as those managers are before their boss, so are they domineering before their subordinates—fundamentally, the same psychological compensation.
(3) A Lack of Ability Determines That They Can Only “Live By Fawning Upward, Establish Authority by Abusing Downward”
People who are truly capable and can stand firm on their own value never need to survive by fawning, much less stoop to compensating by abusing downward.
Those who fawn, however, often lack the ability to truly solve problems and have no irreplaceable core value. They survive in the system not by doing things but by providing emotional value and catering ability upward. And to establish authority in the system, they can only rely on harshness, suppression, and PUA toward those below—because they lack the ability to win people over with professionalism, they can only oppress people with power, using subordinates’ compliance to mask their own incompetence.
3. Extending to the Workplace: Your Ceiling Depends on Your Boss’s Ceiling
This chain of power transmission, extending from the harem to the workplace, reveals a crueler truth: your growth ceiling, your resource boundaries—even your baseline for survival—in the workplace are never determined by your ability, effort, or talent, but are firmly locked to your boss’s ceiling.
(1) The Boss’s Ceiling Wields Your Upper Limit Shut—A Three-Layer Locking Mechanism
1. The boss’s power boundary is the upper limit of the resources you can get
In the hierarchy of employment, all your authority, resources, and opportunities aren’t given to you directly by the company—they’re ceded downward by your boss. However much say he has in the company is however much room you can get.
Just like the grand secretaries of Wanli’s reign: however heaven-reaching their abilities, what they could do never exceeded the boundary the imperial power granted. Zhang Juzheng’s reforms could be carried out because he had the full support of Empress Dowager Li, Wanli, and Feng Bao; once he lost the imperial power’s endorsement, he was immediately purged after death, and the man left and the policy died.
In the workplace it’s even more so:
- If your boss is himself a department manager groveling before the director, unable to even secure the department’s annual budget, then no matter how brilliant your proposal, you get no resources to implement it;
- If your boss is himself a “workplace Empress Wang” who only knows how to fawn upward, spending all resources and energy currying favor with superiors, he won’t hand core projects or promotion slots to subordinates—he’ll only treat you as a stepping stone for his own climb;
- If your boss is himself on the margins of power in the company, unable to even get into executive meetings, then even if you have heaven-reaching ability, you can’t touch the company’s core business or core circle—you’ll forever just do odd jobs on the periphery.
You think you can get opportunities through effort, but you don’t know that the gate to every opportunity is in your boss’s hand. Where his power ends is where your road ends.
2. The boss’s cognitive ceiling is the upper limit of the ability you can grow
More terrifying than resource lock-in is cognitive lock-in.
A team’s direction is always decided by the person with the most power in it. If your boss’s cognition, vision, and judgment of the industry have already peaked, then no matter how forward-looking your insight or how correct your proposal, it simply can’t land—because he can’t understand it, and even less dare take it on.
The crueler reality is: the moment your cognition exceeds your boss’s boundary, it’s not a pleasant surprise to him but a threat.
Just as Hai Rui demanded of Jiajing by the sages’ standard of Confucius and Mencius, and was thrown straight into prison; just as officials opposed Zhang Juzheng’s “seizing affection” by ritual law and were directly given the flogging and exiled. In a power system, those downstream can never be “more correct” than those upstream, or it’s challenging authority and being insubordinate.
If your proposal is more thorough than your boss’s, he’ll feel you’re not giving him face; if you see risks he didn’t, he’ll feel you’re negating his decisions; if your judgment of the industry is more forward-looking than his, he’ll feel you’re too ambitious and hard to control.
The end result is either you take the initiative to blunt your edge, cater to his cognition, and gradually get assimilated by his thinking, losing your own core ability; or you insist on your own judgment and get labeled “value mismatch, insubordinate, no team spirit,” and completely marginalized.
Following a boss with low cognition for the long term, your growth ceiling is welded shut by him from the very start.
3. The boss’s human lower bound is your baseline for survival in the workplace
The most terrifying thing about employment is never that the boss isn’t capable—it’s that the boss has poor character and too low a human lower bound.
A boss who only fawns upward and oppresses downward derives his own workplace security entirely from his superiors’ recognition; his survival logic is “sacrifice subordinates, please superiors.” Follow such a boss, and forget about breaking through the ceiling—you can’t even survive securely:
- When a project succeeds, all the credit is his; he takes your achievements to claim merit before superiors, not even mentioning your name;
- When a project fails, all the blame is yours; he pushes you out as the scapegoat at the first opportunity and washes his hands of it;
- When he’s scolded or suffers grievances among superiors, he turns around and dumps all his rage on you, recovering from you the face he lost through PUA, suppression, and torment;
- For his own promotion, he won’t hesitate to sacrifice your interests and future—even if you’ve worked under him for years, you could be discarded at any time.
The grievances Empress Wang suffered upstream she compensated for by beating palace maids to death; the dignity your boss loses upstream he recovers by manipulating you. His human lower bound is your baseline for workplace safety.
(2) The Most Heartbreaking Truth: In the Employment System, You Can Never “Surpass” Your Boss
In the imperial system, those whose achievements overshadowed their ruler never came to a good end. The same logic applies exactly in the workplace.
In a hierarchical employment system, your boss is your direct upstream of power, and your value of existence is “to help him complete his KPIs and consolidate his position,” not “to surpass him and replace him.”
Even if your performance ranks first in the whole company and your ability far exceeds your boss’s, as long as you’re still in this system you must obey his management, must not bypass him to report upward, must not challenge his authority, and even less show ambitions stronger than his. Once you make him feel that your existence threatens his position, he’ll be sure to find a way to remove you at the first opportunity—even if your departure would crash the team’s performance, he won’t hesitate.
This isn’t speculation; it’s an instinct carved into the genes of power, unchanged for a thousand years.
Emperor Wu of Han, with Wei Qing and Huo Qubing, is the most typical example.
Wei Qing rose from a horseman-slave in Princess Pingyang’s household all the way to the depths of the Xiongnu lands, seven battles and seven victories, rising to Grand General of the Grand Commandant and enfeoffed as Marquis of Changping—almost the most powerful consort-clan general of Emperor Wu’s reign. But it was precisely this “overwhelming achievement” that made Emperor Wu increasingly uneasy. The more cautious and modest Wei Qing was, the more deliberately he avoided factions and hoarding power, the heavier Emperor Wu’s suspicion grew—not because Wei Qing had any intent to rebel, but because the very fact that Wei Qing “had the ability to rebel” already constituted a potential threat to imperial power.
So Huo Qubing appeared. The young Huo Qubing likewise had brilliant military achievements, and more importantly, he had shallow seniority, a thin foundation, and none of Wei Qing’s consort-clan network—posing far less threat to imperial power than Wei Qing. Emperor Wu’s employment of Huo Qubing was certainly because Huo Qubing was truly a genius, but the deeper political logic was: using a new, more controllable “over-achiever” to balance and dilute the power of the old “over-achiever.”
After Huo Qubing’s early death, Wei Qing, though still respected, was far less favored than before. For the latter half of his life he was almost sidelined, his gates deserted, and he died in loneliness. Not because he’d done anything wrong, but because his “ability ceiling” had already touched Emperor Wu’s “tolerance ceiling.”
Emperor Jiajing’s maneuvers more directly wrote this logic into the emperor’s textbook.
Jiajing was one of the Ming emperors most skilled in political maneuvering. The core secret of his forty-five-year reign was one thing: never letting any minister truly grow great, always letting several forces tear at each other while he sat high above as the final judge.
Yan Song monopolized power for twenty years, helping him strike at dissidents, suppress remonstrating officials, and amass wealth—Jiajing found him extremely handy. But when Yan Song’s power grew great enough to threaten imperial authority and popular grievance boiled enough to possibly backfire, Jiajing immediately tacitly allowed Xu Jie to launch an offensive and completely topple Yan Song and his son. When Yan Song’s home was confiscated, the miserable sight of him, over eighty, sprawled on a broken straw mat starving to death, formed a glaring contrast with his once-all-powerful glory.
This wasn’t Jiajing “losing his integrity in old age” or being “deceived by treacherous ministers.” On the contrary, this was precisely the most successful part of his maneuvering: when he needed Yan Song, Yan Song was a handy dog; when he didn’t, he could kill and eat it at any time. Throughout, the one truly in power was only himself.
For Jiajing, a minister’s value was never “how strong his ability, how great his achievements,” but “whether he’s handy, controllable, and won’t threaten me.” Once that line is crossed, no matter how much sweat and merit earned before, the outcome is one—being removed.
When a boss in the workplace faces a subordinate “whose ability exceeds his own and whose performance ranks first in the company,” his mentality is exactly like Emperor Wu’s and Jiajing’s. You are not his “business partner”; you are a component on his power map. When the component runs well, of course he’s happy; but once the component is strong enough to possibly escape his control or even threaten his position, his first reaction is never “cultivate you, promote you” but guard against you, suppress you, and if necessary, eliminate you.
Because for him, keeping his position is always more important than the team’s performance.
This is the most unsolvable ceiling for a worker: all your workplace value must pass your boss’s judgment; all your promotion opportunities must pass your boss’s approval; all your growth must not exceed the boundary he can tolerate. Where his ceiling is, that’s as far as you can go. Many companies these days do “360-degree reviews,” but that’s just a seemingly fair illusion—as long as the evaluator is still your boss, then 360 or 860 is nothing but a tool that looks nice. The 360 review was never a fair tool for breaking the “boss’s one-man rule”; it’s a fig leaf that fully legitimizes the boss’s personal will through a process that looks democratic, compliant, and all-inclusive.
4. Advice for Workers on Breaking Through
All the conclusions point to the same direction for breaking through: never let anyone else define your upper limit.
1. Choosing a boss matters more than choosing a company or a position
A boss with vision, ability, and a willingness to cede interests and growth space to subordinates is your springboard in the workplace; a boss with low cognition, who fawns upward and abuses downward, and is narrow-minded, will only be your cage. Before joining, spending more time understanding your direct boss matters more than researching the company’s title, salary, and benefits.
2. Never bind your growth to the employment system
Employment is only a channel for accumulating resources, ability, and connections—not your whole life. What you should build is “the core ability to still eat even after leaving this platform and this boss.” Always keep a way out for yourself; don’t place all your hopes in life on the promotion opportunity your boss gives you.
3. Once you see the ceiling is locked shut, cut your losses in time—don’t burn yourself up
If you clearly see that the boss’s cognition, power, and vision have completely locked down your growth, or that his human lower bound has already threatened your survival—don’t cling on, don’t burn yourself up, don’t try to wake someone who’s pretending to sleep. You can never break through the boundary drawn for you by someone who doesn’t want you to surpass him. Cutting your losses in time and switching tracks or environments is far more effective than struggling desperately inside a cage.
So never bind your life to any boss’s ceiling. Your ceiling can only be defined by yourself.
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