Origins
Looking at the primary sources, the Zhonghuijiangweizhiluan had two independent yet intertwined causal chains. One is the "merit that overshadows the sovereign" thread for Zhong Hui: holding the posts of Inspector of Sili and General Pacifying the West, Zhong Hui had personally led the conquest of Shu, after which he commanded several hundred thousand troops and had acquired the double prize of Deng Ai and Jiang Wei as war trophies; by the Simashi family's own experience, in such a situation "when the lord suspects his minister, the minister must die" [c:17958]. The other is Jiang Wei's "use the enemy to restore Shu" thread: Jiang Wei had at Jiange actually held off Zhong Hui's main force; it was Deng Ai's crossing through Yinping that destroyed Shu, and Jiang Wei's surrender to Zhong Hui was a matter of having no other option. He astutely sensed Zhong Hui's ambitions and waited for the opportunity, repeatedly urging rebellion through allusions such as "your words look to the distant future" and "Han Xin did not betray Han even in times of turmoil" [c:17958]. The confluence of the two threads was the crux: Zhong Hui needed a local partner of prestige to establish his footing in Yizhou, while Jiang Wei needed a standard-bearer with command of troops to stage a comeback — each taking what the other offered, they formed a temporary alliance.
Participating Forces
The rebel faction in practice comprised two separate contingents: Zhong Hui's Wei officer corps and the former Shuhan commanders Jiang Wei brought with him. The core problem on Zhong Hui's side was the loyalty of his subordinates — the Chief of Staff Du Yu and the Military Supervisor Wei Guan had reason to doubt Zhong Hui's true intentions; when Zhong Hui heaped praise on Jiang Wei before Du Yu, saying "compared to the famous men of the Central Lands, neither Gongxiu nor Taichu could surpass him," this assessment already implicitly positioned Jiang Wei in a political stance opposed to Simashi [c:17958]. The core issue on Jiang Wei's side was the tacit cooperation of Shuhan's former commanders: the Huayang Guozhi record explicitly states that Jiang Wei planned to "instruct Hui to kill all the northern-born generals; once they were dead, to leisurely kill Hui, then bury all the Wei soldiers and restore the Shu succession" [c:17958] — a three-stage plan: first use Zhong Hui's hands to eliminate the Wei officer corps, then kill Zhong Hui, then restore Shu. The counter-faction was the central counter-triangle of Sima Zhao, Wei Guan, and Jia Chong, supplemented by the implicit leverage of Sima Zhao's hold on the Luoyang families of the officers as hostages.
Key Turning Points
In terms of how events unfolded, the turning point was that both Zhong Hui and Jiang Wei underestimated the attachment to home that pervaded the middle and lower ranks of the Wei army. Zhong Hui believed that controlling the senior command would be sufficient to control the troops; Jiang Wei believed that once Zhong Hui struck and he himself turned against him, Shu could be reborn from the flames. Both overlooked one fundamental fact: the families of the Wei main forces were all in Luoyang and the Guanzhong region under Simashi control — not a single mid- or low-ranking officer was willing to sacrifice his family for the slogan "Governor of Yizhou." Zhong Sheng's threat of armed force at the Lantern Festival banquet to compel the generals to sign their names seemed to succeed but was in reality a powder keg. Once news of Deng Ai being dispatched under restraint spread and Wei Guan as an envoy was circulating counter-Zhong proclamations throughout the city, a retainer-troop counterattack was only a matter of time. The result was "Wei's officers and men, enraged, killed Hui and Wei" [c:17958] — this dynamic of "lower-level backlash" was more lethal than any coordination from above.
Suppression and Outcome
In terms of the suppression process, Sima Zhao did not even need to act in person — Wei Guan together with Wei soldiers who rose of their own accord resolved everything. Sima Zhao's settlement thereafter was ice-cold: Zhong Hui himself was executed, and Jiang Wei's wife and sons were all put to death; Pei Songzhi's annotation from the Shishuo Xinyu records that when Jiang Wei "died he was cut open, and his gallbladder was as large as a peck" [c:17958] — this detail of posthumous dissection was itself a political declaration by Simashi intending to hold Jiang Wei up as "a canonical rebel." In terms of strategic consequence, after the rebellion's failure Yizhou was administered for several years by Wei generals Wei Guan, Tian Xu, and others; the former structure of Shuhan was completely dismantled; Liu Chan was relocated east to Luoyang; and Shu territory moved toward formal Western Jin commandery-and-county incorporation. Chen Shou in the biography closes with extremely restrained prose, but Pei Songzhi supplements it with multiple historical sources, preserving the collective memory of "the Shu people who to this day grieve for him" [c:17958].
Historical Resonance
In his annotations Pei Songzhi specifically defends Jiang Wei, rebutting Sun Sheng's negative verdict that "so it was with Jiang Wei," arguing that at the time of Deng Ai's crossing of Yinping, Jiang Wei was still holding Jiange and blocking Zhong Hui's main force — he was not "unable to give his utmost" — and proposing that "Hui had intended to bury all the Wei generals and raise the grand enterprise; giving Wei the heavy troops and making him the vanguard — if all the Wei generals had died and military affairs were in Wei's hands, killing Hui and restoring Shu would not have been difficult" [c:17958]. This passage is a rare example in Chinese historical commentary of "making the case for the defeated," affirming the reasonableness of Jiang Wei's strategy while noting only that "events went slightly awry" and success proved impossible. From the perspective of modern political history, the Zhonghuijiangweizhiluan was an accidental coupling of "a powerful minister's ambition" with "a conquered nation's will to recover": Zhong Hui alone would have been purged by Simashi even without Jiang Wei's involvement; Jiang Wei alone would have had no possibility of staging a comeback without Zhong Hui's military power. The collision of the two threads produced a political gamble of extraordinary drama but extremely slim odds. The reason this affair has been debated again and again across a thousand years of later history is precisely that it pressed the two themes of "the fate of a meritorious subject" and "the obsession of a lost nation" together at a single moment in time — either theme alone would not have cut so deep, but combined they became the most heavily weighted final stroke in the San Guo story.