It is said that he barred the commoners from profiting from communal forests and lakes, and instated a new law which allowed him to punish anyone, by death, who dared to speak against him.
According to the Bamboo Annals, an archaeologically unearthed text discovered in antiquity but postdating Sima Qian, the Gonghe Regency was a period in which the Zhou dynasty was ruled by a single person—Gongbo He (共伯和; Elder He of the Gong lineage).
Sima himself found the information about earlier dates in his sources to be unreliable and contradictory and so chose not to adopt them in his work.
When encountering the western term "republic", the modern Chinese (as well as the Japanese), borrowed the word gonghe to have this meaning.
Historically, however, the Gonghe period during the Zhou dynasty does not confer any republican connotations: the people of the time having had no opposition to monarchy as such, but only to one specific king.