Warfare in China Since 1600

Kenneth Swope, Kenneth Swope

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351873826
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Asiatische Geschichte

Warfare has shaped the modern history of China more than any other single factor. This book brings together the best recent English language scholarship on warfare in China over the last four centuries and situates warfare within the broader sweep of China's modern historical development.

Part I
From Ming to Qing, ca. 1600–1800

[1]
A Few Good Men: The Li Family and China's Northern Frontier In The Late Ming

Kenneth Μ. Swope

The Ming has traditionally been portrayed as a static, insular state, preoccupied with only its own affairs and content to hide behind walls and fortresses while nomadic raiders and pirates plundered the frontiers and coastlines almost unchallenged.¹ Accordingly, the Ming has long been seen as a nadir of Chinese military power, a dynasty when, with the notable exceptions of the Emperors Hongwu (r. 1368-1398), and Yongle (r. 1403-1424), the pen really was mightier than the sword. In these standard treatments, military officials in the Ming were not just overshadowed by their civil counterparts, they were completely dominated, and the power of the military was stultified.² As one noted scholar of Ming history relates, "Partly because of its hereditary character, but mostly because even the highest ranking officers were characteristically illiterate and untutored in Confucian proprieties, the military service enjoyed far less prestige than the civil service."³ Even more sympathetic portrayals of the Ming military have tended to contrast a supposedly static, defensive Ming state with the more vigorously expansive Qing. One of the most persistent arguments, and one which certainly has its merits, is that the Qing were more successful in dealing with frontier threats because the Manchus originated in the steppe and were more familiar with the vagaries of steppe politics.⁴ Therefore, while Qing scholars have devoted much attention to military affairs, especially in the last few years, studies of the Ming, mirroring trends in other eras of Chinese history, especially in the West, have understandably tended to focus either on literary and cultural matters or on the factionalized politics of civil officialdom, marginalizing the achievements of military officials.⁵ While there is comparatively more in the way of recent Chinese scholarship on the Ming military, it has tended to focus on institutional history.⁶

Such an approach obscures the fact that the Ming, like virtually all Chinese dynasties, was founded and maintained by virtue of its military power.⁷ Even a cursory perusal of the Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty (Ming shilu) illustrates the primacy of military affairs in the everyday business of the empire. Likewise, topical and annalistic histories of the Ming period, such as Gu Yingtai's highly regarded Mingshi jishi benmo and Tan Qian's Gnoque devote considerable space to the empire's military affairs.⁸ Despite the outward appearance of institutional rigidity created by the promulgation of the Ancestral Injunctions (Huang Ming zuxnn) of the dynastic founder, Ming officials were constantly refining the military apparatus and seeking to devise creative solutions to the empire's military problems. Efforts to ensure standardized training and superior equipment for the government's soldiers were at the forefront of these concerns even if implementation was haphazard and subject to official whims, rivalries and prejudices. Interest in military affairs crested in the period under discussion here with more than 800 works on military affairs being produced in the last twenty-five years of the dynasty according to one estimate.⁹

By way of introduction, in terms of its general organization, at least at the dynasty's inception, the Ming military system was quite similar to that of the Yuan. Guards and battalions (wei and suo) were established within the empire proper and regional military commissions and aboriginal chieftainships (du si and tu si) were established along the frontiers and in especially isolated regions.¹⁰ In accordance with Mongol practices, Zhu Yuanzhang's early commanders wielded civil and military authority and in 1370 thirty-four of his principal generals were given hereditary titles of nobility. This was not an empty gesture. As will be seen below, throughout the Ming military nobles played important roles and were often given special assignments. Still, as Yu Zhijia asks, it is puzzling why early Ming military officials did not codify their position and maintain their predominance over civil officials like the Mongols did.¹¹ The answer may lie in the fact that civil officials also had a powerful voice in Zhu's administration from a relatively early point and they convinced him of the importance of establishing a more "Chinese" style of administration.¹²

Regular military units were scattered around the empire in divisions known as guards (wei) and battalions (suo).¹³ Though initially the numbers were more flexible, after the empire was pacified there were 5600 men in a guard and 1120 men in a battalion, which was further subdivided into ten units of 112 men, often referred to as companies. Each company was led by two platoon commanders who in turn had jurisdiction over five squad commanders who led ten men each. Each prefecture had three guards, each guard command had five battalions under it and every battalion command consisted of two full battalions and ten companies.¹⁴ The guards and battalions located in the interior of the empire had three basic functions: 1) to defend imperial lands; 2) to act as support forces in times of war; and 3) to rotate to the capital for training and to border garrisons to assist in basic defense and patrols in times of peace.¹⁵ This system of rotation to the capital was especially important after 1424 when the Three Great Training Divisions (san da ying) were established at the new capital in Beijing. Rotation was twice a year, in spring and in the fall and in theory involved some 160,000 men per year.¹⁶ At these times the old and weak were dismissed and the government repossessed their mounts. Troops were also rotated to the frontiers and those who tried to desert at these times were demoted three grades if they were military officials and sentenced to permanent service in border garrisons if they were ordinary soldiers.¹⁷

Originally the combined military forces of the empire were under the control of the Chief Military Commission (dudu fu). In 1380 this position was broken up into Five Chief Military Commissions (wu jun dudu fu) as part of Hongwu's fragmentation of power in the wake of the Hu Weiyong treason case.¹⁸ Each commission had a left and right commissioner-in-chief (rank 1a), a vice commissioner-in-chief (rank 1b), and an assistant commissioner-in-chief (rank 2a), ensuring that one official could never control a disproportionate share of the empire's military power. There were also a number of supporting officials assigned to the commissions. One regional commander was assigned to each province and one was placed in charge of each of the Nine Defense Commands along the frontier. Originally these commanders were all part of the hereditary military nobility created by Hongwu. Under Yongle the lower echelons of the military command system were further expanded and diversified until there were some 407 guards, along with various frontier chieftainships. Yongle wanted the military system to be able to operate flexibly and independently and in implementing his changes, set precedents for later rulers to follow.

Therefore, because of the fact that the Ming had a hereditary military class, there was a self-perpetuating institution in place to ensure the continued power and influence of military officials in government. Military households were expected to offer one able bodied man for service per generation to the regular army, along with their own supplies and equipment. The army was supposed to be self-sufficient, farming in specially allocated fields when not training or fighting. While military service was hereditary, executive officer posts at the provincial and national levels were not. An officer might rise to high rank through his service, but his son would inherit his original post, which could be no higher than guard level (zhihui shi), rank 3a in a hierarchy that resembled that of the civil service, though ranks only went from la down to 6b, rather than la to 9b, as was the case in the civil service.¹⁹ There were also military examinations, which, though supposed to start at the beginning of the Ming, were not implemented until 1464. These examinations emphasized physical talents like shooting from horseback, although there was apparently a written component as well.²⁰ These hereditary military families often came to wield considerable power in local, regional, and even national politics, sometimes over several generations.

Sons received their father's rank and pay at age twenty. If they succeeded to their post earlier, they received half pay. Soldiers typically retired between the ages of fifty and sixty going on half pay at that time if they had no heirs but receiving full pay if they had an heir to succeed them. Circulating officials generally held the highest posts though these officials were often drawn from the ranks of hereditary officers. Promotion for officers was based on merit for the most part. Generals were rewarded when they succeeded and punished when they failed, losing pay or even status. In distributing rewards and determining the danger of assignments, the north was ranked first, followed by the northeast border, the western and southwestern frontiers, and finally the suppression of internal banditry. Rewards were adjusted according to whether men, women or children were killed, and whether combat was one on one, or in groups and the like.²¹ Rewards included money, increased rations and increases in salary. The elite were selected to participate in contests at the capital and those who did poorly could be docked pay or even sent back into the ranks.²² While some hereditary officer families, including Zhang Juzheng's (1525-1582), sought to place sons in the generally more prestigious civil service, other families flourished in military roles and many of the most prominent late Ming generals were from families with distinguished records of military service. Together these families constituted a network of military elites not unlike their much better documented civilian counterparts.

In this article I will look at the careers of one of the most powerful of these military families, the Li, who were based in Liaodong, along the borders of both Korea and Manchuria. The Li produced such notable military figures as Li Chengliang (1526-1618), tutor of Nurhaci (1559-1626), and his eldest son, Li Rusong, (1549-1598), conqueror of the mutineer Pubei and liberator of Pyongyang from Japanese control in 1593.²³ Members of the Li family were involved in virtually every major military action conducted by the Ming from the 1560s through 1620, including the "submission" of Altan Khan (1507-1582), offensive strikes aga...