Abhorred by the State

Significantly, over time, even the death of the notorious rebel Huang Chao became the subject of various afterlives. One of the most colourful and revealing of these many preserved anecdotes concerning Huang Chao's death - or, in this particular case, non-death - is recounted by Shao Bo (d.

As for what is recorded in the histories of the Tang dynasty for the sixth [seventh, in Western calibration] month of 884, [rumour had it that] what at that time was widely taken to be the head of Huang Chao staked atop the imperial encampment was not his. To the east or west, as far as either of the two capitals, elders with wide knowledge of affairs circulated [their belief] that Huang Chao was actually not dead. Thus, there was anxiousness afoot about his still being at large. [He was said to have] slipped away into Wolf-Tiger Valley in Taishan [in western Jiangsu] and, thereupon, succeeded in escaping by shaving his head to pass as a Buddhist monk.^[58]

Shao Bo furthermore informs us that in perfecting his disguise as a masquer­ading monk in order to avoid detection, Huang Chao ‘did not diverge in appearance from the [real] initiates. It was only his unmistakably serpentine eyes that made him appear different, and nothing more.'^[59]

We may note that the death of the infamous Huang Chao was never subject to dispute and that it was in the interest of the restored Tang state to make his demise as broadly known throughout the empire as possible. Yet the foregoing anecdotal passages are noteworthy for what they overtly convey across time to us about the power of rumour in medieval China. For the public as well as for the state, the very ideas of the evasion of justice by a consummate outlaw and the flight of a mass-murderer who was so enabled by the deft use of subterfuge and deception were in themselves clear causes for shuddering.

Yet, inasmuch as we are today capable of adopting the standpoint of observers less than three centuries after the fact like our informant Shao Bo, we will find a good deal more revealed by this tale. We may foremost observe that, no matter how culturally loathsome he himself may have been, Huang Chao as a man in no way surpassed the nefarious concept that he represented in contemptuousness. Indeed, such accounts as the one above have the effect of making historical actors like Huang Chao into embodi­ments of the concept that the Chinese in every historical age have referred to consistently across time as luan, a term meaning - at its most basic level - disorder. With respect to all questions of violence perpetuated in the name of either the past or the present Chinese state, we profit tremendously from considering this concept of luan very closely as an ever-present and integral component.

As is the case with every cardinal cultural precept in the Chinese intellec­tual tradition, all thinking about what luan is begins inescapably with its etymology. The Chinese graph or character luan is originally a pictograph of two hands in the act of detangling or unravelling a skein or section of coiled or knotted thread.^[60] As such, this image has come ideographically to denote the human confrontation with anything confused, chaotic or disorderly. From the customary perspective of Chinese social interaction, the character­isation of something as luan is always undesirable because it signifies a departure from the normatively operative assumption of orderliness, which is the standard to which the individual and society should be held and the objective towards which both should always aspire.

Therefore, we should understand the ascription luan as being essentially applicable to any disturbance or disruption in the expected social order - any tear in its fabric, no matter how small. Indeed, quite fittingly, luan has most frequently described and defined those most quotidian acts of social disharmony - transgressions that in terms of the modern Western legal code we would consign to the rubrics of public nuisance, or disorderly conduct, or disturbance of the peace. Yet, in its most extreme manifestations, luan surpasses by far the level of mere disruption and disorderliness and, as in the salient case of Huang Chao, attains that of open revolt or rebellion.

Consequently, in every age, the Chinese state has looked on luan with a disfavour ranging between distaste and alarm and responded to it as a threat to be guarded against and quashed at all costs. Every recognised instance of luan has elicited some level of violent response against it. Yet, to be fair, at least from its own perspective on the standards for its time, if only for the sake of efficiency, the state has historically tended to respond with some sense of proportionality. As we might expect, for lesser infractions and particularly those pedestrian ones that civilians might ordinarily perpetrate, the initial response by the state was in the form of the police, which was an institution that only became well established in China by late Tang times.^{[61] [62]} Given the impressive length of Chinese history overall, this relatively late appearance of official policemen was no doubt partially attributable to the large-scale urbanisation that began to occur with the advent of the Tang, for these civil agents of the law only reliably functioned in the vicinities of the capitals.¹¹ However, whenever confronting the challenge of luan at its most extreme, the instrument wielded in response by the Chinese state as its first as well as its last resort has never been anything other than the military.

In a society in which the emergence of independent civilian police author­ity was a late-emerging development, reliance on the military to suppress large as well as many small instances of luan is perhaps entirely understand­able. Still another more culturally deep-seated reason why the medieval Chinese state should have relied on its military in combatting all levels of luan is that armies were by custom universally construed as bastions of order unto themselves. Yet, despite being by custom the chief weapon employed by the Chinese state in suppressing instances of major disorder, the military itself was neither immune to direct infection by luan nor impervious to contagion by its proximate propagation.

The preserved historical record of violence in medieval China tacitly acknowledges this transition by exposing us to how the responses by the military especially to disorder of the highest magnitude increasingly result in mixed outcomes. Nevertheless, at least up until the invasions of the Jurchen tribes of the early twelfth century that precipitated the fall and occupation of north China in 1127 and the involuntary geographical creation of the Southern Song, reliance on the military as the solution to extreme luan did largely serve to facilitate order and extend a continuum of victory in the preservation of the medieval Chinese state against its adversaries, whether domestic or foreign. However, we will discover that this victorious conti­nuum was progressively achieved only through the often unchecked collat­eral exploitation, brutalisation and elimination of untold numbers of innocent Chinese lives in the process.