JONATHAN KARAM SKAFF
Violence was an intrinsic element of government and political culture in early medieval China from the fourth to the tenth century. As is typical of other periods in Chinese history, individual monarchs and dynasties came to power through force of arms, and kept order by implementing Chinese legal-bureaucratic systems that legitimised violent punishments for many crimes.
Chairman Mao's famous dictum that power grows from the barrel of a gun held true in the early medieval period when the weapons of choice were the bow, sabre and lance. Less frequently noted, the formal bureaucratic and military systems were riven with informal, patrimonial political ties that engendered violence at court and in the provinces. Male and female relatives by blood and marriage, and sometimes eunuchs, were involved in the struggle to sit on the throne or rule from behind the scenes. A monarch - or courtiers wielding power for a puppet ruler - required the protection of a loyal bodyguard and army that could violently dispose of real or perceived enemies.The violence employed in these political struggles can be defined as ‘physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone', according to the New Oxford American Dictionary. For the most part, killing was the most crucial type of violence in politics because it was a zero-sum game. The winner typically eliminated real and perceived rivals and their adherents. This turbulent political and military climate created a murky distinction between morally justified state-sanctioned violence and unsanctioned forms. To win in the zero-sum game of power, qualities such as intelligence, unscrupulousness, ruthlessness and deviousness were required. Nonetheless, monarchs or courtiers who attempted to instil order purely by terrorising subordinates into compliance never succeeded in forming stable dynasties. Effective rulers bolstered their legitimacy by cultivating reputations for benevolence, carrying out traditional sacral rituals to heaven, and meting out punishments according to the legal code.
Rulership was given moral justification by the Chinese mandate of heaven ideology, which held that heaven chose the most virtuous dynastic line of ‘sons of heaven', to pass down the reign as ‘August Emperor'. The Chinese legal code was the ruler's vehicle for sanctioning violent punishments, but justice could be manipulated to bring false charges against political enemies.The divided and unstable political situation of early medieval China increased the prevalence of conflicts and violence. The various dynasties that ruled during the early medieval period are listed in Table 6.1. Though impossible to measure precisely, state violence was probably more intense during the periods of political division from 220 to 589 and 907 to 960 when ‘China' was separated into two or more states with relatively frequent internecine conflicts at court, interstate wars and dynastic transitions. The geographic divisions were particularly intense in the north in the fourth century and the south in the tenth century. During the periods of disunity, states were relatively weak because provincial strongmen tended to usurp the powers of the central legal-bureaucratic government. To complicate matters further, there was an ethnic division between the rulers of north
Table 6.1 Dynasties of early medieval China (fourth to tenth centuries).
| Northern Dynasties | Southern Dynasties | |
| Sixteen Kingdoms (317-86) | Eastern Jin (317-420) | |
| Northern Wei (386-534) | Former (or Liu) Song (420-79) | |
| Western Wei (535-56) | Eastern Wei (534-50) | Southern Qi (479-502) |
| Northern Zhou (557-81) | Northern Qi (550-77) | Southern Liang (502-57) |
| Northern Zhou (577-8i)/Sui (581-9) | Southern Chen (557-89) | |
| Sui (589-618) | ||
| Tang (618-690) | ||
| Zhou (690-705) | ||
| Tang (705-907) | ||
| Later Liang (907-23) Later Tang (923-36) Later Ji (936-47) Later Han (947-50) Later Zhou (951-60) | Ten Kingdoms (902-79) | |
and south China.
In the fourth to sixth centuries, dynasties of Inner Asian ancestry ruled over the north, most prominently the Sarbi (Xianbei) of the Northern Wei, Northern Zhou and Northern Qi dynasties. A succession of ethnically Chinese dynasties controlled the south. In the tenth century, three of the five successive dynasties in the north had rulers of Shatuo Turk ancestry, while the Kitan Liao dynasty of Manchuria controlled part of Hebei. Even though the northerners have tended to be stereotyped as more martial than southerners, this chapter demonstrates that southern provincial elites also cultivated martial talents and became involved in the violent struggles for power. Though somewhat more stable, the geographically unified Sui and Tang realms were also punctuated episodically by bloody conflicts at court and rebellions in the provinces.
More on the topic JONATHAN KARAM SKAFF:
- Dismantling classification: Jonathan Z. Smith
- Jonathan Grimsha
- Jonathan Miran
- JONATHAN ROTH
- Jonathan Ercanbrack[1575]
- Acknowledgments
- References
- What Intuitions Matter?
- Acknowledgments
- Christian Violence against Jews
- From Deconstruction to New Realism