Perverse Armies of Luan

Given its sheer scale and the magnitude of violence it exacted, the luan committed specifically by Huang Chao wreaked cataclysmic socio-political havoc upon Tang China. To be sure, as it ran its devastating course, Huang's rebellion ignited seemingly numberless smaller and more localised uprisings that conterminously plagued the Tang dynastic state.

Yet, even in light of the quasi-ubiquity of the terror that victimised almost everyone, no group was more adversely affected by the Huang Chao Rebellion than the Tang ruling aristocracy. Indeed, the welter of foreign religious minorities massacred by the thousands in the south at Guangzhou notwithstanding, Huang Chao collectively targeted the office-holding elites who actually controlled the empire - situated almost exclusively in the north at Chang'an and Luoyang as well as along the east-west corridor stretching between the two great capitals - as his chief enemy, and history shows us that he could hardly have been more committed than he was to their removal from power or totalistic in their liquidation. Thus, as Nicolas Tackett has convincingly concluded, principally through systematic analysis of the funer­ary epitaphs and funerary biographies of this class, no single event was more responsible for the wholesale destruction of the medieval Chinese aristocracy than was the ruinous rebellion incited, led and visited upon it by Huang Chao.^{[63] [64]}

The decline by depletion and eventual disappearance of the Tang aristoc­racy as a viable governing entity necessarily affected adversely all of the institutions that had heretofore served its interests as a class.

In truth, the earlier history of the Tang yields stark evidence of the dysfunction likely to transpire in the military sphere whenever there was a leadership dearth stemming either from the absence or from the absconding of the traditional nobility. We need only briefly consider the example of the convention of foreign origin that was eventually adopted by the emperors of the Sui dynasty (581-617) as well as those of the early Tang as the militia troops (fubing) system.1³

First established by the Tuoba clan as rulers of the Northern (386-534) and subsequently Western (535-77) dynasties, the forces that composed the fubing system were not militia in the conventional sense but, in the words of the late eminent scholar Arthur F. Wright, ‘territorially administered soldiery', garri­soned by the semi-nomads along the northern frontier for defence against their more nomadic and northerly enemies.^[65] These troops, collected together in discrete units of approximately a thousand men each and thereby representing several hundred fu or ‘garrisons', were essentially soldier-farmers, and thus intended to be self-sustaining over their long stints of deployment. Crucial in its inception, however, is that the system was one wherein its high as well as middle command staffing often consisted of ethnic Xianbei nobility and that these two levels of generals and officers were frequently affined ‘by tribal or pseudo-tribal bonds'. All changed after the Tang founding and the appropria­tion of the system by the Chinese, as ‘once proud units became... the dumping grounds for criminals, fertile fields for exploiting functionaries, and social classes at once declasse and rebellious'.^{[66] [67]}

To be sure, the transition that the fubing system underwent was deleter­ious, so much so that it functioned under the Tang for only another century and a half.

For a complex of socio-political, economic and also intellectual reasons, in the long run the transition from the Tang to the Song dynasty tended only to accelerate the dysfunction evinced within the Chinese armed forces. Such was the case no doubt in part because the aristocracy that had dominated the prior medieval age was never again to be reconstituted. Thus the most consequential difference between the imperial military of Tang times and the subsequent Song era was clearly the extent to which non-aristocratic class elements became infused into and thus may be said to have become repre­sentative of it.

The ‘levelling’ of the classes within the institution of the military adum­brated the same phenomenon that was ensuing within Song society on the whole and, more than any others, two long-standing but steadily intensifying processes - one eminently inducible and the other highly coercive - greatly facilitated this transformation. The first of these processes was the professio- nalisation of the military as a paid as opposed to volunteer (as distinct from enlisted strictly by corvee) force, and the second was the augmentation of the military by means of practices of conscription that increasingly preyed upon and thus drew into the ranks predominantly men from the poorest and least empowered ranks of society.