Professional Army of the frontier

The second major development during the Han was the abolition of universal mili­tary service and consequently of the direct administration of peasant households.^[597] This institution, which had been the basic organizing principle of the Warring States polity and the Qin state, had preserved a limited utility under the Han until the defeat of the feudatories' rebellion in 154 bce, at which time a general war inside the Han realm ceased to be a real possibility.

The earliest recorded changes in the military institutions appeared under Emperor Wu, who first launched wars against the Xiongnu. He began commuting most terms of military service by the peasants into a tax, and used the income to hire long-term, professional soldiers. He also began to use convicts to serve at the frontiers, and like the First Emperor of Qin he established military colonies, where farmers were provided with land, seed, tools, and tax relief in the vain hope that they could extend the geo­graphic range of agriculture and thereby secure the northern frontier zone for the Han. Although Emperor Wu’s war nearly bankrupted the Han court, and offensive campaigns were abandoned by his successors, a civil war broke out in 60 bce between two claimants to the Xiongnu throne, and in 53 bce one of the rivals officially recognized Han suze­rainty in exchange for financial and military support against his adversary (who was killed by a Han army in 36 bce).

During the first century bce the institution of universal military service had thus fallen into general disuse, but it survived in law. In the last decades of the century the Wang clan came to dominate the court through a series of marriages of their daugh­ters with weak emperors. In 9 ce, Wang Mang, who had dominated the court as re­gent over most of two decades, stage-managed a coup-d’etat in which the Han boy emperor yielded the throne to him after a series of reports of miracles to demonstrate that Heaven had shifted the mandate to the Wangs. Rebellions by wealthy landlords from Henan and starving peasants from Shandong overthrew the new dynasty, and in 25 ce the Han dynasty was restored in a new eastern capital. This transfer of the cap­ital marked the shift of authority from the old Qin region, with its military traditions, to the flood plain of the Yellow River, dominated by wealthy and powerful families who esteemed the arts of civility and self-cultivation. This thus marked another major step in the “classicist turn” or “triumph of Confucianism” that came to redefine the so­cial and political order in the Eastern Han (see later discussion in this chapter).

In the uprisings against Wang Mang, many rebels had used the occasion of the military training sessions held in the autumn to lead the mobilized peasants into battle against the government. The utility for the state of such peasant levies had long vanished, and these uprisings demonstrated the threat now posed to the gov­ernment by the practices required to maintain universal military service, an insti­tution which only trained soldiers for potential rebels. Consequently, in 31 ce the Eastern Han founder, Guangwu (r. 25-57 ce) abolished the regular rota of service, the annual training sessions, and the office of local military commander.

In addition to marking a historical turn away from the political model provided by the earlier competing states, this abolition was significant because the new style of army that emerged to fight the frontier wars was based on the triad of profes­sional soldiers, convicts dispatched for garrison service, and above all cavalry armies primarily composed of surrendered nomadic tribesmen who were attached to the Han state in “dependent states” still ruled by their own chieftains. Thus peoples who were culturally and linguistically distinct from the core population of the Han state became central actors in the political order. In this way the Han state became the first large, multiethnic polity in East Asia, in which differentiated local groups lacking sig­nificant horizontal ties were drawn together under an imperial center that ruled them all through some variation of a “divide-and-rule” policy. This pattern was continued in all later East Asian empires, where not only the core of the army but often the ruling dynasties were drawn from steppe peoples, or semi-nomads from the northeast.