The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644

The Ming dynasty was unique among the major dynasties in Chinese history, and even the minor ones, in that it began in the south. More peculiarly, a significant aspect of the rise of Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming founder, was extensive riverine warfare on the Yangzi River.^[454] Zhu Yuanzhang's rebel group began as part of a religious movement before converting to being simply one of the contenders for power in the ruins of the Yuan dynasty.^[455] The Ming founder combined a hatred for the Mongols with his own parti­cular utopian ideas of society.

State, Society and Trained Violence in China collapsed soon after his death, most obviously locating the capital at Nanjing and leaving the throne to his grandson, others persisted for much longer.

The Ming founder was himself one of the most violent men ever to have ruled China. Some of his violent court practice was a holdover from Mongol court practice, but it was his personal decision, for example, to have a court official beaten to death in front of him by military officials. Such an act would have been inconceivable during the Song dynasty. Tens of thousands of people distantly related to conspirators, or perceived conspirators, were executed to satisfy his growing paranoia. This would also carry over into the reign of his son, the Yongle Emperor, who usurped the throne from his nephew after a bloody civil war. Court culture during the Ming dynasty was far more violent than under previous Chinese dynasties.

Martial arts skills were widespread after the Ming conquest, and armies and soldiers roamed the new empire. The Mongols had been driven back to the steppe, for the most part, but their cultural influence remained. Chinese society in the wake of a century of Mongol rule and decades of warfare was brutalised.

Surprisingly, given the intense fighting in northern China and the fluid circumstances directly after the Ming conquest, the early Ming was far more peaceful than the later Ming, with most collective violence taking place in the south. Three quarters of the outbreaks of collective violence took place in the south, and four-fifths in the second half of the dynasty.^[456] Why this was the case is unclear, though the vastly lower population in north China and the general economic depression of the early Ming may have played a role. Nevertheless, early Ming state policies certainly did not create a violent society, and the breakdown of those policies coincided with an increase in collective violence in the latter half of the dynasty. The rise in collective violence also coincided with the collapse of the hereditary military class as the state’s primary source for men trained in martial arts.

Zhu Yuanzhang’s solution to the relationship of martial arts to the state was to create a hereditary military class.^[457] Army veterans were given land to farm and registered as military men in perpetuity. In theory, the land would

provide a living to support soldiers and officers in return for producing men for the army. The state would be relieved of the burden of supporting soldiers or recruiting them. How much military training these men would receive at home or in their military communities is less clear. Certainly, some kinds of martial arts training, for example with firearms, were conducted by the state after induction into the army. This system worked for some time when the empire was at peace.

Army effectiveness decreased over time, however, and the military families lost most of their traditions of war.

By 1500, the Ming military system established by the dynasty's founder was no longer capable of meeting external military emergencies. Even though the Tumu Incident of 1449, during which a Mongol raid captured a sitting emperor travelling within the Ming empire, demonstrated the unequivocal decline of the army, it proved politically impossible to reform the military system. Any change in that system had broad implications for the state and society, the costs and ramifications of which the government was unwilling to accept. The government was more concerned with internal stability than with defending against external threats. The military families from which the soldiers of the army were to be drawn did not provide enough or even any training in fighting skills, and the central government, in turn, failed fully to make up this deficit. Rather than enhance military training to deal with the Mongol threat, the court had instead continued what was originally a stopgap policy of constructing what would become the Great Wall. Building walls did not require social, political or cultural change, and did not generate a population of men skilled at arms who might not be loyal to the state.

There are a number of reasons why the Manchus defeated the Ming dynasty in 1644, but its fate was not set by 1500.^[461] At the mid-point of the Ming, the state's management of the tools of violence had begun to fail the empire. Society had changed, but a succession of Ming emperors and their courts were unable to adapt to that change. The skills of trained violence were not fully controlled by the state, though the more significant problem was that the state no longer maintained a sufficiently capable group of men trained in violence. When the original system set up to provide the state with trained fighters failed, it could not find an effective replacement.

Conclusion

From the Tang dynasty through the Ming dynasty the relationship between the state and society continually changed. During the Tang dynasty the farmer-soldier and official-officer system of converting peacetime roles tem­porarily into wartime roles and back again collapsed. Soldier and officer became permanent occupations for men who had no other life to return to. Their skills were as specialised as their martial culture. Military men were part of society, but their relationship to society and the state was very different from that of their farmer-soldier predecessors. The ideal Confucian relationship between male farmers, the army and the state was broken, and the place of trained violence within Chinese society irrevocably changed.

The transformation of the connection between soldiers and farmers chan­ged the meaning of martial arts skills. When all adult men in the agricultural sector at least theoretically owed the state military service, martial arts skills were part of the lives of ordinary, law-abiding imperial subjects. Military service, and the martial arts skills that accompanied that, was a sign of submission and loyalty to the government. Once that connection between farmer and soldier, and between official and officer, was broken, practising martial arts outside of the military was politically suspect.

Ironically, the same Confucianised elites arguing against Confucian nor­mative ideals of martial arts in the eleventh century were also trying more broadly to return to those ideals as a way of reinvigorating society and government. Their efforts laid the intellectual and literary foundations of what in the West is usually called ‘Neo-Confucianism’ in the twelfth century. But just as the Neo-Confucians asserted the moral superiority of the literati over the emperor, the separation of martial arts from the state created martial artists who were independent of state authority.

The Mongol Yuan dynasty continued the separation of Chinese society into those who could be trusted to be trained in martial arts and those who could not, with the distinction often, but not always, based upon ethnic lines. It was not just martial arts in general, but specific arts, archery in particular, that concerned the authorities. Who practised particular martial arts was critically important to the state.

Finally, the Ming dynasty inherited the separation begun in the Tang, and tried to increase the separation by making the military a hereditary class. The martial arts genie was already out of the bottle, however, and independent martial arts flourished during the Ming. Martial arts performances grew and spread, and the independence of the martial artist in opposition to the state developed both as a concept and in reality. By the Ming, the state neither produced nor fully controlled the means of trained violence, and that chan­ged the relationship of the subject to the government and the state.