The Plebianisation of Luan
As we have witnessed, over the course of its middle imperial centuries, no term can be said to bear a closer association with the cyclical pattern of violence begetting violence in China than that of luan.
Yet, a fundamentally indispensable aspect of that association still demands and deserves an accounting in closing. From our consideration of the structural and dispositional changes undergone by the armies of the state in transition from Tang to Song times, we have discovered that the perpetration of luan was by no means limited to the civilian domain. Armies themselves, when lacking the requisite quality of leadership that upheld order, could of course readily become seedbeds of luan, and the Chinese past is superabundant with cases of the institution most entrusted with maintaining order instead acting contrarily and directly counter to that aim.Nonetheless, we have seen that - in the critical transition from Tang to Song times - those governing China and, by extension, the people whom they governed, evinced the proclivity to conceive of luan as progressively and preponderantly a plebeian offence. Why would this be so? As I have endeavoured to demonstrate implicitly, much of the reason for construing luan as either a small infringement or a grave crime committed against the state primarily by commoners generates from the downward social trending of the history of large-scale disorder itself in China. After the An Lushan Rebellion (755-63), the instigators of major upheavals of this kind successively tended to be disaffected and disenfranchised civilians - and typically unprivileged peasants or even outcasts - rather than wayward and insubordinate but nonetheless pedigreed military men. As inciters of luan on the grandest stage, these civilians of course had no choice except to function as militarists - adopting the same mindset, donning the same trappings and pursuing the same tactics. Yet, whether emerging from within the ranks of the army or from outside them, such insurgents of the Song ultimately became progressively dissociated as a breed and removed as a class from the typically wellborn but unexpectedly perverse generals of early Tang times.
36 Fang Shao, Qingxi kougui (Traces of the Bandits of Qingxi) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995-9), 1.2b. Fang Shao, the author of this non-commissioned history of the Fang La Rebellion, was born in 1066 and died sometime after 1141.
We may note finally that the Song dynasty, exactly like its predecessor the Tang, was founded by a military coup - that is, established by the deposing of the ruling house through the armed usurpation of a general serving in the army of a pre-existing dynasty.[85] However, we should also observe that it was the last of the imperial dynasties of China to be so founded. Thereafter, the face of luan became conspicuously and inexorably plebianised, with this consequential transition towards an identification of civil disorder as a phenomenon with the common people both leading to and facilitating the corresponding one that was taking place in the composition of the armies. Once the military had transitioned from being one comprised largely of nobles in the Tang to one composed exclusively of commoners in the Song, we find increasingly that the impetus for perpetrating luan as well as the burden of suppressing it could only rest fatefully on the humble shoulders of those of plebeian background and no one else.