Violence and Dynastic Loyalty
There are three main means to enhance the effects of violence: weapons, training and numbers. In China from the beginning of the Tang dynasty in 618 until the mid Ming dynasty in 1500 control of these three factors was the state's basic way to maintain itself.
It was clearly understood that the internal and external security of a dynasty was based upon ensuring that only loyal people were trained in martial arts, had access to weapons, and were organised into large units of men. Deficiencies in any of these three areas made a group of men less effective. This was good if bandits were unable to get well trained, armed and organised, and bad if the government's armies failed in these areas. Of course, often the only difference between a bandit and a soldier was loyalty to the state.Effective soldiers highlighted the social and political problem of loyalty. Once a soldier was trained, armed and incorporated into a fighting unit he could become an asset to state power. But state power, the state or even the dynasty was often far too abstract a concept to be the locus of loyalty: individuals connected to individuals, not offices or ideas. Soldiers were often loyal to their commanders rather than to the political authorities or the emperor. Dynasties rose and fell on their ability to maintain the loyalty of the generals, as was true everywhere in the world. Those who controlled the means of violence had political power, and those with political power strove to control the men and the means of violence.
The problem of loyalty extended beyond the merely political, however, since control over the means of violence had important cultural and social meaning as well. For the government, a soldier simply had to be obedient. The place of violence in the broader society was far more complicated. Chinese culture was not monolithic across time, place and class, let alone when the added issues of explicitly non-Chinese culture are included in this mix.
Although the educated Chinese upon whose accounts of the past we primarily rely distinguished between Chinese and non-Chinese, the reality was much less clear. Chinese culture was a moving target but it did have some consistent ideals and attitudes.There were four classes in this ideal Chinese system: the gentlemen/knightly class shi, the farmers nong, the artisans gong and the merchants shang. The
State, Society and Trained Violence in China gentlemen evolved from a hereditary lower elite into the literati and gentry class of later imperial Chinese history. In theory, the gentlemen governed in peacetime and led the army in wartime. Farmers became soldiers in wartime and then returned to their fields afterwards. Under this system, both the gentlemen and the farmers were trained, if sometimes minimally, in fighting. Most adult males therefore were expected to participate in organised violence, and were restrained in any less politically sanctioned use of violence by the cultural and social norms of the practice of arms. This normative ideal persisted throughout imperial Chinese history. The peacetime social relationship between leaders and followers was reinforced and maintained in wartime.
Chinese writers described non-Chinese groups along the borders of the Chinese ecumene as fundamentally more warlike and less civilised than the Chinese. Particularly with the rise of cavalry forces and the disappearance of chariots from the battlefield, steppe peoples living in areas better suited to horse raising and nomadic lifestyles were better horse archers than soldiers raised in sedentary parts of China. All non-Chinese men were therefore adept at violence and, from the Chinese perspective, inclined towards it. This elides the case of the transfrontiersmen who straddled both worlds, or the continual influence of that steppe culture into China because of the value of nonChinese cavalrymen. Along with horse archery, steppe people were (and continue to be) renowned for their skill at wrestling. At the same time, wrestling and archery were established practices in the Confucian Classics.[436]
This period in Chinese history marked the end of the functional gentle- man/officer and farmer/soldier practice, and the shift to a variety of other systems. The ideal continued, nevertheless, even while any forces produced under the vestiges of that ideal became less and less effective on the battlefield. As that system broke down in practice, fewer farmers or gentlemen/ literati learned martial arts. Owning and carrying weapons was less general. Actual military experience among the literati or farming population was even more rare. Unsurprisingly then, the meaning of violence and its place in society also changed, with concomitant political ramifications. Changes in battlefield practice ramified throughout Middle Period culture.