The Art of Being Governed

Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China

Michael Szonyi

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400888887
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

An innovative look at how families in Ming dynasty China negotiated military and political obligations to the state How did ordinary people in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) deal with the demands of the state? In The Art of Being Governed, Michael Szonyi explores the myriad ways that families fulfilled their obligations to provide a soldier to the army. The complex strategies they developed to manage their responsibilities suggest a new interpretation of an important period in China's history as well as a broader theory of politics.Using previously untapped sources, including lineage genealogies and internal family documents, Szonyi examines how soldiers and their families living on China's southeast coast minimized the costs and maximized the benefits of meeting government demands for manpower. Families that had to provide a soldier for the army set up elaborate rules to ensure their obligation was fulfilled, and to provide incentives for the soldier not to desert his post. People in the system found ways to gain advantages for themselves and their families. For example, naval officers used the military's protection to engage in the very piracy and smuggling they were supposed to suppress. Szonyi demonstrates through firsthand accounts how subjects of the Ming state operated in a space between defiance and compliance, and how paying attention to this middle ground can help us better understand not only Ming China but also other periods and places.Combining traditional scholarship with innovative fieldwork in the villages where descendants of Ming subjects still live, The Art of Being Governed illustrates the ways that arrangements between communities and the state hundreds of years ago have consequences and relevance for how we look at diverse cultures and societies, even today.

PART I

In the Village

CHAPTER ONE

A Younger Brother
Inherits a Windfall

CONSCRIPTION, MILITARY SERVICE,
AND FAMILY STRATEGIES

THE ZHENG FAMILY lived not far from Yan Kuimei’s family, in the city of Quanzhou itself. The mid-fourteenth century was a chaotic time for them. As the ruling Yuan dynasty tottered, local soldiers took up arms against their Mongol rulers. The rebels were crushed after much violence by a loyal Yuan general; his army would soon fall in turn to the rising power of Zhu Yuanzhang. The patriarch of the Zheng family was among the countless victims of the turmoil. His widow fled the city with her four sons, hoping to find safety in more isolated Zhangpu county to the south. In the 1370s when a measure of stability had returned, she sent two of her sons back to Quanzhou, ostensibly to tend to their father’s grave. The other two sons stayed by her side in their new home in Zhangpu.

In 1374, two years before the Yan family, the widow and her two remaining sons came to be registered as a military household—probably as part of a general draft, but we do not know for sure the precise circumstances. The family was required to provide one soldier to serve in the army in a far-off garrison. They had to decide which of the two brothers would serve. The decision might seem straightforward, but it generated some complex negotiations. These involved not only the issue of military service itself but also questions of inheritance or, to use the Chinese term, “household division” (fenjia).

Inheritance in premodern China was patrilineal and partible. When members of a family decided they no longer wanted to live in a common household, pooling their property and income together—a decision taken most often on the death of the parents—the household estate was divided up evenly among the sons. Families might make provisions for specific circumstances, but they generally adhered to this basic principle, and indeed it was required by law.¹ According to an account in their genealogy, the Zheng family did things very differently. The two brothers in Zhangpu divided the whole estate between themselves; the two brothers sent back to Quanzhou got nothing. Nor did the two sons in Zhangpu divide the property evenly, as partible inheritance would require. The elder brother received only one-quarter of the value of the estate. The bulk of the estate, three-quarters of the total value, went to the younger brother. The genealogy explains why. The younger brother received the lion’s share because he took responsibility for the family’s military service obligation. He was the one who went off to join the army. In effect, the elder brother used half of his inheritance to buy himself an exemption from military service.

This decision would have consequences not just for the two brothers themselves but also for their descendants in the generations to come. For the agreement, like the military service obligation itself, was hereditary. Only the younger brother’s sons and grandsons would be liable to serve in the army; the elder brother’s would be exempt.

Many years later when the younger brother had grown old, the question arose of who would replace him in the ranks. Both brothers had three sons; there were six males in the third generation. The initial, unequal division of the original household estate meant that the three sons of the elder brother were free of any obligation to serve. So the crucial question was which of the younger brother’s three sons would go to the army. A second round of negotiations ensued. The family might have simply repeated the solution of the previous generation and given a larger share of inheritance to the son who agreed to serve. They did not, perhaps because the estate was no longer big enough to persuade anyone to become a soldier. Instead, this round of negotiations was all about prestige and ritual.

The result of the negotiations was that the second eldest son of the second brother was appointed the “descent-line heir” (zongzi). This was already an archaic term in Ming times. It gestured back to classical antiquity, when noble families practiced a form of primogeniture called the descent-line system (zongfa), whereby in every generation the eldest son inherited the political and ritual privileges of his father. From the Song onwards, some neo-Confucian thinkers had been calling for this system to be revived and extended to the common people. They recognized that the world of the ancients was gone forever, that primogeniture would never again replace partible inheritance. But they hoped that giving the eldest son in each generation a special ritual role could provide a much-needed sense of order and hierarchy in their own troubled times.² The Zheng were one of many families in Ming Fujian who adopted the practice of appointing a descent-line heir. But they did not give the title to the eldest son of the eldest son. They gave the title to the second son of the second son. Why? Because he was the one who replaced his father in the army. His descendants became the “senior” branch; his sons and their sons would forever take precedence in sacrificial ritual. Whereas the first generation had traded inheritance rights for service obligations, the second generation traded ritual precedence for service obligations (see figure 1.1).³

1.1.The Zheng family

On Genealogy

Like the story of Yan Guangtian in the introduction, this story of the Zheng family is drawn from their own internal account of how family members dealt with the challenge of fulfilling military service obligations over the course of generations. They were not alone in facing this challenge. One widely cited though probably exaggerated early Ming source puts the proportion of military households at 20% of all households. By the late Ming, there were four million registered soldiers, which meant four million registered households.⁴ The rules that governed this immense system are recorded in the Ming dynasty’s statutes. But how did these rules actually matter to these people’s lives? We can answer this question only by turning to the documents produced by ordinary people and in many cases still in the hands of their descendants. The Zheng genealogy shows that for this family the consequences of military registration went well beyond military service itself, shaping inheritance practices and property relations, internal family structure, and even ritual behavior.

In sheer volume, the number of (written) characters they contain and the number of (human) characters they describe, genealogies are the greatest surviving source for Chinese history in Ming and Qing times. The term genealogy encompasses everything from a handsomely printed and bound multivolume work to a handwritten scrap of paper on which successive generations of barely literate family members have written names of ancestors. Today, it can also mean a reprint of an older genealogy that a lineage member has found in a research library, a photocopied version used to replace a personal copy lost in the Cultural Revolution, or even a virtual genealogy that exists only online. A typical Chinese genealogy consists mostly of family-tree charts and biographies of the male descendants of the founding ancestor, and sometimes their wives and daughters. For most descendants, this is the kind of information that is most useful if one needs to perform sacrifices to one’s ancestors—a typical entry consists only of dates of birth and death and the location of their tomb. But many genealogies contain much more information—property deeds and contracts that shed light on the material conditions of the lineage members; prefaces commissioned from prominent men, illustrating the lineage members’ social networks, and essays on such diverse topics as family origins, construction of ancestral halls, and even taxation matters. The story of Yan Kuimei’s family is taken from one such text, as is the tale of the Zheng of Zhangpu.⁵

Not every family in Ming had a genealogy, and no genealogy is the product of the collective efforts of every family member. Rather, genealogies were compiled by certain members of certain families, with their interests in mind. But all this means is that genealogies, like any other historical source, need to be read carefully and critically. As Maurice Freedman wrote, the genealogy is “a set of claims to origins and relationships, a charter, a map of dispersion, a framework for wide-ranging social organization, a blueprint for action. It is a political statement.”⁶ Every -genealogy is produced by a concrete group of people in a concrete historical setting, driven by concrete historical concerns. Genealogies are texts in which power relations, real and potential, have been inscribed. The genealogy is not solely or even primarily a vehicle for making political claims, but it often does serve this purpose. Since genealogies are records maintained by the members of military households themselves, their political claims illustrate the family’s interaction with the state from their perspective, showing what it meant to them.⁷

We need not take these texts at face value as true accounts. Better to think of them as what Zemon Davis called “fictions”—meaning not texts that are false but texts that have been deliberately formed into narratives.⁸ An account of how a family dealt with its obligations may not be simple description but rather retrospective construction or argument. The sources shed light on the organizational resources and approaches that people used to deal with their problems. That these strategies appear in the genealogies suggests, at a minimum, that people found the logic of these strategies valid. They show us solutions that were culturally and politically acceptable. We also know from the appearance of these same strategies in legal documents that certain people did indeed make use of such strategies and found their logic valid and persuasive. Ming judges adjudicated cases about precisely the same practices as are described in the genealogies. Whether a given family actually used a given strategy is for our purposes largely irrelevant. Families made use of certain narratives to explain a situation; at the core of this analysis is the question of why they chose these narratives rather than others.

Military Households of the Ming

The families discussed in this book shared one thing in common: they were registered by the Ming state as military households. They probably had other things in common with one another (and for that matter with our families today). They must have worried about the harvest, worried about money, worried about their children’s future. They squabbled and they celebrated. Not every aspect of their lives is accessible to the historian. But from their genealogies we can learn quite a lot about one particular element of their common experience, the way they were registered with the Ming state.

“Registration” here means several things.⁹ First, it has a concrete sense. The name of the family’s ancestor (usually a late fourteenth-century ancestor) was recorded in a particular type of state file, known as a Yellow Register (huangce). One copy of the file was housed together with other state documents in a vast archive located, to protect against fire, on a small island in a lake near the modern city of Nanjing, the site of the capital in early Ming. All military households in principle had an entry in a Yellow Register. An additional set of records, known as a Military Register (weixuanbu), was maintained for households that held hereditary officer rank.¹⁰ Figure 1.2 is a reproduction of one such Military Register for a household headed by a man named Pu Manu. Copies of these files were housed in different archives, in the Board of Military Affairs and the Palace Treasury.

From 1381 to the fall of the dynasty in 1644, thousands of officials and clerks maintained the vast state archive of such documents, receiving, copying, updating, filing, and transmitting its records. The Ming used various technologies to ensure the security and integrity of its data. The registration archive was protected not only by location but also by redundancy. Household registration data was kept in different forms in multiple locations—in the county offices, or yamen, in the place where the household had originally been registered and in the military base where members of the household were garrisoned—and periodically updated so that mistakes in any one version could be corrected.¹¹ Like any historical document, a personnel file has a material existence, and the story of how the file came to be—of its circulation, collation, and copying, of its storage and transmission—could be the source for a different kind of history. And it has a strategic existence. The story of how a file was deployed, manipulated, faked, or even deliberately lost, tells yet another history. An alternative version of this book could be written as a history of these files, of their creation, retention, and disposal and their movements across the land.

Registration in the state archive had practical political consequences; it implied certain obligations to the state. Military household registration specified a permanent, hereditary obligation to provide labor for the Ming military at a location of its choosing. Pu Manu, a native of Jinjiang county, was conscripted in 1383 and assigned to nearby Quanzhou, the original home of the Zheng family, and the same guard where a member of the Yan family was briefly stationed during the period of the voluntary disclosure policy.¹² In 1388 Pu Manu was transferred up the coast to Fuzhou. Later, in the early fifteenth century, he served on a naval expedition to Southeast Asia (on this expedition see chapter 3). His meritorious performance earned him a promotion to the rank of company commander (baihu). The promotion was hereditary; with some conditions every subsequent member of the household who served in the military also held the rank of commander.

Pu Manu retired from active duty in 1425. By that time his eldest son had already died. So he was replaced by his grandson. The personnel file continues for five more generations, through another of Manu’s grandsons, who replaced his deceased brother and served for almost fifty years, through that man’s own sons and grandsons, to the seventh-generation member of the lineage, Pu Guozhu, who took up his position in 1605. With each transition, authorities in Fuzhou sent word to the central board, where the archive clerks updated the file. The updating of the records only lapsed after Pu Guozhu’s time, in the waning decades of the Ming, probably because by then the whole Ming institutional system was collapsing.¹³ In the way...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Epigraph Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Dramatis Familiae
• Introduction: A Father Loses Three Sons to the Army: Everyday Politics in Ming China
• Part I: In the Village
• Part II: In the Guard
• Part III: In the Military Colony
• Part IV: After the Ming
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Illustration Sources
• Index
• A Note on the Type