Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  The Ming failed to exploit the Manchus’ problems because of an uprising in Shandong province by supporters of a Buddhist sect known as the White Lotus. In 1622 one of the White Lotus leaders declared himself the founder of a new imperial dynasty, and his followers promptly cut off the transport of rice up the Grand Canal, causing shortages in the capital. The Ming therefore withdrew troops from the northern frontier, which allowed them to crush the rebellion before it spread further, but also allowed Nurhaci to consolidate his control of Liaodong by abolishing the dues and services payable to landlords and confirming all peasants in possession of their land – provided they cut their hair and shaved their foreheads in the Manchu manner. According to a disgusted Ming commander, ‘People are so happy that all of them, cutting their hair, have obeyed the Manchus.‘7

  The Erosion of Ming Power

  Ming China had two capitals. Nanjing (literally ‘Southern Capital’), in the lower Yangzi valley, never saw the emperor but possessed a full bureaucracy that mirrored the one in Beijing (‘Northern Capital’) located at the extremity of China's ‘Central Plain’. The strategic vision of the two administrations differed considerably. With the Great Wall barely 30 miles away, ministers in the northern capital normally prioritized defence and the food supply: they not only needed to monitor developments among those who lived on the steppes but also, living in the largest city in the world, needed to ensure a constant supply of the essential goods on which the capital depended, especially the rice that arrived via the Grand Canal from the fertile paddies of the lower Yangzi valley, a region known as Jiangnan (literally ‘south of the river’), and the coal brought by camel trains from the mines of Shanxi, hundreds of miles to the west. Ministers in the southern capital, by contrast, needed above all to maintain peace and productivity in the densely populated lands of Jiangnan, where many farms could no longer feed the families that worked them, either because they were too small or because they produced commercial crops rather than foodstuffs. Even abundant harvests left some people hungry, producing tension between landlords and tenants in the countryside and sometimes disturbances in the towns. Poor harvests almost immediately produced starvation, migration and disorder.

  The ministers of the two imperial capitals, Beijing and Nanjing, nevertheless faced three similar problems: an inadequate fiscal system; a weak military; and ineffective imperial leadership. First and greatest among the fiscal problems was the fact that the Ming state never borrowed – a practice that greatly reduced flexibility in times of crisis, since expenditure could be funded only from current revenues, instead of being spread over several years (as in western Europe). This placed an enormous premium on the efficient collection of the land tax, the Ming government's main source of revenue; but by the 1630s, the distribution of this tax had become extremely uneven. Within each province, counties that had at some point earned imperial disfavour paid extra, whereas others contained tax-exempt lands and therefore paid less. Additionally, new inequities emerged in the wake of a major tax reform in the sixteenth century: mounting budget problems led the central government to combine two different obligations – labour services and land tax – into one, known as the ‘Single Whip’. Ministers hoped to increase yields by using the detailed household registers of labour services (known as ‘Yellow Books’) to allocate tax obligations; but since the gentry enjoyed exemption from labour services, their names did not appear in the Yellow Books and so the Single Whip system exempted them from the land tax, too. Landholders therefore scrambled to register their households under gentry names, significantly increasing the tax burden on peasant farmers. Moreover, local officials determined the annual burden payable by each remaining taxable household, a process that opened the way to corruption and abuse, so that communities were said to dread the annual visit of the tax officials ‘as much as if they were to be thrown into boiling water’.8

  These fiscal discrepancies produced stunning cumulative inequalities. Thus Suzhou prefecture, with 1 per cent of China's cultivated land, paid 10 per cent of the total imperial revenue; Shanghai county paid three times as much as an entire prefecture in Fujian; while a single prefecture near Nanjing which had only three counties paid as much as the entire province of Guangdong which had 75 counties.9 An imperial decree that made support of the emperor's relatives the first charge on each regional treasury greatly exacerbated these gross fiscal inequities: by the 1620s the cost of supporting 100,000 Ming clansmen – most of them with a wife, concubines, numerous progeny and a large household (all tax-exempt) – absorbed over one-third of the annual revenues in some provinces.

  As long as China's agrarian economy continued to expand, as it did throughout the sixteenth century, these inequities remained tolerable; and even after the land tax increased from 4 million taels in 1618 to 20 million in 1639 (to fund the growing defence expenditure), the underlying tax rate in the richest and most fertile parts of China still lay at or below 20 per cent – a heavy but bearable burden. Moreover, 20 million taels should have sufficed to support an army of 500,000 men – more than enough to preserve the Ming state – but corruption and weak central control kept much of the yield from reaching the central treasury. By 1644 the government's budget projected receipts of less than 16 million taels but expenditure of more than 21 million, with no way to bridge the gap.10

  The second common problem facing the ministers in Nanjing and Beijing was the poor quality of their troops. Ming culture disparaged martial virtues and achievements, which not only discouraged talented members of the elite from serving in the army but also demoralized the troops. Most soldiers did not know how to use their weapons properly, while most officers systematically overstated the size of their armies to the Ministry of Revenue to gain more resources (and understated it to the Ministry of War to avoid being sent into combat). Thus, according to a frustrated government inspector, if 100,000 names appeared on the army's lists, only 50,000 soldiers actually served; and, he concluded, ‘of those 50,000 men, no more than half are of any use in combat. The Court thus pays for four soldiers but receives the services of only one.’ Western observers agreed. A Spanish Jesuit who observed the drill of local garrison troops in Fujian in 1625 remarked that their firearms were ‘badly made’, their powder weak and their shot 'no larger than tiny pellets of lead’. Chinese drill, the Jesuit claimed, ‘resembled games more than preparing to fight well’. A decade later, a Portuguese visitor who watched Ming troops drilling likewise noted that the soldiers simply ‘waved their lances and swords as if they were in some stage play’.11 Europeans also noted that officers frequently flogged their soldiers, making them ‘drop their trousers and lie on the ground, as if they were schoolboys, to receive the blows’. Such treatment led many troops to desert and others to mutiny. Over 50 serious military revolts occurred between 1627 and 1644, reaching a crescendo as pay for the troops fell far in arrears.12

  The third critical problem facing ministers in both Nanjing and Beijing was the existence of numerous ‘academies’ where intellectuals discussed current moral and social issues in the light of the teachings of Confucius. Although the goal of Confucianism remained the same for all – the need for each man to perfect himself so that he could serve heaven and human society as a sage ruler or minister – by the early seventeenth century two opposed paths to that goal existed. One required aspiring sages to search for moral principles in the outside world (specifically in the Confucian Classics, the words of past sages) and apply them; the other stressed self-examination, and believed that intuition based on each man's ‘innate goodness’ sufficed to ensure righteous actions. The Donglin (‘Eastern Grove’) Academy in Wuxi, a Jiangnan town, followed the first path: its associates downplayed intuition and introspection in favour of ending corruption and restoring moral rectitude throughout China by applying the ancient virtues enshrined in the Classics. They adopted the popular slogan jingshi jimin: ‘Manage the world's affairs; provide for the people’. Although the Wanli emperor degraded or dismissed ministers who sympath
ized with Donglin goals, for a brief period after his death they prospered and even opened a branch of the academy in Beijing, with a library and a lecture hall where members debated the pressing issues of the day. They used their advantage to attack not only ministers who were corrupt but also those who tolerated corruption in the interests of social harmony. After Nurhaci's occupation of Liaodong, their criticisms focused on ‘a man who sucks boils and licks haemorrhoids’ whom they blamed for the humiliating defeat: the eunuch Wei Zhongxian, the emperor's childhood friend and now his principal minister.13

  In 1624 a prominent member of the Donglin Academy submitted to the emperor a memorial that listed the ‘crimes’ committed by Wei against the interests of the state. Almost immediately a host of other officials, many of them also Donglin alumni, submitted similar memorials that called for Wei's dismissal. Their efforts backfired because Wei convinced the emperor that Donglin factionalism formed the true threat to government stability. Warrants went out for the arrest of 11 critics, all Donglin alumni, and imperial agents arrested and brought them to Beijing, where they were carried through the streets in cages like zoo animals, interrogated, tortured, publicly flogged, and then murdered. In addition, Wei abolished all private academies as well as compiling a ‘blacklist’ of military and civilian officials whom he considered sympathetic to the Donglin movement, replacing them with his own protégés (later known as yandang: ‘associates of the eunuch’).14

  In 1627, however, the Tianqi emperor suddenly died and his 16-year-old half-brother succeeded as the Chongzhen emperor (a reign title that meant ‘lofty and auspicious’, but later black humour punned on the word chongzheng, meaning ‘double levy’, to create the ‘Double Taxation Reign’). The new ruler declined to protect Wei, who hanged himself, and announced an ‘era of renovation’. To achieve this he rescinded the order abolishing the private academies, exonerated most of the Donglin partisans still in prison, rehabilitated the reputations of those degraded, and issued his own ‘blacklist’ – this time of the yandang, most of whom lost their jobs and many of whom were punished. The Chongzhen emperor also urged his senior ministers to end their factional struggle. ‘Consider this,’ he told them at one meeting: ‘We have alarms east and west, we have wars north and south, yet [my officials] have no anxiety for the dynasty. All they do is divide into camps, all they talk about is some clique, some Donglin – and of what benefit is that to national affairs?‘15

  The new emperor's pleas failed because, in the perceptive phrase of historian Ying Zhang, in his ‘ambition to save the empire in crisis’ he ‘sought only instant successes and simple solutions’. Each administrative error and policy failure therefore provoked a spate of denunciations and memorials by rivals of the officials deemed responsible.16 Not knowing whom he could trust to show ‘anxiety for the dynasty’ or seek ‘benefit’ for ‘national affairs’, the Chongzhen emperor changed the heads of the six major departments of state, on average, once every year: half of them he merely dismissed from office, and a quarter he also executed or disgraced.

  Factional struggles among China's bureaucrats had two deleterious consequences. First, the repeated purges reduced the overall quality of senior bureaucrats. Of the 120 magistrates whose biographies appeared as exemplars for others in the official Ming History, composed a generation later, not a single one had served either the Tianqi or Chongzhen emperors. Second, although provincial postings were supposed to be distributed by lot, those who excelled in the civil service examinations went to the more prosperous counties, leaving several poor, remote and problematic areas virtually ungoverned. Thus in 1629 half of the prefectures and counties in the impoverished and turbulent Shaanxi province lacked a single magistrate.

  In the words of the official Ming History, ‘When a dynasty is about to perish, it first destroys its own people of quality. After that, there come floods, drought and banditry.‘17 From the first, the Chongzhen emperor and his dwindling cohort of ‘people of quality’ had to deal with ‘floods, drought and banditry’ in the northwest. The adjacent provinces of Shaanxi and Shanxi normally suffer from uncertain rainfall, a short growing season and poor communications; and, in the early seventeenth century, they lacked both adequate granaries and family lineages wealthy enough to sustain the poor. Neither province could support from their own resources the large garrisons required for their defence, leaving the troops there dependent for subsistence on wages and supplies sent from the capital. So long as these items arrived with reasonable regularity, all was well; but after 1618, when Beijing concentrated on repelling the Manchus, military units in the northwest received little or no pay. Many soldiers therefore deserted, taking their horses and weapons with them, forming fast-moving combinations known in the sources as ‘roving bandits’. Little is known of the organization of these groups, and even their leaders usually appeared in the public record under nicknames: ‘Lone Wolf’, ‘Dashing King’ and (prophetically) ‘Friend of the Red Army’.18

  The brutal punishments for banditry stipulated by the Ming Law Code (death not only for each bandit but also for all male relatives ‘up to second cousins’ and for those who concealed or aided them) helped to keep the problem in check for a while; but a prolonged drought in Shaanxi province in 1628 changed the criminal calculus. Starving farmers now abandoned their land and joined the outlaws; existing hideouts therefore became too small to shelter the new recruits; and the increase in numbers enabled the bandit leaders to threaten more prosperous lands to the south. Then in 1629, with Manchuria also afflicted by drought, Manchu forces for the first time broke through the Great Wall and ravaged northern China.19

  The Chongzhen emperor responded to these developments with two disastrous measures. First, he withdrew troops from Shaanxi to defend his capital against the Manchus, leaving the rest to fight the bandits without pay and supplies. Many of these abandoned troops, including a 23-year-old soldier named Zhang Xianzhong, joined the roving bandits. Second, to save money, the Chongzhen emperor closed roughly one-third of the courier stations that served foreign envoys, officials and messengers travelling to and from Beijing, and dismissed their employees. This not only reduced the central government's ability to receive news and convey orders in a timely fashion; it also caused great hardship in the northwest, where the courier network had traditionally provided many jobs in an area of high unemployment. Li Zicheng, aged 23, from a poor Shaanxi family, was one of the thousands of courier staff thrown out of work. Initially he transferred to the army but, when his unit received no pay, he led a mutiny and then (like countless others) joined the roving bandits.20

  Climate change further exacerbated the situation. Some of the weakest monsoons recorded in the last two millennia produced droughts that destroyed the crops. A scholar-official lamented that ‘Today, people are killed by bandit mobs; tomorrow, they may die at the hands of government troops. No one can tell how many fields have been left fallow by farmers fleeing disaster or in how many fields already-planted crops wither under the sun. No one can count how many families have been broken apart or number the dead lying piled in ditches.‘21 Not surprisingly, many of the starving survivors joined the roving bandits, who now began to ravage lands as far afield as the Yangzi in the south and Sichuan in the west.

  The inequities created by the Ming fiscal system further aided the bandits and hurt agriculture. When a government official travelling through Jiangnan asked the remaining residents why almost 90 per cent of all farms lay abandoned, they replied that after a farmer fled,

  His land was left uncultivated but the land tax was still attached to it. His family was then summoned to pay the tax and if they failed to do so, the people of the [tax district] had to pay it for him … For a rich family, it was possible to pay what was owed, but the poor usually left the neighbourhood, abandoning all their property. This was why the villages were empty and the farms were left uncultivated.22

  Even where no bandits threatened, extreme climatic episodes adversely affected agriculture: thus subtropical
Lingnan (the ‘lands south of the mountains’: Guangxi and Guangdong provinces) saw heavy snowfall in 1633 and 1634, and abnormally cold weather in 1636. Crop yields plunged. Petitions flowed in to the central government from all over the empire, begging for action to end the bandit menace and to relieve the suffering caused by failed harvests, high taxes and bad weather; but the Chongzhen emperor did little because he was concentrating all his resources on resisting the Manchus.23

  The ‘Great Enterprise’ Begins

  While Ming China suffered from the problems created by the tax system, the bandits and the weather, the Manchus improved their military efficiency thanks to some opportune technology transfer. When he declared war on the Ming in 1618, Nurhaci's forces had consisted almost entirely of mounted archers whereas his Chinese opponents relied mainly on infantry using firearms. The Manchus’ lack of artillery allowed the major towns of Liaodong to hold out – indeed, Nurhaci himself received a fatal wound as he besieged one of them. The Chongzhen emperor sought to build on this advantage by importing Western artillery, and soon about 50 bronze cannon defended the Great Wall. It was too late. During the 1629 raid into China, Hong Taiji (who, after a savage succession struggle, followed his father Nurhaci as Manchu leader) acquired not only Western guns but also conscripted a Chinese gun crew ‘familiar with the new techniques for casting Portuguese artillery’. He also offered huge enlistment incentives to any engineer, and anyone proficient in the art of making and using cannon, who agreed to serve him. When the Manchus resumed the war in Liaodong in 1631, they possessed 40 Western-style artillery pieces and the crews to work them, and they built palisades and forts to cut off the heavily fortified regional capital. It surrendered within a few weeks. Hong Taiji also incorporated both his Chinese volunteers and conscripts alike into the Banner system (see page 118 above). By 1642 each of the eight Banners of his army had parallel Manchu, Mongol and Han Chinese components.24