 The Ming founder designed a fiscal system
for a frozen, unchanging agrarian economy — an economy far
different from the
commercialized market system existing at the time. Each man was to
register his
occupation with the authorities, who fully expected his descendants to
perform
the identical task in perpetuity. ... The dependence of the Ming on
agrarian revenue marked an important reversal. Since the years after
755, inadequate land revenue had forced the central government to
develop commercial taxes and monopolies. The success of the Ming in
registering people
and land allowed them to ignore all nonagrarian sources of revenue.
Paper money,
which the Chinese had been the first in the world to invent, and which
the
Mongols had printed in such large quantities that it lost its value,
completely
fell from use by 1450, leaving copper coins the main medium of exchange
for
small transactions and hunks of silver for large ones. (OE, 347)
| The Ming founder planned to update the Yellow and the
fish-scale registers [i.e. the land registers that were used for taxation], but as in the case of the equal-field registers, the
government lacked the manpower to do so. Like the provincial quotas set in the
years after the An Lushan rebellion, the amounts that individual districts paid
in the 1390s became the basis of all subsequent exactions, regardless of
changes in land ownership or productivity. The Ming succeeded in collecting
twice what the Mongols had in land tax, which proved to be more than enough for
the needs of the central government in the 1380s and 1390s. Yet, once inflation
began, as it did in the fifteenth century, these land-tax revenues no longer
sufficed. (OE, 350) |
A Bipolar Emperor?
 Famous for his erratic treatment of officials, the Ming emperor oscillated between periods of relative
lenience and excessive violence. ... After he had launched a massive purge of the
bureaucracy, dismissing some ten thousand officials, he solicited criticism.
When one official dared to explain that … many innocent officials had been
unfairly dismissed, the emperor sentenced him to forced labor. ... In 1380, when
the emperor fired his chancellor and dismantled the Grand Secretariat, thirty
thousand people disappeared. In 1385, some ten thousand were sentenced to death
in another corruption scandal over grain, and in 1393, fifteen thousand died
when the emperor suppressed a challenge to his authority. (OE, 352)
|
[T]he Ming founder had named a
grandson to succeed him, but when the founder died in 1398, civil war broke
out. The new emperor’s uncles did not accept his claim to rule, and in 1402,
his senior uncle led an army who stormed the capital at Nanjing. The troops set the palace on fire,
and the unfortunate grandson, then only twenty-one, probably burned to death.
Rumors of his survival circulated in the years after his uncle succeeded to the
throne, and the new emperor ordered periodic searches for his missing nephew.
The new emperor chose Yongle as his reign title, meaning “Eternal Happiness.” (OE,
352)
 |
 Under
the leadership of a Muslim eunuch named Zheng He (1371-1433),
an imperial fleet of over three hundred ships traveled to Southeast
Asia,
India, and Africa one hundred years before Columbus’s and da Gama’s
more famous
voyages. Some of these treasure ships were 60 meters (200 feet) long,
making them the largest wooden boats in the world. The full fleet
carried over twenty-eight thousand men, who traveled in relative
luxury,
dining on fresh fish kept in separate compartments filled with water.
Dwarfing
those of the European explorers in size, these Chinese ships made a
statement to
the world about the power of the Ming dynasty. But it was a temporary,
even
vainglorious, statement, for the Chinese conquered no territory and
retained no
seaports. The voyages ended as quickly as they had begun, canceled on
grounds
of unnecessary expense soon after the death of the eunuch admiral in
1433. (OE, 354)
|
Comparisons with Columbus
Whereas Columbus’s
crew eked out the days on their diet of hardtack supplemented by bread baked
with ocean water, Zheng He’s men traveled in style. Columbus traveled with 4
boats, Zheng He with 317. The Santa
Maria was 24 meters (80 feet) long, with a capacity of
250 metric tons (280 English tons). The treasure ships were at least 60 meters
(200 feet) long and carried 2,200 metric tons (2,500 English tons). ... All
comparisons between the Chinese and the European ships make the same point: the
Chinese ships exceeded the European ships, often by a factor of ten or more, in
size, staff, and equipment. (OE, 357-9) |
 The
Ming fleet engaged in tribute trade, following the traditional pattern of
giving gifts to foreign rulers and receiving gifts in return. The Chinese gave
items of great prestige value, like suits of clothing, umbrellas, calendars,
and books, but with little intrinsic value.  They also gave out grants of paper
money and copper coins to local peoples, who tended to buy back Chinese goods
with the money and to trade valuable horses, copper, wood, animal hides, gold,
and silver. Ming accounting practices make it impossible to estimate the
balance of trade the Chinese had with these outlying peoples — or even the cost
of the expeditions — but the terms seem to have favored the Chinese. (OE, 355)
The Chinese ships had every advantage over the Europeans but one: the
Chinese lacked continuing government support. After the death of the Yongle
emperor in 1424, the voyages were suspended, with the central government
reluctantly allowing a seventh, and final, voyage in 1433. Zheng He died in the
same year. The ostensible reason for the suspension was the excessive cost of
the voyages, yet clearly civil officials seized this pretext to rein in the
eunuchs who controlled the navy. (OE, 359)
- Why were the “Confucian” officials so
deeply opposed to these voyages?
- What were the long term consequences of
ending these voyages?
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Those Pesky Mongols...
In their continuing battles with the Mongols, the Chinese had the great
disadvantage of trying to defend a border over a thousand miles long, while the
Mongols enjoyed the tactical advantage of mobility. Their cavalry could strike
the border at any point. Lacking the funds to send further expeditions into
Mongol territory, Chinese officials opted to build individual sections of wall,
starting in the far west of China
and moving east. These walls constitute today’s Great Wall, but no one in the
Ming conceived of them as a single entity. As long and formidable as these walls
were, they did not achieve their purpose of protecting the Chinese. In 1550 the
Mongols, under the leadership of the Altan Khan, simply went around a wall, and
seven hundred of his men reached a gate in the Beijing city walls. Luckily for
the Chinese, they turned around once they had presented their demands for
access to Chinese markets.
The Mongol attacks prompted the
court to take the most conservative of approaches to foreign powers. It
regularly passed decrees banning contact and trade with overseas nations while
officials bemoaned the depredations of pirates, whom they incorrectly assumed
were Japanese, on the southern coast. Most of these pirates were Chinese who
dared to violate the court’s ban on foreign trade. (OE, 362)
 |
 Cheng [Yi]’s name usually is linked with that of
the Southern Song master Zhu
Xi, who brought Neo-Confucian thought to a new pitch of moral
intensity and clarity of focus; Zhu’s ideas were not widely accepted in
his own time, but became recognized as the orthodox interpretation of
the Confucian Way, mandatory for examination essays, under the Yuan and
remained so until the abolition of the examination system in 1905. The
Cheng-Zhu synthesis laid great stress on the “Four Books”: the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, and two works claiming to
present parts of the teachings of Confucius, the Doctrine of the Mean and the Great Learning. One passage in the Great
Learning was especially important, providing a set of
problems and even a vocabulary fundamental to an understanding of
Neo-Confucianism in general and Wang Yangming in particular. The
ancients, it says, wishing to establish peace and virtuous government
throughout the world, had to begin with the investigation of things (ge wu). Only on that foundation
could knowledge be extended (zhi);
only on that foundation could thoughts be made sincere, then in
sequence minds rectified, persons cultivated, families regulated,
states well governed, and the entire world brought to peace. (MOF, 202)
[Wang’s] teaching on knowledge and
action ... contributed to a turning of many intellectuals away from
reclusive self-cultivation in the following generations. To Confucius,
human life was radically incomplete without social and political
involvement and action. But the gentleman found his moral standards
within himself and in the study of a Literary Heritage, and did not
change them simply because he was unable to make practical use of them
in his own times. Thus a teaching that laid greater emphasis on study
and self-cultivation than on effective action was a plausible, if
incomplete, development of the Master’s principles. Zhu Xi’s conception
of the investigation of things was such a teaching, laying out detailed
prescriptions for disciplining the mind through study, meditation,and
ceremonial practice. Wang’s objection was that it was very easy to
drift from Zhu’s undoubted seriousness into going through the motions
of ceremonies, memorizing the texts of the classics, without their
having any moral effect. It was especially easy in a social and
political order that dictated study first and action later for the
ambitious young man, that rewarded cleverness with literary forms and
proficiency in memorization. Symptoms of the resulting nonseriousness
included the hypocrisy and self-congratulation of the high official
class in which Wang had grown up, and a tendency to explain moral
lapses by saying “I know what’s right; it’s doing it that’s hard.” Wang
rejected all such excuses, insisting that fundamentally people respond
to good and evil as readily as they respond to a bad smell; they don’t
stop and say “Oh, a bad smell!” and then think about getting away from
it; they move immediately to escape it. (MOF, 208-9)
Wang Yangming in Practice
The Village Compact
Wang grew
bored with his routine positions and requested permission to retire,
but his requests were turned down, and in 1516 he was plunged into new
spheres of action and danger where his straightforward and optimistic
moralism offered only limited guidance. He was made governor of a large
area centered in southern Jiangxi that had been dominated by bandits
and rebels for several decades. ... As areas were cleared of rebels and
brought back under government control, Wang instituted his civilian
control measures, established two new subprefectures, set up local
schools, and elaborated his previous experiments in moral instruction
by local elders into his famous “village compact” (xiangyue) system. This was an
effort systematically to extend the Confucian culture of
ceremoniousness and moral admonition to the common people, and at the
same time to give a more Confucian twist to the “Legalist” practice of
forming mutual responsibility groups. In every village the local people
were to elect a whole group of compact officers, from a chief and two
assistants to clerks and masters of ceremonies. On the fifteenth of
every month, all the people assembled at the special hall built for the
purpose, burned incense, and recited, “From now on, all of us compact
members will reverently obey warnings and instructions. We will unite
as one mind and join together in virtue, and will arrive at goodness
together. If anyone should have any double-mindedness, outwardly doing
good but secretly doing evil, let the gods and spirits destroy him.” A
special ceremony followed to honor those who had done good deeds in the
previous month and to record them formally in the compact’s book of
good deeds. Then there was a similar ceremony recording bad deeds and
admonishing those who had done them. The evil-doers replied, “How dare
I not reform quickly but instead cause my elders to worry for me again?”
The compact chiefs then said, “We have not been able to advise and
instruct you in time so that you have fallen into this trouble. How can
we be free from guilt?” The ceremonies concluded with a banquet. (MOF,
211-2)
The central
new concept of Wang Yangming’s later teachings can be literally
translated Good Knowledge (liang zhi).
It was developed to explain the nature of the knowledge of morality
that always is present within us and is the knowledge that is
“extended” in our moral action as outlined in the Great Learning sequence. ... [Good
Knowledge] could be sensed as part of the unity of the cosmos; “at
bottom Heaven, Earth, the Ten Thousand Things, and Humanity all form
one body. The point at which this unity is manifested in its most
refined and excellent form is the clear intelligence of the human
mind ...” Extending Good Knowledge was a matter of not seeking certain
results or effects of our actions but of unremitting moral effort,
alive and alert, and at the same time cautious, even fearful of any
beginnings of selfish or improper thoughts. ... This teaching appealed
strongly to scholars who were committed both to serious and principled
involvement in politics, community life, and family affairs and to a
quest for a vision of and unity with the deepest cosmic and spiritual
realities. The two were entirely compatible, even inseparable; the
essence of moral action was effort, not results, and that effort was
the most direct revelation of the basic structure of the human mind and
thus of the unity of all things.
There was one final step in the
development of Wang’s late thought that carried him to the outer bounds
of, and some of his disciples beyond, the basic moralism of the
Confucian tradition. It was summarized in his famous Four Sentences:
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In the basic structure of the mind
there
is neither good nor evil.
When there is movement of the will,
then there is good and evil.
Knowing good and knowing evil
is the Good Knowledge.
Doing good and destroying evil
is the Investigation of Things.
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