The Chinese Distrust of the Military is Very Old
The Chinese Distrust of the Military is Very Old
Part 1: The Song Dynasty
(Pictured: Li Shimin leading his cavalry - to the Battle of Hulao Pass)
This is part 1 of a series. See Part 2: The Ming Military - and Part 3: The Qing Military
For a related series on China & the Mongol Threat - see China vs. the Northern Barbarians
Introduction
One strange aspect about the Chinese love for the Saga of the Three Kingdoms is that the Chinese society which the Saga of the Three Kingdoms describes vanished 1,300 years ago and today no Chinese gentleman uses a weapon or thinks the military is anything more than a necessary evil. By contrast, the Three Kingdoms Saga is all about fighting and warfare. The heroes are warriors or generals, or both. Yet today, finding a Chinese man who is proud of his martial skills - meaning he knows all about guns and how to use them - is extremely rare.
When the Sage reads the old stories and dramas of China, the contrast is clear. The dividing line is around An Lushan’s rebellion (which lasted from 755 to 763, the mid-point of the Tang Dynasty). Before An Lushan’s revolt, a Chinese gentlemen always traveled with his sword and his qin (a seven-string fretless musical instrument, now called a guqin) - and he knew how to use them both. In the Song Dynasty - which began in 960 - a gentleman traveled with his collection of books, his writing equipment (pen, ink-stone, paper), and his qin. The sword was gone and it would never return. No Chinese gentleman ever studied the use of a weapon from that point on - archery was an exception, as Confucius praised that skill. Weapons and warfare were relegated to: farmers, bandits, and the hereditary clans of warriors who existed in both the Ming and Qing dynasties.
The Sage argues that in this regard there are two different Chinas - Warrior China and Scholar China. Warrior China exists from the days of Confucius to An Lushan (500 BCE to 750 CE). Scholar China exists from 960 CE to the present.
China Before 750 Looks Like Europe - Military Valor is Prized
Warrior China looks much like Europe as skill at arms was deemed to be vital for every Chinese gentleman. Men who could kill other men in single combat were heroes. The greatest men of the age were the generals who also knew how to read and write. Men like: Guan Yu and Zhou Yu, were the ideal Chinese men - directly equivalent to Alexander the Great and Richard the Lionhearted. One of the few Chinese rulers to lead his men into battle, charging on horseback against his enemies is Li Shimin, the future Taizong of Tang, and Huangdi (Emperor) of China (598-649 CE).
China after 960 Looks like… Modern Europe: Fighting is for Savages
Scholar China is place where the best men never pick up a sword and never kill any one. It is a land where scholars and poets are lionized, where the greatest men are those rare individuals who pass the Imperial exam and - in their mature years - advise the Huangdi on matters of national policy, transforming China by well designed laws and with wise administration.
Why Did China Switch from Warrior Culture to Scholar Culture?
The Imperial exam played a major role in this but the history is complicated. One important change that occurred in China, starting around 680 and lasting till 980, is that the old noble families of China were either killed off, or they lost all their wealth and most of their status.
In the past, there were noble families in China, just like in Europe. The Chinese noble families, with titles such as: Gong 公, Hou 侯, and Bo 伯 (rough analogs to Duke, Count, and Baron) traced their ancestry back to kings and they owned huge tracts of land - often they owned the same land for centuries, with thousands of tenant farmers living on their lands. Yes, there was a time when China looks like a feudal society (see the Sage’s essay on Whether China was a Feudal Society).
However, starting with Wu Zetian - the only woman to rule China as the Huangdi, the nobility came under sustained attack, both from the central government - because Wu Zetian knew the nobility was opposed to her rule - and later from one another.
The Noble families of China killed one other off another starting in 750. This is because An Lushan’s rebellion shattered the power of the Tang Huangdi and the individual provinces of China became quasi-independent states for the next 200 years. In theory the rulers of the provinces still obeyed orders coming from the Huangdi in Chang’an, but in practice, they did what they wanted. In order to solidify their powers, these new provincial rulers confiscated the lands from the other nobles living in their provinces. After a brief period of strong central leadership under the Xianzong Huangdi (r. 805-820 CE), China effectively broke up into many warring states. In most respects, the Tang Dynasty didn’t control China from 825 until it’s official termination in 906. Very few of the noble families survived this chaotic and violent time.
When General Zhao Kuangyin conquered all the provinces of China ~970, and founded the Song Dynasty, there were almost no hereditary noble families left. Zhao Kuangyin could have created a new class of nobility at this time, but he choose not to, for interesting reasons. There is a famous event in Chinese history called disolving the general’s power with a cup of wine which took place in 961, when Zhao, the new Huangdi, told all his top generals that they were now retired, and would live in luxury in the capital for the rest of their lives. He could have given his generals large estates and sent them out to rule as the new nobility of China, but instead he told them to live in the capital and he gave them a yearly income.
Zhao Kuangyin and his brother, who succeeded him on the throne, staffed the Song government via the Imperial exam system. This spelled the end of the Chinese nobility - although a Manchu nobility would reappear as part of the Qing conquest of China in 1650.
The Song Military Leadership was Incapable
It is a fact of history that eliminating the Chinese nobility prevented the Chinese state from producing capable military leadership - with a few notable exceptions.
Facts: The Song waged war on the Liao Dynasty from 980 to 1004 without success. The Song waged war on the much smaller Xi Xia state periodically from 1040 to 1120 also without much success (the Song-Xia wars). There are at least six important Chinese plays about the Yang family of generals who die -heroically - as a result of Song government officials incompetent meddling in military operations. The Song allied with the new Jurchin state and attacked the Liao in 1120, only to be defeated over the next four years. The Jurchin went from being grateful for Song military assistance, to being contemptuous of the Song army, to deciding they themselves could take over all of China - in a matter of six years!
The Jurchins, calling themselves the Jin State, nearly succeeded in conquering China but they were finally defeated by a new group of extremely capable Chinese generals, the most famous of whom was Yue Fei. This new group of brilliant Chinese generals came out of nowhere, they had not been part of the Song military command structure when the war with Jin started in 1126. Yue Fei and his brethren were nobodies who emerged out of the chaos of the war. They proved their skills on the battlefield, and they were promoted because they alone could lead Chinese soldiers to victory.
When this new group of Song generals tried to wield political power, they were demoted or executed, which is exactly what happened to Yue Fei when he objected to a proposed peace treaty with the Jin in 1142. It turned out that the Song scholar class was quite willing to live with bad military leadership, so long as they could retain political power!
Let me be clear: the Song Dynasty spent vast sums of money maintaining a huge military - likely the largest in the world at the time - and they deliberately kept this huge military under the command of incompetent leaders, such that they could not win wars. This was not an accident, it was policy.
Chinese generals of the Song Dynasty were not allowed to plan campaigns. Nor were the Song generals expected to plan battles. All of this intellectual work was firmly in the hands of civilian officials from the ministry of war. Instead, Chinese generals had just two jobs: training their troops, and leading their men into battle. A Chinese general was expected to win each battle, or die trying. If a Chinese general did survive a loss, he was usually arrested and then executed for his failure to win the battle. Meanwhile, the civilian officials who planned everything almost never faced any consequences for their failures.
If this strikes you as manifestly unfair and idiotic, it was, and it was deliberate.
The Song Government Deliberately Kept their Military Leadership Weak
The Chinese scholar officials of the Song Dynasty wrote the following analysis:
If we place talented men in the military, they will seek to use their talents to their fullest ability by waging wars.
Either these wars are aggressive, against other neighboring states, or they are internal wars - against the government.
Wars of aggression against neighboring states are pointless, a waste of money and lives. Internal wars are self-evidently bad.
Consequently: we need to keep talented men out of the military. In times of emergency we can put talented men back into the military as needed, and then take them out again when the crisis is resolved.
The idea that a talented man can become a good general simply by reading a few books and studying the past - is lunatic. It defies everything we know about warfare to imagine that a civilian with no background in military operations can simply read treatises on military strategy and then lead men into battle and win. This doesn’t work and the history of the world tells us that it doesn’t work. The Chinese scholar class took it on faith that book knowledge was all that was required to win wars. In modern terms, the Chinese believed in expert systems written in FORTRAN, as opposed to human expertise. They believed it in the face of all historical evidence to the contrary. They believed it because it meant that they alone would rule the nation and there would not be an alternative power structure.
The Song scholars created this system because they looked carefully at the history of the Tang, and the causes of the disintegration of the Tang government and they came to the conclusion that the key problem was the creation of a military command structure which was independent of the civilian authority. This was correct. The scholars had correctly identified the problem.
An independent military does represent a threat to the existing power structure of a nation. A state’s authority rests on it’s monopoly on the use of deadly force. Logically, whoever controls the military controls the state.
In the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) we can see how the Emperor typically starts out as a successful general and then takes power in Constantinople. In Western Europe, the rulers - from Charlemagne to Napoleon were warrior leaders. European kings and Emperors led their armies into battle, all the way till the 1700s. The King commanded his military.
China was different. The founders of a new dynasty were always war leaders, but their successors typically stayed in the palace and sent their subordinates out to wage war. Keeping successful generals from returning to the capital and seizing power was a major concern of all the Chinese Huangdi after the death of Li Shimin in 649. The Song strategy was: avoid having successful generals!
History reveals that this resulted in the Song nearly being conquered by the Jin State in 1128, and then the Song were conquered by the Mongol Empire under Kublai Khan in 1276.
The first Ming Huangdi, Chu Yuan-chang, knew the history of the Song and was determined to prevent a replay of the past. More about this in Part 2.
This is part 1 of a series. See Part 2: The Ming Military - and Part 3: The Qing Military
For a related series on China & the Mongol Threat - see China vs. the Northern Barbarians- part 1.