Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven: Rebellion and the Economy of Violence in Mid-Ming China (review)

Violence remains the great neglected topic in the study of Chinese history. Mark Lewis' pathbreaking rewriting of the history of the Warring States period in his Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) should have inspired an entire field devoted to the study of violence as what he terms "a constitutive element of the social order" (p. 1). And yet, with a very few exceptions—Alasdair Johnston's Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) and the book under review here among them—this invitation to step away from Chinese cultural prescriptions about the nature of social order has not been taken up. The resistance to the study of violence has many sources. There is first of all the difficulty of theorizing violence in comparison with the more conventional modes of social action with which social theory is accustomed to work. It is hard to decipher violence and pin it to predictable causes. When it occurs, it usually does so under pressures and options that need not produce violence but do, catalyzed by random events, off chances, and slight misunderstandings. It is almost impossible to get to a level of explanation that allows the historian to conclude that violence had to happen, although when it does we are too often ready to rush in with explanations after the fact as to what happened. This produces at best a one-time-only analysis dependent too much on contingency and too little on structure.

A second difficulty in the way of studying violence is its unpalatability. Certain academic subdisciplines, such as the history of warfare or the history of rights, have developed procedures for containing instances of violence within larger categories that immunize the researcher against the subjective experiences of violence that lie buried within historical records, without having to pretend that this subjectivity did not exist. Most historians, though, are at a loss to know what to do with violence, other than leave it in the black box of inaccessible memory left behind in the wreckage of every violent act. For China, the difficulties of studying violence are compounded by a third obstacle, and that is the cultural devalorization of force as a legitimate source of public authority. Except when Chinese intellectuals have opted intentionally to invert mainstream values, as they did in certain sectors of Cultural Revolution historiography, neither Confucian nor post-Confucian Chinese have been enthusiastic about celebrating violence as a creative or transformative mode of establishing civil order. Nor have Han Chinese states since at least the Song dynasty seen fit to praise the use of force as a mark of social or moral distinction, in stark contrast to European states of the same period. The rhetoric of order and moral effort has been a rhetoric of suasion, education, and transformation through virtuous example, not a rhetoric of battle, purge, or punishment. But that, of course, does not mean that battle, purge, and punishment are not as central to the maintenance of the Chinese social order as to the maintenance of social order anywhere.

David Robinson has written Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven against these sources of inertia, and indeed has been able to exploit them to gain traction for his argument in favor of "the utility of systematic analyses of patterns of violence" (p. 247). His occasion for exploring the place of violence in Ming China is a bandit rebellion that broke out in 1510 on the North China Plain south of Beijing and mutated into Shandong and down to the Yangzi River before finally being suppressed two years later. Until now unknown in Western historiography, the 1510 rebellion was not a transformative moment in the history of the dynasty. As Robinson is quick to point out, nothing changed...