Mid-Ch’ing Piracy: An Analysis of Organizational Attributes

1 Mid-Ch'ing Piracy: An Analysis of Organizational Attributes Dian Murray Linnfield College Although the topics of rebellion and social dissidence are of interest to China scholars, many of the studies concerning them center not on a single uprising or event, but rather seek to elucidate broad theoretical categories of rebel mobilization and militarization. For example in Strangers at the Gate, Frederic Wakeman has focused on three levels of rebellion that include "banditry, outlawry, and actual revolt." In Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China , Philip Kuhn has endeavored to show how units of the “heterodox hierarchy", the t'ang , the ku W l , and the community in arms differ from one another on the basis of their organizational complexity.1 Most recently Elizabeth Perry, in her ecological approach to the study of peasant rebellion, has presented insurrection as the result of both protective and predatory adaptive strategies developed by the inhabitants of Huai-pei for coping with their harsh environment.2 One exception to this trend of viewing dissidence from an overall comparative analytical framework is Susan Naquin's case study of millenarian rebellion. In her investigation of the Eight Trigrams uprising, Naquin has focused in detail on the phenomenon of a single religiously inspired peasant rebellion grounded in a strong sectarian tradition. For centuries prior to the Eight Trigrams insurrection, small, 2 disparate groups of believers had transmitted their common beliefs through ongoing series of teacher-disciple relationships. Thus, with nascent organizational networks already at hand, mobilization for a "great undertaking" required that sectarian leaders, still operating within the bounds of normal life, create from isolated groups a 3 more comprehensive network within which to raise the standard of rebellion. Such a mobilization scheme may account for outbreaks of religiously inspired rebellion, but how can one explain uprisings not so grounded in ongoing peacetime traditions? In lieu of long, self-perpetuating networks, how did potential leaders create organizations capable of challenging the state? The creation of a rebel organization di sassociated from any ongoing religious tradition is illustrated by the pirates who operated along the South China coast from 1790 to 1810. Small-scale maritime banditry had existed for centuries along the Sino-Vietnamese littoral, but as a direct result of the Tayson K& r l ( Rebellion in Vietnam (1773-1802) , piracy burgeoned out of control. During this uprising rebel leaders in Vietnam attempted to solve their manpower and material shortages by commissioning the petty pirates of the Sino-Vietnamese frontier as privateers. For this purpose in 1792, the Tayson leader sent out his navy on a recruiting mission into southern China. So successful was his crusade that Chinese from even as far away as Fukien and Chekiang provinces flocked to his standard.1 * The safe anchorages, secure bases, and access to the tools of the trade provided by the Vietnamese afforded pirates, who were for the most part Chinese, an unprecedented opportunity to get organized. By 1796, semipermanent associations of several hundred men and a score of vessels 3 were superseding petty pirates in the competition for prizes. In terms of what would follow, however, the pirate associations under Tayson sponsorship represented only an intermediate level of organization. It was not until the demise of the Tayson in 1802 that the pirates, deprived of their security, then moved the center of their operations back across the border into China, in doing so, they attained a higher level of organization by creating a confederation that united them internally and enabled them to extend their power externally to a cross section of the onshore society, with their organizational acumen and keen political instinct, the pirates of Kwangtung successfully mobilized resources, manipulated subordinates, and created a profit-generating commercial empire that defied the ch'ing government between 1802 and 1810. Organizational Structures: Internal Networks. The key to the pirates' success can be found in their creation of a massive confederation, s l i j tang ^ which at its height consisted of approximately 1,600 junks and 70,000 men, under the overlordship of a powerful Cantonese family named Cheng I ? .® This confederation served as the focal point for the overall coordination of pirate activities, as the final unit of accounting...