Institutional maladaptation in Ming dynasty Strategy

An analysis of the Ming’s institutional framework and its inadequacy in formulating strategy.

Essay

The tales of China’s Great Wall and the maritime voyages of Zheng He are often the targets of grave misunderstanding regarding Chinese strategy. Perception of the wall’s construction is typically framed in the context of a foreign policy preference for absolute isolation, over which it stands as a physical testament to, while Zheng He’s travels are presented as a concerted effort to reach out and expand overseas. Neither of which are true. The wall’s construction was neither a coherent foreign policy nor the product of an innate cultural inclination towards isolation, but rather the culmination of the institutional framework and internal power dynamics of the Ming dynasty in the sphere of its policy regarding the Northern border and its relations with the Mongols — perceived as its only challenge which might have posed an existential threat during the Ming’s existence. Likewise, the naval expeditions of Zheng He came as a consequence of the Yongle emperor’s efforts at legitimising himself and supporting the eunuch establishment which had helped him gain the throne (of which Zheng was a member of), though the voyages did have some tangible (if short-lived) consequences in furthering Ming influence. This essay aims to explore how the Ming failed to capitalise on their advantages to assert clear dominance in the broader Asia-Pacific region and formulate a coherent power projection strategy, and to that effect, we will be analysing the political factionalism, weak leadership, and blunder-ridden foreign policy that resulted from the institutional maladaptation¹ which plagued the dynasty’s strategy-making throughout its existence, often by design.

Let us first consider the traditional strategic challenge faced by imperial China — that of the nomadic peoples which populated the large steppes and deserts to its North, who in the context of the Ming were the Mongols. At the onset of the dynasty, the Ming had inherited many of the Yuan’s military and civilian institutions, and as such had operated in much the same manner. The Yuan were a Mongol dynasty and had been actively engaged in the affairs of the steppe, being willing to reallocate resources from the rich, coastal areas of Southern China to their Northern foreign entanglements, and the early Ming emperors replicated many of these behaviours.²

But then why did we end up with the Great Wall? It is, after all, one of the Ming’s greatest remnants, standing (at least partially) conserved to this day and garnering the marvel of visitors under the impression that this great undertaking of equal parts engineering and national will was a great accomplishment, keeping the barbarians to the North at a safe distance for the watchtowers that dot its course to gaze upon. In reality, for as much as the wall did provide some respite, “it was (…) based on strategic miscalculations; the Mongols often breached it or bypassed it, much as the Germans outflanked France’s Maginot Line in World War II. China’s Great Wall wasted vast amounts of treasure, and it defined a foreign policy that was shortsighted and doomed to failure.”³

The origins of the wall’s construction lie in the early fifteenth century, with the decision of the Yongle emperor to abandon the “outer” steppe beyond the Yellow River. The decision might have been sensible, had the Ming withdrawn to the natural border of the Yellow River proper, which rendered the Mongols’ nomadic, cavalry-based warfare obsolete as it had few fords over which an army could cross, meaning a defender could better channel attacking troops to more defensible positions. But unbeknownst to him, the Yongle emperor’s decision would bring about the chief strategic challenge to his dynasty, having in his withdrawal left the strategically important region inside the Yellow River loop (the Ordos) undefended. This region, though economically unimpressive in the face of the rich Southern China and Yellow River basin, was a boon for the Mongols who then occupied and settled it thanks to the fresh water and arable land it provided in comparison to the barren steppes and deserts of “outer” Mongolia.⁴ This provided the Mongols with a foothold that was both economically viable and from which to exercise their strength over much of Northern and Central China.

Debates over what to do over the Ordos became a recurring theme in the Ming court’s affairs from then on, yet it took the dynasty until the late sixteenth century to achieve a sensible resolution to the conflict with the Mongols. Between the Yongle emperor’s abandonment of the Ordos and the 1570’s thaw in relations, Ming institutions played a central role in perpetuating the conflict due to their own inadequacies. In essence, it was the internal dynamics between the scholar-bureaucracy, military establishment, eunuchs of the imperial household, and the emperor himself that shaped the formulation of strategy. It often was the case that little regard would be paid to any semblance of a “national interest,” and rather it was the vested interests of members of these groups and institutions — further fuelled by an environment of distrust and high-stakes politics — that tended to prevail above it. Such was the political violence in the Ming court that constructive criticism in policy-making could well lead to a violent fall from grace — by which it should be understood as torture and execution of not only the party actively engaged in criticism, but also their extended family and associates (with some purges numbering in the tens of thousands of deaths).⁵ It should, then, be taken into account how these institutions became maladapted in the first place.

The Ming founder Hongwu, a deeply distrustful man of violence (a characteristic shared by most of his successors⁶) with a humble past (which shaped part of these features of his personality⁷), set the tone for his dynasty’s dysfunctional governance, which eventually led to the strategic blunder that was the construction of the Great Wall. John Fairbank notes that the Hongwu emperor began his reign aiming at consolidating his power, something he was extremely efficient at. In a few years, his obsession with centralisation led him down the path of abolishing the office of prime minister and the secretariat which held the bureaucratic administration together, and replaced their roles with his own micromanaging oversight, supported by the eunuch establishment of the “inner” court — the imperial household. Though this was great for the prospects of Hongwu to maintain his grip on the power he so arduously had achieved, — we should remember that the first Ming emperor climbed the social ladder from a lowly tenant farm to the imperial palace — this policy was devastating for the empire’s management as well as its strategy.⁸ Suffice it to say that managing the world’s largest empire was an unfeasible task for a single man, if only for the sheer amount of issues that would have been presented to him in single day.

These characteristics of government would be maintained throughout the dynasty, and would aggravate the Ming’s foreign policy in many ways. But a combination of military prowess and retained experience of Mongol warfare (inherited from the Yuan of still living memory) preserved security and stability until the mid-fifteenth century, when a great political crisis developed following the battle of Tumu. What preceded this battle was a period of Mongol unification under strong rule, but instead of Yuan aspirations of dominion over China, this new Mongol confederation’s goal was motivated more by the deepening economic ties and rethinking the nature of their tributary status.⁹ In response to a series of incidents over the preceding years, in 1449 the young emperor Yingzong decided to mount a punitive expedition against Esen Khan, instigated by the eunuch Wang Zhen, his tutor and close advisor.^{10 11} This expedition was a failure with far-reaching implications for the dynasty. Militarily, it showed the deep inadequacies of Han warfare against the Mongols, who had successfully lured the Chinese armies deep beyond the reach of their supplies while denying them a decisive battle until the right opportunity arose.

But it was the political implications of this military disaster that were far more damaging. For starters, the Ming emperor was captured by Esen and made his hostage, triggering a succession crisis at home. The emperor’s brother, Jingtai, was enthroned, and, under no wish to return his predecessor to power, he actively jeopardised any prospects of peace with the Mongols, pursuing a hardened stance that perpetuated the conflict and gave the Mongols a chance to occupy the Ordos¹² — which, as we have already discussed, held a significant military value to them as a base for future operations into China proper, as well as an economic one. But more interesting yet is the fact that the perceived origins of this crisis lie in the sway the eunuch establishment held over the emperor. This institution was, indeed, deeply influential during imperial China as a whole, but perhaps in no period more so than during the Ming. Like in earlier dynasties, the Ming employed thousands of these eunuchs, but these eunuchs “differed from those of previous dynasties both quantitatively and qualitatively, as they were more numerous and also had penetrated deeper into practically every governmental agency, in fact, dominating the political, military, diplomatic, judiciary, ceremonial, security, and economic affairs of Ming China.”¹³ With this power, they usually found themselves at odds with the scholar-bureaucrats in particular. At heart, this was a question of morality and principles: the bureaucracy espoused the virtues of Confucian thought, seeing themselves as tenders to the garden that was the proper Chinese form of government¹⁴ while denouncing the eunuchs and their encroachment on government as immoral.

This conflict of morals spilled over to the making of strategy, and was not limited to the relations between eunuchs and bureaucrats. The evolution of Ming warfare mirrored institutional changes. The early Ming were by many standards a continuation of the Yuan¹⁵ and had hoped to rein in the Mongols to their new polity, pursuing a proactive strategy centred around the steppe and its pacification. But as they failed to bring the Mongols into the fold, the dynasty evolved into something else. The same Confucian philosophy that came to dominate Chinese policy-making and was intensely studied by the scholar-bureaucracy was also present in military doctrine. Classics like Sun Tzu’s Art of War exalted the virtues of moderation and demonstrated a preference for victory without battle.¹⁶ But the conservative disposition of imperial China’s scholars ended up being a hindrance to much needed institutional change, particularly in the formulation of strategy. While these ancient texts might have been useful in their inception, they were maladapted to the change brought by the horse-centric nomadic tribes of the steppes.¹⁷

Though some Chinese statesmen did have the foresight to understand this and constituted a pragmatic faction within the bureaucracy, the Ming failed in developing a coherent strategy regarding the Mongol threat. The building of the Great Wall during the mid and late Ming, which had resulted from this debate, was a compromise that satisfied no one. While the camp for compromise with the Mongols, had it been successful in doing so earlier than the late sixteenth century, might have made the wall’s construction unnecessary,¹⁸ those for a tough policy had (much like the Jingtai emperor after the Tumu crisis) vested interests in continuing confrontations, and for a long time their position prevailed. The expensive and laborious wall was the best that could be done under the circumstances. Since pragmatists could not gain sufficient political clout to reach a compromise with the Mongols, and hawks had an interest in perpetuating the conflict, a worldview under which positive relations with the nomads were improper, and a material inability to retake the steppe by force, the wall was the only solution which roughly coincided with Chinese philosophy and provided some form of respite. It bandaged a wound that desperately needed to be closed, but the body it was repairing required more holistic treatment, which it would only get in 1570 with the normalisation of relations with the Altan Khan. This came too late for when the Manchus to China’s Northeast invaded during a period of internal turmoil that would lead to the Ming’s collapse in the first half of the seventeenth century, but the fact that a settlement was eventually reached (and there were many opportunities throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in which an off-ramp to the conflict was presented!) demonstrates that, as Frederick Mote put it, “statesmanship could well have spared China the expense and sacrifice of building its fabled Great Wall”¹⁹ and that there was at least some drive for institutional reform by initiative of those individuals with enough power which refused to allow traditional Chinese dogmas of propriety in government and foreign affairs to get in the way of pragmatic policy.²⁰

And it is over these dogmas that I would finally like to bring to attention the maritime voyages of the eunuch admiral Zheng He. His travels across the Southern Asian and Eastern African coasts were sponsored by the Yongle emperor, and during the decades they took place the Ming established many diplomatic relations with the various coastal polities of the region. However, these endeavours were soon abandoned after the death of their patron, Yongle. These trips were chiefly diplomatic in their nature, but also great displays of power-projection. A modern comparison could be made to Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet of the early twentieth century: a great, awe-inspiring fleet, which must have been equally marvellous and intimidating to contemporary eyewitnesses. But as successful as these voyages were, no greater long-term strategy was put in place to continue their legacy. In fact, driven by a combination of the conflict between eunuchs and the bureaucracy, the financial burden of maintaining the massive fleet (the Ming treasury was already stretched thin due to its other foreign entanglements with the Mongols and Vietnamese), and the ever-present push for proper Confucian-driven policy, the voyages were discontinued, their records destroyed, and maritime trade was soon after banned.²¹ Again, the Ming, due to their institutional failings and internal politics, missed the opportunity to put in place a new strategy which could have benefited them greatly. Instead, the banning of trade and lack of aspiration to naval domination opened the door for European travellers a century later to take the Ming’s place and conduct trade on their own terms, while Chinese trade continued illegally in the form of piracy and smuggling.

The Ming, then, serve an important lesson for the study of international relations and strategy. It was an empire more powerful than any of its contemporaries across the world, yet it failed to satisfy any meaningful definition of a great power; its internal dynamics and institutions sabotaged pragmatic policies which could have both furthered its power and spare it from great expenses; and a tendency for cultural primacy over its policy making made it uncompromising when compromise was necessary. This dynasty serves as an example to the significance of a nation’s institutions and their role in creating its strategy, and it shows how an aversion to change and reform can severely damage the formulation of strategy when new challenges arise or old ones evolve. Moreover, the historical experience of the Ming is of great value to those making sense of modern China’s strategy. The Chinese Communist Party, understood as a dynasty of sorts, had experienced in its early years a similar turn inward as the Ming had in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But since the 1990’s China has not only opened itself to the world: it now aims to become a great power and, much like the Ming, it will be important to understand modern Chinese institutions (some of them with familiar characteristics) and their roles in China’s strategic thought.

Bibliography

• Fairbank, John King. China: A New History. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.
• Mote, Frederick W. Imperial China: 900 - 1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999.
• Tsai, Shih-shan Henry. The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty. SUNY Series in Chinese Local Studies. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996.
• Waldron, Arthur. ‘Chinese Strategy from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries’. In The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, edited by Williamson Murray, Macgregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, 4. Aufl. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999.
• —. The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. Canto ed., Repr. Cambridge Paperbacks: Oriental Studies, History. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998.

Notes