UBC Press Blog

Diana Lary, ed.

2007,Chapter 4: What Happens When Wang Yangming Crosses the Border? by Timothy Brook, p. 74-76.

The emperors of the Ming dynasty ruled a bounded territory. There might be occasional doubt as to where exactly the border ran in places where the terrain was rough and the state’s ability to control local populations weak. But everyone understood that borders existed, and all who served the Ming understood that imperial sovereignty extended only that far and not an inch beyond. A border marked a clear break between the order that Chinese sovereignty was thought to create and the disorder that its absence must imply. Being at the edge of sovereignty, where one thing became another, borderlands were places where sovereignty was difficult to enforce, where control required more stringent enforcement than was necessary elsewhere, and where administrative operations had to permit innovations and compromises that were unacceptable in the heartland. Borderlands were troubling to rule-enforcers; they were also politically dangerous for those faced with adjusting heartland rules to conditions in the periphery. This chapter is about one instance of alleged border-crossing in a Ming borderland and the great political excitement that this allegation caused.

Wang Shouren (1472-1529), better known by his sobriquet Yangming, was not only the most innovative philosopher of the Ming dynasty but one of its leading field administrators. His experience of dealing with civil disturbance and armed revolt, notably his suppression in 1519 of the rebellion of the Prince of Ning, Zhu Chenhao (d. 1521), in Jiangxi province endowed him with a reputation as a trouble-shooter. Although being politically savvy was the key to his success in the field, it was his military genius that he was most known for. Political rivalry at court turned his accomplishments against him, however, and he was sidelined by the Zhengde emperor (r. 1506-21) for the remainder of that man’s reign. The ascendancy of the Jiajing emperor (r. 1522-66) brought Wang out of retirement to serve as minister of war in Nanjing, but, in 1522, the obligation to mourn his father once again removed him from the corridors of power. He remained sidelined until June 1527, when the emperor ordered him to lead a campaign to quell a rebellion in the borderlands of Guangxi province, where violence among aboriginal tribes and between aboriginals and settled agriculturalists was endemic. Reinstated as minister of war, Wang was additionally invested with the rank of left censor-in-chief; was appointed superintendent of military affairs for Guangdong, Guangxi, Jiangxi, and Huguang; and was given wide discretionary powers to bring the uprising to an end.

Wang doubted his reputation as a military genius. He says as much in the memorial he sent back to the emperor, asking that he be excused from the commission to quell the southwest on the grounds that he was in poor health. Health aside, he insisted that the emperor should place his trust in the regional military leaders already on site as he himself was not the person best qualified for the job. “Your servant is only a student of books and is not skilled in military command,” he insisted. “My service in years past in Jiangxi led happily to a successful outcome entirely because I happened to meet with fortunate circumstances.” The emperor denied his request, and so Wang had no choice but to proceed to Guangxi. There he was successful again, through the same combination of good fortune and an ability to see his assignment in relation to larger problems. After the leading insurgents, Lu Su and Wang Shou, surrendered without a fight, Wang extended his campaign to quell Yao raiders in central Guangxi and bring the entire region under state control. The pacification of Guangxi would be Wang’s last great contribution to his dynasty. Too ill to wait for imperial authorization, Wang left his post and headed home, dying en route. Qing policy analysts would look back on this campaign as the last significant Ming intervention on the southern border.

Wang’s biography in the voluminous dynastic history gives only a brief account of the campaign and of the politics surrounding his service in the southwest.4 While he was on the campaign, Wang came under attack from Minister of Personnel Gui E (d. 1531). Wang’s biography provides a brief summary of Gui’s charges, one of which was that he tried to capitalize on his success in Guangxi by using the surrendered rebel forces under this command to invade Jiaozhi (a classical term used for Vietnam, and sometimes Laos). It was a serious charge, and Wang’s supporters at court were alarmed. Both Hanlin Academician Fang Xianfu (d. 1544) and Minister of Rites Huo Tao (1487-1540) submitted memorials in his defence. Fang’s original memorial seems no longer to exist, but Huo’s does. Huo rose to the charge by arguing: “An official may be permitted to cross the border [chu jiang, which might also be translated as ‘proceed beyond a borderland’] when it is purely to do something that can bring peace to the guojia (nation) and benefit to the sheji [altars of soil and grain].” Wang Yangming thus stood accused by one party of crossing a border without authorization and stood defended by another of doing so for a legitimate reason.

This chapter is an exegesis of Huo Tao’s statement, which I have undertaken in order to answer these three questions: Why was border-crossing selected as the charge designed to ruin Wang Yangming’s reputation? What was at stake in the charge? And what does this tell us about the understanding of borders and borderlands in Ming political theory and practice? To approach these questions, we need first to survey the contexts central to this story: (1) the politics at the Jiajing court, (2) the reputation and political status of Wang Yangming, and (3) the security situation in Guangxi province. That done, we can turn to the charge and the defence and, more particularly, the language of the defence, in order to assess why border-crossing was regarded as a politically vulnerable act as well as why it could be defended. None of this will reveal much about what went on in the borderland; but some of it should indicate what borders could be made to do through the process of being talked about as well as how the borderland could provide fodder for political struggles that had nothing whatsoever to do with borders.

About the Author

Diana Lary is a professor emerita of history at the University of British Columbia.

Contributors include Timothy Brook, Nicola Di Cosmo, Benjamin Elman, Stevan Harrell, Van Nguyen-Marshall, Pitman Potter, Peter Perdue, André Schmid, Leo Shin, Wang Ning, Alexander Woodside, and Victor Zatsepine.