The Era of Chinese Predominance. 1000–1500 35the cost was loss of field mobility and vulnerability to large-scale,
well-organized nomad attack, the Sung authorities were willing to pay
the price. Only so could civilian authority be assured within China;
only so could the mandarins be sure of dominating all sides of Chinese
life.
Two aspects of this situation seem worth comment. First, from the
point of view of the ruling elite, the policy towards Chinese army
commanders was not fundamentally different from their policy to
wards barbarian chieftains outside the imperial boundaries. Divide
and rule, while pacifying undependable elements by assigning goods,
titles, and ritual roles to military leaders, was the recipe the Sung
officials followed, whether within or beyond China’s frontiers. Policy
called for giving as little in the way of goods and prestige as was safe.
The temptation for officials on the spot was always to divert wealth for
personal and family uses, even if it meant risk of armed reaction,
whether from within or from without imperial borders.
Military men and barbarian chieftains confronted precisely parallel
temptations. Raiding or rebellion might bring immediate access to
booty and plunder more valuable than anything they could ever wring
out of the reluctant Chinese officials. On the other hand, such gains
were risky and could not continue indefinitely. Everyone concerned
had therefore always to weigh long-term benefit against short-term
gain. Since judgments in fact fluctuated, this meant that even the most
cunningly contrived defense system was potentially unstable. Very
sudden changes in the balance of military force along the frontier were
always possible, if border guards ceased to resist the barbarian
enemies, or if those enemies were able to unite into really formidable
armies and acquire the means of besieging and breaking into walled
cities and defended strongpoints. The sudden victories won by the
Jürchen after 1122, culminating in the capture of K’ai-feng just four
years later, illustrate this inherent instability.^26
In the second place, Sung official policy towards armed men and
organized violence was not fundamentally different from govern-
Chao K’uang-yin, the founder of the dynasty. He, in effect, set out to throw down the
ladder by which he had ascended to the throne by establishing administrative patterns
that would put every conceivable obstacle in the way of armed rebellion by military
commanders. On the Tang revolt cf. Edwin G. Pulleybank, The Background of the
Rebellion of An Lu-shan (London, 1955); on Sung military policy see Jacques Gernet, Le
monde chinois (Paris, 1972), pp. 272–75; Edward A. Kracke, Jr., Civil Service in Early
Sung China, 960–1067 (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 9–11; Karl Wittfogel and Feng
Chia-sheng, History of Chinese Society, Liao. 907–1125 (Philadelphia, 1949), pp. 534–37.
- For details of the Jürchen conquest, see Jing-shen Tao, The Jürchen in Twelfth
Century China: A Study of Sinicization (Seattle and London, 1976), pp. 14–24.