VISIONS AND REVISIONS: VILLAGE POLICIES OF THE MING FOUNDER IN SEVEN PHASES

Abstract

Pursuing a vision of an ideal social order, the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368-1398 as the Hongwu emperor) created a new state that aimed at controlling and shaping society. But society also shaped the state-building policies. A chronological account of how the early Ming regime built village institutions shows, first, that many policies initially accommodated existing social formations, and second, that Zhu frequently revised his stance. Discussions of Zhu's creation of the Ming state often consider the reign as a whole, or split it in two at 1380. But such analyses gloss over the details of village policies that are confusing, complex, and self-contradictory. Different laws described the same institution differently, and local leaders with various titles were charged with overlapping functions. Institutions were proposed, rejected, and then established anyway; or were established and then abolished, sometimes to be re-established later. Surveyed year by year, the contradictions make sense: the laws fall into definite phases. The revisions took account of resistance to the laws. AsJohn Dardess has shown, Zhu understood that resistance as individual recalcitrance, stupidity and wickedness, but his own texts also suggest that it was the product of working social networks. Zhu's response to resistance echoed its disruption of the hierarchy, solidarity and immobility he hoped to impose, thereby undercutting his own original blueprint for state and society. Resistance, therefore, revised the autocrat's vision from the beginning.