Lineage Society on the Southeastern Coast of China: The Impact o ...

inasmuch as the typical proponent of such a project was a man who had scored well in the imperial examinations and was therefore motivated to enhance his own social standing—and that of his extended kin group—in the locality. Though these social ambitions are understandable in a normal context, the chaos of the 1550s and 1560s—during which time Haining experienced firsthand the wokou depredations and their aftermath—suggests that filial piety may not have been the primary impetus behind the organization of agnatic kinsmen or for the energies, labor, and money expended to compile genealogies, construct ancestral halls, establish burial grounds, and endow corporate estates. The explanation, I suspect, can be found in the response of the imperial court to the wokou crisis during the Jiajing reign.

The Anti-wokou Campaign

In the early 1550s, as the wokou raids grew in intensity, worries grew apace that the wokou would eventually threaten the city of Hangzhou—indeed, these fears were realized in 1554.⁵⁸ The provincial capital of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou, was also the southern terminus of the Grand Canal, along which tax grain and food supplies flowed northward to the imperial capital of Beijing. This threat to the financial and dietary lifeline of Beijing finally roused the imperial court to action. In contrast to its hitherto lackadaisical and piecemeal response to the growing crisis along the coast, in 1554 Beijing created the post of supreme commander (zongdu) to deal with the problem. It was a powerful post, an appointment that for the first time created a unified military administration on the southeastern coast. The supreme commander was to supervise the military situation in South Zhili, Zhejiang, Shandong, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Fujian and was granted discretionary power over all military matters as well as military and civil personnel.⁵⁹ Yet the position carried grave challenges, for on the shoulders of this one man rested the security of not only the coastal provinces but also of the empire, given the economic importance of the lower Yangzi region. In fact, some appointees came to be pawns in factional politics at court, and in 1555