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

in the 1930s and 1940s. Situating the wokou issue within the framework of Sino-Japanese relations during the Ming dynasty, scholars such as Akiyama Kenzo and Kobata Atsushi argued that the failure of the Ming tributary trade system to fulfill domestic market demands in both China and Japan led to the rise of the smuggling activities that in turn created the wokou problem.³⁷ Pointing to the open admission by a Ming observer that wokou operated as traders and vice versa depending on whether trade was allowed or prohibited, Akiyama and Kobata brought the discussion of the causal relationship between the maritime prohibition and the increased incidence of wokou activities into Japanese scholarship. This led, in the 1950s and 1960s, to a discussion of the nature of the wokou that was initiated by Katayama Seijiro and expanded by Sakuma Shigeo.³⁸ They argued that although the label of wokou was used in all official documents to describe disturbances along the coast in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, the open admissions by Ming observers that the raids were often carried out by “treacherous [Chinese] merchants” ( jianshang) and influential families in the locality who then blamed the wokou and that “there were few real wo among them” suggest that the wokou issue must have had its origins in the social and economic changes taking place in Chinese coastal society. The matter was thus not an offshoot of Sino-Japanese diplomacy.³⁹

This acknowledgment that trade and piracy during this period were but two sides of the same coin was explored in greater detail by Taiwanese historians in the 1960s; these scholars pinpointed the cause of the wokou crisis: the conflict between enforcement of the prohibition and smuggling activities along the coast.⁴⁰ This explanation was further refined in the 1980s by the work of Lin Liyue and Zhang Bincun, who examined the relationship between the local gentry and the rise of the private maritime traders.⁴¹ Zhang, in particular, argued that the wokou crisis erupted because of the breakdown of the tripartite balance on the China coast—that is, the balance of power between the local gentry, the private maritime traders, and the Ming army that had hitherto ensured coastal security and the smooth operation of illicit trade activities. The image of the people on the China coast as crafty individuals who