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

as they were to fight against them. Thus, instead of solving the wokou problem, the imperial and guest troops further added to the local people’s predicament by engaging in extralegal activities, such as plundering and looting. Moreover, the troops and their commanders were charged with identifying the pirates and sifting them out from among the local communities, whose members found themselves in the unenviable situation of being sandwiched between the imperial troops and the wokou bands.

Given such a situation, the question of how the local communities tried to resolve this predicament of being caught between the two competing forces of illegitimate plunder and state-backed military action becomes a pertinent one. In light of the implications behind the social classifications of liangmin (good people) and jianmin (wicked people) imposed by registered lijia status (or the lack thereof) and in light of the labels of wokou or wokou collaborator that could easily be pinned on individuals, the ways the local people in Haining avoided such labeling are interesting. The appearance at this time of more distinctive lineage organizations within the local community suggests that the lineage organization, with its implicit connotations of legitimacy and state approbation, represents the protection sought by the local people. By looking at the chronology of the process of lineage creation in Haining and juxtaposing that with the chronology of legislative changes and the anti-wokou campaign, this study demonstrates that whereas the lineage organization had been slowly making its appearance in Haining during the early years of the sixteenth century, the pace of lineage creation actually picked up during and after the wokou crisis, which effectively ended in Haining in the late 1550s. This process of social reorganization would continue into the Qing dynasty, but the period highlighted in this book marks the beginning of the shift.

Structure of the Book

This book is organized around the study of the wokou crisis in Jiangnan and its effect on the creation of lineages in the county of Haining. Chapter 1 provides the geographical and historical setting through an