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

examination of the Hangzhou-Jiaxing-Huzhou plains area, known during the Ming period as the region of Western Zhejiang—in particular, the county of Haining.

Chapter 2 deals with the wokou crisis and the response of the imperial court and provides a discussion of the background and origins of the wokou crisis of the Jiajing reign. Much of the debate regarding the wokou issue remains one of definition. From the Ming sources, it is evident that identification of the wokou, who looked and dressed like the locals, was a major problem. Were the wokou actually the outcasts of Ming society? Registered status in the lijia was equivalent to political legitimacy in the eyes of the state (because registered groups paid taxes), whereas those who fell outside of the lijia system— such as maritime traders, smugglers, monks, and ruffians—were categorized as treacherous. Could the entire wokou crisis have been an effort by some to force their way into the system? That this is so is suggested by the deals that the two most notorious wokou leaders, Xu Hai and Wang Zhi, tried to seal with the Ming authorities, offering their allegiance in exchange for official posts within the local military bureaucracy and the right to conduct maritime trade. Turning to a study of the anti-wokou campaign of Hu Zongxian, chapter 3 examines the difficulties faced by the supreme commander and the problems his administration brought in its wake.

Given the conflicting pictures painted in the gazetteers and the genealogies about the same period, described in the former as one of conflict and in the latter as one of lineage expansion, questions arise as to whether there was, in fact, a crisis of wokou attacks. Was the sense of crisis perhaps an illusion resulting from the mobilization of imperial troops, who were, in effect, taking action against people outside of the lijia system? Questions abound, too, regarding the people’s ability to organize themselves and construct their lineage identities at a time when, it is claimed, the wokou were terrorizing the region. The lineage construction undertaken by the people in Haining at a time when the wokou incursions were supposedly at an all-time high is traced in the next three chapters. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the process by which the various surname groups in and around the town of Yuanhua constructed their identities