China

Internal solidarity during the decline of the Nan Song

Honouring the Zhu Xi school did not reinvigorate the Nan Song administration, but the military, despite some weaknesses, maintained an effective defense against the Mongols for four decades—the longest stand against Mongol invasions anywhere. The final Song defeat came in part because the Mongol forces, frustrated for many years in their attempts to break the main Song line of resistance, drove through territories to the west and outflanked the Song defenders. The Song capital, Lin’an, finally fell in 1276 without much fighting, all the high-ranking officials and officers having already fled. The empire itself came to an end in 1279, after its last fleet had been destroyed near Guangzhou, when a loyal minister with the boy pretender to the throne committed suicide by jumping into the sea.

Later Chinese historians attempted to explain the fall of the Nan Song as the result of internal decay and abuses, and so they stressed the problems of heavy taxation, inflated paper currency, bureaucratic laxity, and clerical abuses. The absence of any large-scale uprisings among the peasantry, however, suggests that they overstated the seriousness of such problems. To explain this lack of popular discord, most historical accounts cite Chinese patriotism, the point being that the war against the Mongols was for cultural rather than merely dynastic survival. Though partly true, this was not the only reason. Other significant factors contributed to this high degree of internal solidarity: (1) the government mobilized the resources of the wealthiest region, that of the lower Yangtze, without overburdening other regions; (2) the tax burden and the emergency requisitions fell mostly on the prosperous urban sectors rather than on rural areas, the backbone of the empire; and (3) scholar-officials in many areas, in spite of their shortcomings, were sophisticated in the art of administration, moving quickly to put down small uprisings before they got larger or offering accommodative terms to induce some rebel leaders to come over while dividing the rest. Finally, the Neo-Confucian values had pervaded the country through more books, more schooling, and greater efforts by Neo-Confucians to promote moral standards, community solidarity, and welfare activities and through widespread Neo-Confucian roots planted at the local levels by half-literate storytellers, makeshift theatres, and traveling companies in various performing arts.

The examination system itself played a major role in the Confucianization of Chinese society. Only a small percentage of the candidates actually passed the degree examinations and entered the civil service. The vast majority, thoroughly imbued with Confucian studies, returned to the larger society, often to serve as teachers to the next generation. Furthermore, the examination system reinforced the deeply Confucian character of the curriculum, from the lowest level of primary education to the highest level in the academies. Children began imbibing Confucian moral precepts when they began to read. These precepts stressed loyalty, and that in turn probably helped bolster the strength of the dynasty in the face of foreign invasion and helped limit internal disloyalty.