China

Political history

Ineptitude on the throne, bureaucratic factionalism at court, rivalries among Mongol generals, and ineffective supervision and coordination of provincial and local administration had gravely weakened the Yuan government by the 1340s. And in 1351 disastrous flooding of the Huang and Huai river basins aroused hundreds of thousands of long-oppressed Chinese peasants into open rebellion in northern Anhui, southern Henan, and northern Hubei provinces. Rebel movements, capitalizing on the breakdown of Yuan control, spread rapidly and widely, especially throughout central China. By the mid-1360s, large regional states had been created that openly flouted Yuan authority: Song in the Huai basin, under the nominal leadership of a mixed Manichaean-Buddhist secret-society leader named Han Lin’er; Han in the central Yangtze valley, under a onetime fisherman named Chen Youliang; Xia in Sichuan, under an erstwhile general of the rebel Han regime named Ming Yuzhen; and Wu in the rich Yangtze delta area, under a former Grand Canal boatman named Zhang Shicheng. A onetime salt trader and smuggler named Fang Guozhen had simultaneously established an autonomous coastal satrapy in Zhejiang. While Yuan chieftains contended with one another for dominance at the capital, Dadu (present-day Beijing), and in the North China Plain, these rebel states to the south wrangled for survival and supremacy. Out of this turmoil emerged a new native dynasty called Ming (1368–1644).