Chinese Empire

Chinese Army Organisation: From the Qin Fubing to the Qing Eight Banners

The history of Chinese army organisation is a long story of attempts to balance three competing requirements: the need for a large enough force to defend the empire’s frontiers, the need to keep that force loyal to the central government, and the need to keep the cost of the army within the empire’s fiscal means. Every dynasty after the Qin faced these three requirements, and each produced a different answer. The Qin and Han relied on a militia of registered households. The Tang refined the militia into the fubing (府兵, “garrison militia”) system, in which soldiers were also farmers, tied to specific regiments, and called up only in time of war. The Song paid for a professional standing army of nearly a million men. The Ming returned to the militia model in the weisuo (衛所, “guard and battalion”) system, in which military households were hereditary and their members served for life. The Qing, a conquest dynasty, organised its army in the Eight Banners (八旗), a hereditary caste of Manchu and Mongol soldiers supplemented by a larger force of Han Chinese soldiers known as the Green Standard Army (綠營兵). Each of these systems is treated in more detail in the section on the imperial Chinese army, and the broader military history is told in the Chinese military section.

A strong central army could defend the dynasty; a strong regional army could rebel. The Tang fubing system, the Song central guard, the Ming weisuo, and the Qing banners were four different attempts to keep the army loyal to the centre, and each system failed in its own way. The fubing system decayed into the jiedushi (regional military commissioner) system that produced the An Lushan Rebellion. The Song central guard became a hereditary caste of stipendiaries. The Ming weisuo collapsed into mercenary bands. The Qing banners became hereditary sinecures by the nineteenth century. The pattern is a recurring cycle of reform, decay, and replacement.

The Qin and Han Precedent: Conscription and the Militia

The Qin’s army, which unified China in 221 BCE, was built on universal male military service. The Legalist reforms of the Warring States period, particularly those of Shang Yang in the state of Qin, had created a system of household registration, in which every adult male was registered with the state, liable for tax, and subject to conscription. The Shang Yang reforms are examined in the Chinese government section.

The Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) inherited the Qin system. The Han empire was divided into commanderies (郡, jùn) and kingdoms (國, guó), each containing a fixed number of registered households. Adult males were liable for two years of military service, one in the capital region as a member of the palace guard and one on the frontier. The system worked well enough to put perhaps 100,000 men in the field on the northern frontier during the reign of Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE), but it produced social strains that contributed to the eventual collapse of the dynasty in 220 CE.

The Tang Fubing System

The fubing (府兵, “garrison militia”) system was the most carefully designed militia system in Chinese history. It was developed in the late Northern Wei period and refined under the early Tang by Gaozu (r. 618–626) and his son Taizong (r. 626–649). The fubing system divided the empire’s military households into roughly 600 regiments of 800 to 1,200 men each, distributed across the empire. In wartime the men were called up and marched to the frontier.

Soldiers were also farmers: each fubing household received a plot of land. The system was locally recruited, hereditary, and small. The system worked brilliantly for the first century and a half of the Tang, producing an army that could mobilise quickly, fight on the steppe, and demobilise back into civilian life. The system began to break down in the eighth century, as the dynasty increasingly relied on a parallel structure of professional jiedushi with standing armies. The jiedushi were regional warlords, and the An Lushan Rebellion of 755–763 was the consequence. The rebellion see in-depth piece on the An Lushan Rebellion.

The Song Professional Army

The Song dynasty (960–1279) resolved never to allow a general to control an army large enough to threaten the throne. The Song army was therefore divided into three components, all under firm civilian control: the central palace guard (禁軍, jìnjūn), the regional garrison armies (廂軍, xiāngjūn), and the irregular local militia (鄉兵, xiāngbīng). By the reign of Emperor Shenzong (r. 1067–1085), the central guard had been expanded to a strength of roughly 800,000 men.

The Song army was paid in cash and supported by state monopolies. The central guard was a paper institution: only a fraction of the nominal strength was fit for service, the soldiers were drawn from the lowest social orders, and a rigid caste division prevented soldiers’ sons from taking the civil service examinations. By the late Northern Song, the central guard was a hereditary caste of stipendiaries. The Song compensated with technology, deploying gunpowder bombs, fire lances, gunpowder-propelled rockets, and massive counterweighted trebuchets. None of it could stop the dynasty from losing the northern capital Kaifeng to the Jurchen in 1127. The story of the Song is told in the Chinese dynasties survey.

The Ming Weizuo System

The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) returned to the militia model in a more thoroughgoing form. The weisuo (衛所, “guard and battalion”) system, designed by the dynasty’s founder Zhu Yuanzhang (the Hongwu Emperor), divided the empire into 17 weisuo headquarters in the capital region and a larger number of provincial weisuo. The total registered strength at the founding of the dynasty was about 1.2 million.

The weisuo system was, in theory, a brilliant piece of statecraft that gave the central government detailed knowledge of every soldier in the empire. It had, however, several chronic weaknesses. Military households were heavily taxed, their lands were often confiscated by local officials, and their standard of living fell well below that of civilian households. In the late Ming, war, famine, and plague had wiped out a large fraction of the registered military households. The system finally collapsed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the late Ming had to rely on mercenary armies.

The Qing Eight Banners and the Green Standard Army

The Eight Banners (八旗) was a system of hereditary military households first organised by the Manchu chieftain Nurhaci in the late sixteenth century. Every Manchu (and every Mongol or Korean who entered the system) was enrolled in a banner; the banners were divided into companies of 300 men. The banners were a caste: bannermen did not engage in trade or agriculture, were supported by stipends of grain and silver, and could not intermarry with the commoner population. Banner garrisons in Beijing, Xi’an, Wuhan, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou served as the imperial muscle of the new dynasty.

The banners were supplemented from the start by the much larger Green Standard Army (綠營兵), a conventional force organised into ying (營) of varying size, recruited by conscription among the Han Chinese population and paid in cash. The Green Standard was more numerous than the banners (perhaps 600,000 men in the eighteenth century) but less prestigious, and was used for routine garrison duty and internal security. By the nineteenth century, both the banners and the Green Standard had decayed into hereditary stipendiaries, and the actual work of fighting was done by regional xibing (鄉兵, “militia”) armies raised by provincial gentry — the precursors of the warlord armies of the 1910s and 1920s. The longer story of the Qing is told in the Chinese dynasties survey and the section on the fall of imperial China.