The Study Of The Ming Military Recruitment System

Military recruitment system is a military system in which volunteers are called to join the army in a paid way.Before enlistment,there are people who have certain personal freedom,after enlistment,the personal relationship with the country shows different forms,including the strengthening of personal control and the loose employment relationship,which show in different ways of management and remuneration.This paper takes the military recruitment system in Ming Dynasty as the research object,investigates the occurrence and development of military mobilization in Ming Dynasty from the compulsory mobilization of the weisuo(??)system to the voluntary mobilization of the military recruitment system,the identity and status,the management,paid way and personal relationship of the recruiters,and further analyzes the impact on military,financial etc,and social changes reflected.The Ming recruitment system can be divided into two periods.The first period was from the 10^th year of Xuande(1435)when Emperor Yingzong has inherited the throne to the 13^th year of Jiajing(1535)when the recruit soldiers was incorporated into the weisuo,and then to the end of Ming Dynasty was the second period.In the first period,military recruitment was almost simultaneous with the market-oriented mobilization of some military materials,the targets of recruitment included sheyu(??)in military family of weisuo who with certain freedom,the civilian population who became soldiers after Exemption from corvee,refugees who were controlled by army after joining the army,etc.the male adults living in the basic military units weisuo who were not formal military personnel are generally called sheyu,meaning,the extra men,included sheren(??)in the officer family and yuding(??)in the soldier family.The scale of the recruit soldiers expanded after the Tumu Incident of1449,later,they had been serving for a long time because of the confrontation between Ming and Mongolia.Recruits of various names were set up one after another,minzhuang(??),sheyu,local soldiers in the northern frontier and so on.the recruit soldiers who managed by the weisuo and minzhuang who managed by the by prefectures,their management style and military pay structure were similar to weisuo regular soldiers,which was still the principle of the integration of soldiers and peasants.the recruit soldiers went from only getting xingliang(??)to both xingliang and yueliang(??)as weisuo regular soldiers,in addition,their families were entitled to tax and corvee benefits,as well as subsidies and even hereditary duties.With the development of military recruitment system,the weisuo also adopted the way of recruitment to supplement the vacancies of soldiers engaged in training and agriculture.Therefore,the personal relationship between these recruits and the state is in the form of strong control rather than employment,which inevitably leads to the same disadvantages of weisuo after a long time of implementation.To combine it with the institutionalized corvee and training of sheyu in the weisuo,and the change of minzhuang from voluntarily joining the army to being forced to join the army according to the unit of lijia(??),that is,the expansion of military mobilization to the surplus population of the military family in weisuo and the population of prefectures.In this stage,the military recruitment system strengthened the northern defense line externally and stabilized the social order internally;in the financial aspect,it mainly saved the military expenses of soldiers'expeditions;in the military system,it made the weisuo have a certain degree of flexibility,alleviated the speed of failure,and recruited local people to join the army was regarded as the standard and continued.In the second period,with the new changes of the threats of Mongols from the North and Japanese from southeast coast in the middle of Jiajing period,the military establishment Ming Dynasty was generally developed from weisuo to the standing battalion system,the number of soldiers separated from the peasants increased and the scope expanded,and the military recruitment system gradually got rid of the management mode of the integration of soldiers and peasants in the previous period.The main targets of recruitment are the civilian population and the refugees who get rid of the control of the government,with the reform of taxation and servitude in the middle and late Ming Dynasty,especially the implementation of a whip law,the former's personal control from the state tended to relax and had a certain right of career choice;the latter no longer took the re control of the combination of personal and land as the goal in the previous period.In addition to the further development of the marketization of military resource regulation,the government had further expanded the recruitment system to solve the problem that soldiers with strong personal control employ others to replace themselves,because it can not guarantee the combat effectiveness of the army and waste financial resources.From the beginning of the Anti Japanese War,the recruitment,management and combat of soldiers depended on the military pay.After joining the army,the recruitment mainly based on the employment relationship gradually expanded from the southeast to other regions.There is a difference between soldiers recruited in weisuo and those who are hereditary,the former only joined the army itself,retired because of old age and disease,and managed by weisuo to varying degrees in the order of id,military pay and personal status,the soldiers with stronger employment relationship are those who are completely separated from weisuo and only managed by the battalion system.During this period,the tax exemption for conscription was only for itself,the family had no tax preference or subsidy obligation,their income included its own military pay and some family subsidies.With the market-oriented management of the land by the officers in the nine frontier,a special form of conscription system called generals'jiading(??)came into being.The personal relationship between soldiers and generals has developed from dependency to employment,that is,they first form a dominant relationship with generals,and then exchange political and economic interests with the government to become a mercenary team with the government as the sole buyer.It should be emphasized that the military recruitment system of the two periods was not replaced by the later period,but was carried out according to the time and local conditions.Different from the financial savings in the first period,in the second period,from the mid Jiajing period to the Longqing period when determination of the military systemexcept for the limited number of military jiading whose military pay is called Double pay(??)and the rich military pay of nanbing(??),the military pay did not exceed that of the weisuo soldiers.The reason for the expansion of financial expenditure was the increase in the number of troops and the number of standing soldiers after the separation of soldiers and peasants.After the middle of Wanli period,the number of standing and wartime temporary recruits increased,and the high salary of individual soldiers,which started from the war of aiding Korea and continued to expand the scope of the war between the Ming and Qing Dynasties,caused the rapid expansion of finance.The expansion of military expenditure,including the recruit soldiers,led to departmental conflicts between the Ministry of Revenue and the Ministry of War in the central government,and extended to the frontier or front-line military departments.At the local level,it led to the problems of tax collection and corvee collection caused by the reduction of registered labor force.At the local level,it caused the problems of tax revenue and corvee due to the decrease of registered labor force,the increasing burden of the people caused by military expenditure,and the uneven distribution in different regions.In the middle of Wanli period,the military recruitment system of diversified employment relationships was formed,including individual mercenaries such as weisuo recruitment,standing recruitment,wartime temporary recruitment,jiading in military barracks,and mercenary teams such as generals'jiading.However,the training,disbanding,resettlement,reserve service and distribution of military leadership power had not been established systematically.Individual recruits voluntarily serve for economic benefits,but they also tended to benefit after joining the army,which shows that they fled to places with rich military salaries and avoided dangerous military tasks.As a result,the government could only demand quantity but not quality.Although the number of recruits in the late Ming Dynasty accounted for more than half of the total,it did not enhance the combat effectiveness of the army.In the late Ming Dynasty,the military structure with military jiading as the core and ordinary Battalion soldiers as the periphery was formed.This structure of interest prevailed over the military structure represented by Qi Jiguang(???),which emphasized the unity and cooperation of the army,in addition,the corruption of the officer class following the weisuo system became more and more serious,not only was the military reform interrupted,and under the concentration of troops through mobilization and recruitment pushed the Ming Dynasty to the end.