Qiu Jun and the Big Rattan Gorge Campaign of 1465.

In Ming times, anti-government revolts based at the Big Rattan Gorge (Datengxia) area in central eastern Guangxi had great consequences for the social security and ethnic relationship of the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi. The Ming court responded to the regional turmoil with three large-scale military campaigns, respectively launched in 1465, 1528, and 1539. The first of these campaigns involved the largest number of soldiers and had the greatest of historical impact. The military leaders of this campaign were assistant censor-in-chief Han Yong and commander-in-chief Zhao Fu. But Qiu Jun, a Guangdong native from Hainan, then a compiler in the Hanlin Academy, was also an important figure in the campaign because the court had formally adopted his strategy for the military actions and their aftermath. Han Yong did not in effect put Qiu Jun's strategy into action, but neither was he able to end decisively the turmoil despite his successes on the frontline. The present paper studies the century-long Ming government policy in dealing with ethnic risings in Guangxi as a background for the 1465 campaign. It then analyzes the strategy and tactics Qiu Jun and Han Yong respectively devised for the campaign itself and for postwar rehabilitation. It further analyzes Qiu Jun's strategy for long-term control of the Yao and Zhuang aborigines, which he devised a decade or more after the 1465 campaign. The paper argues that Qiu Jun and Han Yong each proposed their strategies in accordance with different interests: Qiu for those of Guangdong natives, Han for the campaigning soldiers. Han lacked a plan for the long-term peace of the area concerned. Unlike Qiu, who eventually proposed a self-government for the ethnic Yao and Zhuang and a cultural policy for drawing the aborigines to the government, Han relied on military suppression and the effect of deterrence. Nevertheless, Qiu's measures for rehabilitation were mostly ignored by the mainstream bureaucracy. During the two decades after the 1465 campaign, only his proposal for rewarding native officials who helped the government in the campaign was put into practice. The turmoil of the Gorge area continued as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]