This chapter focuses on three Japanese pilgrim monks who visited Northern Song China (960–1127) and had extensive interactions with Chinese emperors, court officials, and merchants. Monks’ diaries and other court records indicate that by the eleventh century, the authorities in both China and Japan were aware of the collaboration between monks and merchants and were even taking advantage of the newly formed network. Japanese aristocrats hoped to acquire desirable continental commodities via the monk-merchant cooperation, and Emperor Shenzong of the Song asked a Japanese pilgrim monk to bring his gifts and letter to the Japanese authorities.

Chapter 3 surveys Chinese fiscal institutions prior to the Qing, focusing on reforms implemented in the mid to late Ming. It makes two basic claims: First, the Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming all taxed much more aggressively than the Qing, and, in the Song and Yuan cases, dramatically so. Moreover, the Tang, Song, and Ming all implemented major reforms to their fiscal institutions around mid-dynasty, which generally led to substantial increases in the total volume of government income. Second, fiscal conservatives relied heavily on deontological moral arguments to combat these expansionist policies, but had limited success in doing so. In, for example, the later Ming, although moral condemnations of “pursuing profit” were visibly influential in court politics, they were largely ineffective in stemming the tide of fiscal reform. This was, at least in part, because fiscal conservatives were unable to clearly and powerfully predict the socioeconomic consequences of fiscal expansion, which limited their political persuasiveness until the final years of the dynasty.

The chapter outlines the colorful history of power and resistance in pre-British Hong Kong. Many communities involved in this part of Hong Kong’s history continued to play a part in the colonial and post-colonial struggles. The chapter also discusses how the rise of Hong Kong as an industrial and financial center fomented different social groups that were mobilized in the struggle for Hong Kong’s future by competing political forces at the height of the Cold War. Most significant is the rise of a new middle class in tandem with the transformation of Hong Kong’s economy into a finance and service-centered one in the 1970s and the 1980s. This new middle class, combined with the plurality of grassroots social movements, charted a course for the locally rooted democratic movement that continued to grow after the sovereignty handover, constituting the backbone of the resistance in its quest of greater autonomy of Hong Kong under Beijing’s rule.

The Tang dynasty (618–907) went into steep decline as a result of the Huang Chao Rebellion (874–84). The imperial government and the emperor himself became the tools of regional warlords, each maneuvering for his own power in an increasingly uncertain political and military milieu. These struggles were played out in the final decades of the Tang dynasty and beyond, lasting until the mid-point of the tenth century, when the various factions and power groupings of the late Tang had become so enervated by constant warfare and the deaths of the principal players that a new generation of ambitious power-seekers rose to the top. Steppe influence remained important in these conflicts and indeed, from the retrospective standpoint of the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) and then the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1272–1368), the intervening control of north China by the Chinese Song dynasty (960–1279) almost seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

Trained violence was a central forum for establishing the relationship between Chinese dynastic governments and their subjects. Because training in the use of violence (martial arts), along with access to weapons, determined an imperial subject’s effectiveness in carrying out violence in the service of the state, or in resisting the will of the state, imperial governments were always concerned to confine skills and weapons to those loyal to the state. Not only did different dynasties solve that problem differently at the beginning of their rule, the institutions governing training in violence changed over time in response to a government’s evolving society and external threats. Seen in this light, a state’s control over trained violence and access to weapons is a direct reflection of that state’s evaluation of its subjects’ loyalty and commitment to dynastic goals.