This chapter surveys Qiu’s ideas about financial administration, drawing on Section 4, “Administering State Finances” (Chapters 20–35) of the Supplement. The chapter discusses Qiu’s recommendations for regular and light taxation centred on the land tax and how to control government expenditure, before turning to his view of the state’s relationship with the market and merchants. The state must only involve itself in the market in a limited way, with the exception of moderating the supply of grain, since it is a basic necessity for life and the fundamental source of wealth. A brief overview of policies illustrates Qiu’s support for commerce. Throughout, the chapter also considers how Qiu’s ideas might have reflected or influenced actual practice. While there is some indication that his proposals may have been implemented, by the late Ming and especially from the later Wanli era onwards, the prudent financial administration that Qiu advocated did not exist.

This chapter traces Qiu Jun’s use of Classical ritual texts, legal debates, and historical cases to discuss the political, emotional, and ritual dilemma of filial revenge, the ancient obligation of a child to avenge a parent’s murder. Legal and ritual precedents are given in order to find a balance between the Confucian tenets embodied in the central virtue of filial piety and ensuing ritual obligations, personal feeling, and popular sympathy, with legal sanctions and imperial power, while also elevating filial revenge to a cosmic principle. His chosen texts and commentaries urge leniency and sympathy and for individual filial revenge cases to be considered at the highest level. I argue that there is a palpable unease at the heart of Qiu’s discourses, in that his lifelong attachment to ritual studies and his filial piety complicate his responses as a loyal minister in handling the perennial problem of filial revenge.

The conclusion briefly examines the impact of the Ichigo Offensive on Nationalist military provisioning infrastructures. Although US aid and advice resulted in logistical overhauls for specified divisions, improvements to provisioning and standards of living within the Chinese armies were limited in both scope and degree. Even after Japan’s abrupt surrender, grain retained its political and emotive connotations to remain an effective propaganda trope in the Chinese civil war. To feed its armies and sustain the war against Japan, the Nationalists had systematically extracted resources at civilian expense, a reality which gave the post-1945 CCP significant political leverage. In World War II’s longest-standing theater, food mattered most – to rival governments and regimes, to armies, and to civilians.

This chapter analyzes Qiu Jun’s advice for building the Ming army into an effective force capable of defending a vast empire. It begins with an introductory analysis of some of his army-building proposals, such as emphasizing the importance of military matters, rejecting the staging of unjustified wars, maintaining a relatively small but highly trained army, restoring the ancient system of training farmers into paramilitary troops, respecting the military and its members while upholding the principle of civil supremacy, conducting military examinations to recruit officers and training cadets in military academies, and stressing the significance of firearms. The chapter ends with a tentative discussion of his influence on the expansion of the Ming military during and after Qiu Jun’s time. It further argues that some of Qiu’s suggestions, especially his objection to wars of aggression and expansion, are still relevant more than five centuries after his death.

Chapter 16 of DYB introduces a range of relief policies to succour the victims of natural disasters that Qiu Jun considers should be developed by the Ming state. His references go back to the Rites of Zhou and include a significant amount of Tang and Song precedents. He particularly insists on preparedness measures and on the pre-eminent role of the state to store the surpluses produced by society and redistribute them in years of famine – hence, for example, his reservations regarding public granaries run by local notables – and, more generally, to preserve the stability of local communities confronted with subsistence crises. If Qiu’s recommendations do not seem to have had much impact, if any, on Ming relief policies, several of them anticipate the setting up of a centrally controlled and fairly efficient system of famine relief under the Qing.

This chapter studies civilian grain management agencies and the logistical branch of Nationalist China’s armed forces, the Supply and Baggage troops. It highlights two key policy shifts: provisioning armies in kind, and centralizing and collecting land tax in kind. While these changes shielded army consumers from inflation to some degree, overlapping mandates among multiple agencies produced confusion throughout the war zones, and the Supply and Baggage troops were plagued by both inadequate training and a historical disdain for logistics. However, blanket accusations of ineptitude obscure the fact that, despite large variations in climate, infrastructure and politics across Free China, these institutions fulfilled their basic task: collecting and circulating enough grain to keep the Nationalists in the war. The chapter also uncovers details about the everyday endeavors of low-level grain management officials and military transport personnel, the individuals who implemented provisioning plans but who remain nameless and forgotten in the literature. Moreover, despite systemic weaknesses, a cadre of experts worked to elevate the status of logistics within Nationalist armies.