ABSTRACT
The Southern Song (as this period of Song rule is usually called) military situation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries accelerated and deepened the growing split between the imperial government and local power-holders, a progression which has often been misunderstood as a civil-military split within Chinese society. Local military forces were larger, more important, and more powerful in southern China than they had ever been in the eleventh century, but civil officials were far more dominant at court. The court, which had never been much populated by generals, either on the throne or among the ministers, was extremely suspicious of the army and desperately dependent upon it. Military men, who arose from local militias that the government assimilated into its regular armies, or from northern Chinese who immigrated south, were shifted to the highly militarized border with the Jurchen and then Mongols. Civil officials were drawn from the southern local literati through the exam system, a system they had increasingly come to dominate even before the fall of Kaifeng, and tended to be less emotionally tied to north China. Southern literati understood the importance of retaking the north for the dynasty’s political credibility, but they weighed the risks of failure more heavily. Since the court could never explicitly abandon the idea of recapturing the north, there was an inherent split between the “national” interest of the court and local interests of its officials.2
