In this engaging book, John Dardess accurately assesses the difficulty of his object: “To analyze a collapse is a fairly straightforward challenge. To explain how a system such as the Ming survived for close to three centuries is not so easy” (p. 61). Indeed, the more that is written about the Ming dynasty's many flaws, the harder it is to explain its longevity. “There is no hiding the fact,” Dardess acknowledges, “that there was a crazed and bloody edge to Ming politics. But that is not the whole story” (p. 74). Dardess's achievement is that he has condensed the whole story into a neat book under 150 pages long.

Dardess's five chapters deal with the Ming's frontiers, emperors, governance, literati, and outlaws. Unsurprisingly, it is the second chapter that provides most of the “crazed and bloody edge.” Dardess presents Ming autocracy itself as nearly the only stable element of a political history replete with violent policy shifts, purges, and coups. No subscriber to the “Great Ancestor Idea,” namely the theory that dynastic founder Zhu Yuanzhang (temple name Taizu) bequeathed upon his successors an iron-bound set of government institutions, Dardess sees Taizu's reign as experimental, inconsistent, and ultimately unsuccessful at ridding the country of the corruption he saw everywhere. Dardess also emphasizes that policy was almost invariably reformulated thereafter upon the ascension of each new emperor. The Tumu incident of 1449 is an important turning point in Dardess's narrative, because it marks a change in who initiated these often-dramatic policy reversals, from the emperors themselves (before Tumu) to cliques of palace functionaries and scholar-officials (afterward). Dardess does not go so far as to say that the emperors of the mature Ming were pawns—and he maintains that the Wanli and Chongzhen emperors of the late Ming were in fact hands-on administrators—but it seems clear from his synopsis that many of them were walking power vacuums, into which many ambitious scholar-officials, organized as factions, were drawn. The reader may conclude from this chapter that violent political faction is the inevitable result of an autocracy without an active autocrat, following the pattern of the Qin dynasty after the death of the First Emperor.

If, as Dardess concludes, the secret of the Ming's success had little to do with its emperors (pp. 49, 59), then what was it? Dardess lists a few geostrategic factors, such as the Ming's lack of powerful neighbors and the great size of its army (pp. 61, 66), but the most compelling part of his answer is found in the chapter on governance. Simply put, the Ming intelligentsia, given a stake in the system by the civil service examination regimen, became passionately interested in serving it, and offered copious plans and meditations on a variety of practical problems, in remarkable detail and free from ideological taint. In fact, the scholar-officials were so important to the functioning of the Ming system that, in effect, they were the system, devising ad hoc, geographically-specific methods of administration, in lieu of (and sometimes in spite of) comprehensive, empire-wide procedures. The single-whip fiscal reform is one example of this sort of spontaneous, decentralized innovation (p. 73). Many assorted papers on governance were, of course, preserved in such compendia as the Huang Ming jingshi wenbian (Ming Documents on Statecraft) and the Guochao xianzheng lu (Learned Documentary Records of the Ming Dynasty), and although these collections were assembled late in the dynasty, they contain evidence of concerned statecraft from all Ming reigns (pp. 75–6). Dardess samples this corpus with interesting accounts (pp. 77–84) of the careers of three officials, Zheng Shunchen (1515–92), Lu Guangzu (1521–97), and Ma Lu (1477–1544), who devised imaginative policies in the realms of local security, taxation, and justice. Ominously, all three fell afoul of factional intrigue, but the point—and, again, the point of Dardess's whole inquiry—is not how the system turned on them but how they, and so many like them, served the system as conscientiously as they did. Ming scholar-officials made the dynasty work for over two and a half centuries until the political atmosphere became so corrosive that further devotion was impossible.

The other chapters, though having less of a direct bearing, perhaps, on Dardess's main thesis, are nonetheless informative and interesting. Dardess describes Ming frontier policy as surprisingly flexible and effective, and it is especially intriguing how the dynasty granted or withheld the designation guo, meaning state or nation, in the cases of various non-Han peoples (pp. 2, 5). The chapter on the literati recounts the evolution of Ming Neo-Confucianism from Wang Yangming onward and incorporates many recent exciting additions to the field of intellectual history.

In sum, Dardess's focus on why the Ming dynasty endured, as opposed to why it failed, is both refreshing and necessary. It may also be a little sobering, for it shows that arbitrary, violent, repressive autocracy, enjoying the faithful support of its privileged victims, can work just fine. Ming China will inspire the student and challenge the specialist and is thus a very positive contribution.