Chapter 1672: Rotten Assimilation Policy

Huangyangping, situated in the heart of the Yulin Circuit and under the jurisdiction of Xiazhou, lay roughly a hundred and twenty li from the prefectural seat. On the edge of the desert, its terrain was chiefly sandy ridges and highland, supplemented by numerous ponds and lakes nearby, which had made it a major settlement area of the Tangut people.

The Tangut tribe centered on Huangyangping was the Yeli tribe, a major Tangut clan. Tracing the origins of the Tangut, over the past several centuries there had been two large-scale migrations inland. First, with the rise of the Tibetans, pressured by the Tang-Tibetan conflict, they moved to the Qin-Long region; later, after the An Lushan Rebellion, when the Tibetans occupied Qin and Long, they shifted eastward again, settling long-term in Xia, Sui, Ling, Qing, and Yan. By the end of the Tang, with the rise of the Tuoba Li clan, they had fully become a formidable military province in the northwest.

Through the Tangut people's transformations, several large tribal confederations had formed: the "Dongshan tribe," dwelling east of Long Mountain in Qingzhou and dominated by the Tuoba clan; the "Pingxia tribe," inhabiting the Ling, Yan, and Qingzhou regions; and the "Liufu tribe," led chiefly by the Yeli clan.

Of course, with the rise of the Great Han and the forceful return of the Han army and Han people, the original course of history had been thoroughly disrupted, and the Tangut people's path to ascendancy had been completely broken. Today's Tangut tribes had been split apart by the court into fragments — the upper-class elites were harshly suppressed and controlled, while the lower-ranking tribesmen were scattered and resettled. Over twenty years, no fewer than a hundred thousand Tangut people had been relocated to Shanyang, the Yan Mountains, Andong, and even their ancestral lands.

Yet these measures, after all, only treated the symptoms, not the root. The Tangut in the Xia-Sui region still lived in clustered settlements of large and small tribes. Though the influence of the upper-level chieftains and leaders had been vigorously eliminated, a vast residual influence remained.

And as the court's ethnic policies grew ever harsher, ethnic contradictions deepened continuously, and the Tangut people's discontent with the court kept mounting. By the twenty-first year of Kaibao, matters had reached a point beyond easy remedy.

The court's — or rather Emperor Liu's — original intentions were good: to achieve the assimilation and absorption of the Tangut people, thoroughly resolve the northwest Tangut problem, and maintain the stability of the regime. The coercive and severe nature of the policies may have borne Emperor Liu's distinct personal stamp, but without toughness, they simply could not be implemented.

Only, many policies run into problems precisely at the execution level, and the Yulin Circuit was no exception. To achieve the goal of ethnic assimilation, the best approach was cultural eradication and the establishment of a new cultural identity. The central government had also issued directives, ordering the local authorities of Yulin to promote Chinese characters, the Chinese language, Chinese dress, and Chinese rites among the Tangut.

However, the thinking was good, but some practical problems simply could not be resolved. To genuinely implement those policies formulated by the court required vast amounts of manpower, material resources, and financial outlay — all of which local governments lacked. Even with certain policy incentives and corresponding fund allocations from the court, it still amounted to a drop in the bucket against several hundred thousand Tangut people.

Furthermore, local officials harbored a fear of difficulty, a mentality of lazy governance, and no shortage of corruption and graft — all of which added further obstacles and difficulty to the execution level.

Still, with the court's authority at its zenith, they dared not openly defy policy directives from the capital. So they did what they did — whether they actually accomplished it was another matter entirely.

Under such circumstances, the local authorities selectively advanced and implemented the court's policies. The hard side was handled simply and crudely, going through the motions; the soft side was neglected, delayed, or even deliberately ignored.

For instance, the suppression of chieftains and elites was carried out with great vigor by the authorities, because wealth could be dug out of those Tangut leaders and profits extracted. The breaking up and relocation of tribes was likewise executed thoroughly — those who refused could simply be suppressed by military force, and once relocated beyond the borders, it became someone else's problem.

As for the Tangut who were not relocated, they were also split and reorganized according to court requirements, but these were merely unpopular personnel shuffles that changed nothing about their settlement patterns or way of life.

In the early period, they had to exert themselves, and there was supervision providing some constraint. Later on, except around the major cities and towns, in the vast remaining areas, the work of transformation, reform, and changing customs was basically left to drift.

As for establishing schools to teach Tangut children Chinese characters and the Chinese language, that was confined to within the towns. Sending special personnel to teach at Tangut settlement clusters was likewise done at only a scattering of points — just for show, to pass inspections.

The subjective reason for this state of affairs was the local bureaucrats' delays and buck-passing; the objective reason was that the localities lacked educated men, and even where they existed, no one was willing to go burn themselves out in Tangut settlements contributing their learning.

Due to various factors, by the twenty-first year of Kaibao, the multiple ethnic assimilation policies the court had formulated in the past, after less than a decade of implementation, were basically declared a failure — especially in the Yulin region, where they had degenerated into mere formality, leaving only an empty shell.

Of course, there were successes too — the Xi people of the Yan Mountains' northern circuit, for instance, and the Khitan within the borders who had settled down. Their taming had gone smoothly, thanks to the successful northward spread of Central Plains culture during the Liao era.

The Yulin region naturally had its own particularities — the particularity of the region, and the particularity of the peoples. For the rotten state of affairs that had developed, the decision-making level bore responsibility, and the execution level had to carry a big share of the blame as well. Of course, the Tangut people's stubbornness and xenophobia were also key factors.

And the sluggish performance of the Yulin local bureaucrats reflected certain problems — they were not truly receptive to those court policies either.

They probably felt it was too much fuss. In many people's thinking, for these submitted Hu barbarian peoples, there were precedents to follow — just implement the loose-rein policy, divide and rule, and be done with it. Why dream up so many newfangled schemes and stir up trouble?

Up above, you offend the chieftains and leaders; down below, you harass the tribesmen and common folk; and in the middle, the bureaucrats find it troublesome and hard to manage — it truly won popular support. As the powers-that-be locally, what they wanted was stability — no disturbances during their tenure. The court's forcible push of assimilation policies genuinely added a great deal of trouble for them. They had come to be officials, not to sit on a stove.

The Tangut unrest in Xiazhou back then had thoroughly awakened the bureaucrats of the Yulin Circuit, because the man stripped of office and rank over that disturbance was Liu Chengxi — a bona fide imperial relative. When trouble broke out, even he was not spared, let alone other officials from outside.

However, what the bureaucrats had been awakened to was that no more disturbances could be allowed — at least, no unrest of a rebellious nature. To that end, some local officials even went so far as to cover things up, or even make compromises with the Tangut. In their view, as long as you don't cause trouble for the authorities, the authorities won't cause trouble for you — everyone lives in peace.

Of course, not all officials were like that; some were devoted to their duties and actively took action. But whether in approach or method, they were rigid and inflexible. Likewise, in order to reduce trouble, they favored one-size-fits-all measures — tough, overbearing, even unreasonable.

There were even more egregious cases — some officials and military officers, seizing the opportunity of the court's reorganization of the Tangut tribes, profited from it, wantonly enslaving and violating Tangut tribesmen and squeezing out their wealth.

All sorts of chaos, in all its forms. Twenty years after the Xia-Sui region had returned to the court's fold, the local situation had already become thoroughly rotten. The Tangut people were full of grievances, contradictions kept intensifying, and restless unease kept spreading — like a pile of dry firewood, just waiting for a single spark to ignite it.

And this was only the problem of the Tangut and the Hu peoples. The local bureaucrats and the Han strongmen who had migrated to the frontier were also rife with contradictions. In such an atmosphere, people's hearts were in turmoil, thoughts turning to change.

The court was not entirely unaware of the local situation. Both the insightful men of the region and the reports of the Wude Office had sounded warnings.

However, after all, it was far away. Whether Emperor Liu or the chancellors of the Hall of State Affairs, they only took it as some negative side effects during policy implementation. Thinking back to the Qianyou era, the many policies the court had formulated had stirred up no small amount of trouble — even major rebellions. How severe could the so-called instability in Yulin Circuit really get?

It was not until last year, with the outbreak of the Kara-Khanid envoy case and the exposure of the Mingsha bandits, that the court finally attached sufficient importance to the disorder in the northwest's public security. A major campaign against bandits and robbers in the northwest, though fruitful in its harvest, had only achieved a surface-level strike — it had not cured the root.

As various investigations into the northwest unfolded, the true face hidden beneath the curtain of the Kaibao golden age finally revealed the tip of the iceberg.

While Emperor Liu was entangled in internal court affairs, and court ministers were absorbed by the turbulent political situation, before they had time to implement comprehensive rectification and governance policies for the northwest, Li Jiqian was the first to raise the banner of revolt.

There was no doubt that Li Jiqian was the spark that ignited the northwest's chaos. Of course, the influence of this spark was not so great in the early stage — it even seemed fragile. After all, the might of the Great Han court remained formidable; even those full of grievances, few dared rashly raise the banner of rebellion like Li Jiqian and openly defy the court.

But likewise, the stirring of restlessness was inevitable. Without the support of Tangut forces, how could over a thousand Tangut tribesmen have followed Li Jiqian in taking up arms? And in the process of Li Jiqian's defeat and flight deep into the Gobi, he had certainly not lacked cover from local tribes.

The Yeli tribe, for instance, due to its geographical position, had become a key target for scrutiny by the Xiazhou authorities. Indeed, no evidence was even needed — it could be conclusively determined that the Yeli tribe must have had some connection with the rebel Li Jiqian.

Thus, over the past six months, the Yeli tribe's days had grown even harder. Shangguan Zheng, the Prefectural Administrator of Xiazhou, ordered the Yeli tribesmen to inform on one another, with rewards for those who reported. At the same time, the garrison troops were mobilized by the military command to conduct cordon searches. And with directives arriving from the Eastern Capital, backed by the central government's endorsement, they acted with even more unbridled audacity...