Wang Yang-ming failed to gain acceptance for his philosophy.  His disciples also failed to establish his doctrine in China, because it served the interests of an individual despot against those of the gentry as a class, and the middle class, which might have formed a counterweight against them, was not yet politically ripe for the seizure of the opportunity here offered to it.  In Japan, however, Wang’s doctrine gained many followers, because it admirably served the dictatorial state system which had developed in that country.  Incidentally, Chiang Kai-shek in those years in which he showed Fascist tendencies, also got interested in Wang Yang-ming.

13 Foreign relations in the sixteenth century

The feeble emperor Wu Tsung died in 1521, after an ineffective reign, without leaving an heir.  The clique then in power at court looked among the possible pretenders for the one who seemed least likely to do anything, and their choice fell on the fifteen-year-old Shih Tsung, who was made emperor.  The forty-five years of his reign were filled in home affairs with intrigues between the cliques at court, with growing distress in the country, and with revolts on a larger and larger scale.  Abroad there were wars with Annam, increasing raids by the Japanese, and, above all, long-continued fighting against the famous Mongol ruler Yen-ta, from 1549 onward.  At one time Yen-ta reached Peking and laid siege to it.  The emperor, who had no knowledge of affairs, and to whom Yen-ta had been represented as a petty bandit, was utterly dismayed and ready to do whatever Yen-ta asked; in the end he was dissuaded from this, and an agreement was arrived at with Yen-ta for state-controlled markets to be set up along the frontier, where the Mongols could dispose of their goods against Chinese goods on very favourable terms.  After further difficulties lasting many years, a compromise was arrived at:  the Mongols were earning good profits from the markets, and in 1571 Yen-ta accepted a Chinese title.  On the Chinese side, this Mongol trade, which continued in rather different form in the Manchu epoch, led to the formation of a local merchant class in the frontier province of Shansi, with great experience in credit business; later the first Chinese bankers came almost entirely from this quarter.

After a brief interregnum there came once more to the throne a ten-year-old boy, the emperor Shen Tsung (reign name Wan-li; 1573-1619).  He, too, was entirely under the influence of various cliques, at first that of his tutor, the scholar Chang Chue-chan.  About the time of the death, in 1582, of Yen-ta we hear for the first time of a new people.  In 1581 there had been unrest in southern Manchuria.  The Mongolian tribal federation of the Tuemet attacked China, and there resulted collisions not only with the Chinese but between the different tribes living there.  In southern and central Manchuria were remnants of the Tungus Juchen.  The Mongols had