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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
By the early sixteenth century, however, the situation had changed. Despite the famous raid on Ningpo by contending parties of Japanese ships sent to do trade by their regional daimyos in 1522, the pirates now were overwhelmingly Chinese rather than Japanese. Joanna Meskill's words on the impact of this policy merit repetition:

Concerned with security, the policy ignored the economic realities of coastal Fukien. The provincials therefore defied the ban from the start. Buying the silence of most of the local officials, they conducted their foreign trade as one vast smuggling operation. On the other hand, it also happened that merchants were harassed and blackmailed upon their return.

     Wang Zhi, the Xu brothers, Xiao Xing, Xu Hai, and the many other "pirate" leaders were merchants driven into piracy by official theft or trickery. They sailed their fleets of ships between Fukienese, Zhejiang, and Guangdong ports as well as to foreign countries, doing the same trade as any legal merchant. Unlike the many petty traders and slaves working as sailors on ordinary commercial ships, the crew on these pirate ships often came from the ranks of fishermen, dispossessed peasants, and the unpaid soldiers and sailors of the Ming state. They acquired a widespread reputation for violence, by raiding towns and villages alike, by invading far inland, and by defeating virtually all government troops. And they ended up protecting the voyages of friendly private ships and opposing those of opposite camps. In sum, they were a law unto themselves, since the law had unwisely sought to outlaw them.

     In the mid-sixteenth century, the Ming naval commissioner Zhu Wan was shocked at the weakness of the Ming and the common Fukienese disregard for imperial law, and so he sought to revive the ban with harsh sentencing for captured boats and pirates. But his draconian efforts, however effectively they dealt with pirate raids in the 1550s and early 1560s, eventually proved even more inappropriate for sixteenth century Fukien than the original ban had been for the southeast coast in the late fourteenth century.

     When the Ming officially in 1567 rescinded its ban against foreign trade by Chinese merchants, the waters off the southeast Chinese coast were already aswarm with Chinese merchants and pirates. Thus, the attention often given to Western boats in these centuries exaggerates their importance at this time.

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