social, demographic and economic situation of the late Ch'ien-lung and Chia-ch'ing periods led to an intensification of petty piracy as more and more gangs came into being, but not to any transformation of the phenomenon to a large scale or higher level of organization.
Thus we must next ask whether the growth in piracy was owing to outside patronage or support as was often the case with piracy throughout the rest of the world. In the first instance, the answer is "yes", for the immediate growth of piracy in China can be traced to the Tayson Rebellion in Vietnam and the creation of a privateer fleet by the Quang Trung Emperor (Nguyen Quang Trung). As a result of Tayson patronage, pirates, no longer forced to spend all of their energy on survival, could turn their attention to organization which became larger, more complex, and more permanent.
Whereas pirate gangs of the pre-Tayson era had consisted of a score of men and a couple of vessels, by 1796 associations of a hundred men, and a dozen junks were not uncommon. Hierarchies comprised of patron-client relationships extending two, and sometimes even three, layers gradually appeared, and asylum in Vietnam allowed pirate leaders extraordinary opportunities for getting acquainted and cooperating in joint ventures. In creating privateers, the Tayson legalized piracy and thus radically transformed the status of its underworld practitioners who were instantly elevated from "scourges of the sea" to sailors in the king's navy. The result was a significant escalation in the scale of piracy.
However, the heyday of the Tayson was short and their dethronement in 1802 left the Chinese pirates bereft once more of either a base or patronage. No longer were their activities regarded as "legitimate” in any sense of the word and never would they be so again, yet, patronage notwithstanding, the pirates had come under Tayson sponsorship nowhere close to what would ultimately become their maximum growth. Thus, the Tayson era can be viewed as a kind of transition phase which allowed petty pirates to take the first and most crucial step in their own transformation. Yet, the period of the pirates' greatest strength still lay ahead and it came, not while they were allied to the Vietnamese, but rather after they had been forced out on their own into a hostile world in which they were regarded as the proverbial "enemies of all mankind”.