As he climbed the ladder of Chinese bureaucracy, he became in charge of several provinces as supreme commander, and was involved in conflicts such as the suppression of the Yao rebellions in the southwestern frontier and the defence of China from wokou pirates.
Despite winning a great victory against the pirates in 1555, he quickly fell from power by running afoul of the domineering clique of Yan Song and Zhao Wenhua, and was executed by the Jiajing Emperor later in the same year.
For decades, the jungly ravines of the Rattan Gorge had sheltered several thousand native brigands, who could easily spill out along the Qianjiang River to conduct raids.
[3] In the name of quelling local disturbances, Zhang Jing committed 51,000 troops to dislodge the Yao and the bandits from the gorge in 1539, and took up to 1,350 heads in the operation while receiving the surrender of three thousand men and women.
The operation brought some degree of Ming control to the Rattan Gorge area[3] and demonstrated Chinese military might to neighbouring Vietnam, itself on the verge of war with China.
Zhang Jing, being acutely aware of the situation on the ground, memorialized the throne against war, arguing that the manpower and resources of his territorial command could not support such a campaign.
[1] Zhang Jing went on to subdue the aboriginal tribes in western Guangxi and Hainan Island and was awarded the rank of minister of War and right censor-in-chief (右都御史) for his services.
[9] At this time the eastern seaboard was under attack by the pirates known as the "wokou", and Zhang Jing's assignment to the position was part of the Ming court's response to the onslaught.
A new supreme commander position was eventually created for the first time in this area, overseeing an unprecedented six coastal provinces: Shandong, the Southern Metropolitan Region, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, and Guangxi.
[12] Zhang Jing and his generals Lu Tang and Yu Dayou unleashed the newly arrived aboriginal troops on the pirates and took 1,900 heads in what became the greatest Ming victory so far in the anti-wokou campaign.
Despite the unanimous decision of the three grand secretaries, numerous commentators blamed his death on Yan Song and Zhao Wenhua, who had become reviled figures in Ming historiography.