In addition I finally watched the entire Once Upon a Time In China series for the first time in completeness rather than just stopping at the 3rd movie the last few times I seen the film over the past decades. The 4th movie had Jet Li on the mission to capture the pirates and he doesn't simply use the police but gets an entire militia and round up 50 volunteers so they can capture one of the heads through abn unexpected ship counterattack. He then uses the captured pirate leader to gather intel and attack the pirate base with an elite cadre of volunteers and then continues holding the elader hostage awaiting for the rest of the pirate fleet to attack the enarest town in retaliation for ransacking their unprotected base and in expectation they will try to free their leader by attacking the local prison. He has the complete militia force of over 200 to fortify the town and a big battle takes plae as over 400 pirates besiege the town.......
So this makes me wonder........ Were pirates so huge a deal that not only do local militaries like Jet Li's character in Once Upon A Time in China have to mobilize a military force to defend against them but even a brilliant military mind like JUlius Caesar have to be sent in sometimes to battle them?
Piracy was a constant problem for the Chinese, particularly during the Ming and Qing dynasties. This was driven in large part by restrictions on overseas trade - pirates on the Chinese coast were smugglers first, shipping goods out of the country and selling them to buyers overseas, with Portugal and Japan being the primary customers. And much like the ancient Mediterranean pirates, they had considerable influence among the coastal gentry and the coastal poor, the latter of whom being their primary pool of recruits. Their second major source of income was from tribute and taxes on coastal communities, after all. And they even enjoyed official protection from both the Chinese state (when they were willing to acknowledge the Emperor's supremacy) and European naval forces in the region, pirates frequently being used as mercenaries in naval clashes between Europeans and the Chinese.
And yes, the pirates could grow very powerful. The interregnum between the Ming and Qing gave the region some of the most powerful pirate fleets the world has ever seen; Zheng Zilong at his peak commanded 400 ships, tens of thousands of men (mostly Chinese, but also Dutch and Portuguese deserters and disaffected Japanese soldiers as well), and bullied the Ming Navy so badly that he got the Ming southern fleet to surrender, controlled the entire South China Sea, and eventually got the Ming begging to bring him into their service. Zheng Yi and his wife Zheng Yi Sao, during the Qing Dynasty, commanded a similarly-sized fleet, and were also undefeated by the Qing - the Qing had to beg local European ships for help and the pirates wound up surrendering in comfort to the Qing.