A Chinese perspective on filling the big ‘blue hole’

Despite China’s long and rich history of all kind of maritime activities, Chinese historians have only rarely engaged with maritime history on a professional level. While a limited number of topics – such as the Zheng He treasure fleets – have been covered in detail by academic historians, very little of China’s maritime history has been the subject of professional historical analysis. ¹ Chinese historians, moreover, have seldom engaged with their respective international academic communities. With China’s academia having such a weak tradition of marine historical studies, the ‘blue hole’ is extraordinarily large. Reasons for such a lack of research and participation in the international maritime history research community are manifold, with language one of the most obvious obstacles.

Apart from the South China Sea, most of the environments in which Chinese maritime activities have taken place are naturally dark or muddy yellow rivers, lakes and canals, or the country’s immediate coastal waters. Although there were the ports and cities around the South China Sea, which really is blue water, they were far away from the Chinese central government, which has been located in Beijing over the last 600 years. The human societies that inhabited the coastal areas along the South China Sea were always considered by central government and its related societal elites as culturally backward and barbarian. Consequently, they received little attention from the official institutions and were usually excluded by traditional historical narrative. Furthermore, Chinese historical records, which were always held by the central government, contain little material about these coastal societies and thus it is no wonder that they have not featured prominently in Chinese historiography.

Whereas blue sea might have been a strange or even widely unknown concept to the Chinese state in the past, this was not true, of course, of those who lived in remote coastal areas. Here, local people and communities were always connected to the marine environment and engaged in all kinds of maritime activities, even if they have left little evidence of such engagement, thereby presenting a substantial challenge to historians seeking to conduct solid research grounded in historical source analysis. After the great voyages of Cheng Ho, the perception of the wider marine trade network that connected Chinese to southeast Asian societies was strengthened by businessmen. To a great extent these famous voyages confirmed that Chinese civilization was at the centre and top of the world at this time, even if it was somewhat disconnected from activities in other parts of the world, notably the Baltic, North Sea and North Atlantic, which were rapidly developing into the main areas of global maritime activity during the early modern period. Chinese efforts to explore the sea or the ocean – in particular, the various voyages of the so-called Treasure Fleets under Cheng Ho’s general command – were essentially a substantial extension of central authority to the marine realm. The empire, however, endeavoured to create a marine order, but hardly planned to control the marine realm. Businessmen in Fujian and Guangdong therefore took advantage of the reputation that these voyages established for the Chinese in the western Pacific and eastern India, and they built a great commercial network, which was not only an economic success, but which also changed the lives of ordinary Chinese people in coastal communities. These stories were widely disseminated in novels from the late 1600s. The blue ocean was an important source of food, building materials, and adornment. Nevertheless, this development remains a difficult research area for historians, due to the lack of primary source materials, notably official documentation. Stories found in novels might provide a basic layer of information about this development, but are lacking in terms of critical sources of evidence for research projects that would allow comparative analyses with Western maritime histories.

Since the Opium War of 1840, the marine environment became a scene of danger. While maritime affairs could be largely neglected by the Chinese government up until this point, now they had to be recognized, for European nations and Japan were very obviously using trans-oceanic trade to establish and increase their influence on China. Consequently, the oceans, and more importantly foreign maritime activities, were increasingly considered to be a threat. The oceans became a gateway through which foreign power penetrated China, and a symbol of the mounting national and racial crises that were afflicting the country: ‘we will be destroyed by the Marine Powers’ emerged as a dominant refrain. So even though the ocean was still utilized as a resource, Chinese people were more concerned with navigating a way to survive the competition of marine powers. To China, until very recently, the economic and cultural assets of the sea were eclipsed by military and political issues.

The maritime history of China is diverse and very different to the maritime history of Western nations, as well as being distinct from the maritime history of other nations in southeast Asia. Research into such a maritime history of China is only at the beginning, at best. We need a more comprehensive and diverse understanding of the Chinese ocean and its interactive relationship with Chinese society. We need to build a framework that discerns the different perceptions between central government and local marine societies towards the blue hole. In addition, while such maritime history research will need to focus primarily on the inner Chinese aspects of maritime history, it also needs to be understood that an understanding of Chinese maritime history can only be reached in cooperation with maritime history research around the globe. Chinese historians therefore welcome the opportunity to discuss the future of international maritime history research, and it is without question that future generations of Chinese (maritime) historians will be able and willing to contribute to international comparative maritime history research, as well as conducting research into domestic Chinese maritime history. In other words, (maritime) historians are actively beginning to work on closing the blue hole in Chinese history.