Abstract
This edited volume reinforces an emerging scholarly consensus on the continuities that connect a historical maritime China and the role of China in global history. It suggests that ‘long before the Great Divergence between the West and the East in the eighteenth century and prior to China’s Admiral Zheng He’s worldwide explorations in the fifteenth century, the Chinese had carried out various cultural and economic activities around the world, many years prior to Columbus sailing outside Europe’ (p.16). Arranged thematically in three parts (‘Perspectives on the World’, ‘China’s Maritime World: From Ancient to Modern Times’, and ‘Migrations and the Travel of Ideas’), the volume contains 12 chapters or case studies that seek to ‘catalyse new academic initiatives and to raise awareness about the gaps to be filled in research into the rich but still largely neglected role of China in world/global history’ (p.17). The overall picture presented by the volume resists the conventional characterization of China as a closed, insular empire that had turned its back on the seas.
Part I consists of two short essays that set the stage for the volume, offer theses with which some of the following chapters will engage, and suggest larger works in progress. The volume’s key objectives are largely fulfilled in Part II, whose seven chapters present highly original arguments – some of which have been recently published in individual contributors’ own monographs – that privilege a global perspective and transnational connections. By using a truly impressive gamut of sources such as archaeological artefacts, bronze inscriptions, classical texts, and oracle bones, Chinhau Lei suggests that organized forms of inland water transport in early China (c. 1600–221 BCE) laid the foundation of seafaring activities in Chinese history. The waterways and riverine system built by feuding southern Chinese states to resist the economic and military encroachments of northern China, traditionally the territorial base of the imperial centre, might explain why subsequent land-based Chinese courts or empires adopted ambivalent, perhaps even suspicious, attitudes toward maritime activities. Kin Sum (Sammy) Li examines recent archaeological excavations to show that bronze drums, jade pendants, mirrors, and pots had been circulated across the South China Sea since as early as 2,000 BCE, filling an important lacuna in the scholarly literature, namely the lack of a comprehensive study of China’s cultural exchanges with Southeast Asia prior to Zheng He’s (1371–1433) Ming-dynasty naval expeditions to the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. Although Han Xiaorong’s discussion of Vietnam’s role in China’s foreign relations deviates slightly from the volume theme (it projects the Chinese and Vietnamese nations back into the past and emphasizes the continuities between past and present Sino-Vietnamese relations), it offers a nuanced analysis of Vietnam’s importance to China’s 21st Century Maritime Silk Road initiative. Kuo-tung Chen’s short survey of Chinese navigators and shipping technologies from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries attributes China’s subsequent lag in navigational techniques to the imperial state’s increasing ambivalence toward maritime activities. Ronald C. Po diverts attention away from southeast Chinese port cities – a preoccupation shared among China historians – to the Bohai maritime zone off the north-eastern coast of China, which was thronged with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, and Russian traders and constituted a kind of ‘proto-globalization’. Philip Thai explores how Nationalist China sought to expunge the unequal treaties signed with foreign powers during the Qing dynasty in order to fight coastal smuggling, expand state capacity, and recover national sovereignty. Donna Brunero demonstrates how the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, a product of the unequal treaties and an institution responsible for collecting duties and tariffs, sponsored research and published writings on China.
While Part II discusses culture, diplomacy, law, navigation, smuggling, trade, and transport, the three chapters in Part III focus on migrants and refugees. Glen Peterson’s highly stimulating chapter highlights how international law and the global regime that governed the movement of migrants, refugees, and indentured labourers had created or complicated the classifications of Chinese persons in twentieth-century China as well as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, North America, and Southeast Asia, where most of the overseas Chinese had come to settle. As Peterson suggests, postcolonial states have perpetuated the discriminatory or exclusionary colonial practices against the ethnic Chinese populations and limited political participation by the Chinese in the name of nation building. Catherine S. Chan introduces how the Portuguese diaspora in British Hong Kong, perceived as socially inferior Creoles by British colonial administrators and, to a lesser extent, Chinese residents in status-conscious Hong Kong, sought to ‘dis-identify’ with being Eurasian, Goanese, Hong Kongese, Macanese, or even Portuguese so that they could claim to be British or European. However, Chan’s fascinating chapter does not describe direct Chinese encounters with or perceptions of the Portuguese diaspora, and its relevance to the volume theme is not apparent. Yung Ying-yue offers a personal reflection on diaspora and the idea of Chineseness by narrating her own extended and truly global family’s migration to Oceania, Taiwan, North America, and Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, by narrowly associating Chineseness with close-mindedness, conservatism, ancestor worship, and other ‘values’, she risks essentializing Chineseness as a fixed set of characteristics and traditions that do not represent the complex everyday realities for many Chinese, especially those who are not as privileged as Yung’s family. Seen more positively, Part III illuminates the impact of class, ethnicity, and politics on the identity formation of Chinese dispersed around the world.
Overall, the volume has successfully historicized China’s engagements with the maritime world, but its claim that China had played a global historical role may have been exaggerated. The geographical scope of its chapters seldom extends beyond the South China Sea; the flow of silver bullion from Spanish America to Ming-Qing China, for instance, is surprisingly unmentioned throughout the volume. Even if we were to consider the chapters that discuss China’s involvement in Western-dominated migrant and refugee regimes, we might end up falling back onto the outmoded impact-response paradigm of Chinese historiography, under which significant changes in China would not have occurred without foreign intervention or mediation – China, in such narratives, was a mere recipient, perhaps even victim, of economic, legal, or social ideas and innovations borrowed from abroad. The volume does little to challenge Eurocentric and national paradigms that have obscured the links or relationships that are uncovered within its pages. The historiographical dilemma of accentuating China’s position in global history without having to reference the West or frame China’s difference from or equivalence to the West has remained unresolved. The empirically grounded case studies have thus undertheorized the development of China’s maritime activities and broader worldview after the mid-nineteenth century. As a result, some questions linger. How did Chinese literati or political thinkers perceive China and its overseas engagements through the ages and had anything prompted a reconsideration of such links? What did foreign observers write about Sino-foreign exchanges? In other words, we know more about what historical actors did than about what they thought. For the benefit of the reader, it might be useful if the volume could develop new conceptual tools or recommend those available to truly ‘globalize’ maritime China and expand our knowledge of how China influenced the terms of diplomacy, trade, and cultural exchange beyond the South China Sea. The lack of an index makes it difficult for readers to locate what they might have missed after or while reading the volume.
Quibbles aside, this volume is a valuable addition to the growing literature on maritime China, the East Asian region, and the South China Sea, to name but three fields. Its main arguments are uncontroversial, and its sources wed well with the purposes for which they are employed. Eminently readable and well edited, it deserves to be read by both specialists and students of Sino-foreign exchanges from the past to the present.