The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 12: Republican China, 1912-1949, Part 1
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MARITIME CHINA AS A MINOR TRADITION 13
ment that positioned troops and tax collectors, while the seaways until
recent times were controllable only as the configuration of sea-coasts
permitted. In fine, the sea rewarded even small-scale enterprise and
initiative, the continent facilitated bureaucratic government. The latter
could add control of the sea to its control of the land only by developing
naval power, which to be effective required a comparatively great invest-
ment in equipment and technology.
Such elementary factors, and the lack of rival naval powers nearby,
led the early Chinese state to neglect the sea and leave it to the use of
private bodies. The junk trade along the China coast and to South-East
Asia grew up in private hands. Unlike the Inner Asian steppe where
Mongol power called forth Chinese punitive expeditions, China's sea-
coast seldom required such projections of state power.
On the other hand, the old assumption that prehistoric China was a
land-bound society of North China, out of touch with the sea, has been
spectacularly shattered by the archaeological revolution of recent decades.
Excavations of Neolithic cultures that relied upon farming, used pottery,
and made stone implements by grinding show their presence not only on
the North China plain but also on the south-east China coast as a 'parallel
regional development. . . especially in Taiwan.' Indeed, the Ta-p'en-
k'eng neolithic site in Taipei county with its cord-marked pottery dated
in the early third millennium
BC
is the type site for all the south-east coast.
z
°
This shows a clear Neolithic capacity for sea travel of no mean propor-
tions.
Maritime China for all practical purposes is as old as Continental
China.
21
No doubt the Canton and Yangtze deltas very early saw something like
the port-to-port enterprise that Braudel characterizes as 'tramping' along
the Mediterranean coasts." But in the Mediterranean, as well as in the
Baltic and the shallow seas of Malaya-Indonesia, rival cities and states
could 'profit from their relations with each other through trading, piracy,
plunder, raiding to force better conditions of trade, and colonization',
2
'
whereas the comparable situation best recorded in China was the inland
naval relations among rival kingdoms along the lower Yangtze as in late
Yuan times - hardly a genuine equivalent.
24
20 Kwang-chih Chang,
The
archaeology
of
ancient
China,
83; see also
85-91,
'The Ta-p'en-k'eng
culture of the southeastern coast'.
21 As late as 1980 one may find ignorant references to 'that realm of Maritime China which
forms a minor tradition roughly half as old as the great tradition of the continent. . .'
(J.K. Fairbank in CHOC 11, Introduction).
22
Fernand Braudel,
The
Mediterranean
and
the Mediterranean world
in the
age
of
Philip
II,
1.104.
2$ Wills, 'Maritime China', 208.
24 Edward L. Dreyer, 'The Poyang campaign, 1365: inland naval warfare in the founding of
the Ming dynasty', 202-42, in Frank A. Kierman, Jr. and John K. Fairbank, eds.
Chinese
ways
in
warfare.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
14
INTRODUCTION: MARITIME
AND
CONTINENTAL
Meanwhile, long-distance seafaring
in
Maritime China
was at
first
in-
hibited
by the
distance
to
other centres
of
trade.
China remained isolated,
roughly
500
miles across dangerous seas from Kyushu
or
Luzon, more
than twice
as far
from Siam,
and
connected with Vietnam better
by
land
than
by sea. The
fact that
no
major societies were within reach overseas
during
the
first
two
millennia
of
Shang
and
Chou history, down
to and
even after
the
Ch'in unification
of
221
BC
and the
setting
up of the
early
Han empire, robbed seafaring
of any
strategic urgency.
It
remained
a
minor part
of the
early Chinese civilization. Armies
of Han
Wu-ti were
mainly concerned with
the
Hsiung-nu
in
Inner Asia.
Han
maritime
expeditions were sent
to
North Vietnam,
to the
South China coast,
and
to North Korea
but
this rudimentary naval power
was
still
a
sideshow
compared with
the Han
expeditions sent beyond
the
Great Wall
by
land.
2
'
China's early trade
to
South Asia grew
up in
Arab hands. Traders
and
crews arriving
in
China from West Asia
in the
seventh
to
ninth centuries
used Persian
as
their lingua franca;
and
this
was
still true
in
Polo's
day
four centuries later. Siraf
on the
Persian Gulf
was the
main western
emporium, later Hormuz.
The
large 'Persian ships' impressed
the
Chinese,
who then
had
none comparable.
The
biggest came from Ceylon. They
were
200
feet long
and
could carry
600 or 700
men.
26
China's subsequent development
in
naval architecture
and
nautical
technology confronts
us
with
a
persistent paradox
(by
European stand-
ards):
China's achieving
a
capability
for
overseas expansion,
and her
failure
to so
expand
in the
early fifteenth century.
27
Noted
by
many, studied
by few,
this paradox begins with
the
early
superiority
of
Chinese nautical technology over that
of
medieval Europe.
Chinese ships from very early
on had
flat bottoms,
no
keels,
and
transverse
bulkheads (like
the
sections
of a
split bamboo) which easily formed
watertight compartments. They also developed
as
early
as the Han a
balanced sternpost rudder such
as was not
seen
in the
West until
a
thou-
sand years after
its use in
China. Meanwhile
the
compass was developed
in
25 Michael Loewe, Military operations
in
the Han
period,
5;
ibid.
'The
campaigns
of
Han Wu-ti',
67-122
in
Kierman
and
Fairbank,
eds.
Chinese ways
in
warfare.
For a
collection
of
early
Chinese textual references
to
sea
contact with
the
south
see
Wang Gungwu,
'The
Nanhai
trade',
Journal
of the
Malayan
Branch
of the
Royal Asiatic
Society,
}
1
(1958)
pt
2.1-135.
Professor
Wang suggests the Yueh people should be identified as '"not yet Chinese" (to borrow
Lattimore's phrase) from Ningpo to Hanoi before the Han. They were still mainly so along
the coast until the T'ang. This is why Fukien-Kwangtung people still call themselves
"T'ang-jen".' [Personal communication.]
26
Edward
H.
Schafer, The
golden
peaches
of
Samarkand:
a
study
of
T'ang exotica,
12-13.
Cp. M.
Elvin,
The
pattern
of
the
Chinese
past,
155-9.
27
On
this major conundrum Joseph
R.
Levenson's paperback European expansion
and the
counter-example
of
Asia, 1300-1600, assembled
key
excerpts from
a
score
of
scholars under
categories
of
'technology', 'religion', 'spirit'
and
'social structure'.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
MARITIME CHINA AS A MINOR TRADITION 15
China and its use in navigation there was recorded at least a century earlier
than in the West.
28
This early superiority to European nautical technology
and naval architecture was part and parcel of a general Chinese techno-
logical superiority during the Sung. Chinese seamanship had already had
a long development on the Yangtze and other inland waterways as well
as on the China coast, where one had to deal with the monsoons and their
punctuation by typhoons. Chinese traders in the era before Columbus
faced longer voyages and rougher seas than the Europeans. The Taiwan
Straits, for example, can make the Bay of Biscay seem like a mill-pond.
The T'ang sea route to Japan was undoubtedly as challenging as any
voyage in the Mediterranean.
China's early maritime age was the three centuries from c. 1150 to c.
1450,
after the Southern Sung dynasty was forced south in 1127 from
Kaifeng to Hangchow and became more dependent on sea trade. No
doubt the Arab expansion under Islam in the waters of both the Medi-
terranean and the Indian Ocean had been a common stimulus to both
European and Chinese seafaring. But the more advanced civilization of
China put Chinese maritime activity at first ahead of the fragmented and
impecunious efforts of the Europeans. By the time the Crusades and
their attendant commerce had brought Italian seapower into the Eastern
Mediterranean, the Southern Sung had developed better ships and larger
fleets. They finally set up an overall naval command in 1132, although it
still secured its fleet less by building than by hiring or taking over mer-
chant vessels. The government built harbours, encouraged foreign trade
and taxed it through superintendencies of merchant shipping set up in
nine ports.
29
The early efflorescence of Maritime China under the Southern Sung
was incorporated after 1279 into the Mongol empire. China's naval power
and her sea trade went ahead, as part of the Mongols' continued effort at
global expansion. The Mongol naval attack on Japan in 1274 used a fleet
of 900 ships which transported 250,000 soldiers. After the capture of 800
vessels of the Sung fleet in 1279, the Mongol expedition against Japan in
1281 sent out 4,400 ships - far more fighting men than Europe had ever
seen afloat. The Mongol fleet of some 1,000 ships sent to Java in 1292
was a bigger expedition than any pre-Columbian counterpart in Europe.'"
28 Joseph Needham, et al.
Science and civilisation
in
China,
4 pt 3 sec. 29: 'Nautical technology',
579 ff. On the median rudder, see 650 ff. On the compass, $62 ff.
29 On the Sung and Yuan navies see the pioneer work of J. P. Lo (Lo Jung-pang), especially
'The emergence of China as a sea power during the late Sung and early Yuan periods',
FEQ, 14.4 (1955) 489-504; 'Maritime commerce and its relation to the Sung navy',
Journal
of
the Economic
and
Social
History of
the
Orient, 12.1 (1969) 57-101; and 'The decline of the
early Ming navy', Oriens extremus, 5.2 (Dec. 1958) 149-68.
jo Needham,
Science
and
civilisation,
4. pt 3.477.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
16 INTRODUCTION: MARITIME AND CONTINENTAL
Mongol seapower was followed
by
that
of
the early Ming
and the
seven
great maritime expeditions sent into
and
across
the
Indian Ocean
in the
years 1405-33. Chinese seafaring
was
then pre-eminent.
The
ocean-going
junk
of
this period,
for
example,
was
typically
250
feet long
by no
feet
broad
and of
25
feet draught, displacing around
1,250
tons.
It
might have
six masts
up to 90
feet high
and a
dozen
or
more watertight compart-
ments.
On a
long voyage
it
might average
4.4
knots. Such
a
vessel
was
clearly superior
to the
ships
of
pre-Columbian Europe.'
1
Maritime China
had come of age and
at
that time was potentially the world's
top
seapower,
ahead
of the
Portuguese
and
Spanish.
European naval power over-running
the
globe after
1492 was
thus
a
late Ming phenomenon chronologically,
a
sudden explosion powered
by a
dynamism
of
technological advance, national rivalries, religious zeal
and
capitalist enterprise that
was not
equally present
in
China.
But
European
expansion
was a
cumulative process, slow
at
first,
and it
penetrated
the
Far East after Albuquerque took Malacca
in
1511 only
by the
default
of
Chinese seapower.
For
China's maritime activity, despite
its
qualitative
superiority
to
that
of
Europe
as
late
as 1430, was
still
a
minor tradition
in
the
Chinese state
and
society. Once
the
Ming rulers
had
expelled
the
Mongol dynasts
and
demonstrated their early expansive capacity both
by
land
and by sea,
they found themselves saddled still with
the
menace
of
Mongol cavalry
on
their Inner Asian frontier.
The
recrudescence
of
this
military power, which captured
the
emperor
and
besieged Peking
in
1449,
reconfirmed
the
dominant agrarian-bureaucratic nature
of the
Chinese
realm. Near
'the
Great Wall
an
armed society developed.
The
northern
frontier became
the
fixation,
the
virtual obsession
of
many Chinese states-
men throughout
the mid and
late Ming.' This 'poisoned Sino-Mongol
relationship' affected
all the
rest
of
China's foreign contact.'
2
Maritime China,
for all its
precocity, remained
a
subordinate
and
even
marginal appendage
of
Continental China. Most indicative
was the
fact
that shipbuilding, seafaring
and
foreign trade remained
of
marginal
interest
to
scholars.
The sea and
sea-craft made
no
appeal
to the
Chinese
literati. Maritime contact with Japan
and
South-East Asia
had
become
of
note
to
chroniclers only
in the
T'ang. Arab merchants
at
Canton
and
Zayton (Ch'iian-chou) became noteworthy only
in the
Sung.
In
this turn-
ing inwards,
the
seafaring-commercial life that
had
grown
up
with
Maritime China
was
disesteemed
and
disregarded.
The eclipse
of the
government's seaward expansion
by the
landward
31
J.
V.G.
Mills,
Ma
Huan,
Ying-yai
sheng-lan,
The
overall
survey
of
the
ocean's
shores
{14))),
303 ff.
32
Frederick
W.
Mote,
'The
T'u-mu incident
of
1449',
243-72
in
Kierman
and
Fairbank,
Chinese
ways
in
warfare.
See
270-2.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
MARITIME CHINA AS A MINOR TRADITION 17
orientation of the Chinese empire was evidenced in many ways. The Ming
naval expeditions of 1405-33 had been exceptional exploits handled by
palace eunuchs like the great Cheng-ho, a Muslim who was not of the
regular bureaucracy. Jealous bureaucrats all but destroyed the record of
his voyages. Private Chinese sea trade continued to grow on the eastern
and western junk routes to Java and Malacca, where the Portuguese
after 1511 found a multitude of Chinese vessels and merchants already
active. The Ming government, however, gave foreign trade no support
but taxed and regulated it without any policy of encouragement. Chinese
were forbidden to go out to sea to trade. Indeed the dogma arose that
foreign trade was permitted only in connection with tribute missions from
foreign rulers.
In the
15
50s
when 'Japanese pirates'
{wo-k'ou)
appeared on the China
coast, most of them being in fact Chinese, the Ming dealt with them
defensively like raiders from the steppe on the Great Wall frontier.
Smuggling flourished, but trade was interdicted to 'starve them out'
and at one time local populations were ordered to withdraw inland from
the coast, resulting in considerable resettlement and economic disloca-
tion." 'To officials, the sea represented problems, not opportunities, and
statecraft stopped, if not at the water's edge, certainly short of the high
seas.
Pao-chia
and other registration and control techniques; forts, gar-
risons and coastal control squadrons; and management of government
shipyards were among the foci of their interest. Chinese seafarers' solid
knowledge of areas beyond the seas rarely found its way into discussions
of statecraft.''
4
To historians of the Ming, China's failure to expand like Europe after
1450 is no mystery once one takes account of the local facts, beginning
with the traditional institutions and values of the dominant agrarian-
bureaucratic culture. Without benefit of such a concept of culture, how-
ever, the problem remains murky indeed."
33 Kwan-wai
So.
Japanese piracy
in
Ming China during
the
16th
century,
ch. 3.
34 Wills, 'Maritime China',
215.
35
For
example,
Immanuel
Wallerstein,
The
modern
world-system:
capitalist agriculture
and the
origins
of the
European world-economy
in
the
16th
century,
38-47,
cites
17
Western
scholars,
none
of them primarily concerned with Ming history, as to why the Chinese failed to expand
like the Portuguese and Spanish. Since he has no category of 'culture' as the overall con-
figuration due to the interplay of economy, polity, social structure, values and other aspects
of a society, Wallerstein concludes in a quandary that there was no 'significant difference
between Europe and China in the fifteenth century on certain base points: population,
area, state of technology (both in agriculture and in naval engineering). To the extent that
there were differences it would be hard to use them to account for the magnitude of the dif-
ference of development in the coming centuries ... the difference in value systems seems
both grossly exaggerated and, to the extent it existed, once again not to account for the
different consequences. . .'.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
18 INTRODUCTION: MARITIME AND CONTINENTAL
Our thumbnail sketch
of
Maritime China's history enters
a new
phase
with
the
arrival
of
Europeans
in
East Asian waters, especially
of the
Dutch
and
British East India Companies after 1600. This coincided with
Japan's brief
but
vigorous overseas expansion
and a
recrudescence
of
Chinese seapower
on the
south-east coast. During
the
Ming
to
Ch'ing
transition
of the
seventeenth century, however,
the
leadership
was
taken
not
by
Ming emperors
or
Manchu conquerors
but by a
succession
of
local
Chinese pirate leaders. Their exploits bespoke
the
size
and
value
of the
growing international trade
of
East Asia that drew Batavia, Malacca,
Macao, Amoy, Nagasaki, Hirado, Manila
(and
Acapulco) into contact.
But this growth
of
naval-commercial power
on the
maritime frontier
was
in
private hands.
It
climaxed
in the
career
of
Cheng Ch'eng-kung
('Koxinga'),
who in 1659
invaded
the
Yangtze with over
1,000
vessels
and unavailingly besieged Nanking before
his
death
in 1661.
With
the
final establishment
of
Manchu rule
in
China,
the
continental
anti-seafaring view
was
reconfirmed.
All
overseas trade
was
banned until
1684,
the
size
of
naval vessels
was
restricted,
and as the
Manchu rulers
became Confucian emperors they reaffirmed
the
Chinese empire's agrarian-
bureaucratic ideals.
In
foreign relations these assumed 'that
the
civilized
order prevailing
in
China
was one of
ritual
or
propriety
and
this order
must
be
insulated from contamination
by the
disorder outside.'
The
aim
was
therefore
'to
prevent contact,
not
profit from
it, to
control
for-
eigners,
not
cooperate with them',
and
this
led to a
Chinese style of'unila-
teral decision making
and
bureaucratic regulation,
not
negotiation
and
commitment
by
treaty'.'
6
Here
we see the
peripheral culture
of
Inner Asian tribal nomadism
and semi-nomadism reinforcing
the
anti-seafaring tradition
of
the Chinese
heartland.
It is
commonly observed that
the
Mongol
and
Manchu
con-
quests strengthened
the
despotism
of
the Chinese monarchy.
By the
same
token
the
Manchus gave little
or no
encouragement
to
seafaring enter-
prise.
The
result
was the
continued subordination
of
seafaring
as
part
and
parcel
of the
continued domination
of the
coast
by the
continent
and of
the merchant
by the
bureaucrat.
The
Ch'ing remained strategically
preoccupied with Inner Asia."
The customary dependence
of
merchants
on
officials within China,
however,
did not
prevent
the
Chinese commercial diaspora into South-
East Asia, where
the
mandarins
had no
thought
of
following merchants
across
the
water. China's foreign trade since
the
Sung
had of
course been
36 John
E.
Wills,
Jr.
Pepper, guns
and
parleys:
the
Dutch East India Company
and
China
1622-
1681,
207.
37
As
depicted
in
CHOC
vol.
IO,
chs.
2, 7 and 8.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
MARITIME CHINA AS A MINOR TRADITION 19
a function
of the
growth
of
domestic trade.
No
market overseas could
rival
the
continental empire's home market.
The
early growth
of
trade
within China from
the
eighth
to
thirteenth centuries
had
been
on the
whole successfully contained
by the
bureaucratic state,
but
thereafter
domestic commerce increasingly escaped from bureaucratic controls.
During
the
Ming special products
of
one region such
as
Fukien teas
and
Chekiang silks,
or of one
producing centre like porcelain from Ching-
te-chen
in
Kiangsi, were distributed over
the
empire
by
long-distance
trading firms.
The
Yangtze
and the
Grand Canal were only
the
most
prominent arteries
of
this growing domestic trade, which made China
by
the
eighteenth century
a
semi-free-trade area bigger than Europe.
In short,
the
agrarian-bureaucratic tradition
of the
Chinese state
now
rested upon a vibrant commercial economy, which officials acknowledged
in their private arrangements more fully than
in
their ideological
pro-
nouncements.
The
Ch'ing could still decry
the
potentialities
of
seafaring
but tea, silk
and
porcelain exports,
and
rice
and
opium imports betrayed
the real situation
-
the enormous and largely self-sufficient domestic trade
of the Middle Kingdom
was
ready
for a
greater degree
of
international
exchange,
and the
South China merchants who emerged
in the
European
colonies
in
South-East Asia were eager
to be its
agents.
This expansion
of
Maritime China created
the
main channel
by
which
Western trade and enterprise later invaded the Middle Kingdom. Study
of
it has hardly begun
but
various outlines are discernible.'
8
Chinese
in
Siam
soon became magnates
in the
eighteenth-century rice trade
to
China,
extensive Chinese immigration occurred,
and
eventually Taksin,
who
largely reunited
the
country
and
reigned
for 14
years after
1767, was
half Chinese and proud
of
it.
Chinese traders became prominent
in
all
the
junk trade's ports-of-call down the Malay peninsula and around to Penang.
After 1819 Singapore proved
a
success
for
its founder,
T.
S. Raffles, when
the Chinese moved in. Manila under the Spaniards lived
for a
time
in
fear
of
the
Chinese pirate Limahong because
so
much
of its
trade
was in
Chinese hands.
The
Acapulco galleon trade made
its
profit from Chinese
silk exports
as
well as Mexican silver imports
to
China.
During
the
three centuries from 1600
to
1900 when European coloni-
alism took over South-East Asia,
the
Overseas Chinese were
an
essential
part
of the act. All of the
colonial powers
-
Portugal, Spain, Holland,
Great Britain
and
even France
-
during their hey-day
in
South-East Asia
found
the
Chinese empire paid them
no
mind
but
Chinese merchants
handled their local retail trade
and
often served
as
tax-collectors, conces-
58 One may still profit from the judicious survey
of
Sir George Sansom, The
Western world and
japan:
a
study
in
the interaction
of
European and
Asiatic
cultures.
See pt 1,
'Europe and Asia'.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
20 INTRODUCTION: MARITIME AND CONTINENTAL
sionaires and middlemen vis-a-vis the native peoples. By the nineteenth
century, when Western shipping
in
the 'coolie' trade moved still more
Chinese migrants into
the
area,
the
overseas communities
of
Maritime
China constituted
a
local commercial power even though unsupervised
by the Manchu government.
Thus we derive an image of the agrarian-bureaucratic empire sedulously
preserving
its
ideological structure
on
the continent even while
its
do-
mestic commerce through its coastal fringe was being drawn into integral
relations with
the
developing commercial-military world
of
maritime
trade, rivalries among nations, colonialism and technological innovation
in the service
of
largely European capitalism.
THE TREATY-PORT MIXTURE
What perspective do these broad themes and images provide
for
China's
modern experience? The treaty system
of
the century 1842-1943 can
be
viewed as
a
mediating device that cushioned the shock of cultural contact
between China and the commercial West. As suggested
in
volume 10,"
the system was
as
much Chinese as foreign
in
origin, only the situation
grew beyond Ch'ing control. Through the legal institution
of
extrater-
ritoriality the foreigners in the ports were given
a
privileged status com-
parable
to
that
of
the literati-official ruling class
itself.
Missionaries and
Confucian scholars, for example, both had immunity from the magistrate's
bastinado. Foreign gunboats could not be kept out.
In
this way the for-
eigners in China became assimilated into the new power structure in which
the treaty powers exercised certain aspects
of
sovereignty within
the
synarchic (multi-governed) Chinese state.
The treaty ports, administered mainly
by
foreigners
but
peopled
mainly
by
Chinese, were products
of
cultural symbiosis, junction points
where Western expansion joined forces with
the
growth
of
Maritime
China. This hybrid China grew up after 1842 in the new commercial cities
at the nodes
of
China's largely water-borne commerce. Shanghai and the
other treaty ports were reminiscent
of
Penang, Malacca, Singapore,
Batavia, Manila
and
other European entrepots where earlier Chinese
traders had made their way successfully. The extension of Western naval-
political power to the China coast formed a nurturing matrix for modern-
style Chinese trade and enterprise. All
of
these ports were foci
of
an in-
ternational commercial growth
in
which the Chinese participated more
and more.*
0
59
CHOC
10.375-85,
'China's
first
"unequal
treaty"
settlement
(1835)'; and ch.
5.
40
On
European
expansion
via the
trading
port
network,
see
Rhoads
Murphey,
The
outsiders:
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE TREATY-PORT MIXTURE 21
It
is
now recognized that Chinese capital mixed with foreign capital
in this development, and that the comprador was the foreign firm's actual
manager, not a mere hired hand. The treaty ports were joint Sino-foreign
achievements. They represented
on
Chinese soil
in
their 'semi-colonial'
way a tacit partnership of Westerners and Chinese even more active than
the Sino-foreign relationships that had emerged in the European colonies
in South-East Asia. As
in
Hong Kong,
so in
Shanghai, Hankow and
elsewhere, Western naval power and commerce-minded administration
provided
a
political matrix within which Chinese enterprise supplied
a
dynamic economic element. The Westerners
in
their style sought
a
free
and open market with a published customs tariff and no licensed mono-
polies
-
keeping the Chinese bureaucrats
at
bay. Their compradors
in
Chinese style knew the local network of personal interests and relation-
ships and, while often claiming the foreigners' privileges
of
free trade,
could make use of necessary connections in the complex Chinese structures
of bureaucracy and social hierarchy.
4
'
So much was the treaty-port growth
a
joint Sino-foreign enterprise
that foreign colonialism was stopped
in
its tracks. Western investment
in treaty-port China remained marginal as the capitalists of London, Paris
and New York found better opportunities
in
newer, less crowded lands
like the United States and Argentina. When J. M. Forbes
of
Russell and
Company after 1845 invested his profits from the opium trade in Middle
Western railways, he was following the main chance.
It
was not
to be
found
in
China. Semi-colonialism in China was in large part
a
political
phenomenon of special privilege; it was less clearly an economic phenom-
enon
of
one-sided exploitation.
The
full colonialism
of
foreign-run
plantations producing for export never developed. The overall economic
impact of imperialism, especially the balance between oppressive exploita-
tion and stimulus to economic growth, remains much debated.
42
The umbilical connection between
the
China treaty ports
and the
international trade of South-East Asia has not been adequately explored.
Except
for
the staple trade carried by the East Indiamen between London
and Canton, European and at first even American trade
to
the Far East
the
Western experience
in
India and
China,
ch. 2. The most detailed study of the growth of the
commercial credit network
to
1840
is W. E.
Cheong, Mandarins and
merchants:
Jardine
Matheson
ei* Co., a
China agency
of
the early nineteenth
century.
41 W. E. Cheong notes that by 1838 'Practices in trade and contracts well understood by then
at Canton by both Westerners and Chinese, had to be fashioned anew with the merchants
on the coast.
.
. one is struck by the close approximation of the functions of these Chinese
agents and brokers on whom Jardine's
. ..
increasingly depended,
to
the latter day com-
prador of the treaty ports'. See his
Mandarins
and
merchants,
138.
42 This issue is posed in Chi-ming Hou,
Foreign investment
and
economic development in China
1840-
19)7. There is a large literature.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
22 INTRODUCTION: MARITIME AND CONTINENTAL
passed through the Indian Ocean and mingled with the local, Arab,
Indian and Chinese commerce that had long been established in South-
East Asia. Early American traders from Salem or Philadelphia might call
at Penang, Bencoolen, Achin, Singapore, Batavia or Manila en
route
to
and from Macao and Canton. British-Indian and Parsee opium distributors
supplied South-East Asia as well as China from the East India Company
production.
The nineteenth-century communities of the Overseas Chinese (hua-
ch'iao,
'Chinese sojourners' abroad) were built up by Western as well as
Chinese and local trade, including the Sino-foreign 'coolie trade' of the
mid nineteenth century. As with opium imports, the export of cargoes of
contract labourers required Chinese and Western private cooperation and
eventually provoked joint official regulation. But such shipments were
only a late increment in the seaborne commerce of the China coast.
We know something of the coast trade of Ningpo merchants to obtain
soy beans from Manchuria, and of the tribute trade with the island
kingdom of Liu Ch'iu (Okinawa) which masked a Chinese exchange with
Japan. Chinese trade from the Fukien ports, especially Amoy, with the
Nan-yang ('southern ocean', the whole area now called South-East Asia)
generally overshadowed that of Canton. The import of Siamese rice at
Canton, again within the bulging framework of tributary relations, had
in the eighteenth century already become a staple trade as important as
the tea and silk exports via Canton to London in the ships of the British
East India Company.
43
All of this bespoke a Chinese entrepreneurship in sea trade that was
largely beyond bureaucratic regulation. The Ch'ing writ did not run
overseas. The hazards of seafaring, the alien peoples to be dealt with
abroad, the high personal risk and lack of official protection, were all
rather similar to the conditions faced by Western maritime traders. How-
ever, where the Western nations developed naval power, bases and
empires to protect their merchants, the Chinese could only rely upon
their own community solidarity in alien ports, and often got the worst
of it. They were massacred at Manila as well as elsewhere and persevered
often on sufferance. But the commercial spirit was as strong in them as
in the Western adventurers and entrepreneurial administrators in Asia.
It has been suggested that Confucianism had bequeathed to Chinese
scholars an inner tension as powerful as that which impelled the Puri-
4$
In
comparison with
the
eye-opening pioneer work
of
G. William Skinner,
Chinese society
in
Thailand: an analytical history (1957),
the 1977
publication
of
Sarasin Viraphol, Tribute and
profit:
Sino-Siamese
trade, i6j2-iS}}, inter alia, puts
the
study
of
Chinese-Thai relations
on
an entirely
new
source basis now awaiting research.
See
Viraphol's 'bibliographical note',
342-60.
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