Distant Shores

Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier

Melissa Macauley

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691220482
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in it China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century. Distant Shores challenges this view, showing that the economic expansion of southeastern Chinese rivaled the colonial ambitions of Europeans overseas.In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, Melissa Macauley explains how sojourners from an ungovernable corner of China emerged among the commercial masters of the South China Sea. She focuses on Chaozhou, a region in the great maritime province of Guangdong, whose people shared a repertoire of ritual, cultural, and economic practices. Macauley traces how Chaozhouese at home and abroad reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority. Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, fraternal, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Swatow. The picture that emerges is not one of Chinese divergence from European modernity but rather of a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development and accelerating levels of capital accumulation.A magisterial work of scholarship, Distant Shores reveals how the transoceanic migration of Chaozhouese laborers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked the Chinese homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction.

PART I

The Curse of the Maritime Blessing

1767–1891

It was a pertinent and true answer which was made to Alexander the Great by a pirate whom he had seized. When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied: “The same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship, I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.”

—AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, 426 CE

1

Pacifying the Seas

IMPERIAL CAMPAIGNS AND THE EARLY MODERN MARITIME FRONTIER, 1566–1684

The maritime people are also the children of the dynasty. If they are suddenly removed, even the birds will sigh, and before they are settled in their new homes, they may flee beyond the sea to join those there. Thus we are really delivering the people into the hands of the enemy.

—CENSOR LI ZHIFANG

CHAOZHOU IS A REGION on the southeast coast of China. It is marked by boundaries. Historically, it was the northeasternmost prefecture of the great, mercantile province of Guangdong. It shared a border with the commercial powerhouse to the north, Fujian province. The circle of latitude known as the Tropic of Cancer bisects the region, and today a marble tower rises forty-five feet above Jilong Mountain to signify the boundary between Earth’s subtropical and tropical zones. By the nineteenth century Chaozhou had been partitioned into nine districts (or counties): Raoping, Chenghai, Chaoyang, and Huilai on the coast; Jieyang, Puning, Haiyang (later Chao’an), Dabu, and Fengshun in the interior (map 1). These provinces, prefectures, and districts were administrative divisions, devised by the imperial court far to the north and drawn to establish geographical realities that might subject the area to the unifying control of the central government. The Tropic of Cancer, of course, was invented by international forces far beyond the imperial purview.

Chaozhou is also distinguished by a cultural boundlessness. Speakers of the Chaozhouese dialect and observers of local Chaozhouese religious and cultural practices lived beyond the prefectural border with Huizhou to the south and the provincial border with Fujian. Chaozhou was part of what G. William Skinner described as the “Southeast Coastal macroregion” of China, a macroregion that incorporated parts of three provinces: southern Zhejiang, Fujian, and eastern Guangdong. Macroregions transcended the administrative geography of the central government. They were physiographical expanses formed within the drainage basins of mountain ranges. Distinct and interrelated market economies and cultural patterns evolved within these large territories in premodern times.¹ Chaozhou and the Fujianese prefectures of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou together comprised the economically dynamic “core” of the southeast coast and shared an interconnected social and commercial history at home and abroad.

The cultural boundlessness of Chaozhou extends across the seas. It does not simply lie at the edge of the South China Sea—the Nanyang—it is an integral part of that transnational water world. Culturally and economically, it transcends the boundaries of empire and nation. Chaozhou’s maritime history is a chronicle of southeast coastal China as well as Southeast Asia. It is a part of the Southeast Asian “water frontier,” a borderland that Nola Cooke and Li Tana describe as “a fluid transnational and multiethnic economic zone.”² By the early modern era it was a zone increasingly dominated by Chinese merchants from Guangdong and Fujian and politically controlled by an assortment of monarchs, pirates, sultans, and, eventually, European colonialists.

Chaozhou’s connection to the sea was a blessing. The profits generated from trade with the Japanese, Southeast Asians (including Europeans after 1514), and Chinese in other regions produced a translocal Chaozhou commercial class that was rivaled in the South China Sea only by merchant networks operating out of southern Fujian and Canton. Common people also thrived along the shore. Peasants avoided some of the constraints of demographic pressures on cultivable land through employment offered by the ocean and rivers: fishing and clamming in particular but also work as stevedores, sailors, shipbuilders, boatmen, and shell harvesters. By the nineteenth century laborers were shipping out in large numbers to work on Southeast Asian plantations and in commercial enterprises owned by sojourning Chaozhou (Teochew) capitalists and remitting a portion of their wages home to their families. Access to the sea enabled Chaozhou people of all classes to participate and accumulate capital in the highly remunerative opium smuggling economy as well. The bounties of the sea theoretically were available to all.

Chaozhou’s maritime blessing was also a curse. Over the centuries the coast has been devastated by typhoons and tidal waves. These storms touch ground an average of once every two years, while typhoons that do not directly batter the region but exert a significant impact on agricultural production occur three to four times per year.³ Moreover, Chaozhou is part of a major delta region where mountain streams cascade into three rivers—the Han, Rong, and Lian—which themselves flow into numerous tributaries before emptying into the sea. These river systems form “alluvial corridors” that carry sediment from inland mountains to low-lying plains. This regenerates farmland and fosters marine industries, but alluvial expanses are subject to occasional floods that torment humans eking a living off the land. It also proves challenging to merchants, who struggle to ensure that harbors do not become submerged by oozing sediment. Alluviation also leads to hydraulic shifts of terrain that wreak havoc on property claims. This ecological instability fostered a good deal of disputation in Chaozhou.⁴

By the late imperial period access to the sea was vital to Chaozhou’s fishing and commercial industries. The region constituted one node in an emerging international trade system, and by the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1368) periods residents regularly embarked on commercial expeditions to kingdoms that now constitute parts of the Philippines, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Given the vast distances and necessity of relying on monsoon winds, these sojourners were away from home for long periods of time.⁵ This connection to a wider maritime world induced deep unease in central government minds. Officials feared that commercial families might form confederations with coastal power-mongers and foreign entities. They distrusted the cosmopolitan autonomy of maritime culture and sought to co-opt China’s profitable international trade. They were frustrated by the ability of criminals to evade the law and sail away to distant lands. From the fourteenth through the seventeenth century, these authorities embarked on periodic campaigns to restrict the region’s engagement with its natural maritime geography. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) launched the first of these efforts with their famous maritime proscriptions. These intermittently imposed interdictions provoked an explosion of “piracy” in the sixteenth century.

After the Manchus conquered China and established the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), they sought to bend the region to their will by driving swaths of the Chaozhouese population from their villages. The coastal evacuation of the 1660s was the most important event in Chaozhou prior to 1869. Because the coast constituted part of the Fujian-Guangdong borderland of resistance to the Manchu invasion after 1644, evacuation processes there were harsher, and lasted much longer, than in other parts of China. Hundreds of villages were destroyed. Untold thousands of farmers, fisher folk, salt workers, and traders were driven inland and left to fend for themselves. Interior regions and coastal villages and towns that were not evacuated unhappily hosted multitudes of desperate, marauding refugees. For much of the 1660s, mass starvation and violent chaos were rife. Then, with a snap of the imperial fingers, coastal inhabitants were allowed to return to their ravaged homesteads. Lineages, depleted of kinfolk, struggled to reclaim usurped land and protect themselves from ambitious predators. Property disputes that emanated from the chaos plagued local courts for decades. With the conquest of the southeast coast, the “four seas of the Great Qing empire had been pacified,” as contemporary accounts of the day declared.⁶ The most powerful competitors to Qing overlordship had been eliminated, but the violence also induced legions of Chaozhouese to emigrate to Southeast Asia. Many of the refugees from the cataclysmic violence of the Ming-Qing transition proceeded to lay the foundation for the rise of maritime Chaozhou overseas, ironically reinforcing the translocal nature of coastal life.

Ming Precedents: The Buccaneers of the Chaozhou Water World

The violent feuding that plagued Chaozhou in the nineteenth century was, in part, a historically conditioned and logical response to the baleful effects of government campaigns during the Ming and Qing periods. The most commercially destructive effort under the Ming was the ban on maritime travel and commerce, initially imposed in 1371 by the first Ming emperor, Taizu (r. 1368–1398), and stringently revived by his successors in the sixteenth century. Private international trade was banned, and sailing abroad without a permit from the central government forbidden. Transgressors were subject to a range of harsh punishments.

Taizu, ruthless and paranoid, sought to transform his vast and increasingly commercialized empire into an idealized rural autarky in which people remained properly rooted in their villages, respectful of social hierarchy and imperial authority. He envisioned an international order that contrasted starkly with the free-wheeling, commercially interconnected world that had flourished under the preceding Yuan (or Mongol) dynasty. Instead, he and his successors sought to institutionalize a system that was commercially controlled by the imperial bureaucracy and ritually centered on their capital, Nanjing (after 1421, Beijing). They established what is known in English as the “tributary system” of international relations in which various realms on China’s periphery submitted to the symbolic authority of the Chinese throne. Tributary states such as Siam, Korea, Sanfoqi (on Sumatra), and others found that entering into this arrangement not only ensured stable diplomatic relations with the major power of East Asia but also enabled them to engage in a form of duty-free commerce with the Chinese state. Trade relations thus were an extension of diplomacy. Once foreign envoys presented tributary gifts to the emperor, their compatriots were permitted to conduct business at designated points along the Chinese frontier. As Sarasin Viraphol observed, both the Chinese and tributary states embraced this arrangement because it constituted a major source of commercial enrichment for their courts.⁷

Chaozhou theretofore had experienced a notable level of development in maritime trade. By the fourteenth century local artisans enjoyed a sophisticated understanding of nautical engineering, and the region emerged as a shipbuilding center. Merchants traded along the Chinese coast and across the seas. They sold large quantities of locally manufactured porcelain and other items in Japan and Southeast Asia and returned to China with goods from those faraway lands.⁸

The maritime interdictions dealt a blow to the economy and led to a criminalization of private commerce that transformed merchants into “pirates” and commodities into “contraband.” Piracy had not been unknown on the southeast coast, but historians of this period recognize that, in banning international trade, the Ming court begot veritable navies of “pirates,” many of whom simply were merchants who continued to traffic privately with foreigners or in foreign ports.⁹ This is not merely a modern interpretation. Ming-era observers recognized that their government was instituting its own form of lawlessness. As the scholar Xie Jie famously wrote in 1595, “Pirates and merchants are one and the same. When commerce flourishes then pirates become merchants, when commerce is forbidden, then merchants become pirates.”¹⁰ Inevitably concluding that the state’s interests were antithetical to their own, coastal traders began to operate beyond the writ of law. As one anthropologist has observed in another context, once people start “doing something illegal … they are less likely to feel able to support the government and more willing to do other illegal things.”¹¹ Smuggling, which is trade without state sanction, inculcates in its practitioners contempt for the legal order, a situation that, in the case of China, unleashed violent and predatory opportunism on the coast.

Smuggling constituted the most common form of resistance in Chaozhou. Nan’ao Island emerged as the preferred site for illicit trade. Located off the coast of both Fujian and Guangdong provinces, it was the ultimate borderland hideaway, its many leaf-shaded inlets and tiny harbors providing refuge and opportunities for clandestine activities. In spite of the location of this large island on a naval patrol route during the Ming and Qing eras, it debuted as a smugglers’ haunt and piratical base during this period.¹² Opium was among the contraband smuggled into Guangdong in the fourteenth century, and operations off Nan’ao presumably launched the opium-smuggling tradition in Chaozhou.¹³

Local authorities harassed residents whose only crime had been their familial relationship to merchants who continued to engage in maritime trade. In the early fifteenth century, for example, a group of fifty-five Chaozhouese sailed to Java to “trade privately.” Most of them probably had been sojourning back and forth between China and that island for years, but their luck ran out in 1444. That year thirty-three of the original sojourners returned to their homeland, probably to import goods and visit kin. Just as they were preparing to return overseas, they encountered an armed force led by the local prefect. Most of the “offenders” managed to evade the authorities and sail over the horizon, but four were captured. They testified that twenty-two members of their original group had decided never to return to China and instead took permanent residence in Java, a development officials characterized as a “rebellious attachment to Java.” The captives also must have enlightened the prefect as to the identities of their friends who had managed to escape because, when the prefect reported the incident to the central government, the Zhengtong emperor ordered him to arrest and prosecute their family elders.¹⁴

It was easier for the Ming to persecute relatives who were left behind rather than stifle overseas commerce....