In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

187 Conclusion In concluding, I would like to present some answers to the questions posed in the introduction, namely, the significance of the 1684 trade policy in Chinese maritime history, the characteristics of the Chinese maritime enterprise, and the evolution of the East Asian trade network. In addition, I offer a rough outline of other important questions related to this research, such as the effect of the 1684 open-door policy on the development of the Chinese diaspora in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the impact of the Opium War on the continuation of the 1684 open-door policy. why did thE kanGxi EMPEror choosE PrivatE tradE ovEr statE-sPonsorEd EntErPrisE? Many Western scholars have described the Portuguese and Dutch experiences as the norm for grand maritime exploration, rather naïvely wondering why China failed to live up to this standard. Other scholars have evinced no surprise that the Chinese maritime enterprise developed along a different course. In early modern Europe, overseas expansion, especially in Asian waters, was technologically and financially difficult without access to the capital controlled by monarchs. The official and quasi-official organizations on which the various crowned heads bestowed exclusive trading privileges— the Estado da India (the [Portuguese] Department of India), the British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company—controlled Europe’s commercial links to the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. In China, however, as early as the fourteenth century it was private traders who went from dominating maritime Asia’s trade routes to sailing as far as the Red Sea and East Africa.Throughout the Song and Yuan dynasties the court encouraged the rise of private trade, binding China’s coastal economy into a close dependence on maritime trade and ensuring the spread of navigational knowledge, techniques, and experience among the coastal people. So important did long-distance maritime trade become for Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangsu that all efforts to extirpate it would prove fruitless. 188 Conclusion Although the official suppression of this trade in the early Ming significantly reduced it, private trade did survive, enjoyed a brief resurgence in the early sixteenth century, and claimed center stage in the following century’s economic drama. Thanks to innumerable Chinese merchants active in East Asian waters,foreign silver slipped around the obstacles imposed by the rigid tribute trade system, flowing into China from Hirado, Nagasaki, Manila, Taiwan, and Batavia and fueling the dynamic commercialization and urbanization of seventeenth-century China. After the early Qing coastal evacuation policy, together with the residual official resistance to private trade, spawned a disastrous depression, the emperor and many officials in Beijing and along the coast looked to private trade rather than state-sponsored navigation to relieve their fiscal ills and improve the well-being of the common people. Although Zheng He’s famous expeditions had something in common with those of Christopher Columbus, they were the exception in a maritime tradition in which wealth was linked to private trade. Kangxi’s 1684 policy represented a return to China’s vibrant tradition of unhampered free enterprise. latE iMPErial MaritiME Policy: staGnant or dynaMic? It has long been assumed among students of the Qing that the late imperial trade system represented a step backward from the liberal policies of the Song and Yuan, and that conservative Ming and Qing rulers resisted any change during the Age of Discovery and afterward.The facts are more complicated . From the Song to Kangxi’s reform one can trace a gradual, longterm change from a state monopoly on trade to policies that accommodated private enterprise. The Song-Yuan period saw only a limited space opened for private trade.In the late Ming,a number of local officials,such as those in Yuegang, recognized the benefits of allowing private merchants a freer hand. Separating trade from tribute was part of the revival of overseas trade— in fact, it spelled the end of the tribute trade system. Just as private trade replaced tribute trade as the dominant form of Chinese maritime trade,nontribute Western countries and Japan displaced traditional tribute countries as China’s major commercial partners. By means of the legalization of private trade and the separation of trade from tribute, the Qing established the most open trade policy in Chinese history. These facts serve to lay to rest some of the misconceptions about the character of late imperial trade policy. Far from stagnant, the late imperial trade system responded dynamically to the social and economic realities of the transnational...

Share