Another Look Seaward: New Scholarship on Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Periods

Studies of the maritime world during the Ming and Qing periods usually sprout from three evergreen “systems”: tributary, Canton, and treaty port. Topics unconnected to these nourishing taproots have yielded more limited research. A trio of new books, appearing in short succession, stand not only outside, but in opposition to, this system-dominated framework. Whereas the early Ming tributary system attempted to place all of China’s maritime trade under state supervision, the Zheng regime—the focus of Wei-chung Cheng’s War, Trade and Piracy in the China Seas, 1622–1683 and Xing Hang’s Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, c. 1620–1720—emerged as a late Ming attempt to consolidate overseas trade under the control of a family enterprise. A third book, Gang Zhao’s The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684–1757, tackles the new order that emerged immediately upon the Zheng surrender. Although many studies approach the Kangxi 康熙 emperor’s 1684 legalization of overseas trade as the foundation of the Canton system, Zhao argues convincingly that a more important consequence was facilitating private Chinese junk trade, which into the nineteenth century played a larger role in East and Southeast Asian waters than Canton-bound European vessels.

The Zheng family enterprise rose during the late Ming as a commercial operation that furthered its aims by providing coastal security on behalf of the state. It fought the Manchu invaders in a quest to become a quasi-independent coastal power, nominally under the flag of Ming loyalism, and ultimately realized this goal for several decades from a Taiwanese base taken from the Dutch. Western-language scholarship has not adequately treated the Zheng family’s fascinating career, thereby distorting understandings of China’s engagement with the maritime world. Given the diminutive volume of Zheng-related scholarship in the West, the arrival of two monographs within three years (and not long after Tonio Andrade’s work on the Zheng conquest of Taiwan) might threaten to oversaturate the field.¹ Quite to the contrary, this pair of complementary works can be read together with little overlap and much profit. Cheng offers a granular, not to say dissertation-style, study that stays close to the coal face of Dutch primary sources, supplemented and corrected by extensive research in Chinese. His Zheng family are, for all their political maneuvering, fundamentally commercial animals. Hang, by contrast, provides a sweeping narrative that dwells on questions of historiographical interpretation, in which Chinese primary sources far outweigh their Dutch counterparts. His Zheng regime is shown to have been greatly influenced by family dynamics, factionalism, and its bureaucratic structure, elements to which Cheng pays less attention. Hang represents the Zheng as more distinctively Chinese in their values and concerns, and indeed he foregrounds questions of filial obligation and dynastic loyalism to paint psychological portraits of his main protagonists. A telling indication of the diverging approaches of these two books comes with the 1661 execution of Zheng Zhilong 鄭芝龍: Hang argues that this execution hastened his son’s death by contributing to “the psychological trauma caused by personal tragedy” (p. 143); in Cheng’s account I could find no mention of the event.

Differences extend from minutiae to overarching structure. Cheng uses the Wade-Giles system of romanization and dubs his protagonists Nicolas Iquan and Coxinga 國姓爺; Hang uses pinyin and refers to Zheng Zhilong and Koxinga. The authors diverge strikingly in the space allotted to different segments of the Zheng family’s developmental...