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Security and Warfare on the China Coast: The Taiwan Question in the Seventeenth Century

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For over two centuries, prominent officials, literary figures, and intellectuals in China have paid special attention to the legacy of Shi Lang. Compared to many other historical figures, Shi Lang remains essential to our understanding of the cross-strait tension and the murky outlook for its future. Although the image of Shi Lang continues to mean different things to different individuals, to some degree, his significance to one particular community is also communicated to other communities. By analysing most of the previous appraisals and examinations of Shi Lang, we can reveal the historical narratives of this man as being continually under construction in a shifting and mutually reinforcing process. This article aims to examine the ways in which the legacy of Shi Lang has percolated throughout Chinese history, since the Qing dynasty, and also how it continues to function in the present day. It is fascinating to not only delineate how the story of Shi Lang has evolved as a legacy, but also to explore the rich variety of ways in which an individual or a community has adapted the narratives that make up the story of Shi Lang to suit the demands of different historical settings and perspectives.
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Volume 9, Part 2 of The Cambridge History of China is the second of two volumes which together explore the political, social and economic developments of the Ch'ing Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prior to the arrival of Western military power. Across fifteen chapters, a team of leading historians explore how the eighteenth century's greatest contiguous empire in terms of geographical size, population, wealth, cultural production, political order and military domination peaked and then began to unravel. The book sheds new light on the changing systems deployed under the Ch'ing dynasty to govern its large, multi-ethnic Empire and surveys the dynasty's complex relations with neighbouring states and Europe. In this compelling and authoritative account of a significant era of early modern Chinese history, the volume illustrates the ever-changing nature of the Ch'ing Empire, and provides context for the unforeseeable challenges that the nineteenth century would bring.
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On October 22, 2001, Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV Chinese Channel started to broadcast on Formosa a 50-episode Chinese drama series, Kangxi’s Empire out of which 18 episodes were devoted to a theme to which Taiwanese were quite sensitive: the attack of island in 1683 by the Chinese Admiral Shi Lang (1620–96), who obtained the submission to the Manchu throne of the Zheng insular regime who had resisted the new Qing dynasty. 1 It was quite an event on Taiwan, just a few years after Taiwan’s Government Information Office had authorized the first China-made dramas to be broadcasted in Taiwan.2 Most importantly, it was a year and a half only after proindependence Chen Shuibian was elected president of the Republic of China, on the island. For Taiwanese opposed to unification—around 70% at that time3—it sounded like a clear warning and a bitter experience. As history was sounding like an alarm, the anxious audience was large. Taiwan’s China Television Channel, or CTV bought the rights and started to air Kangxi’s Empire on its own waves early the following year, in the midst of an ongoing debate about the oppor- tunity of showing Chinese historical dramas considered as simplifying history with propaganda intentions. A decade after, one of my interviewee, a young second-generation half-Mainlander in his forties, still recalled vividly his feel- ings: “I felt very bothered. I had the feeling that that story was a little bit simi- lar [to the current course of events].”4
Article
This article focuses on recent revisionist scholarship demonstrating that China's maritime history in the period 1500 to 1630 is no longer a case of ‘missed opportunity’, a viewpoint fostered by earlier writing dominated by state-centric and land-focused models. To challenge this perspective, this study first reviews analyses demonstrating the far-reaching commercial networks between Ming China and localities in Southeast and Northeast Asia, and then considers the impact of the metaphor of Fernand Braudel's ‘Asian Mediterranean’ and his ideas about ‘world economy’ on the study of East Asian seafaring history. Secondly, this investigation reveals the dimensions of Chinese trade networks which the mid-Ming government officially sanctioned, as well as the extent to which literati from the southern provinces challenged the state's involvement in overseas commerce of trade and exchange. Finally, the article assesses how modern historians have studied late Ming maritime defense policies as security along the littoral lapsed.
Article
During the seventeenth century, an alliance took shape between Japan's Tokugawa bakufu and the Zheng organization of southeastern China and Taiwan. The Zheng, especially under the half-Japanese Koxinga in the 1650s, were ideal partners because of their domination of maritime East Asian trade, privileged access to much-coveted Chinese goods, and commitment to Ming restoration against the Manchu Qing, a popular stance in Japan. The organization jointly administered the Chinese community at Nagasaki with the bakufu , and received aid in Japanese armaments and probably mercenaries. Starting in the 1660s, the alliance unraveled amid the depletion of silver to purchase Chinese goods, the rise of a robust domestic market in Japan, and the destruction of the Zheng by the Qing. This article portrays Japan's “isolation policy” ( sakoku ) as a dynamic process, from active involvement overseas to withdrawal, based upon rational assessments of the international climate and subject to contestation from local and foreign players.
Article
During the last 15 years or so, the study of Chinese history in the United States and Europe has been transformed through new foci of interest as well as the employment of social science methodologies. This article surveys a selected number of recent publications and categorizes them according to five themes: “commoners, women, and outsiders”, “the structural approach”, “state and society”, “China and l'histoire globale”, and “China and the West”. It is demonstrated that the continuities within Chinese development, including the progressive demographic expansion of the Chinese population, the formulation and exercise of gentry rulership, the general vigour of the economy, and increased regional and subregional agricultural/industrial production and distribution are not confined to specific dynastic periods and should be viewed in a long-term context.