Comments on On the Road with William Walker: Chinese Sea Power

Interesting article. Let me add my 2 cents' worth....

2008-08-06T19:58:00.000-07:00

Interesting article. Let me add my 2 cents' worth. The reasons why the Ming dyasty ended the maritime voyages is less of a mystery than why they were even begun in the first place.
China had the technology and the capability to build large ocean-going wooden vessels as early as the Song dynasty. Huge volumes of sea-borne trade was being conducted during the southern Song,because the northern trade routes through the central Asian oasis had been cut-off by the establishment of the Khitan Liao empire in north China, which was later replaced by the Jurchen Kin (who themselves fell victim to Genghis Khan). The southern Song therefore maintained a large "merchant navy". Even this was dwarfed by its inland riverine fleet which was, at the time, the largest in the world, with some vessels that were five stories in height and armed with cannon.
The Ming therefore had the technology to launch their expeditions. The huge scale of the voyages though were unprecedented - apart from the major vessels,which included treasure ships that could have been 400 feet in length, there were also troop transport vessels, vessels for horses, "fire" ships, and support vessels.
These voyages were probably intended to "fly the flag" - to announce the new imperial investiture of the Yung Lo emperor (who was now based in Beijing, having moved his capital there from Nanjing). There is also speculation that the voyages were intended to hunt for the fugitive
2nd Ming emperor. Whatever the reasons, these voyages were certainly a demonstration of Ming imperialism, who could no longer look to the traditional tributary states in central Asia due to Tamerlane.
The Ming vessels were well-armed. They carried Chinese cannon, which could fire both large projectiles as well as grape, and were also armed with rocket powered arrows.
Zheng He, the eunuch admiral who was generally in command of most of these voyages, had been a relatively successful military commander in the early Ming's interminable wars with the Mongols to the north. He was also not averse to employing force (and in the case of a Sri Lankan potentate, overwhelming force) whenever necessary. Therefore, unlike the Song, which at best, had a "merchant navy", the Ming were despatching a huge naval taskforce, capable of independent military action, although such action was very rarely taken.
But Ming imperialism was very different from European mercantile-imperialism. Profit by trade was not one of the stated aims of the Ming voyages, and Zheng He certainly never established any trading posts or factories. In this sense, the Ming expeditions were very different from the Portuguese, and later Dutch and English voyages. European expeditions were necessarily on a much smaller scale, because they needed to make a profit from the trade of high-value commodities. Since Zheng He and his emperor were unconcerned about making the voyages pay for themselves, they launched massive fleets, to overawe their interlocutors.
If these fleets were designed to "fly the fla", they were an extremely expensive way to do so. The Chinese strategy proved, naturally, to be unsustainable - tributary relations are well and good from a imperial (and for the Chinese of the 15th century, a ritual) perspective, but the expense of maintaining huge fleets and sailing them around the Pacific and Indian Oceans really did not justify the semi-annual tribute of exotic goods, and animals. In the end, the cost was simply too prohibitive. Chinese, Indian and South-east Asian merchants of course developed trade in the wake of these voyages, but even then, since merchants were held in contempt both by the bureaucracy and the emperor, large-scale maritime trade was never systematically developed in the wake of these voyages.
Of course, the Chinese could have scaled back on the voyages, rather than stopped them altogether, to save on expense. But there were other factors which compelled the stoppage of maritime adventurism. One was the political rivalry between the Confucian bureaucracy and the eunuchs, who supplied the bulk of the admirals and commanders for the expeditions. By stopping the voyages, the bureaucracy managed to cut one source of power and funding for the eunuchs (which would rebound on them in the later part of the dynasty, with the eunuchs venting their energies on establishing their own paramilitary and secret service organisations under weak and indulgent emperors).
Second, and in my view, the far more important reason, was that the Ming realised that China was a continental power, and that her main threat was from the north. Early Ming wars against the Mongols had varying success, and under Yung Lo's successor, there was a major military disaster. Imperial energies and resources were required for fighting the Mongols, which urgently required cut-backs to the extravagant maritime voyages.
But even at the end of the Ming dynasty, Chinese naval power was still strong enough to enable Ming loyalists under Koxinga, driven from the mainland by the Manchu invasion in the mid-17th century, to re-invade and take Taiwan from the Dutch (who had occupied and fortified it several decades before).
The Ch'ing emperors were thus compelled to re-locate coastal communities inland, in response to Ming raids on Fujian and some other south-China coastal provinces, with the usual disastrous humanitarian consequences. The Ch'ing response to these raids is actually another fascinating area of study, and led in my opinion to the atrophy of Chinese sea-borne trade far more than the Ming prohibition (which was only fitfully enforced and often ignored) but I'll leave that to some other time.

From a Euro-centric point of view, it's really one...

2008-08-06T19:06:00.000-07:00

From a Euro-centric point of view, it's really one of the conundrums of late imperial Chinese history as to why China abandoned its maritime voyages at the cusp of what Felipe Fernandez-Amesto terms its "crushing" superiority. And these voyages were really massive in scale. It is speculated that if the Chinese had continued with these voyages, it would well have been the Chinese "discovering" Europe, rather than Europeans "discovering" Asia, and the history of imperialism would have been very different.
However, it should also be borne in mind that China had the technology to build relatively large ocean-going wooden vessels since the Song dynasty.
During the southern Song, large amounts of sea-borne trade through ports at Guangzhou, and Hangzhou were already being conducted. the southern Song also had the largest inland river naval fleet in the world, with large vessels navigating the Yangtze and the Grand Canal, some of which were 5 storeys tall, and armed with cannon. These fleets played some role in resisting the Mongol invasion.
So, by time the Ming dynasty was established, China had the knowledge and the technology to build and arm large ocean-going vessels.
The question is not so much how the Chinese were able to launch these voyages as why they were launched. There were probably a multitude of reasons - the hunt for the fugitive 2nd Ming emperor by his uncle, the newly installed Yung Lo emperor; the announcement of a new imperial investiture (now based in Beijing rather than Nanjing); establishing new tributary relations with southern and western countries, since the traditional tributary routes through central Asia had been cut-off by Tamerlane. On the whole, wh
ile I agree that these voyages, commanded mostly by Admiral Zheng He, were peaceful, it is also historically incorrect to understate the fact that Zheng He used force (and in the case of Sri Lanka, quite overwheming force) whenever he felt it necessary. These vessels were also extremely well-armed. The early Ming emperors (and the Chinese empire) as a whole were not averse to imperialism, though not in the mercantile-imperialism of the European states. Flying the flag and state expansion was not only pursued by several emperors under several some dynasties, even Confucian scholars compiling the official histories gave their grudging approval (surprisingly) to imperial expansion.
The reasons why these voyages were stopped is really less of a mystery
than why they were begun in the first place. The Yung Lo emperor was a megalomaniac, whose strong personality gave the main impetus to these voyages. Once he was dead, the Confucian bureaucracy, who were never too enthusiastic about these voyages, moved to assert control over the new emperor. The commanding admirals of the Ming voyages were eunuchs. From the beginning of the Ming dynasty, there was political tension between the eunuchs (who had intimate personal contact with the emperor) and the bureaucracy - sometimes the scholars were in the ascendant, and (particularly towards the later halfof the dynasty) sometimes, the eunuchs. Stopping the voyages was one way to remove a potential power and revenue source for the eunuchs. Further, the voyages were ruinously expensive, even for a polity as rich and large as that of the Ming. We have to remember that unlike European voyages, the Ming expeditions did NOT have trade profit as an important motivation, although trade, of course, inevitably followed. But in traditional Confucian thought, merchants were poorly regarded, and trade as state policy, in the way that the Portuguese, and later, the Dutch and English, devised for their imperial voyages, could never have formed part of the raison d'etre for Ming voyages. And unlikethe Spanish, the Chinese did not have gold-rich Aztecs and Incas to plunder to finance their maritime adventurism. In the end, these voyages did not pay for themselves. Also, with the re-dredging of the Grand Canal, inland waterways from the south to the north were re-opened, and vitiated the need for maintaining coastal fleets. However, in my view, the main reason for the voyages being stopped was the Mongol threat from the north - even with the sack and burning of Karakorum by Ming generals, Mongol raids did not stop. By moving the capital from Nanjing in the south to Beijing in the north, the Ming emperors were taking the strategic move to ensure the protection of northern China.
One has to realise first that China is a continental power, bordering against extremely powerful nomadic tribes, who were often sophisticated enough to create their own rival empires, and dynamic enough to form significant mlitary threats against China. Ceaseless Ming campaigning in the first 4 reigns faced variable fortunes, to put it kindly, and there were at least 2 major military disasters.
It would have made far better sense for the Ming to focus their resources on the Mongol threat, which, following the death of the Yung Lo emperor, they eventually did.
However, this did not mean that Ming maritime knowledge was entirely lost. At the end of the dynasty, when Ming loyalists were being driven from the mainland in the mid-seventeenth century, Koxinga was still able to assemble a fleet powerful enough to re-conquer Taiwan, from the Dutch, who had ceased it several decades before.
Under the Ch'ing, apart from the fact that, as land-based conquerors from the far north-east who were unacquainted with maritime operations, they were threatened by naval operations of Ming loyalists on the Fujian coast, which was why they moved coastal populations inland, with the usual devastating humanitarian consequences. Over the long term, these measures also destroyed the last vestiges of Chinese maritime capability.