We are excited to announce a new title in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series: Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, c.1620–1720, published by Cambridge University Press. The book’s author is Xing Hang, Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University.
Xing Hang’s book looks at the Zhengs, a family of merchants and militarists who emerged from the tumultuous seventeenth century amid a severe economic depression, a harrowing dynastic transition from the ethnic Chinese Ming to the Manchu Qing, and the first wave of European expansion into East Asia. Under four generations of leaders over six decades, the Zheng had come to dominate trade across the China Seas. Their average annual earnings matched, and at times exceeded, those of their fiercest rivals: the Dutch East India Company. Although nominally loyal to the Ming in its doomed struggle against the Manchus, the Zheng eventually forged an autonomous territorial state based on Taiwan with the potential to encompass the family’s entire economic sphere of influence. Through the story of the Zheng, Xing Hang provides a fresh perspective on the economic divergence of early modern China from western Europe, its twenty-first-century resurgence, and the meaning of a Chinese identity outside China.
We thank Professor Hang for taking the time to discuss his book with us. Please read the following Q&A to learn more about the research and questions that drove the project.
What led you to focus your research on this time period and on the Zheng family in particular?
My interest in this topic grew out of the question of how and why China transformed from a global core in the pre-modern era to the periphery of the nineteenth century. I see the seventeenth century as a time when elements of this transition began to surface, from the first wave of European colonization in maritime East Asia and the Manchu conquest to the decline of the intra-East Asian trading structure and China’s role as a leading producer for the global market. At the same time, this period was filled with contingencies that had the potential to reverse one or more of the overall trends that, in retrospect, has profoundly shaped the world we live in today.
What made the Zheng family special? What characteristics were most important for their success?
On the one hand, the Zheng family grew out of the bureaucratic framework of the Ming and Qing periods and the more informal lineage networks of southern China. Yet, the Zheng managed to merge these elements together in a highly innovative manner. In contrast to the agrarian orientation of the continental dynasties, their organization privileged and protected the interests of merchants and militarists, and encouraged commercial and military expansion for the end of capital accumulation. Perhaps the most important factor behind their success lies in their remarkable adaptability and flexibility. For most of their six decades in power, the Zheng successfully maintained the autonomy and influence of their organization on the sea lanes through upholding a legitimacy based on Ming loyalism and engaging in a combination of skillful military and diplomatic maneuvers toward the Qing, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, and Southeast Asian rulers. They also had the foresight to transition their commercial network from one based upon the China-Japan-centered intra-East Asian exchange toward Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, which would become major product sources during the eighteenth century.
Can you tell us about the competition between the Zheng family and the Dutch East India Company?
The Zheng and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) competed fiercely with one another precisely because of the fundamental similarities that the two enterprises shared. Both achieved a monopoly or near-monopoly over the foreign trade of their mother countries while enjoying a significant degree of political autonomy. They also bought and sold essentially the same mix of goods. Of course, there are crucial differences. For instance, the VOC possessed a global network that stretched from the Cape of Good Hope to the shores of Japan, compared to the Zheng, who mostly operated within the China Seas. Nonetheless, the VOC was chartered some fifty years before its competition reached maturity, and so had a longer timeframe in which to grow. In fact, the Zheng followed a remarkably similar trajectory. Their successful invasion and occupation of Taiwan from the Dutch in 1662 formed part of a broader plan of expansion into Southeast Asia, and, ultimately, the Indian Ocean. Indeed, during the 1660s, the arena of competition between the two enterprises shifted from the China-Japan trade toward Southeast Asia. According to incomplete estimates, the Zheng realized average revenues equivalent to almost 70 million of today’s US dollars every year between 1650 and 1683, over ten million more than the more adequately documented Dutch earnings.
What kind of legacy has the Zheng family left on modern-day Taiwan?
In my opinion, the key imprint that the Zheng have left on Taiwan today is their paradoxical combination of intense idealism, insistence on maintaining an independent course of action, and a high degree of adaptability and flexbility to outside conditions. On an island of tremendous strategic value that overlooks maritime passageways crucial to the economic circulation of East and Southeast Asia, perhaps these are the essential qualities that you need in order to survive as a viable entity.
What kinds of sources and archives did you use for this book? What challenges did you encounter in your research?
There is a vast and diverse quantity of material available. Sources include edicts, proclamations, and poems from Zheng leaders and officials, Qing bureaucratic documents and official histories, the numerous unofficial histories written by Qing-era scholars, port records and local narratives at Nagasaki, interview transcripts of shipwrecked Zheng merchants by Korean officials, and Dutch and Spanish letters, journals, and autobiographies. What is more surprising is that many of these primary accounts are already in published form. However, much of them remain severely underutilized in scholarly analyses on seventeenth-century maritime East Asia, an indication that the field is wide open and needs much more in the way of serious scholarship to uncover this complex historical period.
What are some unexpected or surprising findings that you uncovered in your research for this book?
For me, the most unexpected discovery was that the fierce controversy over Taiwan’s political status was already taking place in the seventeenth century, albeit under vastly different circumstances from today. Koxinga’s representation to the Dutch that “Taiwan belonged under the government of China” and Zheng Jing’s claim of “Taiwan not being part of the Middle Kingdom” in his letter to the Qing negotiators surprisingly resonate with the debates ranging within and between both sides of the strait since the 1949 political transition. There is even a generational gap, with those in Taiwan born after or too young to remember the trauma of the Manchu entry into China in 1644 more willing to assert an independent course of action from the Qing or a Ming recovery of the mainland.
What is your next book project going to be about?
My next project plans to examine overseas Chinese societies and networks in Southeast Asia over the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. I am interested in clan networks and other semiformal associations and secret societies, in particular how these institutions inherited and built upon similar counterparts in China itself over the course of the Qing, how they facilitated cooperation with European colonial authorities and native rulers in Southeast Asia, and how they even stimulated the creation of political entities resembling independent states in the Mekong River Delta and Borneo. I also hope to examine the impact of nationalism and decolonization in the twentieth century, both in China and Southeast Asia, on the preexisting structures of overseas Chinese society.
