Faces of China

Guest Editor Sander Molenaar is a history researcher at the Sinological Institute at Leiden University in The Netherlands.

China’s economy is growing faster than ever, and ‘we’ feel threatened. Who are we anyway? And why do we feel threatened?

We are ‘the West’: America and Europe, mainly western Europe. Constructs of what happened three centuries ago: the Industrial Revolution. The West initiated the Industrial Revolution and by doing so created the foundation for the modern age. Our modern age. Along with modernity came its spoils: steamboats, machine guns, quinine. Through these spoils, the West managed to force its rule on the greater part of the world. Westerners accumulated wealth and continued to develop, and now, in the early 21st century, a clear gap exists between the developed West on the one hand (the Global North), and the developing countries on the other hand (the Global South).

But then, things start to change. All of a sudden, economies in the Far East start to grow, and GDPs start to increase. Giants like China even go as far as to boast on its rapid economic growth. Our reaction? To feel threatened.

Many people take the gap between the North and the South for granted. Ask Max Weber, who explains in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that the rational and industrious character of Calvinism, in comparison to the conservative and lazy character of Islam and Confucianism, inevitably led to the development of the West, while the rest lacked behind. Or take a look at the World System Theory of Emmanuel Wallerstein: the center obtains raw material from the periphery, then processes the raw material into complex products, and finally sells the products for more raw material. Because technology ánd knowledge are in hands of the center, the periphery can only sell raw material or inferior products to obtain the complex products and will thus exhaust its resources, without catching up with the advanced center. The West invented these complex products during its industrialization, and the periphery never managed to catch up.

But Wallerstein is not the only one to shine his light on the world system theory. Take Andre Gunder Frank for example. He accepts the basic divergence between center and periphery, but he places the starting point of the world system long before the industrialization: “the Indian Ocean area, extending to the South China Sea, has been central in global history in all the millennia up to about 1800, and now is re-emerging again as central.” (Pearson. 2003: 4)

It is for good reason that Andre Gunder Frank mentions the Indian Ocean. Adam Smith explains in chapter 3 of The Wealth of Nations that the key to success in a capitalist society is the division of labor. Specialization increases productivity, but it must go hand in hand with an increase in transport, because the overflow of products must reach markets further and further away. Since transport over water is more efficient and reaches further than transport over land, an increase in maritime transport indicates the growth of economies. The one place in the world that was both the cradle and the playground for maritime voyages, was the Indian Ocean.

Regular maritime contact between Egypt and India was established five thousand years ago. The Chinese empire reached India by sea around 200 before Christ. In the following centuries a flourishing market grew in the Indian Ocean. Chinese merchants travelled across the South China Sea as far south as Java, building trading posts (entrepôts) and Chinese colonies, and from this position entered the Indian Ocean to trade. At times, they managed to come as far as the pirate island of Zanzibar, off the east coast of Africa. They brought the fine silk much sought after by the courts of India and the middle East, and they brought the fine porcelain that was found in Tanzanian tombs. From the countries bordering the Indian Ocean they carried back precious metals, spices and woods. They also purchased slaves and horses from Arabic traders.

China, as much of the Indian subcontinent, was always surrounded by horse riding nomads, because of all the desserts around its borders. The Chinese built a wall to fend off the barbaric horsetribes of the steppe, but if they wanted to defeat them they needed horsepower. Therefore, in times when the nomads became a threat, the Chinese increasingly shipped horses from the Indian Ocean area to China.

The Chinese were not the only maritime merchants in the Indian Ocean. Flourishing trade existed between the island people of the Malay archipelago. Spices and woods came from the different islands and were amassed in entrepôts such as Melakka or Singapore. From here, Chinese traders took them back to China, or Arabic traders would take them to India and the middle East. A small amount of spices would even make it as far as Rome, or in later times the Byzantium empire and Venice. This small amount of pepper and such would later prove inspiring enough for the European adventurers to circle around the Turkish blockade and enter the Indian Ocean market.

The century before European entrance of the Indian Ocean is remarkable and worth explaining in order to illustrate the balance between East and West. The early fifteenth century (1400 AD, that is…) was a time of revival. The iron grip of the great Khan and his Mongols was broken in most of the Eurasian continent, and the threat of Timur the Lame was over. The agrarian societies of China, India and the middle East were locked in a cyclic battle with the nomadic tribes of the arid zone that runs from the Great Wall in the east, through Mongolia and the middle East all the way to Egypt. The agrarian societies were strong enough to ward off the different tribes, but when the tribes united they could conquer the agrarian societies (e.g. Djingiz Khan and his Pax Mongolia). However, as they conquered the agrarian societies, their lifestyle changed. The brutal nomads became less fierce because daily life no longer required riding a horse or wielding a bow. The agrarian societies were then able to overthrow the old group of nomads. Until the nomadic tribes were to unite again and repeat the cycle.

The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) was the revival of the agrarian society after the invasion of the Mongol Yuan (1276-1368). The first emperors of the Ming completely reorganized the empire. They dispatched several fleets to explain to all sovereigns in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, by force if necessary, that the Ming emperors ruled China and consequently the world. The third Ming emperor, Yongle, was excessive in all his actions. He ordered the construction of new capital in the north to keep the nomads under control, and in 1420 he moved to this new site and called it Beijing, the northern capital. Emperor Yongle deforested the north of Vietnam to provide the building material for his new capital, and to celebrate the completion of this project he sent the eunuch Admiral Zhenghe to the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean to pick up the important sovereigns, so they could attend the ceremony. As mentioned before, this was not always a friendly invitation. For example, the king of Sri Lanka refused to come along and even ordered his troops to attack the ships of Zhenghe. The eunuch admiral then decided to attack the capital of Sri Lanka in blitzkrieg and the king was carried off to China before his troops reached the beach. On another occasion Zhenghe defeated a pirate king who blocked the trade route in the strait of Melaka.

This is not to say that the Chinese controlled the Indian Ocean. Besides the presence of Chinese on the east side of the Indian Ocean, two other features are important as well for the formation of the trading culture in the Indian Ocean. First there is the spread of Hindu-culture from India to southeast Asia. In the tenth, eleventh century the straits of Sunda and Melaka were controlled by the Hindu kingdom Srivijaya. This maritime kingdom was spread over the east coast of India, the Malay peninsula and Sumatra. Long after the decline of this kingdom, the Hindu-culture dictated everyday life in southeast Asia. The second influence came from the Arabic traders who brought the Islam with them to every port they visited. The spread of Islam in Indonesia goes back to Arabic traders in the years after the fall of Srivijaya.

This was the world the Portuguese entered in the late fifteenth century. The Indian Ocean was an early global network where merchants connected an area from the Ottoman empire, to the Chinese empire and the islands of southeast Asia. The merchants communicated in pidgin Malay and shared knowledge and technology, e.g. the hybrid ship types that blended south and east Asian shipbuilding techniques. The Portuguese, and later the Dutch and the English, didn’t take over the market as many believe they did. They roamed off the top, but the main share of the market was still in hands of Arabic, Malay and Chinese merchants. Until in the early 19th century, when the spoils of the industrial revolution enabled the Europeans to control the people of Asia on their own soil. In accordance with the world system theory, the center develops over the back of the periphery, and the West accumulated wealth, where the East was left behind.

However, this control did not last long. Less than hundred and fifty years later the second world war left Europe in ashes and America in pole position. Now, sixty five years later, people are starting to doubt the strength of the USA. In this article we’ve seen some five thousand years of Asian supremacy, and about two hundred years of Western control. It is this hidden minority complex that causes our fear of the rising East. But if history has anything to teach us it is that all we have to do is come up with a second ‘industrial revolution’, and our Western way of life is safe for another two centuries. Or perhaps it’s time to learn using chopsticks.

Sander Molenaar