by Kevin Reilly
A Road Not Taken . The Ming dynasty voyages pose one of the most intriguing “what-if” questions of modern world history. Clearly, fifteenth-century China had the capacity to create an enormous maritime empire in the Indian Ocean and beyond and to dominate its rich commercial potential. What would have happened if this formidable Chinese navy had encountered the far smaller Portuguese expeditions that entered the Indian Ocean in the early sixteenth century? Had the Chinese rounded the southern tip of Africa, entered the Atlantic Ocean, and made contact with the Americas, a China-centered economy or empire of global dimensions was surely possible, and an entirely different direction to modern world history would have been likely. This kind of speculation invites a comparison between Chinese maritime expansion and the early phases of European, mostly Portuguese and Spanish, oceanic “discoveries.” These European voyagers had crept down the West African coast in the fifteenth century, traversed the Atlantic with Columbus in 1492, entered the Indian Ocean with Vasco da Gama in 1497, and penetrated the Pacific with Magellan in 1520. How did these voyages differ from the Chinese maritime expeditions?
Comparing Chinese
and European Voyages
The most obvious differences were of size and scale. Columbus’s first transatlantic voyage contained but three ships, each no more than 100 feet in length, less than a quarter the size of Chinese treasure ships, and a total crew of 90 men. The largest fleet which the Portuguese ever assembled in Asia contained just 43 ships. Clearly, the Chinese possessed a degree of wealth, manpower, and material resources that far surpassed that of the Europeans.15 But the Chinese were entering known and charted waters in which long-distance commercial shipping had been long practiced, while the Europeans, particularly in the Atlantic basin, had little idea where they were going and no predecessors to guide them.
Power and Religion . A further difference lay in the conduct of the expeditions. The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean frequently resorted to violence, attempted to monopolize trade, and established armed fortifications where they could, and the Spanish in the New World soon turned to outright conquest, carving out a huge empire in the Caribbean, Mexico, and the Andean highlands. Inspired by the spirit of the crusades, Europeans sought to implant their own religion wherever possible. The Chinese, by contrast, seldom used force; they did not construct forts, conquer territory, or establish colonies. Perhaps their huge numbers, obvious military potential, and enormous wealth provided an incentive for cooperation that the weaker and poorer Europeans lacked. The Chinese sought rather to incorporate maritime Asia and Africa within the tribute system, and this required an acknowledgment of Chinese authority and superiority in return for commercial access to China. The fourth voyage, for example, brought back the envoys of 30 separate states or cities to pay homage to the Chinese emperor. Nor did the Chinese voyages have a religious mission. The admiral of these voyages, Zheng He, was a Muslim, and on one of his visits to Ceylon, he erected a tablet honoring alike the Buddha, a Hindu deity, and Allah. It would be difficult to imagine a Spanish or Portuguese monarch of the same era entrusting his ships to a Muslim sea captain or any European ruler practicing such religious toleration.
Differing Motives . The impulse behind these voyages differed as well. In Europe, a highly competitive state system sustained exploration and oceanic voyaging over several centuries, and various groups had an interest in overseas expansion. Revenue-hungry monarchs anxious to best their rivals, competing merchants desperate to find a direct route to Asian riches, rival religious orders eager to convert the “heathen” and confront Islamic power, and impoverished nobles seeking a quick route to status and position—all of these contributed to the outward impulse of a European civilization vaguely aware of its own marginality in the world. In China, by contrast, the Ming dynasty voyages were the project of a single unusually visionary emperor, eager to cement his legitimacy and China’s international prestige after a bitter civil war. His primary supporters were a small cadre of eunuchs, such as Zheng He, with official positions at the court. Most Chinese merchants already had access to whatever foreign goods they needed through long-established ties to Southeast Asia and from foreign traders more than willing to come to China. And the powerful scholar-gentry class, which staffed the official bureaucracy, generally opposed the voyages, believing them a wasteful and unnecessary diversion of resources from more pressing tasks. In their view, China was the Middle Kingdom, the self-sufficient center of the world with little need for foreign curiosities. After the death of the emperor Yongle, who had initiated these voyages, these more traditional voices prevailed. A single centralized authority made it possible to order an end to official maritime voyaging, while in the West the endless rivalries of competing states drove European expansion to the ends of the earth. Thus, the Chinese state turned its back to the sea, focusing on the more customary threat of nomadic incursions north of the Great Wall.
Differing Legacies . Despite their unprecedented size and power, Chinese voyages made little lasting impression on the societies they visited. And back at home, the memory of his achievements was deliberately suppressed, and even the records of his journeys were destroyed. This was very different from Europe’s celebration of men like Columbus and Magellan, who achieved the status of folk heroes. But the cessation of Zheng He’s voyages did not mean the end of a Chinese commercial presence in Southeast Asia, for private Chinese traders and craftsmen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially from the southern province of Fujian, often settled in East and Southeast Asia. Sizable Chinese communities emerged in Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, and throughout the Indonesian archipelago, where they proved useful to local authorities and to intruding Europeans in brokering commerce with China. While Europeans were developing a huge maritime market in the Atlantic basin, the Chinese had created one in East and Southeast Asia.
But China’s maritime world altogether lacked the protection and support of the Chinese state. When the Spanish in the Philippines massacred some 20,000 Chinese in 1603, the Chinese government did nothing to assist or avenge them. Thus, Chinese official maritime voyages, private settlement abroad, and an impressive entrepreneurial presence throughout Southeast Asia did not lead to an expanding Chinese empire. In this respect, China differed sharply from European governments, which licensed and supported their overseas merchants and settlers as a foundation for a growing imperial presence in the Americas and in Asia.
China’s Inner Asian Empire
Manchus Move West . If China declined to create a maritime empire in Southeast Asia and beyond, it actively pursued a land-based empire in inner Asia, to the north and west of heartland China—from where the Mongols had come to conquer in the thirteenth century. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China’s Manchu or Qing dynasty rulers brought Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet under direct Chinese control. These were huge dry areas, sparsely populated by largely nomadic peoples practicing Islam, Buddhism, or ancient animistic religions. While they had long interacted with China through commerce, warfare, and tribute missions, they had normally remained outside formal control of the Chinese state. But the new Qing dynasty (1644–1911), itself of non-Chinese origins from the northeast in Manchuria, felt threatened by a potential alliance of Mongol tribes and Tibet and by growing Russian encroachment along the Amur River valley. This sense of threat motivated a prolonged series of military and diplomatic efforts, lasting well over a century, that brought these areas under sustained and direct Chinese rule for the first time. In the process, China became more than ever an empire, ruling over a variety of non-Chinese people.
Empires of Many Nations . This new Chinese Empire broadly resembled the European empires under construction in the Americas and elsewhere at roughly the same time. Like their European counterparts, the Qing dynasty took advantage of divisions among subject peoples, allying with some of them and governing indirectly through a variety of native elites, local nobilities, and religio
us leaders. Furthermore, the central Chinese government administered these new territories separately from the rest of the country through a new bureaucratic office called the Lifan Yuan, similar to the Colonial Office, which later ran the British Empire. Chinese authorities also limited immigration into these areas. Such efforts to keep the new territories separate from China proper contrast with policies toward non-Chinese peoples to the south, where the climate and geography made a Chinese style of agriculture possible. There, assimilation was the goal with Chinese officials operating through the normal provincial administration, establishing schools to promote Chinese culture, forbidding men to wear traditional clothing, and encouraging both immigration and intermarriage.16
But the early modern Chinese Empire also differed from its European counterparts in important ways. Most obviously, it was a land-based empire, like the Ottoman Empire, governing adjacent territories rather than those separated by vast oceans. This gave the Chinese central state somewhat greater control over its newly subjected regions than Europeans who often had to wait months or years to communicate with the colonies, at least before the advent of the steamship and telegraph. Furthermore, the Qing dynasty governed areas with which China had some cultural similarities and historical relationships, whereas the Europeans felt little in common with their American, African, or Asian possessions and had almost no prior direct contact with them. This may have contributed something to the sharper sense of difference between colonizers and the colonized that characterized European relationships with subject peoples. Qing rulers, unlike Europeans in America, generally tolerated local cultures, trusting that the evident superiority of Chinese civilization would win the allegiance of local people. One emperor, Qianlong, even took a Xinjiang Muslim woman as a concubine, permitted her to maintain strict religious and dietary practices, and inscribed her tomb with passages from the Quran in Arabic. No European ruler would have practiced such toleration.
Consequences of Empire . Qing dynasty empire building had lasting consequences. Together with Russian imperial expansion across Siberia, it finally put an end to the independent power of central Asian nomadic peoples who had for 2,000 years both connected and threatened the agrarian civilizations of outer Eurasia. Without easy access to gunpowder weapons, these peoples were incorporated within one or another of the great early modern empires. An ancient way of life was passing into history. Furthermore, the simultaneous growth of the Chinese and Russian empires meant the division of central Asia between them and the beginning of a long and often contentious relationship that even the common experience of twentiethcentury communism did not overcome. And by transforming China into a multinational empire, although one with an overwhelmingly Chinese population, the Qing dynasty set in motion tensions that would plague China in the twentieth century and beyond. As the potent force of modern nationalism penetrated China in the late nineteenth century, it undermined the legitimacy of the non-Chinese Qing dynasty itself and set the stage for the Chinese revolution of 1911, which both overthrew that dynasty and ended China’s dynastic history altogether. But it also worked on the consciousness of those non-Chinese peoples newly incorporated into the Chinese Empire. It is surely no accident that efforts to achieve autonomy or independence from China in the early twenty-first century derive from those areas incorporated into the empire during Qing times—Tibet and Xinjiang in particular.
China and Taiwan
A third focus of Chinese expansion in early modern times took shape on the island of Taiwan, about 100 miles off the coast of southern China.17 The native peoples of Taiwan, ethnically and linguistically quite distinct from those of China, had long lived independently in agricultural villages while exporting deerskins to their giant neighbor and providing occasional refuge for Chinese and Japanese pirates. In the early seventeenth century, the island came briefly under Dutch control as Europeans sought offshore bases from which to take part in lucrative Asian trade. In order to make the island self-sufficient in rice, Dutch authorities invited Chinese immigrants to settle there, a process that only intensified after China expelled the Dutch in 1661 and took control of the island. During the eighteenth century, Chinese migration to Taiwan boomed, particularly from the densely populated regions of coastal South China, and the native Taiwanese soon found themselves greatly outnumbered by the recent immigrants.
Unlike native peoples in Siberia or the Americas, indigenous Taiwanese did not suffer from imported diseases; their earlier connections with the mainland provided them with immunities to standard Chinese maladies. And the Chinese state generally required their settlers to respect the land rights of the native peoples. But the overwhelming numbers of Chinese settlers gradually undermined the economic basis of Taiwanese life. The trade in deerskins on which many had depended largely collapsed by the mid-eighteenth century as overhunting and the loss of habitat to agriculture greatly reduced the deer herds. By the early nineteenth century, many Taiwanese were well on their way to becoming Chinese as they took on the Chinese language, names, modes of dress, medicine, and religious practice. It was a process more similar to China’s internal colonization than to the creation of its inner Asian empire or its short-lived maritime expeditions in the Indian Ocean.
Collectively, these three forms of Chinese expansion, together with its highly productive economy, powerful state, growing population, and sophisticated culture, remind us that early modern China was a dynamic and expanding society. It was very much in motion on its own trajectory when it encountered an outward-bound Europe in the sixteenth century and beyond.
The Making of a Russian Empire
Paralleling both Islamic and Chinese expansion in the early modern era and intersecting with them was a rapidly growing Russian Empire. It was an unlikely story. In the midfifteenth century, a small, quarrelsome Russian state, centered on the city of Moscow and embracing the Eastern Orthodox variant of Christianity, had emerged on the remote, cold, and heavily forested eastern periphery of Europe after 200 years of Mongol domination and exploitation. That state and the society it embraced evolved in quite distinctive ways during the early modern centuries.
Mother Russia
In western Europe, rulers generally respected the property rights of their subjects while negotiating with them over political power. But Russian tsars, following the Mongol model, claimed total authority over both the territory and the people of their country. While these claims were never fully realized, the Russian state came to exercise greater authority over individuals and society than was the case in western Europe. A long and bloody struggle removed the nobility as an obstacle to royal authority and required them to render service to the tsar in return for their estates and the right to exploit their peasants. Urban merchants, few in number and far removed from the main routes of international commerce, had learned that “the path to wealth lay not in fighting the authorities but in collaborating with them.”18 And while the Catholic Church in western Europe resisted state authority, Russia’s Orthodox Church was closely identified with and controlled by the government.
As the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the Orthodox Church came under the control of an increasingly powerful state, so too were the ancient privileges of the peasantry undermined. From early times, Russian peasants had been tenants, free to move from one landlord to another. But when, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries large numbers of them took advantage of this right to move into the recently conquered and fertile “black soil” region south of Moscow, the state acted to enserf them and to forbid their leaving the estates of their landlords. There serfs had a measure of autonomy over their own internal affairs but were subject to harsh and frequent discipline by their owners, usually severe floggings with a birch rod. Serfdom was created in Russia just as it was declining in western Europe.
But the most striking feature of early modern Russia was its relentless expansion. Despite its unpromising location on the interior margins of major European and Asian societies, Russia became the world’s largest territ
orial empire, stretching from Poland to the Pacific and from the Arctic Ocean to the northern borders of the Ottoman and Chinese empires to encompass roughly one-sixth of the world’s land area. Russian empire building paralleled the overseas expansion of Portugal, Spain, and England on Europe’s western periphery but proved more enduring than any of them.
“Soft Gold”: An Empire of Furs
The greatest part of Russia’s emerging empire lay to the east of the Ural Mountains in that vast territory of frozen swampland, endless forests, and spacious grasslands known as Siberia. Sparsely inhabited by various hunting, fishing, and pastoral peoples, most of them without state structures or gunpowder weapons, Siberia hosted societies organized in kinship groups or clans, frequently on the move and worshipping a pantheon of nature gods. The way to Siberia opened up only after Moscow brought other Russian principalities under its control and especially after defeating the Muslim state of Kazan, a fragment of the earlier Mongol Empire. Then, in the 1580s, Siberia stretched before them some 3,000 miles, largely unknown, populated by only about 200,000 people, and possessed, many believed, of great wealth. In less than a century, Russians penetrated to the Pacific Ocean across some of the world’s most difficult terrain; subdued dozens of Siberian peoples; erected a line of fortifications, trading posts, and towns; and claimed all of northern Asia for their tsar. In its continental dimensions, Russian expansion resembled that of the United States as it moved westward toward the Pacific, though it occurred much more rapidly. The early nineteenth-century French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noticed the similarity when he observed that these two countries seemed “marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”19
