"Perhaps China did not really want to expand." - Immanuel Wallerstein,
The Modern World System, Volume I, p. 17.
What this presumably meant at the time, perhaps still does, might be
rendered, "In light of demonstrable Chinese ability to project power all
around the Indian Ocean rim, in the guise of the seven voyages of Admiral
Zheng He and the Ming Treasure Fleet between 1405 and 1433, the failure
to keep up the effort in this direction thereafter is mysterious. It is
explicable only in psychocultural terms, possibly some sort of immunity
to capitalism, as it is, from the standpoint of capitalitic self-interest
extremely shortsighted. Moreover, when one considers what the Portuguese
made of their opportunity shortly thereafter, with a much lesser effort,
it looks retrospectively suicidal."
Does anyone recall the tourism-advertising slogan used by TAP, the
Portuguese national airline, before the Revolution of 1974? *Portugal
Is Europe Before It Changed*. There need have been nothing whatever
capitalistic about a country which, as late as 1667, was judicially
murdering textile manufacturers on charges of evil-spirit possession.
What the Portuguese had, as of 1498, was a commodity for exchange, West
African gold; a shopping list, Indian spices; and naval guns. Their
arrival was no accident of timing, as the system-wide industrial and
commercial depression which set in with the arrival of the Bubonic
Plague circa 1350 had bottomed out around 1400 and was back up to
something like its former levels. Contrast this with Ming China in
1405. (a) It had nothing to export in commodity exchange. (b) There
*was no Indian Ocean trade to take over*. (c) Due to the pervasive
technical Luddism of the Ming founder, there was no longer any
gunpowder artillery in China. (d) As a result, such trade as was
stirred up could only take the form of politically motivated gift
exchange. (e) The projection of Chinese power at sea could only
begin to pay for itself, after a heavy initial outlay, as a result
of political extortion. (f) In furtherance of political extortion,
it is necessary to have what was called, during the Administration
of Lyndon Baines Johnson, "credibility." See following paragraph.
(g) Due to the rather strange state-building intentions of the Ming
founder, the fiscal constraints upon state policy were extremely
tight, inflexible, and consequently unequal to any such self-imposed
responsibilities. (h) The Ming army, finally, was a paper kitten,
due to the fiscal utopianism, Paranoia, and, as above, Luddism
of the Ming founder. Each of a-h has its own explanation, which
unfeasable here and now.
In 1406, the year after the Treasure Fleet set out on its first
voyage, the Yongle emperor sent 200,000 men into Vietnam to restore
China's loyal vassal, the Tran dynasty ruler who happened to be a
refugee across the border at the time, to his rightful throne. This
action was taken at said legitimate ruler's request.
It is most highly unlikely that the Yongle emperor, who seized power
in 1402 and reigned until 1424, or any of his advisers, had thought out
the inner logic of the policy of expansion associated with that ruler's
name. Zheng He, like Vasco da Gama and the latter's successors, was
opportunistic; to this very day, and possibly at the time, nobody knows
what the Treasure Fleet was *for*. What we do know are the contingencies
it was provided for. These include one victorious war and three other
armed interventions: 1405, Majpahit, Java--intervention in succession
to the throne. 1405-6, Palembang, Sumatra--protection of Chinese colony
from local officials. 1409, Malacca defended against claim by Majpahit.
1410, Sri Lanka--defeat of royal army in pitched battle.
In other words, if you are willy-nilly committed to conducting
gunboat diplomacy, and there are no guns on the boats, you are logically
compelled to maintain a fairly sizable army afloat, indefinitely, and
at enormous cost.
So, it is a simple statement of fact by Jacques Gernet, in A History
of Chinese Civilization the book I happened to bring to the computer
lab today that, "The big maritime expeditions of the Yongle era
were contemporaneous with the big military operations in Vietnam and
its occupation from 1406 to 1427." (p. 401) The author does not state
that there was any logical connection between the two, and it is not
likely that any such logic was perceived at the time. Though it is
apparent that, if a system of client states was to be established,
a demonstration had to be made of readiness to intervene, conquer,
or permanently occupy any or several of these states as an object
lesson. As I said, "credibility." Furthermore, for over a thousand
years, Vietnam had been China's gateway to the exotic products of
the South Seas. That was why it had been conquered in the first
place, in 216 BC under the Qin dynasty; again in 111 BC, under
emperor Wu of the Former Han; once again by General Ma Yuan for
emperor Guangwudi of the Later Han in 42-43 AD after the revolt
led by the Trinh sisters; and so on for every instance of Chinese
weakness followed by political reunification or recovery. During
the Tang dynasty, China suppressed numerous revolts and fought
logistically difficult wars against the Buddhist kingdom of Nan
Zhao in what is now Yunnan Province to retain its grip of Vietnam
up to the very moment when the Chinese people's hero, the salt
smuggler Huang Chao, broke the back of the dynasty. It was only
in 937, with China split into ten states, that Vietnam became
independent, due to what would in this century be called a
"people's war of national liberation," that is, a peasant war,
whose leader, and subsequent first emperor of Vietnam, was a
peasant. When the Song (960-1279) reunified China, it was
faced by hostile powers, Khitan and Tangut empires, on two
fronts, and was militarily ineffectual, besides.
Unlike the eastern portion of the ancient Nam Viet, which is now
Guangdong Province and, indeed, the entire West River system through
it, the Red River valley of Vietnam was never settled by immigrating
Chinese. It had been densely populated to begin with; Chinese had
always come as soldiers, administrators, officials, and merchants.
Romans, Persians, and Arabs also came to the Hanoi Jiaozhou region
(the latter two, of course, from 758 to 792, when Guangzhou was closed
to them). In the context of systemwide trade depression, however,
Vietnam would have loomed as a naval base (as it indeed was in this
century, until 1989 or 1991, if we include Champa, site of Cam Ranh
Bay, which was also occupied at this time), and a place with plenty
of trees and marijuana (for sails and rope), hundreds of miles
closer to the South Seas than the existing Treasure Fleet base
at Nanjing.
It would be stupid and silly, not to mention anachronistic, to say,
"But the Vietnamese always beat the Chinese, because the Vietnamese
are patriotic." The way certain sport teams *always* lose to other
teams. The previous invasion of Vietnam from that direction, by the
Mongols in the 1260s, was part of an otherwise-brilliant strategy
used against the Southern Song: First, the Mongols swiftly overran
the somnolent kingdom of Dali, successor to Nan Zhao in present-day
Yunnan, which replaced a somnolent border with hundreds of miles
of war front. Vietnam lay southeast of Dali, with hundreds more
miles of frontier. This Mongol strike failed.
What distinguished this Chinese campaign in Vietnam was the enormous
scale of the commitment. If we consider the Treasure fleet and the war
as parts of the same policy, it represents one of the best-planned and
sustained policy efforts of the 276 years of the Ming dynasty (1368-
1644). As early as 1391, 50 million trees were planted around Nanjing,
then the capital. This is where the treasure fleet was built. Though,
as no construction occurred until Yongle seized power in 1402, it
might be that this was merely part of billion-tree reforestation
program which was part of taking marginal agricultural lands out
of cultivation following the Bubonic Plague depopulation. More
relevant to the context was the lessons taught by the career of
Tamerlane.
He was the Asian analogue of the English lords in the Hundred
Years War, after the Bubonic Plague added zest to it. One is reminded
of Edward the Black Prince deveastating everything in his path between
Normandy and Gascony. As I've previously said, in the aftermaths, or
the intervals between, major epidemics, one commonly finds states
with shrunken populations and resources, but undiminished or even
enhanced ambitions. There is a despair about current or foreseeable
production, to which corresponds an alacrity to acquire by armed
robbery and mass murder someone else's production and resources.
It may happen that someone who starts off with no resources to
speak of, but adapts quickly to living off other people's resources,
will prove endlessly victorious once the *mana* or *baraka* of
unimpeded conquest and spoliation accrues. So with the the Arabs
of Early Islam after the state-weakening effects of the Plague of
Justinian and the mutual predations of Byzantines and Sassanids.
So, also, with Tamerlane's Qipchaq Turks. Whilst posing as a
defender of Sunni Islam (and descendant of Jinghiz Qan), he
made war almost always against Muslim states, the Sultanate
of Delhi, the Turkish khanates of Persia, the Ottoman Sultanate
(Battle of Ankara, 1402). Unlike the Arabs of Early Islam,
Winning was the Only Thing; governing was uninteresting or
of secondary importance. Chaos followed his death. He seemed
to prove, while he lived, that Southern and Western Asia was
a power vacuum; and it was that much more so afterward.
As Tamerlane was exhibiting the Ottoman Sultan, Bayezid I, in
a cage following his 1402 victory, Zhu Di, fourth son of the
Ming founder and Prince of Yan, was conducting massive political
purges in the smoking ruins of Nanjing, where the body of his
nephew and predecessor was never identified. The deceased had
been young, decent, well-meaning, and stupid. The Paranoid Ming
founder's final paroxysm of purges had murdered all of his generals,
even those from his rise to power. He replaced them with his own
sons, of whom there were twenty-four. He had thereby created a
system of appanages, with warlord princes commanding private armies
in their own fiefs, in complete contradiction to his original
Paranoid intentions. (See Ray Huang, Taxation and Finance in
Sixteenth Century China, 1971).
The Ming state, as originally planned, was designed to preclude the
possibility of any challenger getting control of local concentrations
of money and military units. Each provincial revenue-collection point
had multiple sources of income, with mandated specific expenditures
on local agencies or army units already laid down; each of these might
have multiple sources of funds in turn. It proved impossible to
unscramble this mess, only to commute in-kind or forced-labour payments
for cash. The level of taxation was itself set well below capacity,
with collection at the local level itself unpaid and dependent upon
"tax captains" serving by rotation, as well as local groupings of
tens and hundreds of families collectively responsible for arrears.
Which meant, in effect, when the terror was lifted after 1398 the
peasants were paying through the nose to gangsters in order to get
out of voluntary obligations and forced labour, as well as paying
the taxes which the recrudescently powerful landlords did not.
The army was designed to feed itself and fight, in order to
ostensibly cost the state and taxpayers next to nothing. In actuality,
it did the former or neither. It was equipped with the cheapest, hence
technically most primitive, weapons in use. The same principle applied
to Luddism in all areas of state operation. In salt manufacturing and
minting the copper coinage, the cheapest and, consequently, lowest-
productivity methods were always chosen. Part of the explanation was,
indeed, keeping the level of taxation as low as possible; and part was
a genuine technical regression compared to the Mongol period. Thirteenth
and fourteenth-century mathematical treatises were no longer understood.
In one symptomatic case, the Ming founder imported a complete astronomical
observatory from Persia, installing it in Nanjing. Later, it was moved
by Yongle to the new capital, Beijing, where it still is. Nobody knew,
in the early fifteenth century, that it would not work at the new
latitude.
In the civil war between Yongle and his nephew, the half-million
government troops were disgracefully beaten by a small, but rapidly
growing, fraction of that number. This was the first battlefield test
of the Ming founder's army. Yongle's gesture of early 1405, whereby
he announced his intent for peaceful and friendly relations with several
neighboring states, including Vietnam, was insincere propaganda. He'd
heard that Tamerlane was marching from Samarkand with a half million
men to invade China. Had Tamerlane and any few thousand soldiers actually
arrived, Yongle might have been dead meat. But Tamerlane died of natural
causes on the march.
The army sent into Vietnam was the same, unreformed, service previously
beaten. So long as there was no serious resistance, that is, until 1417
or 1418, nobody worried, however. By 1421, the Vietnamese, under their
Ly ruler, had wiped out the Chinese army in a surprise offensive, which
proved decisive. To cover up the disaster, Yongle insisted on having a
victorious war against the usual national enemy, the Mongols. In a
famous confrontation, the Minister of Revenue brought two baskets to
his audience with Yongle. These proved, when opened, to contain the
severed heads of his two sons; the Minister stabbed himself to death
on the spot. The Chinese empire was irremediably broke as well as
beaten.
China did not expand because it could not, which was ascertained
by trying it.
Daniel A. Foss