The South China Sea (9 page)

Throughout this period, the Chinese demand for silver appeared to be insatiable; coins of Latin American silver became the regional currency. But after 70 years of the Acapulco trade, the Spanish had shipped so much silver bullion to China that its value started to fall – it just didn't
buy as much gold or grain as it once had. In China, the economic imbalances led, ultimately, to the fall of the Ming Dynasty in 1644 and its later replacement by the invading Qing. But the consequences rippled wider. Without the surplus from the Acapulco galleons, Spain could no longer afford to fight the Thirty Years War. The result, in 1648, was the Peace of Westphalia that created the basic political structure of modern Europe and the beginnings of the international state system as we know it today.

The change of regime in China was bloody and drawn-out. In the face of resistance by an independent Fujianese leader known as Koxinga, the new Qing authorities had, in 1656, banned trade once again and instituted one of history's most devastating ‘scorched earth’ campaigns along the southern coast. Huge numbers of people were forced to move inland and for the first time in Chinese texts the phrase ‘maritime frontier’ –
hai jiang
– began to be used. However, the policies were counter-productive: both trade and emigration increased as people sought any means to survive.

The drastic campaign eventually consolidated the Qing's hold over the coast and, in 1684, the new authorities felt secure enough to end their ban on private overseas trade. All along the southern Chinese coast, merchants set sail for new markets. By the end of the seventeenth century, with home advantage and low margins (no need for costly war-fighting), they had turned the Europeans into ‘also rans’ in the South China Sea. The Portuguese had Macao and Timor but little else. The Spanish were running a thriving trade between Latin America and Manila but not beyond. The Dutch – who had dominated for decades – had been expelled from Taiwan, pulled out of Tonkin (northern Vietnam) and Cambodia and lost their special relationship with Japan. The English ‘empire’ in the region consisted of a trading factory in Canton. In short, the Europeans were just another group of foreign merchants: tolerated so long as they respected local customs. It was the beginning of a ‘Chinese Century’ in the South China Sea region.

Now the barriers to migration had been lifted, great numbers of Chinese set off to seek their fortunes. Some travelled back and forth but others stayed away, most as traders but a few as administrators for local rulers. Then labourers started to travel abroad too. As demand for pepper, gold and tin grew back home, many thousands of Chinese migrated to
Southeast Asia to set up plantations or work in mines. In some places they created self-governing communities –
gongsi
– and in others they became an integral part of the settlements created by the European trading companies. The colonial cities of Portuguese Macao, Spanish Manila or Dutch Batavia couldn't have run without Chinese labour.

The Europeans feared their dependency on the Chinese and adopted racist policies to keep them marginalised. This – combined with grossly unfair business practices – frequently caused unrest and sometimes massacres. Nonetheless, overseas Chinese communities endured, generating wealth and contributing the skills and labour to enable their host communities to develop. The result was what's been described as an ‘informal empire’ around the rim of the South China Sea: ‘informal’ in the sense that it wasn't systematically exploited by the Qing authorities. For them it was a source of revenue, not territory. They paid little attention to the world beyond the coast.

The Chinese merchants who used the sea generally regarded it as a dangerous inconvenience and stuck to its edges, still convinced that the Wan-li Shi-tang – the mythical 10,000-mile archipelago along the coast of Indochina – blocked the direct route.
¹⁴
Chinese rutters such as the
Tung Hsi Yang Kao
– published in 1617 – make this clear.
¹⁵
It was Europeans who were foolish enough to try to find a direct route through its centre. Their successes and failures are now memorialised on sea charts: the Macclesfield Bank, in the middle of the South China Sea, was first described by John Harle, the captain of the English ship
Macclesfield
, in 1701.
¹⁶
One notable failure gave its name to the Scarborough Shoal, after the British ship wrecked upon it on 12 September 1748.
¹⁷
These maritime disasters were tragedies for the Europeans but provided useful business for others with the skills to plunder the wrecks. The business was so good that the Nguyen rulers of what would later become central Vietnam licensed a band of seamen to salvage the cargoes – a practice now used in support of Vietnam's claim to the Paracel Islands.
¹⁸

In 1795 the English East India Company hired the man who would revolutionise travel in the South China Sea: the hydrographer James Horsburgh. Between 1807 and 1810, EIC ships mapped most of the coasts of the South China Sea and finally disproved the existence of the Wan-li Shi-tang. In 1809 and 1811 Horsburgh published his two-volume
India Directory
of navigational instructions and then, in 1821, a chart of the South China Sea containing the first reasonably accurate mapping of what are today called the Paracel Islands and Spratly Islands.
¹⁹
This European knowledge did not transfer quickly to Chinese geographers. As late as 1843, the writer Wang Wen Tai could still contrast the route taken by European navigators with that taken by Chinese mariners. In his publication,
Hong mao fan ying ji li kao lue
(
To Study the Foreigners
), the name he used for the Macclesfield Bank – Hong Mao Qian – translates as ‘the bank of the barbarians with red hair’, the Chinese translation of Banc des Anglais or English Bank, the name used on French maps before it was renamed Macclesfield Bank.
²⁰

Two decades after the publication of Horsburgh's chart, Wang still believed the Paracels were 1,000
lis
(500 kilometres) long and in what's thought to be a reference to the Spratly Islands, he wrote ‘in the Qi Zhou Da Yang there are big rocks, but we do not know anything about it’.
²¹

But Horsburgh did discover some local seafarers who did know how to navigate among the reefs and rocks. In his description of the Paracel Islands in the 1852 edition of the
India Directory
he noted that:

Why did Horsburgh make a distinction between the hardwood vessels and ‘Chinese’ boats? Perhaps it was because their crews weren't Chinese in the sense that he understood the term. Their semi-nomadic lifestyle suggests
that they might have been ‘sea gypsies’ – part of the Tanka people or the U-tsat, or the Dan-Jia – relics of the Nusantao network (see Chapter 1) who lived along the coasts of Vietnam and southern China. (The Dan-Jia can still be found in Hainan, living in floating villages.) Others may have come from further away: Badjao from the Philippines, Orang Laut from Malaysia and other nomadic groups are all known to have fished among the islands. Wherever they were from, the sea nomads lived lives that were largely separate from land-based authorities. They were treated with suspicion, often regarded as brigands or pirates and not seen as full citizens. It is ironic that these people are now regarded as the pioneers of the modern state sovereignty claims currently being put forward in the Sea.

The English EIC was prepared to spend money on surveys because its China trade was so lucrative. From small beginnings it came to subsidise the entire British Empire. In the first half of the eighteenth century, 90 per cent of the EIC's exports to Canton were in the form of silver. But, just as it had done a century before, the price of silver would fall drastically. After 1775 it comprised only 65 per cent of the company's exports to Canton.
²³
In 1780 the EIC suddenly needed a new business model. The British government had dropped its tax on Chinese tea and demand for the brew exploded. The EIC needed something else to sell in exchange and found the answer growing on its lands in Bengal: opium. The exchange of an Indian narcotic for a Chinese stimulant grew to immense proportions: imports of tea in London fetched £23 million by 1800. Customs duties on the tea subsidised the British government, which funded the Royal Navy, which ultimately protected the traders and the empire. It was all built on opium.

The EIC, like its predecessors, now desperately needed a base in the Malacca Straits, a port where it could do as the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch had done before and connect to the Chinese junk trade. In 1786 it leased the island of Penang at the northern end of the Straits but with only modest success. It was the acquisition of Singapore in 1819 that gave the British the edge. Perfectly sited to receive trade from all directions and free from traditional rulers, overbearing religion and cumbersome bureaucracy, Singapore rapidly developed from a malarial swamp into an Anglo-Chinese (or perhaps more accurately a Sino-British) regional hub.
With its victory over France in the Napoleonic War, Britain became the new global hegemon and, like its predecessors, sought to control access to the China trade through the Straits of Malacca. The Dutch could protest but they were in no position to resist.

Up until the nineteenth century, the interventions of European powers in East and Southeast Asia had been significant but generally local and temporary. With the power of the industrial revolution behind them, however, that would change. Trading empires would evolve into territorial ones and these new empires would create boundaries and new conflicts. The stories of two territorial disputes illustrate this well. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Vietnamese Lê emperor and the Lao king were fighting over a section of the upper Mekong Valley. The conflict was eventually resolved when the two rulers agreed that people whose houses were built on stilts (the ‘Lao’) owed allegiance to the king, whereas those who lived on the ground (the ‘Vietnamese’) owed allegiance to the emperor. A defined boundary was much less important than the personal allegiances of the people.
²⁴
In total contrast, the British and the Dutch resolved their nineteenth-century dispute in the Straits of Malacca with a very different kind of agreement. The 1824 Anglo-Dutch treaty drew a line through the sea – British activities were confined to the north side and Dutch to the south. It meant the British had to abandon their settlement at Bencoolen on Sumatra and the Dutch had to evacuate Malacca. Personal ties meant nothing; nationality and place were everything. It resolved a European problem but created many more for the indigenous Malay communities who had long roamed across both sides of the imaginary line. Those who tried to live in the traditional way were called ‘smugglers’, those who tried to resist were called ‘pirates’.
²⁵

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Europeans and Southeast Asians had radically different ideas about what constituted a ‘country’. The traditional Southeast Asian political unit was defined by its centre: by the personal prestige of its ruler. In this
mandala
system, the ruler's authority diminished with distance from the centre of the kingdom. In Europe, at least since the Peace of Westphalia, a political unit had become defined by its edges: laws, rights and duties applied equally across the territory but stopped completely at its boundary. In the Asian system there could be gradual transitions in authority and even gaps where no ruler was
acknowledged. Smaller units might recognise more than one sovereign or possibly none at all. Traditionally, boundaries in Southeast Asia had been fluid – and maritime borders vague in the extreme. The ambiguity allowed relations between rulers to evolve and frontiers to shift: sometimes peacefully, though more often violently. In the European system there were no gaps – everywhere was supposed to belong to a sovereign – and to only one. Hard choices were inbuilt.

As a result of the arguments between Grotius and Selden (and their successors) there was now a consensus among Western rulers about how these definite boundaries could be extended into the sea. As their empires expanded, that consensus travelled east and was imposed upon a region that had a completely different understanding of maritime boundaries. The transition from fluid frontier to fixed frontline laid the foundations for the current conflict in the South China Sea.

* * * * * *

European trading companies had ventured to East Asia as both merchants and mercenaries, ready to fight for their right to profit. They were licensed by their governments but acted in their own interests. By the nineteenth century the two most successful – the British and the Dutch – had become governments in their own right. The necessities of making alliances, squashing rivals, charging customs duties and preventing smuggling had obliged them to grab territory and rule populations – often in the most vicious and capricious manner. As the governments back home tried to control these abuses and fix the companies’ financial problems, the interests of business and state became utterly intertwined. The VOC bankrupted itself in 1800 and its territory was taken over by the Dutch state. The EIC was repeatedly in trouble but survived on the profits of the opium–tea trade. The Qing authorities were demanding payment in silver but the silver price was rocketing because of independence wars being fought in Latin America. Without opium, British cash would flow out of the country to pay for tea and other imports from China. When the Qing tried to stop the EIC's trade they implicitly threatened the British economy with a balance of payments crisis. The combined response of the EIC and the British government was to try to force open China's
markets – not just for opium but for all products – and restore the balance of trade. The ‘Opium Wars’ of 1840 and 1860 did just that. Gunboats of the EIC and the Royal Navy, subsidised by opium, overwhelmed their Qing opponents. While these ships blockaded the coast, British-commanded troops forced the emperor to cede Hong Kong and open five other ports for international trade. The Treaty of Nanjing was the first of 26 similarly ‘unequal treaties’ that the Qing would be forced to sign with a total of ten countries over the following 60 years.