Tension and Potential

The Qing Dynasty’s troubled relationship with migrant networks began shortly after its establishment. These networks preceded it, having begun to form in the final century of the preceding Ming Empire (1368–1644) when that dynasty had relaxed strictures on coastal mobilities and began licensing private trading vessels.Footnote ¹⁰ Following the conquest of China from the north by the ethnically Manchu Qing dynasty, some of the most bitter resistance was put up by the vast maritime network of the Ming loyalist Zheng clan on the Fujian coast and Taiwan, itself seized from the Dutch in 1661. Seeking to cut the Zhengs off from support on the China coast and overseas, between 1656 and 1683 the Qing state violently uprooted many coastal communities and enforced a total prohibition on private maritime trade and travel called the haijin 海禁.Footnote ¹¹

Following the eventual Qing conquest of Taiwan in 1683, the Kangxi emperor in 1684 declared the seas “open” for trade once more, establishing a new customs and licensing system to regulate Chinese maritime circulations. This was perceived to be beneficial for both regional livelihoods as well as government revenues.Footnote ¹² Nevertheless, in the halls of power there remained persistent anxieties about the recurrence of a maritime political crisis through the coalescing of an anti-Qing movement abroad, especially one made in collusion with European colonial powers in Southeast Asia. This, combined with imperial China’s longstanding belief that the stabilization of agricultural populations was the foundation of a strong society, led the dynasty to adopt an extremely cautious orientation to maritime migration.Footnote ¹³

Migration, in the state’s view, was supposed to be temporary and undertaken primarily for the purposes of trade. While trade indeed was the lifeblood of many networks, as we saw in the case of Batavia, on the ground the economic activities undertaken by many migrants varied considerably. They worked in all manner of skilled trades, laboured in agriculture and construction, and operated small and large business. While many eventually returned to China, when local conditions were favourable some remained for many years, or even generations. Some formed temporary or permanent unions with non-Chinese women, leading to the growth of whole new transcultural communities, like the Sino-Malay Peranakans. In maritime Southeast Asia, such patterns would be appealing to many colonial and native authorities seeking to expand their revenues or power bases.Footnote ¹⁴ These longer-term undertakings and attachments were essential for the meaningful circulation of technologies. Eventually, however, these lived practices of migrant networks would clash with the ideals and anxieties of the state.

One of the key early anxieties in fact concerned the circulation of Chinese shipping technology. No later than 1694 reports were already reaching Beijing of “domestic merchants constructing vessels overseas” in unspecified locations, almost certainly Southeast Asia. Fearing the use of these unlicensed vessels for smuggling or worse in China, the court attempted to prohibit the practice.Footnote ¹⁵ By 1717, however, the primary concern had become the export of vessels themselves especially to Manila and Batavia, apparently alongside large quantities of rice that China could not afford to lose. This again was closely tied to a fear of privileged shipbuilding technology being exported. On his imperial tour of southern China, Kangxi had apparently been personally informed at the Suzhou shipyards that nearly half of all ships built there did not return, and many were suspected of being sold abroad. “Seagoing vessels,” the emperor had been rather bafflingly told, “require ironwood for their keels, and this type of wood is not produced in foreign countries, only in Guangdong.” This, of course, was not accurate. Particularly concerning to the throne were related reports of large numbers of Chinese people remaining at these ports long known to be “pirate dens.”Footnote ¹⁶ While the fears of ship export and piracy seem to have been unfounded, the accumulation of longer-resident Chinese populations was real enough. The court appeared to have little interest in what possible economic activities these populations might have been undertaking – their existence was sufficient evidence that expectations of trade-centric, short-term migration were not being upheld.

Coinciding with a nadir in Han-Manchu and Sino-foreign relations, all this was deemed sufficient reason for the state to declare another ban on maritime trade. The ban was less extreme than before, being confined to maritime states south and southwest of China. The domestic coastal trade was permitted to continue, as well as trade with countries of the eastern seas like the Ryukyus and Japan.Footnote ¹⁷

In stark contrast to the late-Ming era, when the Imjin War (1592–8) and coastal piracy had made Japan the primary maritime threat and prohibited destination, it was now perceived as comparatively benign. A renewed direct trade, legalized by the Tokugawa and Qing governments in 1646 and 1684 respectively, had proceeded smoothly thus far and would be allowed to continue uninterrupted.Footnote ¹⁸ By 1718 trade with adjoining Vietnam was also approved to continue, and foreigners based in Macau were allowed to continue their activities as normal.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite these many exceptions, the renewed ban represented a real blow to the livelihoods of migrant networks and the prospects for technological circulations, with violators again potentially liable for capital punishment.

Perhaps most immediately and deeply impacted were those already abroad. The court promulgated an order demanding that all those overseas were now required to return, and granted a three-year window in which to do so.Footnote ²⁰ For Chen Wei, and likely for many others, this proved to be impossible. According to Chen, with the ban in place there were simply too few ships now making the journey between China and Batavia for him to return in time, and he thus had no choice but to remain.Footnote ²¹ Ultimately, according to reports roughly only two thousand people returned under this program – a disappointing figure from an official perspective.Footnote ²² While even Qing officials acknowledged that some vessels, especially those bound for Vietnam, were likely still visiting ports such as Batavia surreptitiously, returning on such ships was apparently unfeasible or undesirable for people like Chen Wei.Footnote ²³ With network connections severed, and family members trapped on both sides of the divide, the state-migrant relationship had again become extremely strained. Unless a way was found to allay the court’s fears and improve this relationship, the prospects for stable migratory circulations and productive technology transfers were dim.

Fortunately for migrant networks, the ban of 1717 proved relatively short lived. It was lifted again for Fujian province in 1727 at the request of Governor-General Gao Qizhuo 高其倬. This was extended to Guangdong later that year, and all other provinces by no later 1729.Footnote ²⁴ The intervention of respected scholar Lan Dingyuan 蓝鼎元 was crucial informing in this policy change.Footnote ²⁵ Unlike most senior officials charged with making and enforcing coastal policy, Lan was actually from one of the cities where many depended on migration for their livelihood – Zhangzhou, outside Xiamen. Lan was thus able to bring both local and global knowledge to bear in his treatise “On the South Seas” (1724). In it, Lan painted a compelling picture of the hardships visited upon coastal communities by the ban. Reopening the southern oceanic trade, he argued, would be beneficial for seagoing families, as well as state revenues. Moreover, years of peaceful trade by foreigners at Macau and Guangzhou had demonstrated that entanglements with colonial powers of the region were nothing to be afraid of.Footnote ²⁶

Of particular significance for technology were Lan’s reflections on the benefits to China what could be called a migrant-driven technological dialogue in ship construction.Footnote ²⁷ Criticizing the ill-informed officials whose claims had led to the ban, Lan explained that timber used in Southeast Asian ships was in fact sturdier and cheaper than that found in China. Indeed “every merchant bought and made use of it” already. Future observers certainly noted that China-built ships abroad commonly replaced masts and rudders with superior Southeast Asian teak.Footnote ²⁸ Lan’s comment implies that construction on (or even of) Chinese ships overseas had already been taking place before the ban. Significantly, it also suggested that such technological exchanges by migrants could represent a benefit to China, rather than a risk. This was an explicit inversion of the imperial framework used to justify the ban. Moreover, it was only one of several arguments Lan intended to show that fears over the export of ships were unfounded. The same was true of rice, he argued, which was much more often imported cheaply from the region, not exported.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed the role of rice was so central to the lifting of the ban that importing rice was made a condition of travel for Fujianese ships under the plan ultimately approved by the Yongzheng Emperor, Kangxi’s son, in 1727.

Return of the Network

Now that the ban had been lifted, what would become of the many people like Chen Wei who had been stuck overseas for years during its enforcement? Governor-General Gao Qizhuo argued in favour of another three-year grace period to return. Ultimately, however, the Yongzheng Emperor refused, insisting that such lax treatment would only lead others to “flippantly leave their native places, and people who drift off to foreign countries will grow ever more numerous!”Footnote ³⁰ Clearly the emperor still saw the kinds of longer-term migrations that were important for technology transfer as contrary the interests of the state. Unfortunately for the previous generation of migrants, they would be the ones to bear the burden of this conclusion.

Actually implementing the emperor’s wishes, however, was not so simple. With large numbers of vessels again to soon be going back and forth to places like Batavia, how were officials to prevent the return of those supposedly forbidden from doing so? Moreover, how would they prevent large numbers from “drifting off” to engage in activities beyond simple trade? According to their informants from coastal foreign trade firms, there were potentially tens of thousands in Java, where Chinese “craftspeople” could turn an easy profit. To address this, officials in Fujian and Guangdong promised exhaustive documentation of all future crew and passengers, whose hometown kin and communal security (baojia 保甲) units would also be enrolled as guarantors for their behaviour. Moreover, ships engaged in the same trade were to be grouped together in threes who would be mutually responsible for one another. Finally, the details and even appearances of persons aboard returning ships would be checked against the manifest of who departed, to ensure that people hadn’t snuck away or been replaced by unwelcome returnees.Footnote ³¹

This was an administratively demanding and possibly unrealisable way of screening out the pre-1717 migrants deemed politically dubious. As Gao Qizhuo pointed out, officials possessed no details on those who had gone abroad in years past. With large numbers of people soon to be coming back on newly departed ships, everyone on board would naturally claim to have only left recently when admitting otherwise meant punishment. This time, they proposed just a one-year grace period, but Yongzheng again refused, claiming security concerns.Footnote ³²

In summer of 1728 the first contingent of trading ships to make a round trip since the ban was lifted returned to Fujian’s booming hub of Xiamen, bringing with them no fewer than thirty-three long-term residents of Java (and three from Vietnam). Fortunately for the passengers, they were allowed to return to their homes under scrutiny, as they would likely have left before the order against doing so reached them. Among the biographies passed to Beijing, all were aging natives of Xiamen, and officials did not appear troubled that some identified as agriculturalists, like the fifty-two-year-old Zhu Cai 朱猜 or sixty-year-old Han Pin 韩聘.Footnote ³³ Despite the seemingly unintimidating image of grey-haired farmers and tea salesmen, the emperor had no interest in reconsidering his prohibition. It was, after all, the principle of discouraging long-term settlement that lay at the foundation of his logic. Regardless of the bureaucratic and practical limitations of keeping them out, the pre-1717 generation would remain formally barred from return.

As the case of Chen Wei illustrates, efforts to keep the long-resident Chinese from returning were porous, to say the least. Despite the closure of the South Sea trade in 1717, Chen had managed to build a good life for himself in Batavia. He and his wife had three daughters together, and his business seems to have thrived. With the lifting of the ban in 1727 and Chinese ships again circulating regularly to Batavia, in 1730 Chen returned to China, seemingly without difficulty. He spent three years in country, before heading back to Java with another load of exports. Unfortunately, according to Chen, in early 1733 his wife passed away. In Java Chen purchased two concubines, a young housemaid, and four servants. With his family, entourage and several cases of rice in tow, he caught another ship to China, claiming good Confucian intentions of returning home to look after his aging mother.Footnote ³⁴

This time Chen and his party were caught attempting to smuggle themselves to shore in a smaller boat, seemingly a necessity for anyone seeking to bring their non-Chinese family and staff into the country. Chen was charged with attempting to subvert the border post, a crime which was exacerbated by the revelation of Chen’s background as a pre-1717 migrant. For all this Chen Wei was deemed liable for one hundred strokes with a cane and three years’ imprisonment. Ultimately Chen managed to bargain his punishment down to nothing by agreeing to fund a granary for public relief, complete with an astronomical 8,000 dan of grain (∼480,000 kg). Clearly his time in Java had made Chen an extremely wealthy man. The unfortunate shipper who carried him back to China, Guo Pei 郭佩, was not so lucky and appears to have received a full punishment.Footnote ³⁵ Not everyone could afford to buy their freedom through such good deeds.

It was perhaps because of Chen’s case (or Guo’s fate) that the following year that a group of pre-1717 migrants attempted an altogether different tactic to return home. Mobilizing their entire network stretching from Southeast Asia across the seas and into their home communities, a group led by Xu Chao 许朝 petitioned the government to be allowed to return legally. In this they were backed a coalition of Xiamen-area elders, ship’s masters, and firm owners, led by Lin Yuangui 林元桂, Xie Cheng’en 谢承恩, and Wang Peixing 王沛兴, respectively. The pleas of such prominent members of society succeeded in capturing the attention and sympathy of Governor-General Hao Yulin and the senior military and civilian establishment of Fujian.

Hao and his officials put this request to the emperor, asking for another three-year window of opportunity. The officials claimed to have looked into the matter closely, and concluded that migrants had not returned after 1717 for valid economic reasons like debts, or ownership of land and property that could not be quickly liquidated (apparently not deemed inappropriate). They had wives, children, and tombs to care for back in China, and longed to return to them – a “terribly pitiable” situation, according to Hao. But how would the state adequately scrutinize the loyalty and conduct of these returnees, and reincorporate them into the Qing bureaucratic system?

For this the network itself provided the solution. The aspirant returnees themselves would be asked to provide their details, along with the names of relations in their hometowns to serve as guarantors for their behaviour. All this would be passed to ship’s master ferrying them, and then on to port and local officials, obviating the need for complex and time-consuming interrogation and investigation upon arrival. Despite all this, however, once again the Yongzheng Emperor flatly refused, claiming that changing policy on travel would only lead people to treat it lightly.Footnote ³⁶ Perhaps at the end of the day it really was a case of networks versus the state. Or perhaps not.

Not long after, the Yongzheng Emperor died and his son Qianlong took the throne. In March 1736, Hao boldly put a proposal again to the newly enthroned emperor. “The righteous might of our holy dynasty has spread far and wide,” he argued, “harmonizing the Chinese and foreign worlds. It is all embracing and all encompassing.” “All under heaven,” he intoned, “is one family.” This was more than mere rhetorical flourish, but an appeal to the expanding dynasty’s self-concept of multi-ethnic, world centring, universal emperorship that reached its height under Qianlong. The application of this principle to the maritime world is significant, as it was most commonly employed in justifying authority over Mongols, Tibetans, and other inner-Asian peoples whom the Qing now ruled. Hao instead used the framework to highlight those foreigners who flocked to the China coast and were permitted to settle in Macau.Footnote ³⁷

Chinese and foreign peoples were already entangled domestically, Hao thus argued, and this was a testament to the flourishing of their dynasty. By contrast those trapped overseas were “all compatriots of the state” whose “situation was deeply pitiable.” This new strategy proved enough to convince the emperor to approve the opening of another brief window of return.Footnote ³⁸ By 1738 this was even expanded at Hao’s request to include that returnees’ wives, concubines, widows, sons, and daughters be formally permitted to “return” and registered for settlement, whether or not they accompanied the original migrant. If forced to “abandon their wives and children, leaving them behind in alien lands,” Hao argued, it would not only be a great hardship for those abroad, but discourage then returning promptly.Footnote ³⁹

Perhaps most the most important outcome from this, however, was the state’s acceptance of the use of migrant’s networks themselves as a means of guaranteeing loyalty. According to subsequent documents, this episode marked a major turning point. From this moment on, apparently, all those who subsequently stayed for lengthy periods abroad were able to return through the simple obtaining of a bond from the shipper.Footnote ⁴⁰ Xu Chao and his network had managed to transform official policy. Combined with an increasing willingness on the part of Qing officials to view the activities of migrants abroad as operating within a broader vision of empire, this would have a meaningful impact on the ease of operations for migrant networks and the feasibility of technological circulation. Things would ultimately become even easier – but there were further hurdles to pass along the way.

Crises and Resolution

Almost immediately after the window of return for the pre-1717 generation was closed, an unprecedented crisis in the South Seas that threatened to put a stop to both long- and short-term migrations. In October 1740, amidst a revolt by disaffected Chinese sugar cultivators in the Javanese countryside, Dutch colonists and their allies carried out a government-sanctioned massacre of Chinese civilians in Batavia. Accused of being a fifth column for the rebels, some eight thousand men, women, and children were killed.Footnote ⁴¹ These were the people who would have been Chen Wei’s friends and neighbours before his departure. Once word of the revolt and massacre reached the court in 1741, it launched an enormous debate on the future of Chinese mobilities. Some coastal officials, especially Fujian’s acting governor-general Celeng 策楞, argued that a new ban on all or part of South Seas trade was necessary to punish the savage Dutch and protect future traders from potential depredations. However justified it may have been to sanction the Dutch, such a ban would have also meant disaster for many migrant networks.Footnote ⁴²

After much debate, officials agreed to leave the trade open, given its importance to the economy, food security, and tax revenues on the coast. Their intelligence showed that the Dutch were repentant and welcoming of new traders, and had even replaced the governor of Batavia for his excesses, while officials accused victims of having brought this on themselves for assimilating abroad and ignoring the repeated imperial overtures to return. Conversely, the continuation of circulations was framed within the throne’s universalizing aspirations for “spreading our emperor’s moral teachings far and wide, until the four seas brim over with them.”Footnote ⁴³

Despite the tragedy, the decision to keep the trade open allowed migrant networks to continue to thrive – even in Batavia, where the Chinese community would return to prominence over the coming decades. The trade’s continuation also enabled one of the most important and explicit decisions about technology transfer made during the period. This was the official embrace of overseas ship construction by migrants, or at least those in Siam. The first openly Siamese-built Chinese merchant ship, belonging to one Lin Jieheng 林捷亨, arrived at Xiamen around 1744 and was soon followed by another belonging to Xie Dongfa 谢冬发. The next year at least twice that number entered port. In 1746 no fewer than ten merchants had apparently gone abroad with intentions of doing the same. Before their return in 1747, acting governor of Fujian Chen Dashou 陈大受 requested that this practice, rather than being restricted, should be encouraged through formal licensing.Footnote ⁴⁴

According to Governor Chen, not only the cost of lumber but also the cost of labour was significantly lower for these merchants in Siam, up to 50 or 60 per cent cheaper than in China. The major appeal of this, to Chen at least, was its capacity to reduce the cost of essential rice imports. In Chen’s estimation, given the rapid growth of the phenomenon, it was also important for security reasons to subject the Siamese-built ships to the scrutiny of licensing. According to him this would actually make it easier for ship owners, allowing them to have smooth interactions with the bureaucratic infrastructure and avoid extortions. This was roundly approved.Footnote ⁴⁵ Over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Chinese ship construction in Siam boomed.

This arrangement was enormously profitable to Siamese kingdoms, especially after the establishment of the Chakri Dynasty at Bangkok in 1782. There, sovereigns welcomed huge numbers of Chinese migrants to the capital and beyond, gave special trading privileges to Chinese merchants, and sponsored both the commercial and tributary trades between the two states.Footnote ⁴⁶ These vessels were, according to Europeans at least, superior to all other Asian varieties in size and utility.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, they were owned by not only Chinese migrants but also Siamese nobles, like the early nineteenth-century aristocrats Prya Sipipat and Luang Apai-pinit.Footnote ⁴⁸ Their actual manufacture took place largely along the Chao Phrya River, demanding specialized carpentry to build ships’ bodies, masts, and anchors; blacksmithing to forge bolts that held the pieces together; and caulking to seal the hulls. Crews made sails from locally purchased fabric and wove large cables out of abundant coarse grasses. Construction was done “under the direction of a Chinese head carpenter” but apparently employing many Siamese “ordinary workmen.” Some Siamese sailors even crewed ships bound for Guangzhou, the only port where they were permitted to land.Footnote ⁴⁹

In mid-eighteenth-century China, however, there remained one final hurdle to overcome, in the form of the lingering criminalization of migrants for having simply overstayed abroad. The resolution came in the wake of a case quite similar to Chen Wei’s that took place between 1749 and 1751. This was the prosecution of long-term Javanese resident Tan Iko (Chen Yilao 陈怡老). Tan had gone to the island in 1736, and in the wake of the massacre of 1740 he moved to Batavia to serve as a Chinese officer for the Dutch there. After retiring from his position in 1749, Tan was caught attempting to smuggle himself, his family, and servants ashore near Xiamen. Again, it seems to have been the unauthorized bringing of his foreign-born entourage into China that drew the attention of authorities. Unlike Chen Wei, Tan was not able to buy his way out of punishment, and was sentenced to transportation to the empire’s far northwest.Footnote ⁵⁰ This was an even harsher sentence than Chen had initially been given, based on the claim that Tan’s actions had contributed to a disruption on the frontier. In many ways Tan Iko seems to have served as a scapegoat, or a proxy perhaps, for the migrants blamed for the crisis of 1740.

In another likely similarity with Chen Wei’s case, Tan Iko’s punishment seems to have deeply troubled the migrant networks connecting the Fujian coast to Southeast Asia. Though in this instance their names were not reported to Beijing, it appears that again a coalition of networks made overtures to provincial officials in Fujian. This time the official to take up their cause was the respected Governor Chen Hongmou 陈宏谋. Chen was well known for his contributions to the “statecraft school” (jinsgshi) of governance that sought pragmatic solutions to social, economic, and political problems facing the state.Footnote ⁵¹ Explicitly made in the tradition of Hao Yulin’s precedent, Chen asked that any Fujianese person, regardless of whether they had left before or after 1717, should now be permitted to return, along with their wives, widows, and children. This for the first time included the category of people who had gone abroad in between 1717 and 1727 in violation of the ban, who had hitherto been rigorously excluded. Though Tan himself had been a comparatively recent traveller, clearly this was meant as an overture to those migrant networks with long-standing ties.Footnote ⁵²

In what would have likely been a great disappointment for Chen’s petitioners, however, his program also called for the institution of new bans on returns for all subsequent traders who stayed abroad for more than three years.Footnote ⁵³ This time, when the emperor and Grand Council reviewed the request, they fully agreed with the grants of return, but over concerns that the three-year window simply proved too restrictive, ordered the coastal governors to draw up regulations that would “enable all those who go overseas to be able to return to their homeland.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Why the throne was now more willing to relax its own restrictions is uncertain. Perhaps the generations of advocacy by key networks and officials had gradually convinced Beijing that the economic benefits exceeded the threat. Or perhaps the court, having nearly completed the extermination of its last major inner-Asian rival, the Dzungar Mongols, felt more secure than ever in allowing its subject to circulate abroad.Footnote ⁵⁵

In any case, Guangdong governor-general Yang Yingju 杨应琚 replied arguing that Chen’s program for returns should be extended to all provinces’ loyal subjects and their families.Footnote ⁵⁶ As to Chen’s proposed three-year limit, Yang argued that only “indolent drifters” who remained abroad, enticing foreign women into marriage, until they had no way of making a living and so returned “just to feed off mainland” should be refused. He argued that “all apart from them are in fact law-abiding trading subjects” (贸易良民) and should be welcomed back. Yang’s definition was a significant and seemingly open-ended one. While trade was unquestionably the banner under which migration was to take place, for Yang at least the most important qualification for participation in the trade appeared to be economic productivity and self-sufficiency rather than specific profession.Footnote ⁵⁷

This was approved in 1754 in an edict proclaiming “All those people who go overseas for trade, regardless of whether it is for long or short periods, shall all be permitted to return home.”Footnote ⁵⁸ “Trade” would remain the idiom under which all migratory activity was understood, and permanent expatriation was never condoned. Yet with a broader and more inclusive definition of what constituted participation in the trade, and an end to specific punitive restrictions on duration of absence, migrants engaging in the kinds of longer-term stays enabling technology transfer were better positioned than ever before. Perhaps most importantly, Chen and Yang’s plans also reaffirmed the centrality of the network in (re-)integrating migrants and their families into the Qing bureaucracy. For Yang, bonds from shippers were all that should be required going forward to guarantee the status of returnees. This freed the state from the burdens of attempting detailed scrutiny of individual returnees, which would have been a costly demand on an already strained coastal bureaucracy. Ultimately, networks themselves were empowered with significant authority in determining who was in fact a loyal subject participating in the trade.

A New Era

More than simply giving Chinese networks a freer hand in managing migration flows, there were several early modern Qing policies that actively stimulated migrants’ economic activities. The official embrace of ship construction abroad discussed above is a clear example, but it is not the only one. As in the case of shipbuilding, rice was king. As a baseline, rice imports became subject to a preferential taxation regime, making them a consistently lucrative cargo.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the late eighteenth century, Fujian and Guangdong provinces even offered coveted official government ranks to traders who imported large quantities of rice, with progressively higher stations granted based on volume.Footnote ⁶⁰

Perhaps most broadly impactful were the routine privileges Chinese networks enjoyed in their interactions with the Chinese border. The Qing Empire represented one of the largest import and export markets in the world.Footnote ⁶¹ During the eighteenth century, Chinese traders arriving in China and had significantly greater access to ports along the China coast than their non-Chinese competitors. This difference only became more pronounced from the middle of the century as the state increasingly constrained foreign trade to Guangzhou, while at the same time opening many new customs stations for domestic vessels along the coast. While not all stations were open to those who traded internationally, domestic trans-shipment was common.Footnote ⁶²

As Jennifer Cushman has shown, Chinese vessels were further advantaged in generally being subject to lower taxation rates and supplemental measurement fees upon arrival in China.Footnote ⁶³ This, in my view, was the crux of a semi-protectionist system that significantly advantaged Chinese networks over potential non-Chinese competitors. Ultimately, the demand for Southeast Asian products in China proved to be so great, and their import so profitable, that it became one of the most significant drivers of both migration and technological diffusion. This was especially the case in the production of cash crops and the mining of precious metals. These were skills honed in parts of South China or among its diasporas, whose outputs enjoyed a ready market on the Chinese end of migrants’ networks and which were capable of generating easy tax revenues for Southeast Asian sovereigns.

On the Malay Peninsula, by the 1720s Chinese migrants had begun cultivating pepper in Johore and Kuala Trengganu, and gambier (used as a dye and food additive) in Riau by the 1730s. From the 1760s both were grown on the nearby island of Bintan, and on the west coast at Perak. All this was done at the invitation of local Muslim rulers.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Siam from the 1790s and 1800s, migrants especially to the Chantaburi area began growing large amounts of pepper and sugar for export, as part of the kingdom’s larger embrace of Chinese migrant technology transfer.Footnote ⁶⁵ Brunei, on Borneo, also came to host a large settlement of Chinese pepper cultivators.Footnote ⁶⁶ This was very much a process of dialogue, as these plants were all native to Southeast Asia, but their embrace as cash crops in specific localities was often spearheaded by Chinese networks possessing labour, capital, and specialized knowledge. Achieving high-quality export pepper, for example, required not just the right soil conditions but a specific “care with culture and curing” known only to the Chinese.Footnote ⁶⁷ It was Chinese migrants who introduced sugar cane into Siam, as well as the milling and claying processes that transformed it into a lucrative commodity. The latter in particular, using wet clay to slowly refine sugar into higher and lower grades, was key to creating the “whitest and best” product in the region. While ownership and operation of mills remained exclusively in Chinese hands, some sources also report extensive cultivation by Siamese farmers.Footnote ⁶⁸

Chinese tin and gold mining operations also grew considerably, especially in kingdoms on Borneo. In Sambas and Pontianak in the west, local Muslim rulers invited Chinese networks to mine gold in the hinterlands from the 1750s, which turned into a veritable gold rush. From Palembang in Sumatra, Chinese miners were invited to the nearby island of Bangka to mine tin from the mid-century, and later summoned to do the same in Kelantan and Perak in Malaya, and around Phuket in Siam. Chinese miners dug surface pits and drained them with hydraulics, using waterwheels and aqueducts to refine the minerals, and on-site furnaces and bellows to smelt them into ingots. Interestingly, according to one observer, Malay miners were known to “imitate the Chinese at an humble distance,” employing similar methods and machinery on smaller pits requiring less capital.Footnote ⁶⁹ Chinese operations were typically run as kongsis, or companies, shareholding partnerships consisting of both capitalists and labourers within the same network.Footnote ⁷⁰ In west Borneo some of these operations eventually became so autonomous as to constitute functionally independent states that clashed with the island’s colonizers.Footnote ⁷¹

None of this was orchestrated from Beijing. The tremendous economic power that Chinese migrants achieved in these industries across these Southeast Asia over the eighteenth century was the result of the efforts of the myriad migrant networks stretching out from the China coast, and their allies among Southeast Asian elites. These were figures like Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin of Palembang, who married a part-Chinese woman and surrounded himself with Chinese converts, or Sultan Alauddin Mansur Shah of Perak, who even took to dressing in the Chinese style.Footnote ⁷² The kinds of technological diffusion undertaken by migrants were not sponsored by the Qing state, and ranged from approved to merely tolerated as part of the larger migrant trade. But the particular form those technological circulations took, and degree of success they were able to achieve, I believe were shaped by Qing policies. Not only were networks largely permitted to organize their own migratory and economic activities, they also operated in an environment where the regional hegemon granted them privileged access to its markets. It is not coincidental that those endeavours which thrived most involved export back to China. Though European and Southeast Asian elites in the region almost always benefitted financially from such arrangements, I believe one should be cautious in labelling this system necessarily equitable.

Most obviously, migrant networks operated in a geopolitical environment where the Qing state usually demanded formal subordination from the so-called tributary states in which they were active. Additionally, in terms of technological development, the dominance of Chinese networks could arguably be seen as suppressing the development of industries in places where migrants could more cheaply import finished products from China. For example, the archaeological record in insular Southeast Asia shows an immediate surge in the import of Burmese, Vietnamese, and Japanese ceramics during the initial Qing haijin prohibition in the late seventeenth century. Afterwards, by the mid-eighteenth century, these were completely displaced by Chinese wares.Footnote ⁷³ Similarly, entire economies could arguably be considered to have become overly dependent on the export of raw materials to China to the potential detriment of industry, analogous to underdevelopment and world-systems critiques of Europe.Footnote ⁷⁴

One particularly interesting case is the fate of the construction of Chinese-style junks in Siam, which continued up to the mid-nineteenth century. These ships had to follow the proper style, featuring a distinctive hull shape; large, single-piece folding sails; a recessed rudder; and rounded bottom to be licensed as “Chinese” and eligible for preferential taxation rates and access.Footnote ⁷⁵ Already by the end of the eighteenth century these ships were outclassed in speed, stability, and carrying capacity by European-style square-rigged brigs in the region. Famed Southeast Asian traveller Wang Dahai 王大海 certainly thought as much in 1791, claiming that in comparison “our Chinese junks … seem merely like children’s playthings.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Despite this, the dominance of Chinese networks and the Qing system inhibited the brig’s adaptation in Siam. Not long after the first European-style ships were constructed in Siam in the 1830s, King Rama III was so impressed he ordered an end to junk construction altogether. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, however, builders were forced to create inferior hybrids, essentially brigs disguised as junks still capable of clearing Chinese customs.Footnote ⁷⁷ Again, this was not mandated by the Qing state, merely a product of system created by the confluence of protectionist policy and the dominance of migrant networks.

Whatever its flaws, and whatever its limitations, this was not a system I see as characterized by a persistent and irreconcilable antagonism between migrant networks and the state. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, the days of Chen Wei’s struggles with exile and arbitrary criminalization were long past. True, the relationship had begun in tension between the perceived imperatives of political stability and economic benefit, and this tension never entirely disappeared. Yet in the years surrounding Chen’s lifetime, the Qing state repeatedly found it necessary to concede autonomy and authority to migrant networks to make its own border system function. It ultimately permitted longer-term settlement abroad, and seems to have accepted or at least tolerated a broader range of economic activities under its rubric of “trade.” These conditions meaningfully impacted the potential for the circulation of technologies by migrants. In the case of shipbuilding at least, the Qing state eventually came to encourage its transfer abroad by networks, recognizing the potential for a technological dialogue with Southeast Asia. The extremely profitable dissemination of mining and cash crop technologies abroad by migrants, while not overtly supported by the state, likely benefitted significantly from the quasi-protectionist regime erected along the Qing border. In this framework, migrants could be framed not as transgressors of the empire but rather as beneficiaries of a universalizing project that extended beyond the borders of China, centring “all under heaven” around the Qing throne.