Session 41: Re-emergent Region: New Perspectives on Southeast Asia-China Interactions

Organizer and Chair: Philip A. Kuhn, Harvard University

Discussant: R. Bin Wong, UCLA

Keywords: Southeast Asia-China, cross-border flows, diaspora, maritime.

Southeast Asia and China have, for millennia, been linked by commercial interaction, human movement, and political aspirations, and woven together by technological and cultural interflow. These links have been disrupted or repatterned, initially by the expansion of European imperialist powers, and subsequently by the revolutions which emerged in the twentieth century. Today, the situation is undergoing change again. This process is, in various ways, reviving some of the older ties which long linked these areas. If we are to understand the changes now taking place in the region, the growing interdependencies and alliances which are emerging, we need to examine them through both contemporary and historical lenses. But academic "area studies" have continued to divide Southeast Asia and East Asia. Many aspects of human existence that have extended across these boundaries have not been systematically studied.

Southeast Asia-China interactions is an emerging research focus at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. Our panel seeks to bring attention to ARI’s research focus and new publication series. We and our publication series, "Southeast Asia and China: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives," try to understand the long-term links between the polities and societies of East Asia and Southeast Asia. We will, for this panel, focus on the flow of political power, peoples, trade networks, goods and cultures of consumption between Southeast Asia and China from the 15th to the 21st century. Linkages and their dynamics between Southeast Asia and East Asia are the essential and common elements of our panel.

The Zheng He Voyages: A Reassessment

Geoff Wade, National University of Singapore

The Ming eunuch navigator Zheng He is lauded in contemporary China as a great maritime voyager, an ambassador of peace and friendship, and a potent symbol for Chinese patriotic education. The eunuch and his voyaging colleagues will receive more than their fair share of public attention over the year 2005, a year marking the 600th anniversary of the first voyage commanded by Zheng He. The attention they will garner will in part be celebratory, but at the same time there will be critical, scholarly notice paid to the nature of the voyages and how they might be perceived both in East Asian and world history. On the basis of Ming texts, this paper will examine Zheng He as an agent of the Ming state, pursuing one strand of that state’s colonial expansion in the early 15th century. In conjunction with the successful colonial enterprise which the Yong-le emperor pursued in Yun-nan and the ultimately unsuccessful colonial venture in Dai Viet, the Zheng He voyages will be here examined as an alternative form of protocolonialism—one which the Portuguese were to pursue almost a century later. The argument to be advanced is that these voyages were military expeditions with both political and commercial purposes, aiming to achieve a pax Ming throughout Southeast Asia and, by controlling the maritime trade centres, to take control of the trade routes and thereby the trade controlled until then mainly by the Arabs.

The Making of a Transnational Social Sphere: Institutional Linkages and the Construction of the Homeland in Singapore, 1945–2005

Hong Liu, National University of Singapore

The "Homeland," Philip Kuhn argues, has to be understood "both as objective facts (the Chinese revolution and the modern Chinese state [and, one may add, the qiaoxiang, ancestral hometown]); and as subjective visions in the minds of Chinese overseas." By using Singapore as a site of geographical focus, this paper explores the linkages and interactions between the "objective facts" and "subjective visions" and how the homeland has been interrogated, imagined, and reconstructed at the time of decolonialization and globalization. The first section of the paper is conceptual, arguing for the importance of institutions in the configurations of the homeland. By looking at the locality/business associations’ linkages and dissociations with China, the second section examines the processes of the loss of the hometown (1945–65) and the remaking of the homeland (1965–90) and the ramifications for diasporic interactions. The third section discusses the dynamics and mechanisms behind Singapore’s drive in building itself as a major nexus of the emerging global Chinese networks in the closing decades of the 20th century. It is in this context that Chinese new migrants form an integral segment of the transnational social sphere and new patterns of homeland linkages have emerged. This paper concludes that an historically grounded institutional approach to the homeland facilitates a better understanding of Southeast Asia-China interactions and that the focus on the making of a transnational social sphere takes us beyond the conventional nation-state framework and qiaoxiang paradigm that have been predominant in the studies of Chinese overseas.

Opium: Mechanism of Commodity and Culture Transmission

Yangwen Zheng, National University of Singapore

While historians have produced excellent works on the opium trade, British imperialism and opium regimes, they have not studied the most important aspect of the opium theatre—consumption. The question I ask first is at what point did opium became a luxury item; and secondly why it became so popular and widespread after people discovered its recreational value. This paper is a chapter of my forthcoming book titled "The Social Life of Opium in China" (CUP). It studies the introduction and naturalization of the opium culture of consumption in China. My paper will demonstrate the political, commercial and cultural ties between the peoples of Southeast Asia and China since the early Ming. These ties were created and maintained by seafaring Chinese, both merchants and laborers. They sojourned to and from Southeast Asia; they also carried many Southeast Asian or New World goods and cultures back to China. Tobacco, smoking, the peanut, the sweet potato, birds’ nests and fragrance came to China this way; so did opium from the Ming. This was opium’s journey to China and this was opium’s mechanisms of transmission. This would extend to North America and Europe in the nineteenth century as the Chinese frequented more foreign shores and settled in more strange lands. The seafaring Chinese people are the interface and link between China and Southeast Asia. They changed consumer behavior and helped to shape the history of China.