The Pearl

on China’s historical and contemporary perceptions of its maritime frontier, we examine this unprecedented binge of “marine theft” in the context of the nation’s awakened realization of its relationship with the sea, a century and a half after the Chinese navy was routed by Britain’s Royal Navy in the mid-19th century.

China’s Maritime Frontier

In Western discourse, China has consistently been considered a land-based, continental power with a lack of maritime engagement, despite its 18,000 km coastline. This is part of a wider narrative claiming that the violations of Great Britain and other European powers, such as the Opium Wars of the 19th century, were “a long overdue wake-up call for a land-focused empire reluctant to embrace the opportunities, and guard against the dangers, of the wider world beyond its neglected coastlines.”4 The following section provides an alternative narrative highlighting two critical and often-overlooked factors that help us understand and evaluate the implementation of land reclamation in contemporary China. First, China has considered both its maritime frontier (haijiang 海疆) and its land frontier (lujiang 陸疆) strategic importance since early imperial times. Second, the ancient and long-standing knowledge and techniques China has applied to describing and managing its littoral territory make its maritime boundary as visible and tangible as its continental counterpart. China’s perception and management of its maritime space throughout history must be considered in the context of many other themes ranging from the daily life of farming and fishing, to trade, travel, diplomacy and military priorities. China has always made use of its marine resources in addition to land based agriculture as illustrated by the ever-changing reinterpretations of the Chinese phrase yihai weitian 以海為田 (literally “the sea as arable fields”). Before the late 16th century, the phrase was mainly used to describe the equal importance of sea and land from the point of view of food production, referring sometimes to reclaiming land from the sea directly to expand arable fields,5 and sometimes to exploiting marine resources to substitute for or supplement agricultural products. The latter included raising and gathering marine plants and seafood along the shoreline, fishing on the high seas, and above all extracting salt from saltpans. Indeed, salt production was so profitable that it was tightly controlled by government and formed an important part of the imperial budget. As China’s maritime trade expanded in the 16th century, the meaning of yihai weitian became more complex as it increasingly took on a mercantile connotation. One of the earliest references to farming as an analogy for marine production and trade in Chinese literature, can be found in

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7. Part of the Wanli haifang tu showing coastal area near Jiaolai river delta in Shandong. Research of the East and the West (dongxiyang kao 東西洋考, ca. 1611), one of the best-known records relating to Chinese maritime history. After a government ban on maritime trade was imposed in an effort to eradicate increasing piracy along China’s coast, officials representing coastal regions used yihai weitian and its variation yihai weisheng 以 海為生 (literally “making a living on the sea”) to persuade the imperial court to relax the ban. Later in the 17th century, after the Qing dynasty took over China proper in 1644, the usage of yihai weitian started to lose its mercantile connotation. Instead, the phrase referred to not only the exploitation of marine resources, a resumption of the traditional analogy between farmland and the sea, but also to the politicization of the maritime frontier. With the emergence of a more modern concept of sovereignty in Qing China, yihai weitian came to imply that marine resources and littoral territories could be mapped and taxed just like arable ones. When discussing “the great epoch of enclosure” of the early modern period, scholar Charles Maier rightly points out that the process of fortifying frontiers and redefining sovereignty to give “more cohesively organized territorial states … unrestricted authority within their own domains” could be found not only in Western Europe, but also in China, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.6 In the case of Qing China, rulers and scholars sought to project the “all-encompassing gaze”7 of the emperor onto both terrestrial and maritime domains, in an effort to precisely define all areas under the control of the state. Indeed, the projection of state power over the ambiguous littoral territory composed of islands, inlets, cliffs, rocks, shoals and reefs was critical for thwarting real and perceived threats to the legitimacy of imperial rule.8 While geographical knowledge, mapping and documentation of China’s maritime space already had a long history well before