1-20 of 39 Results

  • Keywords: China x
Clear all

Article

Infrastructure Development in Xinjiang  

Alessandro Rippa

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region covers one-sixth of the entire territory of the People’s Republic of China and shares international borders with eight countries. Rich in natural resources, Xinjiang is home to several Turkic-speaking, Muslim Indigenous groups. Following Xinjiang’s formal incorporation into the Qing empire as a province in the late 19th century, recent scholarship shows how the region was subjected to a colonial-like civilizing project, in part carried out through large state investments in infrastructure. These covered agriculture, mining, and connectivity infrastructure, as well as a growing number of Han migrants settling into new urban centers. While the last few decades of the Qing administration and the convoluted Republican period that followed them (1912–1949) did not deliver much of what was planned, this phase would nevertheless define the approach taken later by the Chinese Communist Party toward Xinjiang. Since the Communist takeover in 1949, in fact, the way in which the Chinese authorities see Xinjiang has crystallized: as a potential economic outpost and a restless frontier space in need of further integration. This is particularly evident in Xinjiang’s history in the 21st century, as the region is both a backbone of transnational connectivity as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, and the site of one of the world’s most severe security apparatuses.

Article

Nanjing Massacre  

Daqing Yang

Also known as the “Rape of Nanjing,” Nanjing Massacre refers to the mass killings of disarmed Chinese soldiers and civilians, as well as other atrocities such as rape and looting, committed by the Japanese troops after they occupied Nanjing in the winter of 1937–1938. It is widely regarded as one of the worst Japanese war crimes in World War II. Shortly after the Imperial Japanese Army entered the Chinese capital of Nanjing (previously written as Nanking) on December 13, 1937, Western newspapers reported horrific conditions in the fallen city including mass execution of Chinese captives. Wartime records, mostly compiled by a few Westerners who stayed in the city and organized a refugee zone, showed widespread Japanese atrocities of rape, random killing, and looting that continued for weeks. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the Nanjing Massacre became a leading case of Japanese war crime at the military tribunals conducted by the victorious Allies between 1946 and 1948. Citing witness accounts and burial records, these tribunals put the total number of Chinese killed in the Nanjing area variously from 100,000 to over 300,000. In addition, they estimated that there had been around 20,000 cases of rape and that one third of the city had been destroyed by the Japanese troops within six weeks of occupation. Largely overlooked before the early 1970s, the Nanjing Massacre has since become a hotly contested issue in Japan and between Japan and China. In 1985, China opened a large memorial museum in Nanjing, where the number of 300,000 victims is on prominent display. The Chinese government has designated December 13 a day of national commemoration. Documents related to the Nanjing Massacre submitted by China have become part of the UNESCO Memory of the World registry. In recent decades, many important first-hand evidence has emerged and makes it both possible and necessary to reassess this historical event. Wartime Japanese military and personal records confirm that at least several tens of thousands of Chinese had been killed in mass executions that were condoned, if not ordered, by the high command of the Japanese army in China. Moreover, killing disarmed Chinese captives and atrocities against Chinese civilians had already begun well before Japanese troops reached Nanjing; many such atrocities continued long afterward, thus suggesting there was more than a temporary breakdown of Japanese army discipline in Nanjing. Western and Chinese accounts add vivid details of sexual violence, indiscriminate killings, and looting by Japanese soldiers. They also reveal grave errors on the part of the Chinese defense that likely made the situation worse. Despite these points of convergence among historians, however, there is still disagreement over the exact number of victims and causes of the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing.

Article

The Yellow River, the Chinese State, and the Ecology of North China  

David A. Pietz

Flowing through the North China Plain, one of China’s major agricultural regions, the Yellow River has long represented a challenge to Chinese governments to manage. Preventing floods has been an overriding concern for these states in order to maintain a semblance of ecological equilibrium on the North China Plain. This region’s environment is heavily influenced by seasonal fluctuations in precipitation, leading to a long history of famine, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when water management structures disintegrated with the deterioration of the imperial system. In the 20th century, new civil and hydraulic engineering techniques and technologies held the promise for enhanced management of the region’s waterways. After 1949, the new government of the People’s Republic used a hybrid approach consisting of the tenets of multipurpose water management combined with the tools of mass mobilization that were hallmarks of the Chinese Communist Party. The wide-ranging exploitation of surface and groundwater resources during the Maoist period left a long shadow for the post-Mao period that witnessed rapid consumption of water to fuel agricultural, industrial, and urban reforms. The challenge for the contemporary state in China is creating a system of water allocation through increased supply and demand management that can sustain the economic and social transformations of the era.

Article

The Canton Trade, 1700–1842  

Paul A. Van Dyke

In 1684, China reopened its doors to trade with the outside world, which had a huge impact on the development of global commerce. Canton quickly emerged as one of the few ports in the world where everyone was welcomed and where everyone (except Japanese and Russians) had access to everything including tea, silk, and porcelain. Unlike other ports, individual traders in Canton could buy and sell the same high-quality products as those handled by the East India companies. As the Canton trade grew, international networks became more sophisticated; as more ships went to China, new forms of remittance such as Letters of Credit and Bills of Exchange became standard, which streamlined international finance; as more money flowed into Canton, more goods were distributed worldwide, which gave rise to globalization; as economies in both the eastern and western hemispheres became more integrated with the Chinese market, there was a parallel decline in the risks of conducting trade, which encouraged the advancement of private enterprise. One by one the large East India companies found it increasingly more difficult to compete and went broke. However, the success of the Canton trade was also its weakness. Because the legal trade was so dependent on silver collected from opium sales, and because a decline in opium sales would likely lead to a decline in rice imports, only minimal efforts were made by local officials to stop the smuggling. Foreigners were eventually able to overcome the system with the outbreak of war in the late 1830s, but this happened because the system had already defeated itself.

Article

The Chinese in Colonial Myanmar  

Yi Li

Exchanges of people and goods between Myanmar (formerly Burma) and China have a long history spanning over a millennium. However, it was during the British colonial era in Burma (1824–1948) that substantial and consistent migration of ethnic Chinese occurred, laying the foundations of Sino-Burmese communities in present-day Myanmar. Two distinct migration routes were initially taken by Chinese immigrants: the overland route between northern Burma and Yunnan, predominantly used by southwestern Chinese since precolonial days; and the overseas route connecting the southern coast of China with port cities in Southeast Asia, including Rangoon. The latter forms part of the Nanyang Chinese network and was primarily used by immigrants from Fujian and Guangdong provinces. Over time, regional differences between different Chinese immigrant groups blurred, and Chinatowns or Chinese quarters in Rangoon, Mandalay, and other major towns across the colony emerged with distinctive Chinese characters. In colonial Burma, migrants from China constituted a smaller population, were less influential commercially and socially, and were generally less visible than their Indian counterparts. Nonetheless, they were recognized as a distinct ethnic group in the colonial state. Given colonial Burma’s geographic and administrative position, Chinese immigrants, while maintaining strong connections with other Southeast Asian Chinese communities, experienced a unique trajectory under colonial rule, navigating through internal tensions and World War II, and, alongside their multiethnic fellow residents, in British Burma, declared the independence at the beginning of 1948.

Article

Wa Communities in the China-Myanmar Borderlands  

Magnus Fiskesjö

The Wa is an ethnicity in the borderlands of China and Myanmar (Burma). In the 1950s and 1960s, their ancient land was divided for the first time by these two modern states. Before this watershed moment in Wa history, the Wa were famous as independent, practically invincible warrior-farmers, much feared in their region despite having no kings and no regular army. These Wa farmer-warriors were deeply engaged in their regional economy through trade in mining products, as well as in opium, and, as a result, the British colonial officers who tried but failed to incorporate them into their empire could not but marvel at the wealth of the Wa. Since the division, the formerly independent Wa communities have been transformed on both sides of the border: on the Chinese side, into drastically impoverished regular peasants under Chinese rule; and, on Burmese territory, since 1989, into peasants under a new type of Wa elite in the Wa state—a semi-state governed by the United Wa State Army (UWSA). Both in China and in Myanmar, the Wa are officially listed as an indigenous ethnic minority. In China, there is local autonomy in name only. In Myanmar, the UWSA is an ethnonationalistic Wa elite with an army of considerable power and occupies a fraught position in the geopolitics of the fragmented state of Myanmar, which the UWSA recognizes even as it seeks even greater autonomy. Both contemporary Wa societies are dramatically different from the past, although many cultural traditions continue.

Article

The Uyghurs: Making a Nation  

David Brophy

The Uyghurs comprise a Turkic-speaking and predominantly Muslim nationality of China, with communities living in the independent republics of Central Asia that date to the 19th century, and now a global diaspora. As in the case of many national histories, the consolidation of a Uyghur nation was an early 20th-century innovation, which appropriated and revived the legacy of an earlier Uyghur people in Central Asia. This imagined past was grounded in the history of a Uyghur nomadic state and its successor principalities in Gansu and the Hami-Turfan region (known to Islamic geographers as “Uyghuristan”). From the late 19th century onward, the scholarly rediscovery of a Uyghur past in Central Asia presented an attractive civilizational narrative to Muslim intellectuals across Eurasia who were interested in forms of “Turkist” racial thinking. During the First World War, Muslim émigrés from Xinjiang (Chinese Turkistan) living in Russian territory laid claim to the Uyghur legacy as part of their communal genealogy. This group of budding “Uyghurists” then took advantage of conditions created by the Russian Revolution, particularly in the 1920s, to effect a radical redefinition of the community. In the wake of 1917, Uyghurist discourse was first mobilized as a cultural rallying point for all Muslims with links to China; it was then refracted through the lens of Soviet nationalities policy and made to conform with the Stalinist template of the nation. From Soviet territory, the newly refined idea of a Uyghur nation was exported to Xinjiang through official and unofficial conduits, and in the 1930s the Uyghur identity of Xinjiang’s Muslim majority was given state recognition. Since then, Uyghur nationhood has been a pillar of Beijing’s minzu system but has also provided grounds for opposition to Beijing’s policies, which many Uyghurs feel have failed to realize the rights that should accord to them as an Uyghur nation.

Article

Asian Indentured Labor in the 19th and Early 20th Century Colonial Plantation World  

Richard B. Allen

The period between the mid-1830s and early 1920s witnessed the migration of some 3.7 million Africans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Melanesians, and other peoples throughout and beyond the colonial plantation world to work as laborers under long-term written and short-term oral contacts. Studies of this global labor migration over the last forty years have been heavily influenced by Hugh Tinker’s 1974 argument that the indentured labor system was essentially “a new system of slavery.” There has also been a propensity toward specialized and compartmentalized studies of the indentured experience in various parts of Africa, the Caribbean, the southwestern Indian Ocean, India, Southeast Asia, and Australasia, with a particular emphasis on systems of labor control and worker resistance. Recent scholarship reveals that this labor system began two decades earlier than previously believed, and illustrates the need to explore new topics and issues in more fully developed local, regional, and global contexts.

Article

The Population History of Asia  

Tim Dyson

When composed of hunter-gatherers, Asia’s population numbered perhaps 1–2 million. But the emergence of agriculture saw population growth, and it appears likely that by 1 CE the continent’s population exceeded 100 million. For China and Japan, there are data which shed light on their population histories during pre-modern times. Moreover, both countries experienced rapid demographic transitions in the 20th century—substantially limiting the associated extent of population growth. For the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, there are almost no population data prior to the late 18th century, although what happened subsequently is better recorded. Both these diverse regions experienced fairly protracted modern demographic transitions and substantial population growth. West Asia’s population is thought to have been of similar size in 1900 as in 1 CE. During the 20th century, however, most countries in West Asia experienced late birth-rate declines and very substantial population growth. Throughout history, the level of urbanization in Asia has generally been extremely low. Nevertheless, the continent contained most of the world’s most populous cities, though that situation changed temporarily in the 19th and 20th centuries. That said, after 1950 mortality decline fueled urban growth. As a result, by 2020 Asia once again contained most of the world’s largest cities, and about half of the continent’s people lived in urban areas. The population history of Asia has generally involved very slow population growth. The main explanation has been that death rates were high, marriage was early and universal, fertility was uncontrolled, and so birth rates were high too. However, research has increasingly suggested that in some areas the levels of fertility and mortality which prevailed in pre-modern times are better described as “moderate” rather than “high.” Moreover, as in Europe, there were regulatory mechanisms which helped to maintain a degree of balance between human numbers and the resource base.

Article

Gender and Demography in Asia (India and China)  

Ravinder Kaur

China and India together account for over one-third of the world’s population and both countries have considerably fewer women than men.. With long histories of skewed sex ratios and gender discrimination, these two countries have experienced a sharp decline in the birth of girls since the late 20th century. The unfolding and intimate relationship between gendered social structures, son preference, fertility decline, and new sex determination technologies has had serious demographic and social consequences, resulting in millions of “missing” girls, surplus males, bride shortages, and possibly, rising levels of gender violence. Even as women’s socio-economic indicators such as life expectancy, literacy, education, and fertility have improved, families continue to show a preference for sons raising questions between the tenuous relationship between development and gender equality. The advantages of raising sons over daughters, supported by traditional kinship, family, and marriage systems, appear to have got further entrenched in the era of neoliberal economies. Family planning policies of both nations, advocating small families, and the advent of pre-natal sex selection technologies further set the stage for the prevention of birth of daughters. Governments in both countries have since banned sex determination and launched policies and schemes to redress the gender imbalance and improve the value of the girl child. While these policies have not been highly successful, other social forces such as urbanization and rising educational levels are beginning to transform the way girls are perceived. A kernel of hope seems to be emerging at the beginning of the 21st century, as some improvement is visible in the sex ratio at birth in some of the worst affected regions in the two countries.

Article

The Japanese Empire and Russia, 1868–1945  

David Wolff

As Russia expanded eastward in the early and mid-19th century, it came into increasing contact with the Japanese Empire. In turn, after the modernizing Meiji revolution premised, in large part, on fears of Western countries, such as Russia, the Japanese began to expand westward, leading to further collisions. War was avoided for the first thirty six years, but the next forty years were bloody, with Russia and Japan fighting three times. Although the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 (called the “Japanese-Russian War” in Japanese) has been depicted in Japan as a victory and the apogee of empire, it also put the Island Empire on the road to future wars it could not ultimately win. The USSR was one of the victor nations taking the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay in September 1945. Thus, Russia played an active role in both the glorious heights and shattering conclusion of the Japanese Empire. The clashes with Japan also influenced Russian history. Russia’s defeat in every land battle and the loss of two-thirds of its naval forces defied expectations and set off a sequence of events that, among other causes, fatally weakened the Russian Empire, both internally and externally. Revenge would come forty years later. Although Stalin failed to garner many of the fruits of victory he had hoped for, especially in regard to Japan, the very presence of vast Soviet armies in the Chinese northeast at the end of World War II put them in a position to midwife the Chinese communist revolution, mainly by handing over the captured Japanese weapons to Mao Zedong’s army. The meeting of Russia and Japan in the period from 1868 to 1945 gave birth to modern northeast Asia, a region whose rapid and recent rise to prosperity has been riddled with conflicts and controversies.

Article

Environmental Change and Chinese Empire  

David A. Bello

Agriculture—especially grain cultivation—informed the primary environmental ground of imperial China (221 to 1912 ce) and was ideally intended to produce human habitat from state-supervised environmental change. The consequent political and socioeconomic development of the empire and its constituent dynasties was conditioned within larger global ecological contexts that can be abbreviated as two major climate shifts, the Medieval Warm Period (MWP, c. 1000–1300 ce) and the Little Ice Age (LIA, c. 1400–1900 ce). Before 1000 ce, China likely experienced a number of less prolonged alternations of cold and warm climate, such as the Sui-Tang Warm Period (650–700 ce). Chinese empire’s adaptations in response were rooted in agriculture, augmented by agro-pastoral and pastoral measures mainly concentrated along and above north China’s steppe ecotone. Critical inputs for the sustainability of environmental relations were maintained throughout the imperial period and came from domestic and foreign sources—most critically including the fertile eroded silt of the north China Loess Plateau, the water resources of the Yellow and Yangzi river basins, a high-yield crop suite of both dryland and wet rice varieties, south China fast-growth tree species, and New World silver and highland crops. Ongoing development and exploitation of these resources across the succession of seven major—and over a dozen more localized—dynasties over two millennia allowed China’s population to expand at globally unprecedented rates, numbering from tens of millions around the year 0 ce to hundreds of millions during the 18th century. In the process, biodiversity—especially that of wild growth forest habitats—was steadily reduced from north to south, successively. The empire’s main resource base and population centers correspondingly relocated south of the Yangzi around the watershed Song (960–1279 ce) period, with the Grand Canal tapping both of China’s major rivers to deliver southern abundance as far north as Beijing by the Yuan (1279–1368 ce). Inner and Southeast Asian peripheries came under comparable agro-commercial developmental pressure only during the Ming–Qing period (1368–1912 ce). With the onset of the 19th century, however, destabilizing environmental pressures emerged across the empire, many of them paradoxically driven by once-effective adaptations.

Article

The History of Badakhshan from the 7th to the 19th Century  

Daniel Beben

Badakhshan is a historical region spanning the present-day territories of northeastern Afghanistan and eastern Tajikistan, as well as bordering districts of northern Pakistan and northwestern China. This mountainous region was historically significant on account of its position as a key transit point for trade between China and western Eurasia, as well as for its gem mines. The region held a largely peripheral position within the Muslim world down to the 12th century. Its status changed significantly in the wake of the Mongol conquests, from which Badakhshan emerged as a notably enlarged and autonomous kingdom, one which thereafter played an important role in the political history of Central Asia and Afghanistan. However, neighboring empires continued to encroach on the region throughout the 18th and 19th century, and by the end of the 19th century, the region had permanently lost its autonomy and was partitioned between Afghanistan and the Russian Empire.

Article

Demography of Qing China  

Shuang Chen

The Qing dynasty (1644–1912) experienced one of the fastest population growth rates of the premodern world. The total population grew from well over 100 million in the late 17th century to 430 million in the mid-19th century. This rapid population growth was produced by the proactive response of Chinese families to new and improved economic opportunities after an initial period of war and chaos, especially the recovery and development of agriculture and increased food productivity and living standards from the end of the 17th to the mid-19th century. The social and cultural systems of Qing China were characterized by distinctive patterns of mortality, marriage, and fertility. In terms of mortality, improved living standards and health intervention in the Qing enabled some populations to enjoy a life expectancy comparable to their European counterparts. At the same time, in a largely patriarchal society, families practiced sex-selective infanticide, especially targeting girls, to control family size. Sex-selective infanticide resulted in a skewed sex ratio, which in turn led to a shortage of marriageable women. Therefore, while women married early and universally, a significant proportion of men remained unmarried. Moreover, since marriage in late imperial China was characterized by female hypergamy and male hypogamy, eventually, men with lower socioeconomic status fared poorly on the marriage market. In terms of fertility, historical data show that marital fertility among some Qing populations was low, and families practiced deliberate birth control to achieve a desired number and sex combination of children. Other than regulating their demographic behaviors, families also proactively used strategies such as adoption and migration to keep a balance between family size and resources. Low marital fertility, high infant and child mortality, and the practice of infanticide left some people without a male heir. Childless and especially sonless couples responded by male adoption to continue their family lines. Adoption, especially the adoption of sons, was a prevalent and integral part of the Chinese demographic system during the Qing and functioned to counteract the negative effects of low marital fertility and infanticide. In addition, migration was increasingly common in the Qing dynasty and helped ease regional population pressure on economic resources, thereby making sustained population growth possible. Finally, in the Qing demographic system, gender, socioeconomic status, and family hierarchy significantly affected individuals’ demographic outcomes: the likelihood of dying, being married, and having more children. Gender often had opposite effects on men and women. While household socioeconomic status had significant effects, an individual’s position in the hierarchy within each household was also important in influencing her or his demographic outcomes. This is because the household constituted the basic unit of production and consumption. Often, the household head did not equally allocate resources among all members but instead favored the priority group within the household.

Article

Manchu Language  

Mårten Söderblom Saarela

The Manchu language was the language of state in the Qing empire, which ruled China and large parts of Inner Asia from 1644 to 1911. For much of its history, it was used by communities in which Chinese was also spoken and written, but Manchu is a Tungusic language that is unrelated to Chinese. Its implementation in China and maintenance as the administrative language of core elements of the Qing imperial bureaucracy prompted the development of a Manchu education system and a tradition of bilingual Manchu-Chinese language pedagogy. Long before upwardly mobile individuals in China from the late 19th century onward committed to the study of the languages of the industrialized West and Japan, numerous Chinese-speaking servants of the Qing throne applied themselves to the study of Manchu. Over time, not only a voluminous government archive accrued in Manchu but also a literature in several genres that consisted largely of translations from Chinese. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Manchu ceased to be a vernacular language in many areas where it had been previously spoken. It remained in use longest on parts of the imperial periphery, even beyond the fall of the Qing empire itself. Both as an administrative language and as a vernacular, Manchu survived into the tumultuous new century. Over time, however, it was supplanted by Chinese in most places. Yet dialects of Manchu remain spoken by small communities as of the early 21st century.

Article

Southeast Asian Trade in a Global Perspective, from Antiquity to the Modern Era  

Derek Heng

Southeast Asia has been a critical nexus of the economic interactions between the Indian Ocean, China Seas, and the Pacific Ocean littoral. Trade and commerce developed from the early first to late second millennia involving shipping and commercial networks both within Southeast Asia and from further afield. Accompanying these networks were the region’s port cities, which held these networks together, pulling the subregional networks of trade and commerce into one regional economic sphere. The nature of trade and commerce was affected by the different ecological and economic zones of Southeast Asia. This in turn affected the types of products that were traded and the communications links that connected the different subregions to the outside world. In addition, economic interactions with regions further afield and the geopolitical changes that these regions underwent also determined the types of products that flowed into and through Southeast Asia, as well as the way in which commerce was conducted.

Article

The Uyghurs in Modern China  

Rian Thum

The Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking ethnic group, most of whom live today within the People’s Republic of China. Virtually all Uyghurs are Muslims, and most are oasis farmers, small-time traders, or craftsmen. They constitute the majority population of the Tarim Basin, a region that eventually fell under Chinese rule after the Qing conquest of 1759. Although Turkic speakers predominated in the Tarim Basin for several centuries, the modern Uyghur identity was only named and formalized in the 20th century. During that period, a succession of Chinese states gradually transformed Uyghur lands from a loosely held dependency under the Qing to a closely monitored, assimilationist, settler colony in the 21st century, ruled by a Han Chinese–dominated bureaucracy. Uyghurs inherit traditions rooted in Turko-Persianate Central Asia, elaborated in the 20th century by strong influences from Soviet Central Asia and continually adapted to a political context of shifting outsider regimes punctuated by briefly successful independence movements.

Article

The Yangzi River and the Environmental History of South China  

Ian Matthew Miller

Over the last seven thousand years, humans have gradually domesticated the environment of South China. Transitioning from a reliance on wild environments, humans tamed plants and animals and transformed the landscapes and waterscapes to better fit their needs. Rice paddies, orchards, and artificial ponds and forests replaced naturally seeded woodlands and seasonal wetlands. Even the Yangzi River, and many of the other rivers, lakes, and seashores, were transformed by polders, dikes, and seawalls to better support human activities, especially rice agriculture. In the last thousand years, farmers intensified their control of the cultivated landscape through terracing, irrigation, flood prevention, and new crop rotations. They planted commercial crops like cotton, fruits, oilseeds, tea, and sugar cane in growing concentrations. Migrants and merchants spread logging, mining, and intensive agriculture to thinly settled parts of the south and west. Since the 17th century, New World crops like sweet potatoes, chilis, maize, and tobacco enabled a further intensification of land use, especially in the mountains. Since the early 1800s, land clearance and river diking reached extremes and precipitated catastrophic flooding, social unrest, and a century of warfare. Since 1950, the People’s Republic has overseen three further waves of degradation accompanying the mass campaigns of the Mao era and the market reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Following catastrophic flooding in 1998, the government has increasingly worked to reverse these trends. Nonetheless, South China remains one of the most intensively cultivated environments in the world and continues to feel the effects of new attempts to tame and expropriate the forces of nature.

Article

Spatial Organization of Chinese Imperial Government and Society  

Nicolas Tackett

Despite important continuities in imperial practices and bureaucratic structures, the spatial organization of Chinese government and society evolved in significant ways over the course of the two millenniums of the imperial period (221 bce–1911 ce). Different dynasties were structured in very different ways, some controlling only the agricultural zone of “China Proper,” or portions thereof, and some establishing distinct administrations to exert authority over the jungles, mountains, deserts, and steppe lands on the peripheral exterior. Successive regimes turned to a range of strategies to maintain order in the interior, collect tax revenue, and supply both the enormous population inhabiting the capital and the armies defending the frontiers. In addition, by the beginning of the 2nd millennium ce, there was a noticeable trend toward greater economic and cultural integration across China’s vast territory. A range of factors explain this trend, including the intensification of marketing networks following a medieval commercial revolution, a “localist turn” that spurred a decentralization of the imperial elite, and changes in how policymakers envisioned the nature of their state.

Article

Commerce and Economy in Southeast Asia within the Sinosphere (Laos and Vietnam)  

James A. Anderson

Before the 16th century, Southeast Asian trade within the Sinosphere (Laos and Vietnam) took place in a maritime trade network that drew together the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea (Eastern Sea). Land-based and maritime trade routes were interlinked across this region. Behind the maritime trade was the upland supply of forest products that included many of the items most desired by distant markets in China and Southeast Asian destinations. The upland access to trade items was as important as was control of the coastal ports. Westerners arrived in the early modern period, as others had, as traders, and were accommodated into established trading patterns. The general current of anti-imperialism was still to come in the 20th century.