Distant Shores by Melissa Macauley offers a translocal and transnational historical narrative of the Chaozhou (Teochiu) people. She traces the expansion of their area of settlement and influence from their homeland in eastern Guangdong to Shanghai, Siam, and beyond, from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. The vast-ranging, turbulent story of this community provides the reader with a fresh perspective that challenges and cuts across conventional temporal and spatial boundaries in the historiography of China. Macauley complicates the divide between early modern and modern, and the Skinnerian macroregional framework of cores and peripheries. In doing so, she sets out to integrate the experiences of Chinese in China and its far-flung diaspora, particularly in Southeast Asia, and to contemplate their collective significance in the shaping of the present world order.
In Part 1, Macauley identifies four seminal events that contributed to the emergence and institutionalization of the Chaozhouese as a translocal and transnational sojourning community. During the seventeenth-century Ming–Qing transition, southeastern China, including eastern Guangdong, experienced decades of warfare and lawlessness. In particular, the Qing court's draconian scorched-earth evacuation of the coastline brought about severe devastation and dislocation, and caused many residents to perish. Local elites took up arms to defend themselves and their communities. The Zheng regime in neighboring Fujian provided a model for organization and maritime expansion through their resistance to Manchu forces and overseas trade with Japan and Southeast Asia. Some prominent Chaozhouese individuals, such as Qiu Hui, joined the Zheng, while others, notably Su Li, became fiercely independent local powerholders. The Qing occupation of Taiwan in 1683 ended all official forms of Ming loyalist resistance. However, many individuals, refusing to acknowledge the new dynasty, took refuge abroad. Chaozhouese formed an important part of this outflow, which diversified the composition of the overseas Chinese, previously consisting primarily of southern Fujianese.
The momentum of Chaozhou expansion intensified across the eighteenth century, stimulated by population pressures and shortages of land and rice at home, combined with the availability of vast, sparse frontiers in Southeast Asia. According to Macauley, the landmark event that epitomized this process was the seizure of power in Siam by the half-Chaozhou Taksin in 1767. His mercantile native-place compatriots had helped place him on the throne. During his reign, he afforded them political protection and privileges that promoted their commercial activities and migration. As a result, Chaozhouese proved able to acquire a dominant position in Siam and maintained it beyond Taksin's downfall in 1782. The kingdom became a base for them to make further inroads into other parts of Southeast Asia, such as the Mekong River Delta, Malaya and Singapore, and West Borneo, where political authority was thin or effectively nonexistent. Not only migrants, but a large part of the economy of eastern Guangdong, were offshored to these places. Chaozhouese merchants and laborers opened up rice paddies and cash crop plantations and engaged in shipbuilding and mining.
The decline of centralized power in China, and the unwillingness or inability of the Qing court to actively intervene on behalf of its overseas population, provided opportunities for the development of translocal institutions to regulate and protect the interests of Chinese abroad. Macauley argues that although some ambitious adventurers, such as Mac Cuu and Taksin, chose the path of military conquest and state-building, the majority of them, including Chaozhouese, organized according to native place and fictive kinship ties. These relatively decentralized, translocal associations helped sojourners find employment and provided them with material welfare and emotional attachment. Operating legally and illegally in the form of secret societies, such as the Tiandihui, they connected the Chaozhou native place with the sites of sojourning.
Many secret societies adopted a platform of Ming restoration. As Macauley shows, the Chaozhou area had long been a site of latent anti-Qing sentiment. However, it was the prolonged and intensive exposure to Ming loyalist ideas prevalent among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia that provided organizations like the Tiandihui with a clear ideological platform subversive to Manchu rule. Chaozhouese made effective use of these institutions, which also proved well-adapted to participate in the illicit circulation of opium, which enjoyed a rapidly growing market in China. Its importance to maritime East Asian trade increased with China's defeat at the hands of the European imperialist powers during the mid-nineteenth century. The establishment of free trade colonies, such as Singapore, the opening of treaty ports, including Shantou in the Chaozhou heartland, and the Qing court's legalization of opium, provided Chaozhouese with additional bases of operation and channels of distribution for the drug.
For Macauley, the third turning point in this community's translocal history occurred around this time, with the emergence of Fang Yao as the most powerful man in eastern Guangdong. Prior to him, the local landscape was highly fragmented. Strongmen hailing from prominent lineages controlled one or several villages and constantly feuded with one another, while pirates infested the coastline. Fang's rural pacification (qingxiang) campaign, waged from 1869 to 1873, cut through this web of vested interests. He proceeded to establish a militarized chain of command that cracked down on opium smuggling and channeled the trade and distribution of the drug into official channels and subjected them to the lijin transit tax. As a result, the port of Swatow became a major “center of opium importation and revenue collection” (119). He further implemented Self-Strengthening projects, such as irrigation systems and land reclamation.
In Part 2, Macauley examines the long-term translocal and transnational implications of Fang Yao's pacification and dominance in the wake of his death in 1891. His military rule replaced the scattered hierarchy of entrenched power brokers in eastern Guangdong with a new, solidified privileged class consisting of his relatives and allied gentry. They survived the fall of the Qing in 1911 and the early decades of the republic. The communists proved able to expand their influence and bases of operation in the area by singling out this closely knit group of elites as targets of class antagonism and revolution.
Meanwhile, as centralized control collapsed amid warlordism and civil war, many Chaozhouese fled their homeland, as many as 80,000 people, according to Macauley. They flooded into all parts of Southeast Asia, especially Malaya and Singapore, and to Shanghai. The massive influx of migrants forced the British and other European colonial authorities to rationalize their governance, including the standardization of administration over their possessions and detailed legal codes and systems of taxation for categorizing and managing the Chaozhouese and other Chinese groups. In effect, Fang Yao's pacification campaign reflected and stimulated common transnational trends involving shared efforts by multiple state actors, Chinese and European, at subjugating a highly mobile and unruly population. Macauley calls it “entangled state-building” (15).
Ironically, this process also provided a solid framework for the creation and development of a translocal capitalist economic network: Maritime Chaozhou, which extended from Shanghai to Singapore and beyond. The second part of the book devotes the majority of its pages toward a survey of this greater Chaozhou zone at its height, from 1858 to 1929. The opium trade became the original means of capital accumulation for Chaozhouese merchants. Their trajectories resembled those of their Anglo-American counterparts, including Jardine-Matheson and Sassoon. However, the Chaozhouese eventually beat their competitors and became the largest opium traders in maritime East Asia. They skillfully made use of distribution channels and ports, such as Singapore, Bangkok, and Shanghai, and adapted themselves to various political environments through arrangements such as multiple citizenships. The money made from opium became invested in cash crops, such as gambier, pepper, and sugar from Malaya to Cambodia. Chaozhouese opened factories in Shanghai and other treaty ports. They proved incredibly successful in these enterprises, offering stiff competition to, or even marginalizing, Western firms. In particular, they managed to completely dominate Swatow, despite it being originally opened up by Britain to serve British interests.
The translocal economic linkages gave rise to unique social arrangements that perpetuated the survival and vitality of Maritime Chaozhou. As in other immigrant-sending Chinese locales, male sojourners comprised a substantial majority of the Chaozhouese in the treaty ports and Southeast Asia. This meant that they were absent from their native places for extended periods of time, or even for their entire lives. Their wives stayed behind to take care of the family property and rear their children. As a result, eastern Guangdong had a much lower ratio of male to female compared to the rest of the country. The few women who went abroad mostly ended up as prostitutes or servants (mui tsai) of rich families. Native banks established by the Chaozhouese and their financial instruments perpetuated these translocal circulations, providing loans and credit tickets for immigrants and remittances back home to family members. In the end, the Great Depression, followed by the Japanese invasion and the triumph of the communists cut off the linkages between the Chaozhou homeland and its maritime extensions.
Through her narrative of the rise and fall of Maritime Chaozhou, Macauley challenges Kenneth Pomeranz's claim of a great divergence in the early modern world, whereby Britain and Western Europe successfully industrialized with the assistance of fossil fuels and colonies, while China remained caught in an intensive agrarian mode of production. Instead, she argues for a convergence across Eurasia. Using the example of the Chaozhouese, she shows that they did not hit an ecological cul-de-sac but rather alleviated the resource shortages of their homeland through expansion into Southeast Asia, acquiring vast “ghost acreages” and mineral supplies. Like their European counterparts, enterprising Chaozhouese sold opium, and converted the profits into the creation of a holistic capitalist system replete with industrial manufacturing, banking, and plantations. They even proved able to beat out their European competitors in certain economic sectors, such as the opium trade.
Unlike the Europeans, Chaozhouese expansion remained primarily economic in nature and based upon informal dialect, native place associations, and secret societies. Although some ambitious adventurers and military strongmen emerged among them, they usually did not harbor territorial ambitions. Moreover, they received no support and often encountered outright hostility from the Chinese state. Macauley, however, believes that this lack of official support proved to be a blessing in disguise. The Europeans have long withdrawn from Southeast Asia, but the Chaozhouese and other ethnic Chinese groups have survived and continue to exercise an influential role in the region in the post-colonial period.
There is certainly compelling evidence to favor convergent trends occurring in different parts of the world from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Yet, the role of state institutions and policies should not be overlooked. Britain and, later, Western Europe, Japan, and the US not only achieved mechanized industrial growth, but also proved able to harness it in the service of increased state power. This, in turn, was used not just for overseas expansion, but also in establishing a world order in which they could acquire a disproportionate share of profits, resources, and capital. The Chaozhouese enjoyed tremendous success and often beat the imperialists at their own game. Still, they operated and flourished in a world centered upon rules established and enforced by the Western countries and Japan. Seen in this light, the Chaozhouese were enterprising pioneers preceding the Chinese state, whose efforts to promote and harness industrialization occurred much later, took much longer, and is, arguably, still ongoing.
There is no space to elaborate further upon these preliminary ideas, which would probably take up several volumes. Nonetheless, they are a testament to the innovative and thought-provoking character of Macauley's narrative. She has set out, with much success, to observe the global through the local, and bridge the divide between early modern and modern, and Chinese and overseas Chinese historiographies. By doing so, she is able to ground her analysis firmly in primary sources, combined with interviews acquired through her fieldwork. The perspectives and approach offered by Distant Shores serve as a useful model for subsequent scholarship.
