| My dissertation "Shaping the Asian Trade Network: The Conception and Implementation the 1684 Chinese Open Trade Policy, 1684-1840" suggests that the transnational economy from 1500 to 1840 was shaped by two different paradigms of maritime expansion: the Western and the Chinese. Whereas the Western paradigm was characterized by direct state initiative and sponsorship, government promotion of private trade, represented by the making of the 1684 open trade policy, was the central feature of the Chinese maritime enterprise.; It first disproves the widely accepted myth that Zheng He's state-sponsored voyages to the Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth century were both the earliest Chinese discovery of the sea routes to that region and China's last active contribution to the global economy. It suggests that it was the Chinese private traders who first discovered the sea routes to the Indian Ocean two centuries before Zheng He. Actually, Zheng He's voyages were merely part of China's numerous official voyages to the Indian Ocean during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which were made possible by the private navigational discoveries.; My dissertation then examines two historic changes in Ming-Qing China brought about by the global economy that emerged during the post-Discovery period: the second rise of the Chinese private trade, which had once declined in the fifteenth century, to a predominant role in the East Asian trade network and the formation of Chinese mercantilism among the Han and Manchu official-elites, which stressed the development of private trade as a new approach to wealth and power and thus urged an open trade policy. Finally, it explores how the Chinese emperor Kangxi, in response to these new economic and intellectual trends, ended the tributary trade system and established one of the most open trade systems in Chinese history in 1684. My dissertation concludes that it was not the Zheng He's voyages, but the 1684 Chinese open trade policy, that did contribute much to both the Chinese maritime enterprise and the formation of the Asian trade network during the ensuing one and half centuries. |
