BORDERS AND BEYOND: CONTESTED POWER AND DISCOURSE AROUND SOUTHEAST COASTAL CHINA IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

Abstract

This article focuses on the mobile peoples who engaged in piracy on the borders beyond the territories negotiated by the imperial Chinese and colonial Spanish and Dutch powers, and by doing so, reframe our perception of early modern imperial and maritime history. In pre-modern times, the control of territory within the administrative borders was incomplete, and small pockets of territories with porous borders were beyond governmental rule. The people and the groups that lived along the coast of the northeastern South China Sea were, at different times, recognized differently and many of their activities were at times sanctioned and at other times outlawed. This article reveals a facet of how the non-stateless peoples lived on the borders beyond, claimed their own order in their own way, and worked and became naturalized or classified inside the strengthening borders in pre-modern societies according to the agenda and discourses of the dominant powers. I argue that the coastal societies had their own “order” that created groups “beyond control” or “being registered gradually.”

Two significant pirate leaders, Lin Feng 林鳳 (Limahong, ?–1575?) ¹ and Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功 (Koxinga, 1624–1662) ² , influenced the early modern borders around coastal southeast China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in different ways, revealing a borderless reality beyond the ideal Chinese imperial and European colonial claims, urging us to reflect on the original social “order” in a different way. This reality further relates to piracy, strengthening administrative borders, European colonial settlements with their new borders, along with regional barriers and the spaces occupied by borderless people. Born in Chaozhou (Teochew), Lin attacked the Spanish-controlled city of Manila, and then fled to the Pangasian region in 1574 before disappearing from the Philippines and becoming a legend in Cambodia and the Malay Peninsula. Zheng, having lost a chance to save his Japanese mother, Tagawa Matsu, from the Manchu army (1646), fought a life-and-death struggle with the Qing (1644–1912) court and seized Taiwan as a base from the Dutch in 1662. At one time he controlled both commercial and pirate ships from Nagasaki to Melaka. The two pirates Lin and Zheng established maritime dominance during their time, reshaping the order and borders of the sea basin and the region together with their enemies, as well as bringing with it by-products of discourses up to the modern era. This article, due to limitations of space, will focus on those mobile people who shaped piracy and the borders beyond those negotiated by the different powers, and further reframed our perception of early modern imperial and maritime history. I argue that the coastal societies had their own “order” that created the groups “beyond control” or “being registered gradually.”

Previous studies have proved that the pirates and the merchants on the early modern Chinese southern coast were generally the same people––coastal natives. ³ These people, either “outlawed” or “law-abiding,” as well as most of the commoners, took on the identity of pirates or merchants in order to reap different benefits, moving back and forth between these two categories or identities. Similarly, Western Europeans and Chinese officials alternated between labeling these people “pirates” as well as “merchants,” depending on whether they wished to oppose or cooperate with them. However, after understanding this situation, we may push the conclusion further to see if this “pirates as well as merchants” model shadowed some facets of the coastal societies in terms of “order” and the groups beyond social control. The reason different subjects needed to label others was that they collided with each other right there at that time; in other words, the empire tried to strengthen its administrative border in the context of the borders beyond. Along with this new consolidated border was the creation of new identities. This article focuses on administrative efforts in southern Fujian and colonial Manila and Dayuan (Tayouan), people outside the Chinese empire's control (“outlaws”), and the negotiation between people and power. It first reviews the scholarship on border issues, then on the nature of the pirates, then examines the colonial process of the Spaniards and Dutch, and finally moves to describe how the historical processes above shape our understandings of the past. The borders beyond were clarified day by day under several strong powers, and historical discourses and consciousness were shaped under the newly strengthened administrative borders.

To define the “borders beyond” or the “borderless,” we will clarify how borders were, in fact, drawn around southeast coastal China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From an external perspective, Chinese imperial authority generally considered the coastline, including the coastal islands, as its southeast border. After Taiwan was incorporated into the imperial administrative settlement, it also became the southeast “hedgerow” of the empire. ⁴ The Spanish colonialists considered northern Taiwan as their border until their forts were taken over by the Dutch, while the Dutch considered the coastline, which covered the ports of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou, their front line as well as their maritime border. ⁵ Outside these regions, Chinese, Spanish, and Dutch administrators, in their view, perceived these as the borders beyond, whether of land or sea. However, from an internal perspective, these three powers all faced inner barriers which created the de facto borders beyond. These borders beyond included communities no smaller than the area inside the “border” controlled by the administrators, including many villages and towns (although not all). The administrators understood what separated their own territory from mobile people, but they had less control over what went on inside their borders. In other words, control of territory within the administrative borders was not complete, and small pockets of territories with porous borders were beyond their control. For instance, the Dutch only controlled the small areas around Zeelandia, their fort in south Taiwan, and the Spaniards even in the 1630s were able to hide inside their fortress in Danshui (Fort San Salvador). ⁶ The Ming government effectively controlled the prefectural seats; however, within its territory were several restless areas, with several groups of equally restless people, who also moved beyond their borders. Most of those, the Chinese imperial and European colonial authorities labeled as the pirates and merchants described in this article, people who lived in these borders beyond, and moved back and forth inside and outside them.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Few English-language works have tried to connect the border issues of this region in the pre-modern world to the activities of these mobile people, who were part pirate and part merchant. Ng Chin-Keong's recent book, by compiling most of his previous articles over the past two decades, uses the concept of boundaries “to explain the development of China's maritime southeast and its interactions across maritime East Asia and the broader Asian Seas.” ⁷ Harriet Zurndorfer summarizes recent western scholarship on this topic to look at how the “maritime” turn changed our sense of continental history. ⁸ Tonio Andrade demonstrates that the Japanese, Dutch, and Spaniards had different understandings of the territoriality and taxation rights in the case of Taiwan (especially its eastern part) in the first half of the sixteenth century. ⁹ Although this problem had disappeared after the expulsion of the Dutch by Koxinga and by the later Chinese administration of Taiwan, ¹⁰ the same issues would be revived again in the nineteenth century, when Japan adopted and mimicked the attitudes of Western imperialists in the 1874 Taiwan Expedition. ¹¹ In this sense, border issues were closely connected to the clash of powers and the shaping of historical discourses in connection with these mobile people in modern times.

How the regional powers went about controlling these mobile people has also been an attractive topic. ¹² The limitation of the theory of social control, as Lucien Bianco points out, is that while it defines control as the prevention and repression of incidental disorders, it can no longer use the definition itself to analyze the lack of unrest. ¹³ Plus, the theory of social control completely fails to explain the mechanisms of disorder. The bankruptcy of the social control theory in social history after the 1960s makes it vital to rethink the basic order of society (how local organization was manipulated) in late imperial China. ¹⁴ From the 1990s until now, the mainstream local control discourse was set under ritual practice and the lijia 里甲 system. ¹⁵ This dominant discourse has, so far, repeatedly pushed scholars to discuss the mechanism of social control. This article inherits the legacies of these social history studies by focusing on people beyond “control” and hopes that by revealing this reality we can understand the keys to social disorder and admit that society had, in fact, its own order.

Southeast coastal China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be described as a world of “pirates” and “merchants.” Previous scholars have for a long time taken note of the topic of pirates. Charles Hucker presents a case of how civil officials campaigned against invading groups in the context of traditional Chinese patterns of response to military threats. ¹⁶ Kwan-wai So addressed the same problem in the 1970s, but he only focused on “Japanese pirates” while neglecting the fact that their equivalents were being nourished by unstable local society, or the places that we here describe as the borderless regions outside the control of the administrative government. ¹⁷ Dian Murray studies the pirates of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century South China coast and points out that the Vietnamese regime in the south supplied them with a fertile breeding ground, and Robert Antony brings another work of Qing piracy and “history from the bottom up” by revealing in micro-perspective the life of pirates, rampant disease, homosexuality, and violence. ¹⁸ Recently, Dahpon Ho published his study on earlier piracy and Qing motivations for controlling the coastal people. According to Ho, his research portrays “the depopulation as not just a military act to combat pirates or the powerful sealord Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), but also an act of social engineering to subjugate the coastal population by removing it behind an artificial land boundary.” ¹⁹ The current article, then, traces the earlier piracy and further reveals the key reasons behind the persistence of this piracy.

Piracy and the Intensifying Administrative Border

The strengthening administrative powers reshaped borders and the borders beyond. Piracy represented a status closer to the original ecology of the borders beyond, and was a representation of the conflicts accompanying the process of the expansion of the Chinese imperial and European colonial powers. Ming dynasty (1368–1644) Chinese commentators referred to coastal pirates and some bandits as wokou 倭寇. This term literally means “[dwarf] Japanese bandits/pirates,” though many of the pirates were Chinese from the southeast coast. To strengthen the feeling of the borders beyond and the background of piracy, we need to review the study of kou (all kinds of robbers such as bandits and pirates), including wokou (literally meaning Japanese bandits and pirates) and haikou 海寇 (generally meaning pirates).

Studies of Piracy

Beginning in the 1890s and continuing into the twentieth century, Chinese historians paid a great deal of attention to the phenomenon of piracy. At that time, especially during the 1930s to 40s, China was threatened by Japan, and this had much to do with why scholars were provoked to recall the history of wokou incursion. These early studies made a contribution in identifying primary historical sources and in providing fertile ground for introspection today. ²⁰ However, these works tend to have at least one of three characteristics that have placed limits on the development of the field: one a purely chronological narrative with little historical interpretation, another a rigid class analysis, and finally a simplistic view of Sino-Japanese relations. Prior to the 1990s, such characteristics dominated research on the kou. ²¹

Despite their contributions in identifying relevant primary sources, these Republican-era works share some flaws. First, they view wokou in the beginning of the Ming dynasty as being the same as wokou in the Jiajing reign (1522–1566). Such a perspective ignores the fact that these wokou groups were composed of different people and involved in quite different activities. More important is that almost all Chinese historians who wrote about the wokou before the 1990s explained the sudden severe conflicts in the Jiajing period as resulting from the contradictions between the policy of the sea prohibition and private trade. Turning to studies from the 1980s, even though they made great improvements, the characteristic of rigid class analysis persisted, or we can say that they shared paradigms with the works of the 1930s. Furthermore, in much prior Chinese scholarship, such portrayals quickly led to discussions of “the sprouts of capitalism,” “the movements of anti-feudalism,” or the “revolution of the people.” Such knee-jerk associations are the second characteristic found in much of the previous research on wokou. Generally speaking, works from the Republican era (1912–1949) tended to have the first and the third limitations, while works from 1949 to the 1980s tended to have the second and the third limitations.

These associations could be found even in otherwise outstanding works. However, Dai Yixuan in 1982 successfully changes the “traditional view” by moving away from viewing wokou as Japanese bandits to seeing them as Chinese, either bandits or commoners, and Lin Renchuan in 1987 finds that even from another standpoint we can recognize this fact: of the fifty-three identifiable wokou leaders, at least forty-four can be confirmed as Chinese (83 percent). Hence, Lin makes the clear judgment that, in the Jiajing reign, it was really not the Japanese bandits but the anti-prohibition struggle of the maritime commercial cliques and the anti-repression struggle of the coastal peasants that caused the unrest.

Although Lin shows some cases in which the wokou were at the same time merchants, we cannot simply attribute wokou incursion to a so-called maritime commercial clique, nor can we simply characterize them as fugitives, for such categories would necessarily obscure the complexity of the living habits and activities of coastal populations. If wokou incursions were really rebellions by maritime merchants, why do we, in the primary sources, see such passages as “the merchants are so frightened when they hear rumors of wokou,” but find no evidence of merchant-wokou collusion? Some of the primary sources prove the limitations of these explanations by scholars prior to the 1990s. ²²

In the primary sources of the Ming dynasty, it seems that the bandits in South China had many qualities in common and often blended into the general population. In the Jiajing reign, the scholar-official Gao Gong 高拱 wrote that “it is not the people who become bandits, but the whole of Guangdong is full of bandits. It is all because of this situation [that local officials and generals collude with the bandits].” ²³ The existence of such bandits was typical for most areas of southeast China. Such groups were a mainstream part of the social milieu of the area, and people who were willing to rebel on a small and local scale were very much a part of the local society along the coast, the original borderless place. ²⁴ An assistant of the Zhejiang and Fujian Grand Coordinator wrote in the sixteenth century that “the people who had capital would collude with the wokou to trade; those who had little capital would collude with the wokou to rob; the really powerful and rich families would cover such activities, and the officials can only negotiate with [the wokou].” ²⁵ In fact, people in the mid-Ming found that the phenomenon of the wokou started when the rich, powerful families found ways not to pay for their goods, while at the same time, “The ordinary people were also oppressed by corrupt and fierce officials and distressed by hunger and cold. They then followed one another into the sea.” ²⁶ Besides this local power, another problem was that the kou were mobile. Though they could be suppressed in one area, it was fairly easy for them to move to a new area that was more lax in state control. Likewise, the kou strengthened both this mobility and social networks through marriage ties.

Aside from the mainland Chinese scholarship discussed so far, scholars in Taiwan and Japan also discuss piracy from a social historical perspective. In addition to emphasizing the waxing and waning of prohibitions on maritime activity, Zheng Liangsheng and Wu Daxin have also tried to place wokou in the broader framework of South Chinese social history. Zheng's book is a very solid study with rich commentaries and research, which benefits later scholars in providing the chronology. Japanese scholars have also made a substantial contribution. ²⁷ Katayama Seijirō and Sakuma Shigeo's works and ideas were introduced to China very early on. ²⁸ Katayama Seijirō has noted the rebellions. He is influenced by earlier ideas about community and gentry, hence is most interested in the inner motive power. In formulating his ideas, he focuses on the independent movement of people in Haicheng. This, then, led his discussion back to the maritime prohibition policies. ²⁹ In Japanese scholarship, the focus on Sino-Japanese relations pushed scholars to appreciate the maritime perspective very early on, though its by-product is the concentration by and large on trade, tribute missions, and the “pirate as well as merchant/envoy” model. ³⁰ This framework is constructed by Ng Chin-Keong and Jennifer Cushman, who challenged the tribute system as a referential framework of Chinese trade overseas. ³¹ Murai Shosuke, an authority on this topic, also takes the view that wokou who attacked Ming from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries comprised multi-ethnic groups who played a significant role in Sino-Japanese maritime trade, including the official business among governments. ³² Later, Nakajima Gakusho reveals that the international trade order of East Asia was reorganized into the so-called “1570 system” in which various trade routes coexisted and interacted. ³³

The study of kou provides some insights into the significance of state formation in the twenty-first century. Chen Chunsheng adds haikou into the discussion and views this group as a continuation of wokou. Chen's research, based on his investigation of local society, shows how the southeast coastal people and society were integrated into the empire in the Ming-Qing era. ³⁴ From Chen's perspective we can easily find that wokou groups in the early Ming dynasty are quite different from those in the mid- and the late-Ming periods. ³⁵ It is clear that they were “created” by two different societies. Chen also indicates another way to approach the phenomenon of wokou, by studying the process of their disappearance. The earliest chronological narratives or historians who upheld previous conventional views on Sino-Japanese relations tended to regard General Qi Jiguang's 戚繼光 (1528–1588) final military victory over the wokou as signaling the disappearance of this group. This military general was famous for eliminating the wokou raiders. Hence, Chen points out that the explanations of both a military subjugation and a policy to open up previously prohibited trade are able to elucidate the wokou's disappearance in some ways, but such explanations cannot account for the continuation of the haikou. ³⁶ This article, based on Chen's search on how marginal people and society came into the national system, reveals how marginal people and the state powers shaped the local order on the borders and beyond.

To prove the validity of this “local order” interpretation, it is first necessary to refute the myth of the market, policy, and smuggling. Discussions about policies of sea trade and capitalism often quote the words of the scholar-official Tang Shu 唐樞 (1497–1574), who worked at the Ministry of Justice: “When the market was working well the bandits were all merchants, when the market was prohibited the merchants became bandits.” ³⁷ This remark is cited as solid evidence that the unrest caused by the wokou was a result of the technical prohibitions on private sea trade since the founding emperor of the Ming. These scholars argue that when the market periodically opened up, profits from smuggling declined substantially. More “normal” trading activities were then conducted, since there was no need for “illegal armed smuggling.” However, a critical view of such an analysis shows that even after the market was opened up during the Longqing reign (1567–1572), armed smuggling continued to exist and, in fact, was quite active all the way to the late Ming. After Lin Feng attacked Manila, Wang Wanggao 王望高 (Omocon), Fujian's Squad Leader, went to Manila in search of Lin. ³⁸ After the Spaniards repulsed Lin's attack, they sent a mission to the viceroy of Fujian, who welcomed them, sending them luxurious presents and asking them to eliminate the pirates. ³⁹ In fact, earlier, in letters from 1574, Guido de Lavezaris (1499?–1581?) had mentioned the numerous pirates that were harassing the trade along coastal China. ⁴⁰ This happened after the Longqing period, a time which was thought to be the golden era of the “open” policy in Haicheng. ⁴¹ It seems obvious that neither the “prohibition” explanation nor the “merchant-bandit” explanation is sufficient. In fact, trade, smuggling, and even unrest are often different aspects of a single phenomenon: they are all different forms of group behavior that are often hard to distinguish from each other. In this borderless space and background of piracy, the escaped Lin Feng and the organized groups under the control of Zheng are meaningful.

Enforcing the Administrative Border

Imperial China expanded effectively, especially after the fifteenth century. Along its southeast maritime frontier, the empire enforced its control in every prefecture, from Ningbo, Taizhou, and Chuzhou in Zhejiang province, to Fuzhou, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou in Fujian province, to Chaozhou, Huizhou, and Guangzhou in Guangdong province. The seats of these prefectures were no longer isolated imperial bases as they had been in the Tang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) dynasties, although the extension of imperial political control was not smooth. One of the central issues the empire had to handle was local power. The issue around local power was not simply a central/local division, since some high officials in the court were the allies of, or even came from, these local powers.

Besides the issue of local power, one particular form of the local power in southeast coastal China was piracy, which caused much trouble for the empire. The history of the southeast coast of China between 1500 and 1700 is inseparable from the issue of piracy. Zhu Wan 朱紈 (1494–1550), the head of the Ming coastal defense for Fujian and Zhejiang, once tried to challenge powerful families. He raided many of the hiding places of the wokou and put more than ninety people to death. ⁴² However, his action provoked those families to rebel and he was later impeached, leading to his suicide. Before taking his own life, Zhu was reported to have said, “It is still possible to get rid of foreign bandits and pirates, but especially difficult to get rid of Chinese bandits and pirates. It is possible to get rid of Chinese coastal bandits and pirates, but especially difficult to get rid of Chinese noble bandits and pirates.” ⁴³ The bandits and pirates also strengthened both mobility and their social networks through marriage ties, although it might begin with force, as Zhu Wan bitterly criticized: “Xu Fu 許福, a national civil service degree holder of Tong'an County, whose sister was robbed by pirates, joined with them after she married one of them. The result was that their family became rich.” ⁴⁴ Their borderless status was as a Ming literatus declares: “Unscrupulous merchants in Fujian and Guangdong became accustomed to having contact with the barbarians. They elected rich and powerful people as the head of each ship, with valuable commodities inside and other private goods to exchange. They got hundred-fold profits.” ⁴⁵ From the perspective of “unscrupulous merchants” and pirates, the complaints of the officials (“became accustomed to having contact with the barbarians”) reveal that the empire was trying to interfere with the borders beyond. Conflicts became unavoidable.

In the context of this loose coastal border the empire was limited in establishing its administration, although its power was enforcing fixed borders. Scholars have discovered that the Maritime Trade Office (Shibosi 市舶司) was transferred from Quanzhou to Fuzhou around the Chenghua (1465–1487) to the Jiajing reign since there were too many “unscrupulous merchants” in Quanzhou. ⁴⁶ Even as late as the mid-sixteenth century, when the Ming court chose a place to establish the Tariff Supervising Bureau (Duxiangguan 督餉館), it had to change the original location from Meiling 梅嶺, where pirates were active, to another place close to the central Zhangzhou Prefecture seat. An early seventeenth-century book, Dong xi yang kao (Research on the Eastern and Western Oceans), written by a local Zhangzhou literatus Zhang Xie 張燮 (1574–1640), records an instance in which bandits disrupted the opening of a port (Meiling) market, and that finally the government had to open up another port (Haicheng). ⁴⁷ It is no doubt that even this valuable port, Haicheng 海澄, took the empire a little time to confirm as the solid border. ⁴⁸ In the fortieth year of the Jiajing reign (1561), wokou attacked Haicheng, but people in Haicheng took this chance to respond by “proclaiming ‘Twenty-four Leaders’ and taking control of the sea for a long time,” in the name of resisting wokou, but the government then quickly labeled them also as wokou. ⁴⁹ Influenced by previous Japanese scholars’ ideas about community and gentry, Katayama Seijirō studies the inner motive power driving this rebellion. In formulating his ideas, he focuses on the independent movement of people in Haicheng. However, he leads the discussion back to the maritime prohibition policies. ⁵⁰ In fact, this port did not emerge as an important market until well after the removal of the embargo in 1567, taking some two decades to achieve real prosperity. ⁵¹ Enforcing the administrative border took time, and during this time all sides used identity discourse to support their agency. We should focus on that local knowledge in terms of how these local people (pirates, local elites, merchants, and commoners) presented themselves, rather than the grand discourse left by the state.

We will now make a detailed inquiry as to why these people became wokou or why they were named wokou. Taxation and brokerage in the context of local administration played a central role in this process. It is easy to understand that despite the rebellions and attacks, one way the government enforced its authority was through taxation. However, this might have driven even more people to join the outlaws. The scholar-official Zheng Xiao 鄭曉 (1499–1566) gave a good explanation for the reason for this state of affairs:

The big civil and military officials cannot restrain their troops, and the local officials often abduct the rich using military law. They wildly extort and impose tariffs … from the initial wokou entrance into Huangyan 黃岩 County until now, ten years have passed and most people in Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangnan, Jiangbei, and Guangdong have followed the wokou…. People who were evil and fond of benefits liked the arrival of the bandits and they have used this occasion as an excuse to avoid taxes and corvée conscription. ⁵²

The mid-Ming scholar-official Tu Zhonglü's 屠仲律 memorial to the emperor tells us they were supposed to be registered people; however, they were not under direct official control in reality since they lived in the borders beyond. Regarding such wokou, Tu concluded:

We should cut off the source of unrest. The unrest of the maritime bandits results from evil people who trade with the foreign areas. The foreigners are in a proportion of nearly ten percent, the landless people may be twenty percent, the natives from Ningbo and Shaoxing account for nearly half, and the people of Zhangzhou, Quanzhou and Fuzhou are up to a ninety percent (yiren shiyi, liuren shier, Ning Shao shiwu, Zhang Quan Fu ren shijiu) 夷人十一，流人十二，寧、紹十五，漳、泉、福人十九. Although they were all named wokou, they were “really” [our] registered people (Qishi duo bianhu zhi qimin ye 其實多編戶之齊民也). ⁵³

It is clear from the sources that such groups of bandits were formed from the local populace. One source in 1561 records that “over half of the bandits in Fujian were native people.” ⁵⁴ Another author explains in 1562 that “the bandits Lü Shangsi 呂尚肆 and Li Zhanchun 李占春 colluded with the surviving wokou of Fuzhou, Xinghua, Zhangzhou and Quanzhou and plundered everywhere.” ⁵⁵ It is apparent from such sources that the existence of such bandits was quite normal in the coastal regions. According to many Ming officials, it was the common view that wokou were such kinds of people during the Jiajing reign. ⁵⁶

THE COLONIAL SETTLEMENTS AND THE NEW BORDERS

There is another abundant body of scholarship in the context of Sino-Western interactions that works well in this field. Aside from the great achievements of earlier Portuguese eastward expansion and its impact in this region, which are fully developed by Charles R. Boxer, Roderich Ptak, and George Bryan de Souza, the interlaced Spanish and Dutch colonial scenes are also prominent. ⁵⁷ The Survival of Empire is definitely an outstanding monograph on the early Portuguese exploration and colonization in Asia, with solid statistics revealing the imperial business and those merchants and pirates who engaged in it. The parallels in the relationships among imperial administrators, merchants, and pirates, and between Portuguese and Chinese communal groups, makes clear that the Chinese initially considered all the Portuguese as pirates. This is also one noteworthy conception that defined the border and its distinction for the “uncontrolled” people. Compared to the Portuguese presence, the Spanish and Dutch were more active in the northeastern South China Sea, especially after the seventeenth century, hence, they played major roles in terms of the collision of borders and the dominance over cross-border people.

Manel Ollé eloquently points out that the Spanish changed their colonial “model” dramatically and strategically to accommodate the Chinese “factor” in the Asian ecology. ⁵⁸ Leonard Blussé addresses the diasporic Chinese interaction with the Europeans within a broad context of European expansion and Southeast Asian local development. ⁵⁹ Some recent works also reveal that the outsiders of the northeastern South China Sea crossed the border to engage in this region. ⁶⁰ These studies map a basic but vivid scene of the imperial “encounter” and of the trans-regional people beyond the borders. At the same time that the Chinese empire was enforcing its borders, the Western European colonial powers also began to create some new borders (northern Taiwan and the Philippines) beyond southeast coastal China, and people who lived in the borders beyond had their own responses to this as well.

Spaniards and Their “Western” Trading Networks

The Spaniards, in search of spices, came to East Asia after the arrival of the Portuguese. Since they had first seized sites in America, once they successfully reached the South China Sea across the Pacific Ocean, they viewed the Philippine Islands as the Western Islands, which could be evident in their letters and reports. ⁶¹ They tried to fight against the Portuguese in the Moluccas and were later defeated; hence the leader of the fleet had to surrender. ⁶² A letter from Father Jerónimo de Santisteban to Antonio de Mendoza, the Governor of New Spain, proves that the disease and famine that the Spaniards suffered was profound. Hence, a truce was made between the Spaniards and the Portuguese, and part of the facilities on Ambon were abandoned. ⁶³ Still, the Spaniards needed a foothold: on September 24, 1559, the King ordered Luís de Velasco, the Governor of New Spain, to seek to discover the islands opposite Molucca, despite a vexed domestic debate over the destination and routes for exploration. ⁶⁴ It was in 1564 that Philip II finally ordered Miguel López de Legazpi to lead a fleet to Luzon in order to avoid conflict with the Portuguese.

Then the trade between the Chinese and the Spaniards began, though it took several decades to thrive, during which the Spanish administration in Manila was trying to control the Chinese population. The Spaniards needed commodities made in China, while Chinese merchants were eager for silver, which the Spaniards extracted from the New World, especially in Potosi, South America. But the trading relationship was not built smoothly. ⁶⁵ The newly established trading relations brought both the Philippine authorities (a 6 percent import duty, generating over 30,000 pesos’ income per year) and the Chinese merchants substantial benefits; the people living in Manila were also able to obtain numerous commodities. ⁶⁶ The rise of mutual exchange not only represents the manner in which the Chinese empire strengthened its administrative border or how the border gradually presented its potential power, but also reveals how borderless people were regulated under a “non-smuggling” rule while at the same time retaining their “outlaws” business in a creative way: the negotiation inherited the “smuggling” tradition of the local society since there were definitely more real trading ships than official ships (two on average per month).

The prosperity generated by increased commerce attracted a greater number of Chinese immigrants to settle in Manila, which became a problem for the Spaniards. In 1547, the Chaozhou pirate Lin Feng heard that Manila was a new and relatively unprotected settlement. Seizing the opportunity to capture Manila, Lin Feng took nearly one hundred ships and several thousand men and women, along with seeds and cattle, to establish a new settlement in Manila. Upon arrival, Lin Feng and his troops found that Manila would not be an easy capture—the Spaniards resisted and conflict ensued. At first, Lin and his troops successfully attacked Manila and killed the Spanish commander Martín de Goiti (1534–1574), but they eventually grew weary from the unanticipated battle and thus fled to the Pangasian region to find a settlement. The Spaniards then pursued Lin to Pangasian and surrounded his settlement, leading to a four-month-long gridlock of skirmishes with Lin's troops. At last, Lin somehow escaped the Spanish blockade, fleeing the scene of battle.

After Lin's attempted conquest, and another case in which Pan Hewu killed the Spanish Governor-General in the 1590s, the Spaniards grew paranoid about possible further Chinese settlements. Pan Hewu, one of the South Fujianese sojourners and the famous rebel leader in the sixteenth century, led laborers to kill Governor Dasmariñas and his soldiers—an astonishing incident at that time. ⁶⁷ In 1603, the Spaniards suppressed the so-called “Sangley Rebellion,” during which they killed many Chinese in Manila based on a suspicion from people such as Archbishop Benavides that the Chinese were trying to take over the Philippines. ⁶⁸ Interestingly enough, these Chinese merchants were neither associated with Lin Feng, nor were they engaging in piracy; the Spaniards, however, believed that they should not be underestimated as a potential threat. In the end, the failure of Lin Feng to settle in the Philippines, the mutual distrust created by a series of misfortunes, and the Spaniards’ reaction in expelling the Chinese merchants changed the status quo in the trade between Fujian and the Philippines. This conflict was not the final one, as we can see what disaster Zheng Chenggong's victory in Taiwan brought to the Chinese settlers in Manila.

One of the following conflicts in 1662 proved this trouble, when governor-general Sabiniano Manrique de Lara was alarmed by Zheng's threat to invade the Philippines as well as forcing him to surrender. ⁶⁹ “The damned Dutch barbarians do not know the rule of nature and dared to mistreat our commoners,” Zheng said. “… Your small state is no different from the Dutch barbarians, who rode roughshod over our commercial ships…. I formerly intended to lead my troops personally to go on a punitive expedition.” ⁷⁰ “Koxinga and his friends in Luzon conceived the idea of expelling the Spaniards. Their plot was discovered and the Spaniards murdered no less than 24,000 Chinese.” ⁷¹

Zheng's power, as mentioned before, grew very quickly after the 1630s, especially in the 1640s. By 1655, even the Dutch were aware that he would not punish those who killed Dutch sailors if they gave up their stolen goods. ⁷² In 1656, he also threatened the Dutch and behaved very arrogantly. The Dutch had estimated that “time will tell us” what he would do. ⁷³ Indeed, with the development of his power and the shortage of the resources that he could get from the mainland, he gave the Dutch an answer by expelling them from Taiwan. ⁷⁴ Hence, Zheng's threat to the Spanish colonial authority was taken seriously. Zheng demanded that the governor-general surrender and pay tribute on April 4. The governor replied only after three months had passed, on July 10. He wrote for assistance from Spain and New Spain and sent ambassadors to negotiate, however, he also suspected that a group of Sangleys intended to rebel at the time once Zheng's troops had arrived. Hence, the Manila authorities pushed the Chinese into leaving the Philippines, as it would have been hard to get rid of all non-Christian Chinese “infidels” outside the captive region in Binondo and Parián. ⁷⁵ Many of the diaspora refused to follow the order to leave and relieve the uneasy authorities, and misfortune also occurred during the process of expulsion.

Despite a series of misfortunes, the Spaniards finally strengthened not only the border in the Philippines but also the maritime border north of the Philippines. At first the Spaniards tried to fight to push the Dutch away from the near coast of Manila. ⁷⁶ They also took over part of northern Taiwan in 1626, establishing Fort Keelung (San Salvador) there and developed the trade with Fujian more closely, as I have mentioned earlier. ⁷⁷ The Dutch continuously cut the trading route between Fuzhou and Keelung and Dansui. ⁷⁸ Plus, ships between Nagasaki, Manila, and Macau were also attacked. ⁷⁹ The Dutch gradually changed their tactics of intercepting and blocking after 1636. One report shows that there were many ways to change the trading pattern, including developing their customs to trade in Dayuan 大員. ⁸⁰ Then there was no further need to intercept the junks to Manila: “The Chinese need our silver, just as we cannot live without their commodities.” ⁸¹ Two forts in northern Taiwan were lost to the Dutch in 1642. ⁸² The Dutch pressed further during 1645–1647 by attacking the Philippine islands fiercely, however, a treaty was made in 1648 to acknowledge the mutual benefits of trade. ⁸³ In short, by relying on the colonial settlement, the Spaniards clarified their northern maritime border in the first half of the seventeenth century, and gradually regulated people who crossed the border. Since the expulsion and killings of Chinese in 1662, the authority emphasized the 6,000 restriction and maintained the non-Christian Chinese population sojourning in Manila at 5,000–6,000. ⁸⁴ The Spanish experience led to one dominant model of maritime order in Manila, while the Dutch's subsequent entry into this region led to another.

The Coming of the Dutch and Their “East”

When the Dutch first arrived on the Chinese coast, they were amazed that there were so many sampans or junks and that the population was so huge. ⁸⁵ Not surprisingly, they utilized the pre-existing trading networks when they came into this old world. ⁸⁶ They used the labels too, to divide the cooperative “merchants” from the uncooperative “pirates.” They tried to take a port along the coast of China by force but failed; they tried to seize Macau from the Portuguese but were defeated. They attacked the “Haicheng-Manila” trading routes, and they launched wars against the Spaniards four times, and against the Ming government and the Zheng family several times. The Dutch had their agenda to deal with the complexity of their circumstances. In the northern part of Asia, they failed to get a foothold on the Chinese coast and had to move to Dayuan in southwest Taiwan. ⁸⁷ To the south, they needed to create another parallel fort to resist Bantam, which was at first controlled by the local chief, and finally they chose Jayakarta (Batavia). ⁸⁸ Hence, to realize their agenda in the north, finally a compromise was made and the trading routes became “Haicheng-Manila” and “Anhai (Zheng's base)-Dayuan.” The key point we should not omit is that all these conflicts were a part of the bordering process against the background of piracy. In the Tianqi reign (1621–1627), we again see the rise of pirates. Since the Ming court failed to extend administrative registration to all the borderless people, there were numerous people who were considered to be outside the government's control, while at the same time, soldiers and bandits easily exchanged their identities. The Dutch also originally used the term “pirate” to refer to these peoples, but later referred to them as merchants after the Dutch and Zheng Zhilong 鄭芝龍 (Nicolas Iquan Gaspard, 1604–1661) formed contracts, although the so-called pirates remained active until the end of the Ming dynasty. ⁸⁹

Between the forces of the Chinese empire and the colonial powers, small groups of pirates combined to form several concentrated groups in response. The Ming government and the Dutch tried to pacify the pirates and utilize them to eliminate other “uncontrolled” groups, which also accelerated the concentration of pirate groups. The process of concentration took several forms: conquest, military pacification, or fights between different factions. The empire also asked the Portuguese for help in eliminating the pirates. ⁹⁰ The final concentration of pirate power was when Zhilong, previously thought to have surrendered, was victorious in uniting or defeating all pirates. However, the situation was not completely stable, as Li Kuiqi 李魁奇, Zhong Bin 鍾斌 and Liu Xiang 劉香 “rebelled” one after another, leading to the reappearance of pirates. In general, though, Zhilong and his son Koxinga were successful in controlling these groups.

Zhilong's father, Zheng Shaozu 鄭紹祖 (or Zheng Shibiao 鄭士表), had been a minor official in Quanzhou prefecture. ⁹¹ When famine swept through Fujian, many people came to seek shelter with Zheng's family, and Zhilong became powerful. Referring to Zhilong, one source records that: “He was familiar with the sea when he was a child, and he was surrounded by pirates. After Zhilong joined with the Ming government, no ships or junks could navigate without his flag.” ⁹² Zhilong also built a base at Anping, where he kept his army. He created his own financial system and did not need to ask the government for support. He imposed taxes on commoners and asked the rich and powerful families to donate to his coffers. When the Dutch first came into the region they clearly recognized “the monopoly of the grand Chinese merchants.” ⁹³ They described Li Kuiqi and Zhong Bin's rebellion, after Zhilong had joined sides with the government. ⁹⁴ In fact, Li Kuiqi competed with Zhilong for the alliance of the Dutch. ⁹⁵ It is recorded that Li “defeated Iquan's army, seized the Chinchew (Zhangzhou) gulf and surrounded Amoy (Xiamen), causing the merchants to be unable to connect with each other at sea, so the trade vessels could not be seen in Tayouan (Dayuan).” ⁹⁶

By 1637, Zhilong had control over the sea area from Melaka to Nagasaki, from Southeast Asia to the Northeast Asian maritime basin. The Dutch had to surrender; hence, they chose to join forces with Zhilong. The Dutch officials in the company surmised: “We should choose our trade partner seriously and cautiously. We will stand with the Chinese high official and drive out the pirates together.” ⁹⁷ Hence, the dissension and integration of the pirates reveals the fundamental truth about the kou––that it is a loaded term. The characteristics of the term, namely its mobility, instability, and its quick regeneration, can be explained by the fact that many people there existed outside the control of governmental power or in the borders beyond, a situation caused by an ineffective registration system and an unstable border region.

The Ming–Qing transition did not help Dutch expansion, but did help confirm an original “borderless” region as a new local dominant area with clear borders: land mainly centered on south Fujian and Taiwan, and the broad basin of the South and East China Sea. ⁹⁸ When the Ming dynasty fell, the Dutch reported in 1642 that China was in chaos and merchants had lost a great deal. ⁹⁹ However, Zhilong still had substantial commodities. ¹⁰⁰ Though the Dutch defeated and expelled the Spaniards in North Taiwan in 1642, they could not achieve a decisive victory in the Philippines War during 1645 to 1647. As Haicheng was gradually replaced by Anhai, junks in Anhai could be guided where to go, and so Manila and Dayuan needed to compete. Although Anhai was destroyed by the Manchu army in 1647, with the collapse of the Ming and the ascendance of the Qing, the prosperity of Anhai did not stop during the change of dynasty. ¹⁰¹ Over the next two decades Zhilong's son Koxinga persisted in fighting against the Manchu power, and his troops wandered around the South China Sea. He found it was hard to survive without a base, so he decided to seize Taiwan. As is generally known, Koxinga defeated the Dutch, forcing them to give up Taiwan. After Zheng built a Chinese regime in Taiwan, he also found that it was necessary to seize Manila to establish another anti-Manchu “fort,” causing the Spaniards in the Philippines deep distress. ¹⁰² Luckily for the Spaniard colonists, Koxinga died suddenly, at the age of thirty-eight and before he could pursue his ambition of taking over Manila. However, the resulting situation was brutal for the mobile people as well as for the borderless people, as many of them were suspected, expelled, or killed.

The conflicts between Lin Feng and the Spaniards, the Spaniards and the Dutch, Koxinga and the Dutch, and Koxinga and the Spaniards reflect the process of border and discourse creation. From the perspective of Lin Feng, the military pressure, whether from the Ming court or the Spaniards, forced him to flee to another region to rule and lead the pirates and commoners. From Zhilong's perspective, the new border created by the Dutch was invalid, as was the border enforced by the Ming empire; he only recognized these borders when it was to his benefit, while Koxinga had his own agenda to create a region with borders to save the Ming and get revenge on the Qing. Hence, he sacrificed his competitor, the Dutch, in order to get control of Dayuan as a base. The integrated borderless people then confirmed south Taiwan as their border with the Spanish colonial power, and the southeast coastline as their border with the Manchus.

REGIONAL BARRIERS AND THE SPACE OF THE BORDERLESS PEOPLE

In every significant area barriers exist: the inner regional barriers of the Chinese empire (especially the three southeast provinces in this article); the barrier between Zheng's Fujian (mainland) and Taiwan (island); the barrier between the native Taiwanese and the Dutch; the south and north political barrier of Taiwan under Dutch and Spanish dominance; the Manila inner and outer city barrier; the political barrier between the colonial metropole (Manila), the northern region (Pangasian) and southern region (Mindanao) of the Philippines. Among these barriers, the least obvious one was the inexactness of the inner barriers between the three southeast provinces of the Chinese empire.

Relying on the administrative barriers, people who lived on the borders beyond could continue doing their business. The mid-Ming scholar-official Zhao Mingke 趙鳴珂 had once observed that the activities of the bandits were interprovincial. He expressed this opinion by saying that, “The bandits collude across the provinces: Fujian's bandits come to Gaozhou and Chaozhou prefectures in Guangdong to build junks, and go to Ningbo and Shaoxing in Zhejiang to buy their goods, and then go to foreign areas. Bandits in Zhejiang and Guangdong build their junks and buy their goods in Zhangzhou and Quanzhou prefectures in Fujian. This is the general malpractice in these three provinces.” ¹⁰³ Furthermore, the barriers were not simply divided by coastal and inland region. For example, in Fujian, it was recorded that, “The three prefectures, Fuzhou, Xinghua and Quanzhou, suffered from bandits from the sea, while Tingzhou and Zhangzhou suffered from bandits on land.” ¹⁰⁴

If saying that the administrative barriers were obvious, the cultural and political barriers inside the empire under the new strengthening borders were not obvious. Few people noticed that the bandits constituted by the local populace robbed each other's neighborhoods. We can take Zhangzhou prefecture and Chaozhou prefecture as a case to better understand such division. These two prefectures are side by side, and each experienced severe unrest. One of the counties belonging to Chaozhou prefecture, Zhuluo 諸羅 county, continued to have cases of unrest. Its local history records that Zhang Lian 張璉, the biggest bandit chief in Raoping 饒平 county, robbed other places and wiped out many villages “without concern or [local] lineage restrictions.” ¹⁰⁵ According to the sources, it seems that the bandits who harassed Zhangzhou came from Chaozhou. ¹⁰⁶ However, a Chaozhou literatus Lin Dachun 林大春 also mentioned that Chaozhou suffered much from bandits from other areas. Chaozhou and some areas of Jiangxi province feared that bandits from Zhangzhou would come, and “one day suddenly there were bandits coming from the northwest and claiming that they were soldiers, but instead were actually bandits from Zhangzhou.” ¹⁰⁷ The Dapu local history also records:

The bandits rose up from Ping and Jinguan and rebelled in collusion with Zhangpu's bandits. They built forts and camps valley by valley, and robbed Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, Chaozhou, and Jieyang. ¹⁰⁸

This case strongly demonstrates that bandits in these two prefectures were mobile in order to be able to rob, and that they generally did not rob their own local villages, for they were people living on the borders beyond and who followed the original “order,” and thus were not true bandits. In other words, they were closely connected to their local villages. The inner barriers of the empire also stimulated local militarization. Each locality had its own militia, the “village soldiers.” These groups were used not only as a defence against outside bandits, but also at times even against the official military. It is not hard to find inscriptions describing how the militia defeated the pirates. ¹⁰⁹ These local militia were found “sufficient to be relied on,” ¹¹⁰ so much so that the official military could not threaten the local village. ¹¹¹ As Lin mentioned in his report, the official military was so corrupt that Zhejiang soldiers came to Fujian and “fiercely harassed the Haicheng people, who suffered much pain.” ¹¹² The same was true for the Guangdong soldiers, who went to Fujian. ¹¹³ In fact, soldiers often joined the bandits, especially after they were dismissed. This was an easy transition considering that many of the soldiers and bandits came from the same villages. There was a famous case in which the soldiers secretly made a deal with encircled bandits in Xiaoyingfang 小營房 in Songjiang Prefecture to let them go by pretending that the bandits had defeated them. “Many Zhangzhou people were the bandits, hence how is it possible not to succeed by using the Zhangzhou soldiers to exterminate the bandits?” ¹¹⁴ Likewise, the similar nature of the bandits and soldiers was clear: be mobile in order to rob.

The best way to solve the problem of the borderless people was to force them to return home and become registered people, fixing them inside the strengthening borders that the empire was establishing. This strategy can be seen in the following incident: “Ruan E 阮鶚 (1509–1567), the Grand Coordinator at that time, led his army to defeat the wokou, but the wokou escaped to the island of Nan'ao 南澳 [in Guangdong]; rebels joined them, making nearly ten thousand families. Some asked Ruan to slaughter the bandits and rebelling families …, but Ruan said: ‘They were bandits in Zhejiang, but after they returned to Meiling [in Fujian], they were ordinary people, why should we kill them all?’” ¹¹⁵ This episode clearly shows that once the mobile people returned to their former status—that of supposedly controlled, registered people—they were not viewed as wokou or haikou. Those who remained mobile, though, were viewed as bandits or pirates. There were many people who could be classified as being outside governance, and, unless an effective registration system were put in place, or unless they were under the agenda of the empire, they and the unrest they brought would never be eliminated.

One study concludes that, “In the latter Ming, the court began using a system of conscription, and enforced the protection of the coast by using both official forces and the citizenry. As the enemies were won over as friends, the kou were finally pacified.” ¹¹⁶ According to Chen Boyi's studies on the Ming military systems, militia, conscription and military strategies, the military reform and its effectiveness are temporary, and effectiveness was more proper to the Nanzhili region and Zhejiang province, but fitted the situation of Guangdong and Fujian provinces rather less. ¹¹⁷ The regional barriers among the three southeast provinces show that the transformation of the borders beyond continued despite the strengthening borders.

RESHAPING THE HISTORICAL DISCOURSE WITHIN THE CLEARER BORDERS

As we have shown above, Chinese society experienced many vicissitudes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the collapse of the Ming dynasty and the ascendance of the Qing dynasty. The people and the groups that lived along the southeast coast were, at different times, recognized differently and many of their activities were at times sanctioned and at other times outlawed. The studies of piracy produced in the last fifteen years have fundamentally broken with earlier paradigms: this topic directly relates to how marginal people and society came into the national system, with people's identity being reshaped under the strengthening borders and related discourse.

Both of the discourses on individual and borderless groups were significantly reshaped in the process of border building. Firstly, the definition of certain people at that time began to change, especially wokou and haikou. While it is not easy to clearly distinguish between the wokou and haikou, by looking at a couple of examples, we may be able to gain a greater understanding of the identification. The narrations on Wang Zhi 汪直 and Hong Dizhen 洪迪珍 described them both as haikou and the heads of wokou. ¹¹⁸ In the records of the Zhangzhou local history (1561), Hong Dizhen is listed as the chief of bandits while Hong and Wang were named haikou in the Ming “Veritable Record” (1563). Likewise, Hong and Wang were examples of people with different labels, being called wokou, haikou, and “people out of control” in different texts. Generally speaking, after the late Jiajing period, the term wokou was used less and less while the term haikou was more common. In analyses of the unrest between the thirty-ninth to forty-fifth years of the Jiajing reign (1560–1566), Fujian is described as a place where “bandits and haikou rebelled at the same time,” and then it is recorded that this in fact happened. After the forty-fourth year of the Jiajing reign (1565) we see the rise of Wu Ping 吳平, one of the major haikou. We can see that bandits, wokou, and haikou are found in the texts in parallel. In short, the haikou were at times under the label of wokou. When the wokou were in the ascendancy, the haikou were also classified as wokou, but when the wokou “disappeared,” the haikou moniker reappeared. If we view the maritime forces after the wokou's demise as in fact consisting of the same groups, then the actual “disappearance” of the wokou (now labeled haikou) should have come after the “Great Evacuation,” an order that forced people who lived on the southeast coast to move approximately ten to eighteen miles inland in order to eradicate anti-Manchu activities in the early Qing period. ¹¹⁹ It is obvious that during several decades of the haikou unrest different groups often became integrated. ¹²⁰

There were many reasons for the confusion in these terms. One of the most essential reasons was the system of registration. As mentioned above, officials widely extorted and imposed tariffs. Pan Jixun 潘季馴 indicated that, “The ordinary people had no way to appeal, so they had to assemble and became bandits.” ¹²¹ He furthermore reports that he renewed the system of registration and everything went well. In this case we can see that it was the imposition of the system of control that changed local society as well as enforced the administrative border. ¹²² Without such an adjustment, the kou would rise once more. The transformation of the use of the terms wokou and haikou seems to have occurred nearly around Qi Jiguang's victory—he came to Zhangzhou to conquer the haikou, then pursued Wu Ping and killed many haikou. But the record further states that “in wiping out wokou and bandits, Jiguang's contribution was great.” ¹²³ In the Tianqi reign (1621–1627), we again see the rise of haikou. This phenomenon is closely related to the imposition of land tax. Such measures led to instability and a greater amount of activity outside official control. Those involved in such activity were referred to as haikou. The Dutch also originally used this term to refer to these peoples. Many years later, after the Dutch and Zhilong formed contracts, the same people became merchants. The haikou were active until the end of the Ming dynasty. ¹²⁴

Since the government did not have a reliable system for registration, there were numerous people who were considered outside governance; “Even Fujian, a territory of China, is harder to manage than places outside the country.” ¹²⁵ At the same time, soldiers and bandits easily exchanged identities. Feng Jiahui 馮嘉會 (?–1627), Minister of the Ministry of War, indicated that “Fujian used to be afraid of foreigners, but now was afraid of the bandits; we were initially afraid that different bandit groups would join together, but we now fear that bandits and the people, or even soldiers, would join together.” ¹²⁶ The concern was that if the haikou could not be controlled, they would cause so much disorder that they would eventually topple the regime.

On the basis of analyzing the various appellations applied to groups at different times, I argue that we should comprehend labels such as wokou and haikou as often referring to the same peoples. The terms used to designate these peoples not only describe these so named, but also reflect those doing the naming. Whether these groups were involved in piracy, trade, or even “daily lives” depends on one's perspective. By analyzing the various kou of different periods, we can see how different labels were applied in different situations, and why the empire and colonizers did that. Through a cursory analysis of these terms and groups, we can see that their activities of piracy and trade are actually two sides of the same coin. It was finally after the “Great Evacuation” that various kou really “disappeared” (at least for over a century), for the whole structure and the complex relationships within coastal society had then changed. The Qing regime finally had a solid registration system, and the borders were enforced. Unrest and trade are topics of interest for scholars, but they are often viewed as being in contrast. Actually, pirates and merchants often existed simultaneously and within homogeneous groups with similar backgrounds. The activities of the coastal groups discussed in this article show us how these groups formed. No matter how the labels changed, the groups and the peoples constituting them did not change. After these groups returned to the places they were supposed to be in, to the lands along the coasts inside the designed or assumed borders, there was no need to label them bandits or pirates any more, for they were then registered people.

Secondly, the new border also brought and enforced a new historical consciousness. The events caused by people such as Lin Feng and Zheng Chenggong that unfolded in this region are consequential to the formation and perceptions of modern nations. The ideas and perceptions owned by today's countries are rooted in historical processes. While the Spaniards successfully secured the Philippines by defeating the merchant-pirates, the Dutch failed to do the same in Taiwan. This difference is critical in helping to explain why twenty-first century perceptions of Taiwan are so closely tied to China, while perceptions of the Philippines are not, despite both territories once having a similar historical status. The Spaniards kept Manila and ruled the Philippines, so the Philippines were assigned the historical explanation of colonial history after it won independence from America, and are involved in a broader historical sense of the Malay archipelago; on the other hand, the Dutch lost and Taiwan was taken by Zheng. A Chinese regime was built and a Chinese historical explanation was made, thus the place became “part of China.” Zheng commanded greater military force than Lin, so his relative success was not by pure chance. But the diverging outcome from Zheng versus Lin's conquests is somehow historically pivotal, and the subsequent trajectories of each territory reinforced the outcome. The Manchu emperor had to fight the anti-Qing military in Taiwan, and finally his army was victorious. There were many debates at court over whether it was necessary to leave people and the administrative system in Taiwan. The final decision was not taken based on the land consideration but in the interests of security: if no one lived there, the island would be taken by the pirates again and would constitute a serious threat to the Qing Empire. So the Qing court kept Taiwan as an administrative region and the “hedgerow” of the empire. If the Philippine islands had also been controlled by Zheng's regime, or that control challenged by other “pirates,” the Qing court most definitely could not have been able to withstand its anti-Qing neighbors. ¹²⁷ That was the real reinforced trajectory meaning of those two piratical cases. Few people consider that these two such “different” places had once been so similar and could have had the same fate. However, except for thinking about the occasional and necessary history, historians have a duty to learn more about what really shapes people's identity and historical consciousness.

CONCLUSION

All in all, the division of the borders and the borders beyond supplied a broad stage for the people in these vaguely defined areas to play different roles. Great powers clashed and redefined their borders within which people became naturalized. It might seem a rather sad story that eventually most of these people submitted themselves to one state or another, but it was never a one-way process. The anthropologist James C. Scott has pointed out how the people in Zomia, a mountainous region including Southwest China, Northeast India, and upland Indochina, lived without being governed by any state. ¹²⁸ Whereas Scott concerns himself with those stateless people who searched for self-determination in an anarchic way, I focus more on how the non-stateless peoples lived in the borders beyond, claimed their own order in their own way, and worked and became naturalized (or, were to a greater or lesser extent classified and led) inside the strengthening borders of pre-modern societies. If Scott is good at showing what the state fails to do in marginal areas, this article shows what the powers succeed in doing, and to whom the state has done it. In short, all the disorder and registration or other efforts to establish the management of people inside and beyond the border only proved that the society created its own “order.”