Transformations
of East Asian Polities
in Maritime East Asia: A comparison
of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, Taiwan and
Korea, 1600-2000
R.
Bin Wong
University of California at Irvine
Introduction
The formation of national states in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries has been a complex process. The models of state
formation that are based on early modern European experiences
stress the development of domestic capacities to rule coupled
with successful competition with other similar states in a multi-state
system. Rulers negotiated with their elites for more taxes
and greater power and authority in exchange for various guarantees
of elite interestsãthe story line of these negotiations plays
out in different ways across Western Europe but similar actors
are engaged in the same kinds of relationships in those areas
that were becoming England, France, Spain, and later Germany.
States also achieved territorial consolidation by annexing areas
near them through some combination of military force and diplomacy;
the formation of Britain is a clear example such a process.
Successful states more generally competed with each other through
warfare and diplomacy. In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the "national" component of the national state becomes
important as an ideological identification of the state with
its subjects is achieved in successful states. The cleavages
in states that are torn by internal divisions often fall along
lines of distinct social identities that become "nations" clamoring
for their own states; these dynamics are basic to the declines
of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.
The dynamics of state transformation observed in early modern
and modern Europe provide much of the empirical foundation for
more general assumptions about how states are formed and transformed
throughout the world. Modern states are generally viewed
in one of two ways: either in terms of their similarities
to or divergence from traits first observed in Europe or in
terms of how the imposition of Western power defines state making
possibilities. On the one hand we have cases like Japan
where the adoption of Western political institutions beginning
in the 1860s and 1870s defines their modern state formation;
on the other hand is much of Southeast Asia where British, French
and Dutch power shaped so much of what became the possibilities
for successor regimes to colonial rule. My purpose in
this essay is not to claim that such perspectives are "wrong"
or even that they are unhelpful. Rather, I will suggest
that they are incomplete in ways that obscure to us other regionally
specific features of state transformation in East Asia.
I will look at three different parts of East Asia across three
time periods distinguished from each other in terms of the configurations
of local, regional, and global forces that collectively shape
political possibilities. Taiwan in 1600 is an island on
which both the Portuguese and Dutch will make efforts to set
up trading facilities, but by century's end will become a frontier
of the Qing empire. Korea in 1600 is a kingdom that recently
survived two Japanese invasions and in a few decades will accept
the Manchus as the successor to the Ming dynasty; by 1700 its
government is largely focused on issues of domestic order and
with limited foreign contacts. The Ryūkyū islands
in 1600 have recently become politically coordinated under a
common king who will shortly face a military threat from the
Satsuma domain in southern Japan, an event that pushes the kingdom
into a delicate position as a tributary state of the agrarian
empire and a government owing taxes to agents of the Tokugawa
system.
The mix of political autonomy and subordination to more powerful
neighbors changes in the centuries following 1700.
The growing presence and threat of Western power in the second
half of the nineteenth century changes political possibilities
for Korea, Taiwan and the Ryūkyū islands, but not
because any of them become Western colonies. After World
War II and the emergence of the United States as the premier
global power locked in competition with the Soviet Union and
Communists more generally, the political futures of Korea, Taiwan
and the Ryūkyū islands are transformed. Setting
out the interplay of political and economic forces at different
spatial scales across four centuries allows us to establish
a regional context for political changes that helps us perceive
possibilities not easily apprehended from an exclusive focus
on either European state making experiences or Western colonial
impacts. At a more general level, they do not replace
those well-established concerns, but broaden the set of state
transformations that inform our understanding of world history.
Maritime Locales in a World of Agrarian Empire
Seventeenth-century East Asian commercial routes connected ports
from Northeast Asia such as Nagasaki to those in Southeast Asia
such as Hoian in Vietnam. Ports had varying degrees of
integration economically and politically with larger political
systems. Some were subordinated to territorial administrations
at some distance, like Nagasaki, while others like Aceh on the
northern coast of Sumatra were themselves the centers of administration
over larger territories. The largest political system
in which ports and their rulers participated was the tributary
system centered on the agrarian empire.
The importance of trade to the polities within which ports were
located varied across East Asia. In small polities centered
on ports, like several in Southeast Asia, trade revenues loomed
large. In Northeast Asian polities like Japan and Korea,
in contrast, trade revenues were not generally as important,
though they could still be politically important issues as we'll
see later with respect to the Ryūkyū kingdom.
The importance of ports politically depended upon both the amount
of trade and the spatial scale of the territory to which they
belonged.
Taiwan as a Frontier of Agrarian Empire
In 1600 Taiwan had ports at which merchants based in Nagasaki
and others in Southeast Asia would engage in trade for Chinese
goods. Since the Ming dynasty and Tokugawa bakufu did
not recognize direct commercial relations, their goods moved
between them via intermediary merchants. The Dutch wanted
to expand their role as such a middleman, and for a while they
succeeded. After the 1630s, the Japanese prohibited their
own merchants from engaging in overseas trade beyond Korea,
the Ryūkyūs, and points to the north, relying instead
on the Dutch to handle their trade to Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
Chinese traders, however, were more numerous than Dutch.
Those based in southeastern China under the Zheng lineage became
increasingly powerful economically and politically; the Ming
government delegated to them the responsibility for and hence
profit making possibilities from managing the southeastern coastal
region's maritime trade. Between the years 1661
and 1683, as the Ming dynasty fell and the Manchus conquered
the mainland, the Zhengs were able to push the Dutch out of
the East Asian trade routes between Japan and Taiwan, trading
Chinese silks, cotton textiles, sugars and medicines for Japanese
metals, silver, copper and iron. The subsequent defeat
of the Zheng's by the Manchus allowed the Dutch to regain an
important position in East Asian maritime trade. But it
also spelled the end of Taiwan's role as an important site within
this trade.(Miyachi Masato 1995; Nagatsumi Yōko 1999)
The Manchus imposed a ban on all maritime trade after they defeated
the Zhengs and moved coastal people to place inland in order
to secure the region against maritime based power. Several
years later, in 1717, they imposed a maritime trade ban. When
they lifted the ban in 1727, they allowed trade at Canton and
Amoy but not on Taiwan.
In addition to Taiwan's early seventeenth century role as a
maritime trading center, its coast also housed fishermen who
migrated from the mainland coast to establish new villages on
the island. They were joined by migrants who moved to
Taiwan to open land as peasant settlers in the 1560s and 1570s.
The Qing government came to see Taiwan as a land frontier that
it wished to incorporate into the agrarian empire. Initially
the Manchus aimed to collect revenues from aboriginal people
living on the plains and protect their rights to land from Chinese
immigrants, but as the numbers of these immigrants continued
to grow, the Yongzheng emperor decided in the 1720s to support
this migration and make efforts to ensure the land claims of
this immigrant population as means of ensuring social order
and increasing tax revenues.(Shepherd 1993) Chinese settle
the plains in the western part of the island, but didn't go
into the mountains to the east where other aboriginal groups
lived. The Qing government made Taiwan into a prefecture of
coastal Fujian province. The island became a grain and
sugar exporter to the mainland, a role that officials found
helpful to meet their broad agenda of promoting subsistence
security across the empire.
Regional economic integration followed the social and cultural
networks of the Chinese immigrants. People on the island
and coast shared language dialect, customs, foods, and their
deities. Kinship groups established on the island recognized
their links to lineages on the mainland. Were this coastal
and island region politically independent from the agrarian
empire, we might imagine its leaders turning to maritime trade
as a source of income, to promote and develop the trade in order
to expand its own resource base. But the area was not,
of course, politically independent. Its subordination
to an agrarian empire defined administrative priorities and
fiscal preferences different than those that would likely have
emerged otherwise. In contrast to its early eighteenth
century policies along southwestern and northwestern frontiers,
the Qing government chose early on to integrate Taiwan administratively
under the same bureaucracy that managed the vast majority of
the empire's population. The choice made sense because
many of the people the empire governed on Taiwan were tied culturally
and by kinship to people who lived along the mainland coast.
The political integration of Taiwan into the agrarian empire
meant that the island would no longer be an intermediary for
the trade between the agrarian empire and the Tokugawa regime.
Ports in the Ryūkyū kingdom and Korea, however, continued
to give the Japanese indirect trading opportunities with the
Chinese.
Ryūkyū Islands: Tributary Kingdom and Trading
Partner
The Ryūkyū kingdom was formed in the early fifteenth
century on a chain of more than fifty islands stretching from
the southwest of Japan almost 400 miles or some 650 kilometers
to the northeast of Taiwan. Between the ninth and thirteenth
centuries local chieftains competed with each other; their efforts
led to the consolidation of rule under three kingdoms in the
fourteenth century and subsequent unification under a single
ruler. The some 200,000 mid-eighteenth-century inhabitants
scattered across several islands engaged principally in agriculture,
fishing and trade; the introduction of the sweet potato allowed
larger populations to exploit hill lands and the production
of sugar cane gave peasants a valuable commercial crop.
The ecological and economic limitations of the area made the
development of a strong government quite difficult. During
the seventeenth century the government was so weak that it was
unable to rebuild the capital after a 1660 fire because of the
its poverty (Takara 1998: 81). The government was also
constrained bureaucratically; priestesses practiced in the arts
of divination enjoyed great power at court, while officials
were often viewed as both corrupt and ineffective. Limited
domestically, the Ryūkyū kingdom was also caught between
two larger and more powerful neighbors. On one side it
was part of the agrarian empire's tributary order; on the other,
it became subordinated to Japan.
The tributary system within which the Ryūkyū kingdom
joined both Vietnam and Korea, also embraced a range of other
regimes, representatives of which, like those from the Ryūkyūs,
Vietnam and Korea, presented tribute and received gifts from
the Chinese imperial government. Tributary relations were
the basis for much of the trade that took place between the
agrarian empire and its neighbors. The frequency of missions
and the scales of tribute presentations varied among groups
and changed over time; Chinese officials often considered the
maintenance of these relations quite costly and therefore periodically
sought to restrict the fiscal burdens created by this system
of foreign relations. Not all tributary states sent frequent
missions over long periods of time. The tributary order
also meant more to some foreign leaders than others. The
Ryūkyū kings, like the rulers of Korea and Vietnam
for instance, gained prestige locally by having Ming and then
Qing emperors acknowledge their rule through investiture ceremonies.
Being part of this Sinitic ceremonial order gave rulers in these
three kingdoms symbolic distance between their ruling houses
and the elites that surrounded them. By schooling their
elites in Confucian doctrines, these governments also defined
politically and socially useful roles, reproducing and extending
principles employed within the Chinese empire. At the
other extreme, states could opt out entirely from the tribute
order. The most important example comes from Japan. As
part of its effort to create a strong and independent state,
the Tokugawa regime that unified the Japanese islands in 1600
after decades of civil war, halted tributary relations with
the Ming empire.
The desire to avoid direct relations with the Chinese empire
did not mean that Tokugawa leaders were unaware of the economic
and political advantages of forging indirect relations.
The Ryūkyū islands came to play the role of intermediary,
though other possibilities were also considered by Japanese
leaders. In 1609, a mere nine years after the Tokugawa
bakufu had declared its rule and subordinated the noble houses
ruling their domains, the Satsuma leaders in southern Japan
sent naval forces into the northern islands of the Ryūkyū
kingdom and established a political presence. Some officials
of the Tokugawa bakufu initially envisioned incorporation of
the northern Ryūkyū islands into Japan, while domain
officials in Satsuma sought to subordinate the Ryūkyūs
to themselves, thereby creating an indirect relationship between
the islands and the Tokugawa bakufu. Through the seventeenth
century, general agreement emerged among Japanese leaders that
the Ryūkyūs should be an intermediary for trade with
the Chinese empire, at the same time as they were liable for
Japanese tax levies. Japanese officials went so far as
to order Ryūkyū islanders who dealt with the Chinese
to feign ignorance of the Japanese language in order to distinguish
themselves more completely from the Japanese (Smits 1999: 45-46).
Seeking to disguise their political importance, Japanese leaders
aimed to subordinate the islands to their authority in order
to ensure that the Ryūkyū kingdom's participation
in a Chinese tributary order brought economic advantages to
the Japanese. Early seventeenth-century Ryūkyū
leaders were too weak to resist militarily Japanese demands,
but they were also financially unable to meet them fully and
absorb the expenses of entertaining Chinese envoys who came
for investiture ceremonies. Negotiating their relations
with both China and Japan was thus a difficult challenge for
a small and weak seventeenth-century Ryūkyū kingdom
seeking to retain a measure of autonomy between two far more
powerful neighbors. In order to bolster royal power and
create a stronger kingdom, a number of Ryūkyū leaders
advocated during the eighteenth century the use of Chinese models
of state ceremonials and Confucian temple rites. They
proposed festivals to promote agricultural productivity as they
sought to displace the ritual importance of shamanesses at court.
In 1786 the kingdom promulgated its first legal code based on
Qing statutes (Smits 1999: 134). Chinese models were used
not only to increase royal power, but to shape elite practices.
The Chinese logic of jiaoyangãto teach and to nourishãwas
applied to elites who became adept at tea ceremony and poetry
as they also studied texts ranging from political works to medical
treatises (Takara 1998: 87). Both the royal family and
the elites adopted Chinese political and cultural practices
to become what many educated men in this part of Asia considered
a more civilized kingdom. Eighteenth-century Ryūkyū
kings increased their domestic authority by practicing Confucian
principles of rule and secured their international role by fulfilling
a position in the Chinese tribute order (Tomiyama 1994: 244-45).
Korea: A (Pen)insular Place
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Korea, like the
Ryūkyū kingdom, was an intermediary for the trade
between China and Japan. Before Japan severely curtailed
silver exports in the mid-eighteenth century, Japanese silver
was exchanged for Chinese silk thread by merchants in Korea.
But the government was less concerned with taxing maritime commerce
than taxing the land. With government institutions modeled
on those of China, Korean officials were especially interested
in promoting the ownership of land as the basis for material
security. Officials addressed other issues of economic
management as well, seeking to prepare for famines and ensure
a stable currency supply. The economy was gradually monetized
in the seventeenth century, but a subsequent inadequate currency
supply caused a deflation during the first three decades of
the eighteenth century. In general, commercial economic
relations were less developed in Korea than either China or
Japan, though more developed than those in the Ryūkyū
islands or Taiwan.
Politically, Korea's position within the Chinese tributary order
was secure. Korean merchants who engaged in the tributary
trade between the two countries enjoyed privileges that made
their operations profitable. Neither the Ming nor Qing
worried about the Koreans posing a military threat. The
maintenance of tributary relations did not require great investment
by either government and created the basis for a stable if limited
political relationship. While the Tokugawa regime in Japan
did not participate in the Chinese tributary order in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, they also didn't challenge Korea's
place within that order. In sharp contrast to Hideyoshi's
two invasions of the 1590s and the Meiji government's aspirations
in the late nineteenth century, the Tokugawa regime pursued
no plan of expanding influence in Korea. Largely absorbed
in domestic issues, the Tokugawa regime sought to control and
limit its connections with outside forces.
For their social organization and political structures, seventeenth
and eighteenth-century Korean officials and elites relied on
Confucian precedents which made possible a distinctive agenda
for social stability and political order. Practices in
the agrarian empire supplied the basic institutions of the government;
Confucian texts guided individual moral development and the
pursuit of social harmony. When the Manchus defeated the
Ming dynasty, some Korean literati argued that the center of
Confucian civilization had shifted to them because they viewed
the conquerors of the agrarian empire as unlettered and uncultured.
This initial perception was tempered first by the military superiority
of the Manchus which compelled the Koreans to accept the tributary
framework previously employed by the Ming dynasty and then by
a growing recognition that Manchu leaders took seriously their
study of Confucian policies and institutions. In different
ways, Koreans like populations on Taiwan and the Ryūkyū
islands, drew upon a common repertoire of Confucian political
possibilities for ordering society and constructing government,
even though their cultures were otherwise very distinct from
each other.
The Maritime Region Politically and Economically
Korea and the Ryūkyūs formed tributary relations with
the Ming and Qing empires. Taiwan, in contrast, was bureaucratically
incorporated into the Qing agrarian empire. The difference
mattered to the range of techniques and types of expectations
the political center held of these different places. To
have tributary relations meant to engage in trade and to observe
a set of rituals that invested the rulers of Korea and the Ryūkyūs
with symbolic recognition from the agrarian empire at the same
time as these rulers acknowledged themselves to be subordinate
to the Qing. Yet beyond the ritual and market exchanges
of goods and services, there were few political and economic
features to the relationships. The Qing administrators
did not aspire to impose their land tax system on Korea or the
Ryūkyū islands, nor did seek to organize people under
their direct administration. The Confucian policies of
jiaoyang ("to teach and nourish") were forwarded at times
in both Korea and the Ryūkyū kingdom by their own
government leaders, in ways similar to those pursued in the
agrarian empire. Beyond these parallels, the spatial scale
of implementation in the agrarian empire allowed for a crucial
difference between the empire and other places adopting Confucian
strategies of rule. Confucian precepts in the agrarian
empire created a widely shared base of cultural, economic, and
political practicesãkinship relations, marriage and funeral
customs, agricultural technologies, schools and granariesãthat
gave people throughout the empire elements of a shared social
identity. Many other differences including linguistic,
culinary, and religious, distinguished people across the empire,
but they co-existed with common and shared Confucian elements.
Taiwan was incorporated into the agrarian empire and subject
to these policies and expectations and thus conceived by its
rulers to be quite different from either Korea or the Ryūkyūs.
In 1600 maritime trade mattered greatly to possibilities for
economic prosperity in both Taiwan and the Ryūkyū
kingdom. By 1700, Taiwan was much more the land frontier
of an agrarian empire, the economic potential of which was agricultural
and thus closer to the economic conditions of Korea than the
Ryūkyū islands where maritime trade remained a key
source of economic wealth. Maritime economic connections
existed and were important for some places but not others.
Politically the maritime region in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries shared important ideas and institutions even if these
Confucian practices didn't always directly lead to political
connections between them as they did in the case of Taiwan under
the Manchus. The tributary order of the agrarian empire
created loose direct connections with Korea and the Ryūkyū
kingdom, as well as indirect trade relations with Japan.
Though the system of political and economic relations was far
less dense than it would become in later centuries, it was coherent
and strong enough to define possible roles for European outsiders.
The Dutch were unable to hold onto their foothold in Taiwan,
but they did become the exclusive European trading partner of
the Tokugawa. The Portuguese had a toehold on Macao, while
the English became the main European merchants at Canton. In
all these cases European merchants looked for niches within
Asian trading networks at the same time as they created trade
flows back to Europe. Those trade flows of
East Asian goods, especially Chinese silks, pottery and teas
depended on the Europe export to Asia of New World silver.
Thus, the trading system of maritime East Asia was tied to larger
product flows, but this is not the same kind of integrated system
that would emerge in the nineteenth century when products and
currencies were more integrated (Wong 2002). For Korea,
Taiwan and the Ryūkyū kingdom specifically, relations
within the region defined their maritime positions economically
and politically far more than any links to places farther away
did. Such global connections would begin to matter more
after 1850.
Maritime Incorporation in an Age of Overseas Empires
By 1850 British naval power had established its superiority
over European competitors and European more generally were advancing
politically in Africa and Asia. British industrial might
was also flexing its muscles and making sensible and convenient
the proclamation of a free trade policy, the economic principles
of which did not prevent political force from shaping production
and distribution of goods such as opium. Nor did the British
lead in industrialization prevent other Europeans from competing
politically for territory in Asia. The Dutch had long
been present along the Southeast Asian archipelago, the Spanish
even longer in the Philippines and the French getting ready
to compete on the Southeast Asian mainland in the coming decades.
The Asian expansion of Western European power, by century's
end to be joined by American military might, is conventionally
viewed as a nineteenth-century process and surely there is much
to support this standard view. At the same time, however,
in the parts of East Asia examined here, Euro-American power
became more important without any Western state imposing itself
in formal colonial terms. Instead, the threat of Western
colonial power redefined some of the power and authority relations
among East Asian states.
Ryūkyū Kingdom: A paucity of options
An eighteenth-century political equilibrium in maritime East
Asia was achieved without the two main powers, the Qing and
Tokugawa, observing direct relations with reach other.
The Ryūkyū kingdom served as an intermediary, simultaneously
observing a tributary status to the Qing dynasty and recognizing
a subordinate relationship to the Tokugawa. This equilibrium
was fundamentally undermined by the growing Western diplomatic
presence in nineteenth-century East Asia. The Western
advances on China and Japan have been repeatedly chronicled.
Buried beneath the outlines of the main narrative of Chinese
and Japanese responses to Western challenges is the fate of
the Ryūkyū kingdom. From the vantage point of
the Ryūkyū leadership, what Westerners were able to
do in China and Japan wasn't as relevant as what had happened
in Southeast Asia where the British were able to make a colony
out of Singapore in the 1820s. Ryūkyū seemed
potentially vulnerable to the same sort of act as the one creating
Singapore as a British stronghold. The Qing tributary
order proved too weak to offer protection in the mid 1840s when
the Ryūkyū government appealed to rid the port of
Naha of a French ship's and its leaders who professed first
to want trade and then to be Catholic missionaries. The
Japanese subsequently proved far better at mounting a diplomatic
defense of the Ryūkyū ports against European seizure.
First, the Satsuma domain and then, after 1868, the new Meiji
state told Westerners that Japan controlled the Ryūkyū
islands (Maehira 1994: 243-48). We can see how the Meiji
state's late nineteenth-century territorial expansion into the
Ryūkyū islands was made possible by the demise of
the Chinese tributary order and made desirable by the growing
threat and presence of Europeans.
Historians conventionally portray nineteenth-century Japanese
political changes in terms made familiar by European examples.
The Meiji state constructed many political institutions inspired
by European practices. Officials learned the languages
of European diplomacy; they learned the technologies needed
to make the state strong and the people wealthy. From
a European vantage point on global politics of the late nineteenth
century, Japanese colonialism can be seen as a late entry into
the scramble for influence that Europeans had started earlier
in Africa and Asia. But if we view Japanese colonialism
within an East Asian regional context, we see that Japanese
leaders were seeking to define new relations with their immediate
neighbors that allowed them to replace the Qing empire as the
political and economic center of the region. In this project,
political space doesn't divide neatly into a binary of domestic/colonial.
Rather, there is a continuum of dependent political spaces,
with the Ryūkyūs occupying an intermediate position
between a standard domestic prefecture and a distinct colonial
administration, like those that would be formed in Korea and
Taiwan.
In formal administrative terms, the transformation of the Ryūkyū
islands into Okinawa prefecture made this former kingdom subject
to the same bureaucracy that ruled over islands to the prefecture's
north. Yet, as Alan Christy has argued, in many ways Okinawa
was like a colony. Some Japanese leaders in the early
twentieth century located Okinawans along a cultural continuum
that had the Japanese as most advanced and the the Koreans and
Taiwanese as more backward than the Okinawa. But other
Japanese leaders distinguished Okinawa from Korea and Taiwan
by viewing people on these islands as Japanese. Being
Japanese was a status people of Okinawa could consolidate by
becoming schooled and cultured in the modern ways developed
in Japan. To complicate social identification, there were
also Japanese thinkers who sought the essence of a native Japan
in the ancient past that was, for them, best represented in
their current day by people of Okinawa; these scholars stressed
the ancient ties between Okinawa and the islands to its north
as a basis for defining a distinct Japanese identity.
Okinawan elites themselves, however, were more likely to express
their aspirations for social and economic change by identifying
becoming modern with being Japanese. Both Japanese officials
and intellectuals, as well as Okinawan elites, had reasons for
constructing social identities that linked and even combined
Japanese and Okinawan identities.(Christy 1997)
Tensions about becoming modern and living under Japanese rule
affected people in Korea and Taiwan after colonial rule was
established in both places in the early twentieth century.
But the processes leading to their incorporations under Japanese
dominance were different than those affecting the Ryūkyūs.
Korea: Japanese advances
From a global perspective, the Korean government in the second
half of the nineteenth century faced the same set of Western
challenges confronting the Chinese and Japanese. Korean
officials, like their Chinese and Japanese counterparts, divided
into groups favorable to political reforms inspired by foreign
practices and those who preferred to close the country off to
outside threats. Those seeking to ward off foreign pressures
placed their faith in Confucian principles of rule; officials
so inspired were not, however, able to cope with domestic unrest,
let alone offer guidance for dealing with Western threats.
What distinguished the reform minded officials in Korea from
Chinese reformers were their close ties to the Japanese.
Meiji Japanese reforms also influenced Chinese political leaders
but Japanese leaders could not mount the scale of influence
on the Qing bureaucracy that they could with the far smaller
Korean government.
The internal debate within the Korean administration over how
to deal with Western demands and address issues of domestic
social order became the site for competition between the Qing
and Meiji governments who supported different official factions.
Where Qing officials showed little interest or ability to stop
Western threats in the Ryūkyū islands in the mid 1840s,
they showed great interest in the 1870s in using Western treaties
with Korea as an attempted buffer to expanding Japanese influence.
Li Hongzhang negotiated treaties with Western powers on behalf
of the Korean government as a creative extension of their tributary
relationship into a new setting. The Qing also sought
to refashion their commercial relationship with Koreans by signing
new treaties with the Koreans that revised tributary relations
in ways that the Korean government protested. Korean merchants
lost the privileges and benefits of a tributary framework and
were henceforth subject to taxes for trade done with China and
on trade they did in China. (Hamashita 1994) The
Qing desire to change the diplomatic basis of trade relations
with Korea grew in part out of a desire to mobilize additional
revenues. As northeast China became the site of increased
Chinese migration, the Qing border region to Korea was becoming
more active economically. Western interest in having Korean
ports open to them raised issues of how taxation of trade would
take place. The Qing government argued that the Imperial
Maritime Customs Administration established in China should
be extended to Korea as part of the Qing state handling Korea's
foreign relations with others, but the Inspector General, Robert
Hart, disagreed. He argued that either Korea had to be
considered as a domestic part of the Qing empire and thus its
ports part of the same customs administration or it was separate
from the Qing and required its own customs administration.(Hamashita
1994: 293-94)
On the domestic front, the Korean government faced a number
of protests mounted by common people inspired by visions of
a society in which traditional social relationships could recreate
a material and emotional security no longer present. These
protests became transformed ideologically by anxieties about
the survival of Korean political autonomy amidst the direct
competition of the Chinese and Japanese governments for influence
in Korea, a competition aggravated by Western advances especially
those of the Russians who shared a common border with Korea.
But neither the Russians nor other Europeans posed as serious
a political challenge to Koreas as did the competition between
China and Japan. The intra-regional political relations
made Korea's autonomy increasingly difficult to sustain.
Expansionist sentiments in Japan continued to grow from the
mid-1880s into the 1890s. Leaders felt that the consolidation
of their state required patriotic assertion of national strength.
Fukuzawa Yukichi's call for Japan to leave Asia affirmed Japanese
intentions of emulating European practices; Fukuzawa hoped other
Asian countries would do the same but he did not want to see
Japan made vulnerable to Western pressures should they fail
to do so. Others wrote more explicitly of a unification
of a greater Asia under Japanese leadership. This included
the subordination of Korea to a greater Japanese influence if
not direct control. The growing Japanese interest in Korea
was in part economic. Trade between the two countries
grew in the 1880s as Korean rice and soybeans went to Japan
in exchange for both Japanese and Western goods; nearly 90 percent
of Korean exports went to Japan. Antagonism against Japan
reached a flash point in 1882 when the anti-foreign faction
staged a coup against the Queen and Japanese officers training
the new army, resulting in a Korean government mission of apology
to Japan. The opportunity for Japanese aggression came
in 1894 when the Korean government called on the Qing to supply
troops to help quell disturbances within the country.
The Japanese labeled these troop movements to be a violation
of the 1885 Tianjin Convention according to which neither China
nor Japan would move troops to Korea without prior written notification
of the other. The Japanese moved in ships and troops that
proceeded to defeat swiftly the Qing forces in Korea.
Claiming to be fighting for Korean independence from China,
Japanese troops moved beyond Korea to the Liaodong peninsula
the following year, thereby threatening the Qing government
with a more serious threat. Li Hongzhang journeyed to
Japan in 1895 to sign a treaty with Ito Hirobumi. The
Treaty of Shimonoseki of 17 April 1895 gave the Japanese territorial
claim to the Liaodong peninsula and an indemnity of more than
300 million yen, confirming Japan's status as the first non-Western
imperialist power.
Japanese influence in Korea expanded economically and politically
after the Sino-Japanese War. Japanese were involved in
commerce, railroad development and serving as advisors to the
government. Korea became a Japanese protectorate in 1905
at the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War; Japanese influence
over key government activities including finance, police, and
the courts expanded even further. After formal colonial
control was declared in 1910, Korea became subject to more than
three decades of Japanese rule. During this period the
Japanese pursued various policies. Economic policies tried
both to develop the economy and subordinate its priorities to
serving the Japanese economy; this meant large rice exports
to Japan that contributed to low levels of consumption within
Korea. A very large Japanese military presence backed
up the formation of a bureaucratic administration that aimed
to keep tight control over the population. The normative
component of colonial administration varied. In the 1920s
the Japanese allowed the use of Korean and expression of Korean
cultural sensibilities in an effort to dull the opposition to
their rule. For the Japanese rulers, Korean identity was
often subordinated to different projects of assimilation that
portrayed colonial rule as a means to achieve participation
in a modern society that was distinctly East Asian with the
Japanese at the center. For Koreans, however, an affirmation
of a history distinct from the Japanese was crucial to promoting
a national identity upon which resistance could be built(Schmid
2002).
Korean nationalism was forged in the fire of resistance to Japanese.
The scale of social mobilization made possible by appeals to
nationalism dwarfed the kinds of mobilization that occurred
in eighteenth-century Ryūkyū kingdom to oppose growing
Japanese pressures. In this earlier era, an appeal to
Confucian principles was intended to strengthen and focus elite
efforts to resist Japanese demands. Ryūkyū elites
were not seeking to become Chinese by adopting Confucian strategies
of strengthening their state; nor were they seeking to assert
a broadly based social identity different from that of the Japanese.
The nature of the political, economic and social control that
Japan could exert within East Asia in the early twentieth century
was so much more developed than had been conceivable a century
or two earlier. These capacities, not surprisingly led
people to draw upon new forms of opposition that were also not
yet conceived in the era of agrarian empire and its tributary
order. In related ways the imposition of colonial administration
over Taiwan created some similar opportunities and problems.
.
Taiwan: From Qing frontier to Japanese colony
For nearly two centuries, Taiwan was a Qing frontier with its
administration under Fujian provincial authorities who were
aided by the presence of additional military forces stationed
on the province's coast. The Qing government's perception
of Taiwan's strategic importance changed in the 1870s and 1880s
as Western and Japanese pressures in the area alerted the court
to the danger of encroachment on the empire's territory.
While Qing rule was limited over the island by most twentieth-century
standards of government, the imperial bureaucracy was far more
present on the island than it ever had been in Korea or the
Ryūkyū kingdom where establishing Japanese control
began earlier and took far longer to achieve. Japanese abilities
to move more quickly in Taiwan did not result simply from their
building up of new kinds of power but equally from the revised
set of regional political relationships created by the placement
of the region in a larger network of relations by the expansion
of Western political power. The threat of British seeking
to establish control over the Ryūkyū port of Naha
certainly mattered to the political transformation of the Ryūkyū
kingdom into Okinawa prefecture. In the Taiwan case what
mattered was Japanese ability to bargain diplomatically with
European powers; the Japanese recognized European colonies
in Asia in return for European acceptance of Japanese rule over
Taiwan that followed the Sino-Japanese War.
The Japanese entry into Taiwan may have been acceptable to Western
powers, but this did not mean their arrival went uncontested
locally. For more than four months Japanese troops struggled
to defeat Chinese soldiers and quell opposition among the civilian
population, resulting in several thousand deaths. Until
1918 the colonial government in Taiwan, much like the colonial
government in Korea, concentrated on establishing effective
civilian administration and military control; on the economic
front, they surveyed the land in order to better tax it and
established monopolies over key agricultural products including
sugar and salt. In the 1920s colonial administration stressed
Japanese education with the twin goals of promoting cultural
assimilation and equipping people with the skills to work in
a changing economy and live in a changing society; this contrasts
with Japanese policies in Korea where more vocal resistance
to the Japanese prompted a period of cultural plurality.
As World War II began to make greater demands on Japan to mobilize
resources and harness human energies to support the war effort,
Chinese on Taiwan were increasingly forced to adopt Japanese
customsãto take Japanese names, eat Japanese food, wear Japanese
clothes and worship Japanese deities.
Taiwanese elites were drawn in two competing directions under
Japanese colonialism. At one level new elites, like doctors,
could see themselves as leaders of their nation with an opportunity
to improve their society. At another level, there was
a positive attraction to Japan as the source of modern change
since Taiwanese doctors achieved their status and professional
achievements based on Japanese educations. (Lo 2002)
Japanese rule more generally transformed Taiwan. Schools,
public health, roads and port facilities were all improved to
some degree under colonial rule. On balance the economic
impact of colonialism was less devastating than in Korea and
in some ways at least created some of the infrastructure used
to pursue economic growth in the 1950s. Korea faced far
more Japanese migration than Taiwan did, extending well beyond
colonial officials to include businessmen and farmers.
In neither Korea nor Taiwan, however, did Japanese policies
of forced cultural assimilation succeed. Had the Japanese
remained for several additional decades the endpoint of the
processes may well have been different. But following
the Japanese defeat in 1945, few Korean or Chinese on Taiwan
thought of themselves as Japanese in terms of their principal
social identity. This doesn't mean, of course, that some,
especially those who received educations in Japan and benefited
personally from colonial rule, did not think of themselves as
willing subjects of the Japanese empire in the early 1940s,
but it does suggest that there wouldn't be much effort to restore
Japanese rule after the collapse of empire. For Koreans,
an anti-Japanese sentiment would remain strongly in place for
decades. In Taiwan, however, a more mixed reaction to
the Japanese emerged, in part because Chinese of Taiwan saw
the defeat of one conqueror immediately bring the arrival of
a new conqueror, the Guomindang, that also established its initial
presence through bloody fighting.
Japanese colonial empire in world space
The expansion of Western power through East Asia in the second
half of the nineteenth century created distinct outcomes in
the Southeast and the Northeast. In Southeast Asia, formal
European colonial regimes were established everywhere except
Thailand where the ability of the government to remain independent
rested upon its buffer position between the British and French
and the willingness of the two European powers to maintain a
balance between them in which Thailand was juridically independent.
In Northeast Asia, the expansion of Western economic connections
and political demands put relations among East Asian states
in a revised geopolitical context. While the arrival of
Westerners is conventionally cast as a challenge to which East
Asian governments responded, the Western threats were also an
incentive for them to transform their relations with each other.
From this competition, Korea, Taiwan and the Ryūkyū
kingdom all ended up moving more fully under Japanese authority.
The political hierarchy of the region became far sharper and
significant than the hierarchy of the tributary framework.
The drive to incorporate subject populations more fully included
aggressive efforts at forced assimilation, a cultural project
the agrarian empire pursued in less dramatic and draconian ways
within its borders but not beyond them. For their parts,
people in Korea, Taiwan and the Ryūkyū islands increasingly
defined themselves in relation to their Japanese rulers, both
when identifying with and when reacting against them.
Their self-perceptions along with the kinds of political and
economic resources they could mobilize affected their likely
futures after the fall of the Japanese empire.
From an East Asian perspective, the likely futures of Korea,
Taiwan and Okinawa after the defeat of the Japanese in World
War II included an independent Korea, a Taiwan rejoined to the
mainland and Okinawa integrated more fully into Japan.
Korean elites were about to compete among themselves but all
envisioned their country to be unified and separate from Japan.
Taiwanese elites did not generally seem to have the same degree
of anti-Japanese feelings; they also had cultural ties to the
Chinese mainland that made their political future seem inclined
toward a re-establishment of connections that had existed before
Japanese colonization. Only Okinawa, which had been formally
incorporated as a Japanese prefecture in the late nineteenth
century seemed plausibly to remain under Japanese rule.
But none of these possible outcomes obtained. In each
case U.S. military power created alternative scenarios from
which have emerged different histories.
Globally Defined Divisions in a Regional World
The military capacities and political agenda of the United States
after World War II played major roles in creating some new and
reinforcing other old political divisions within East Asia.
Together with domestic actors, the U.S. government defined divisions
within the region against a global grid placing most countries
into the political camps of its friends or foes. Taiwan
became independent, but with its government basing its legitimacy
on claims of rule over the mainland. Korea became divided
with leaders in northern and southern parts forging alliances
with outside powers on opposite sides of the global division
of power. Much of Okinawa was subject to American military
authority for decades. Key features of the political terrain
in each case were clearly defined by political forces from beyond
the region. But the political dynamics in each case also
responded to the particular actors present in each and to their
local concerns. These local concerns in turn were framed
at times during the next half-century within regional rather
than global terms. Economic opportunities and anxieties
have both motivated the formation of relations within the larger
East Asian region. At the millennial transition, these
regional relations both complemented and competed with economic
and political relations linking the Koreas, Taiwan and Okinawa
to larger global forces.
Korea
The division of Korea linked the north to the Soviet Union and
China and the south to the West, especially the United States.
In the years following the Korean War the two parts of Korea
embarked upon different trajectories of political, economic
and social change. South Korea's well-known economic transformation
has combined big business, heavy industry, and a strong government
presence to produce the basis for the production and sale of
a wide variety of Korean goods on global markets. These
economic changes contrast with the more limited changes in the
north which remained largely isolated from outside markets until
very recently. The political systems have also differed
dramatically. North Korea has a regime led by a charismatic
figure whose authority is expressed, in part, through claims
about his moral virtue; cast in Communist categories of expression
they resonate strongly with an historical sense of Confucian
values (Cumings 1997: 407). The South, in contrast, has
been democratized through popular movements putting pressures
on government institutions, the leaders of which made changes
to open up political processes to larger numbers of people.
Here too, however, earlier cultural values associated with Confucian
thought remain strong in the society, even if their expression
differs considerably from that in the north. Three features
of the post-1945 changes deserve highlighting in the context
of a long-run perspective on Korea in East Asia. First,
the major economic changes came from global economic connections
that made possible technological changes as well as markets
on which to sell goods; learning from Westerners has been an
important component of the conditions for political changes
as well. Second, neither economic nor political changes
necessarily preclude the persistence of culturally specific
values and their deployment to support current political and
social practices. Third, the division between north and
south has become an extremely important local issue over which
people organize politically with priorities very different from
those driving the division internationally. In other words,
one could view Korea in the year 2000 by looking at the interaction
of connections and conflicts at both global and local levels.
Yet changes have also take place at the regional level politically,
economically and culturally. Politically, the relationships
between the Koreas, China and Japan are important to each of
the states. In cultural terms the South Korean government only
began in 1998 to allow popular Japanese music into the country
legally. Since then Korean pop music has become fashionable
in Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Economically,
the Japanese witnessed South Korea emerge as a major competitor
on many markets. More recently, South Koreans have turned
to China as the land of economic opportunity, increasing the
Korean presence greatly and displacing North Koreans in the
process.
Taiwan
Taiwan's economic miracle has been frequently compared to South
Korea's. In both cases government played a considerable
role and global markets were crucial sources of technology and
targets for sales. Politically, the two countries in the
1960s and 1970s had similarly hostile and competitive relationships
to the regimes from which they had been separated by U.S. military
power. But by the 1980s conditions for both began to change.
Both South Koreans and Taiwanese were willing to invest in the
north and the mainland respectively. The building of closer
economic connections made it possible to conceive closer political
relations. In the China-Taiwan case, some analysts on
the mainland have asserted for many years that the prospects
for reunification continues to improve as the economic gap between
the two is diminished. This expectation has been
qualified and indeed complicated by the emergence in the past
decade or two of a political movement asserting the island's
independence from China. As part of asserting a distinct
Taiwanese national identity, the island's history of connections
to outsiders became written as one of varying forms of colonialism,
the Japanese being a conventional variety and Qing rule as a
kind of "internal colonialism."(Wu Micha 1994) Political
separation and economic connections compete in Taiwan's case
in ways they do not in Korea's.
Another difference between the Korean and Taiwanese cases
concerns the kinds of social identity created in these two places.
Support for reunification in Korea rests in part upon the promotion
of a shared cultural and historical identity. In contrast,
Taiwanese identity has increasingly been asserted as different
from a Chinese identity. For these purposes, China is
not so much a cultural unit as a political unit so that people
on Taiwan can claim that China ruled the island for a relatively
brief period of time. Some claim that the movement of
Chinese Minnan people to Taiwan in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries was little different from moves that coastal Chinese
also made to Southeast Asia, to places which are most clearly
not part of China. Together, the Korean and Taiwanese
cases tell us that social identities in these places, despite
being caught between the larger and more powerful Chinese and
Japanese states, can gain support, perhaps even more than they
once did. A similar message comes out of the Okinawa case.
Ryūkyū Islands as Okinawa
A part of Japan's early twentieth-century empire, Okinawa may
have been more completely subordinated to Tokyo than either
Korea or Taiwan, but it was considered separate enough for the
U.S. to take over control in 1945. The U.S. military presence
after World War II in Okinawa led many people there to seek
a return to Japanese rule. Ironically, the "return" has
in many ways involved far more Japanese rule over the islands
than had ever been the case previously and a level of integration
quite beyond what had been in place before U.S. military authority
came onto the scene. But this has been seen as preferable
to the heavy handed U.S. military presence. At the same
time however it was under the U.S. military authorities that
Okinawans were encouraged to affirm their distinct social identity
with a history separate from that of the Japanese.
The Ryūkyū kingdom's transformation from a small independent
political unit between two larger powers to a dependent territory
of one of them constitutes one kind of state transformation
in East Asia. While ruled by the Japanese national state,
social identity is constructed more locally and its position
can be located both regionally and globally (Hamashita 2000:
180-205). Where the Ryūkyū kingdom lost its
independence, Taiwan may be developing a stronger political
base on which to claim its autonomy. Distinct from either
of these movesãone from independence to subordination and the
other from subordination to autonomyãthe Koreas may achieve
reunification despite the anxieties of outside political powers.
The Region as Site for the Global and Local
Today's maritime East Asia frames Korea, Taiwan and Okinawa
in ways very different from the conditions of either the Japanese
empire or the earlier tributary world of agrarian empire.
The Japanese empire was in important ways an empire connected
by the seas. In an age predating large amounts of commercial
airline development, the principal lines of transportation were
seaborne. The economic connections subordinating Korea
and Taiwan to Japan were achieved across the water. Maritime
connections mattered less in both the previous and subsequent
periods. In the earlier period a looser political order
centered on the agrarian empire didn't depend greatly on maritime
connections. The commercial routes that did link much
of northeast and southeast Asia to each other and the agrarian
empire did not directly reinforce political hierarchies as they
did under the Japanese empire. The routes that have mattered
after the 1950s spanned are more than the region itself and
depended increasingly on air traffic as much as seaborne trade.
Yet the East Asia region may become more important economically
and politically as a set of relations that distinguishes the
area from other world regions, such as those of Europe or North
America. Within this regional order, China again has asserted
itself as a centerãnot the ritual and diplomatic center it was
several centuries ago, but an economic center with financial
and commodity flows into and out of the country challenging
the other countries in the region on global markets.
Regional relationships in East Asia defined different kinds
of political and economic spaces for Korea, Taiwan and the Ryūkyūs
in 1750, 1930 and 2000. At the first date, regional relations
were largely defined in tributary and trade terms with an agrarian
empire at the political center that cared far less about these
foreign connections than it did its domestic challenges of rule.
There emerged by the early twentieth century a very different
regional order defined by Japanese colonialism, an order within
which a far denser web of political and economic relationships
subordinated Korea, Taiwan and the Ryūkyūs to Japan
than they had ever been to China. The post-World War II regional
order was the first in which an actor from beyond the region
became a major force, yet this "global" presence of the U.S.
in East Asia doesn't erase the significance of local and regional
political and economic dynamics. Taking all three periods
together, the political possibilities for Korea, Taiwan, and
the Ryūkyūs have been reframed by the distinctive
regional systems that define the area in different historical
eras. While it would be difficult to predict confidently
the political futures for these three areas in later periods
based solely on features of earlier ones, the histories probably
contribute as much if not more to defining the plausible scenarios
as do models of state transformation derived from European historical
experiences.
Bibliography
Christy, Alan S. "The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,"
in Tani E. Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity
in East Asia. Duke University Press, 141-70 (originally
published in positions 1.3 (winter 1993)).
Cumings, Bruce. 1997. Korea's Place in the Sun. Norton.
Hamashita Takeshi. 1994. "Chōkō to jōyakuãHigashi
Ajia kaikōjōo meguru kōshō no jidai 1834-94,"
in Mizoguchi Yūzō Hamashita Takeshi, Hiraishi Naoaki,
and Miyajima Hiroshi, eds., Shūen kara no rekishi (Ajia
kara kangaeru 3), 273-302. University of Tokyo Press.
Hamashita Takeshi. 2000. Okinawa nyumon. Chikuma shinsho.
Lo, Ming-cheng M. 2002. Doctors within Borders: Profession,
Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan. University
of California Press.
Maehira Fusaaki. 1994. "Jūkyū seki no higashi Ajia
kokusai kankei to Ryūkyū mondai," in Mizoguchi Yūzō,
Hamashita Takeshi, Hiraishi Naoaki, and Miyajima Hiroshi, eds.,
Shūen kara no rekishi (Ajia kara kangaeru 3), 243-71.
University of Tokyo Press.
Miyachi Masato. 1995. "Taiwan," in Rekishigaku kenkyūkai,
ed., Sekaishi to wa nani ka. University of Tokyo Press,
313-27.
Nagatsumi Yōko. 1999. "Tōzai kōeki no chūkeichi
Taiwan no seisui," in Satō Sugitaka and Kishimoto Mio,
eds., Shijō no chiiki shi. Yamakawa Shuppansha,
326-66.
Schmid, Andre. 2002. Korea Between Empires. Columbia
University Press.
Smits, Gregory. 1999. Visions of Ryūkyū: Identity
and Ideology in Early Modern Thought and Politics. University
of Hawaii Press.
Takara Kurayoshi. 1998. "Ryūkyū ōkoku no tenkai,"
in Kishimoto Mio, ed., Iwanami kōza Sekai rekishi 13:
Higashi Ajia Tōnan Ajia dentō shakai no keisei 16-18
seki, 77-96.
Iwanami shoten.
Tomiyama Kazuyuki. 2000. "Fukugō shihai to chiikiãjūzoku
teki ni shu chōkō kokuã Ryūkyū no bai,"
in Hamashita Takeshi and Kawakita Minoru, eds., shihai no
chiiki rekishi (Chiiki no sekaishi 11), 213-47.
Yamagawa shuppansha.
Wu Micha. 1994. "Taiwan shi no seiritsu to sono kadai," in
Mizoguchi Yūzō, Hamashita Takeshi, Hiraishi Naoaki,
and Miyajima Hiroshi, eds., Shūen kara no rekishi (Ajia
kara kangaeru 3), PAGES. University of Tokyo Press.
Wong, R. Bin. 2002. ""The Search for European
Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World: A View
from Asia," American Historical Review, 107.2: 447-69.
