Notes on Why Taiwan: (2) 16th-19th century

Continued: On how Taiwan entered (or did not enter) the imagined geography of China

"By the middle of the sixteenth century, though, economic opportunity, as well as 'push' factors along the southeast coast of China, impelled profit-seekers to flout Ming regulations restricting seagoing ventures and to enter into the vibrant oceanic trade that entangled Japanese, Southeast Asians, European, and, increasingly, Chinese merchants into the skein of commercial interactions (p.51)."

"Davidson writes that 'A formal cession of the island was now made, which, considering that the Chinese had no right to it and never claimed any, was probably not a heart-rending task for them' (p.53)." (referring to 1624)

"Emma Teng argues that the prevailing view of Taiwan inherited from the Ming was 'that it was [beyond the seas] (haiwei); and... that it belonged to a realm known as [Wilderness] (huangfu) (p.57)."

"Teng makes the case that negligible contact with Taiwan and scant knowledge of it contributed to the view that it was an untamed frontier (p.57)."

"She cites, as examples, The Record of the Naval Defenses of Fujian Province [Fujian Haifangzhi], in which it is written that Taiwan 'extends from the northeastern to the southeastern like a standing screen; it is the outer boundary for China's four [coastal] provinces (p.59).'"

"In this formulation, Taiwan is not 'Chinese' in the sense of being territory deeply enmeshed in the national consciousness. It became China's for instrumental, geostrategic purposes long after the concept of China's territorial heartland had established in the minds of Chinese elite (p.59)."

"Chronicles of the cross-Strait dispute ordinarily begin with the ROC-CCP rivalry of the 1940s and, occasionally, peek back at the cession of Taiwan to Japan in 1895 and, more rarely, review the Qing history of interaction with the island dating to the early seventeenth century. Most analyses of the contemporary controversy focus on the cross-Strait dispute as if it were bounded by a logic and history that is separate from China's contest over other territories and over the island prior to 1950s. It is not (p.67)."

"Taiwan is not simply an object of bilateral dispute between Beijing and Taipei that emerged from Chinese civil war, but is perceived by some analysts in the PRC as a struggle for security and power in the context of an enduring rivalry with the United States for hegemonic influence in the Pacific (p.67)."

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