Category Archives: China

The Korea Times reports that:

6.08 million Koreans were living overseas as of July 2003, recording a 7.56 percent increase from 2001, according to statistics released by the Foreign Affairs-Trade Ministry recently.

The largest population of overseas Koreans, about 3 million, is in the Asia-Pacific region, with over 2 million in China alone, and nearly 200,000 in Australia and New Zealand. The largest growth in the Americas was in North America, where nearly 2.5 millions Koreans now live. Europe and the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) account for another 600,000 or so. Korean populations actually declined in Japan, South America, the Middle East, and Africa.

South Korea’s population is now approaching 50 million, while North Korea’s is about 22 million–and probably falling.

I remember attending a talk once by a pair of Korean government-sponsored speakers whose purpose seemed to be to flatter Koreans abroad and enlist their support in Korea’s drive to achieve its rightful place in the universe. A Korean raised in the Soviet Union talked about the disproportionate success of the Korean minority there–second only to the Jews in educational attainment. He even suggested that Koreans were a “chosen people” although he became somewhat defensive about the comment later. The other speaker framed his message in terms of competition with Japan. Korea might lack Japan’s population, its wealth, its resources, and its head start, but it had a secret weapon: its huge population of well-placed Koreans abroad. During the question period, my favorite fearlessly contrarian antinationalist among the Korean graduate students asked the speaker what made him think that Koreans abroad might be willing to be shills for either the Korean government or Korean businesses.

Andrei Lankov’s latest column in the poorly edited Korea Times discusses a fundamental paradox of human-rights monitoring: The most repressive societies yield the least reliable evidence, while the most open societies yield the best evidence. This favors apologists for the most repressive regimes, and undermines apologists for more open regimes.

Attempts to study repressive systems in non-democratic societies unavoidably hit a paradox: the more effective and stringent the controls over the population, the less the outside world knows about ongoing horrors. In the late 1960s, when the terror of Mao’s regime reached its apex, information about the horrors perpetrated was seldom reported by the Western press. Under Mao’s successors, when the regime softened, the Western press took up reporting the “abuse of human rights in China.” A few decades earlier, something similar had been happening in the USSR after Khruchshev’s [sic] reforms.

In both cases, the current ideological fashions among Western intellectuals played a major role: the self-appointed “progressive thinkers” of the 1960s loved Mao almost as much as their predecessors loved Stalin in the 1930s. Solzhenitsyn was not the first to tell the world about Stalin’s terror — there had been earlier reports. However, leftist thinkers who reigned supreme in academic and intellectual circles ignored those reports. Solzhenitsyn’s exposures in the 1960s were taken seriously only because by his time the Soviets had gone out of fashion. However, former fans of Stalin switched their adoration to Mao.

The same has often been the case in Korea where the left is increasingly powerful in academia and the media. The leftist intellectuals tend to dismiss reports of North Korean terror. However, in recent decades it has become quite difficult to ignore the growing number of testimonies coming from the North.

via The Marmot

The July 2004 IIAS Newsletter includes an article by Wil O. Dijk on the Dutch VOC in Burma during the 17th century, the same period in which they were conquering one sultanate after another in the Spice Islands and the rest of the Indonesian archipelago.

This article highlights a little known aspect of the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s inter-Asian trade: the trade with Burma. The vast archives of the VOC at the National Archives in The Hague have yielded a treasure trove of detailed information on seventeenth century Dutch-Burmese relations. The archives throws light on the composition of the VOC’s Burma trade, and how it fit into the grand design of the Company’s inter-Asian commerce, where it was not as marginal as some historians would have it. Vital statistics on shipping, imports and exports, wages and prices, and inventories of Indian textiles the Dutch shipped across the Bay of Bengal, together with purchasing and selling prices, allow us a unique glimpse into life in seventeenth century Burma….

The VOC’s years in Burma can be divided into three distinct periods: the early years of indecision (1634-1648), the golden middle years (1649-1669) and the final years of decline and departure (1670-1680). During the first period suggestions were made, in turn by Pulicat and Batavia (the company’s head office in Asia), to close down the Burmese factories. Pulicat and Batavia, however, seemed unable to agree, with the result that trade continued halfheartedly. The second period witnessed a great improvement in conditions for trade. In the final years, a new king with little interest in trade or foreigners ascended the Burmese throne. By this time the objectives of the Dutch East India Company had altered, while forces beyond its control were working to undermine the company. In the end the Burma trade became a casualty of the company’s new priorities….

Empire of trade

Burma offered a large assortment of export goods. Statistics indicate that the Dutch generally took what they could get. Tin was a constant as were lac, elephant tusks, chillies (long peppers) and beeswax. In the 1650s, Chinese copper coins and Burmese ganza (a metal akin to bell metal) became major exports. The Company turned large quantities of Chinese copper coins, flowing into Burma from Yunnan, into money to be used as legal tender in Batavia and Ceylon. In the final years, the Dutch also exported a great deal of gold, much of it originating in China. The VOC, through its elaborate inter-Asian network, was in a position to trade Burmese goods in the most profitable markets throughout Asia.

[Ming China was at this time selling off copper and gold to convert to silver coinage, thereby fueling global trade, especially with Tokugawa Japan and the Spanish Empire in the New World.]

Their Bengal factory, always in need of additional funds, was sent valuable Burmese cargoes (including Chinese coins, ganza, and zinc). The copper extracted from Chinese coins and ganza was in great demand in Coromandel, as were gold, tin, timber and chillies. In Japan a profitable market existed for Burmese catechu, namrack, deerskins, buffalo hides and horns. Lac generated excellent profits in Mocha, as well as in Persia, where there was a good market for Burmese tin, elephant tusks, cardamom, and the costliest of Burma’s fabled rubies. Considerable quantities of Burmese elephant tusks were shipped to Surat, while in Holland there was demand for the excellent Burmese lac. As for Burma’s famous Martaban jars, there was constant demand throughout Asia for these huge, glazed pots used to store and transport a myriad of things, from potable water and rice to gunpowder and, on occasion, stowaways….

Military commitments

The main points of contention – the ban on direct trade with China at Bhamo, royal monopolies, high tolls, and the disarming of ships – were exasperating but not new. Rather, the circumstances and priorities of the Company had changed. Trade was no longer its main concern; the VOC had changed into a territorial enterprise with military and political commitments and began to operate increasingly from its two power bases, Batavia and Ceylon.

More importantly, a radical shift occurred in its commercial priorities. Whereas in the early days the company’s inter-Asian sea-borne traffic was a key element in its drive to create a vast empire of trade – with the outcome of this traffic largely determining the flow of trade between Asia and Europe – by 1680 the situation was different. The VOC’s inter-Asian trade had peaked by the 1670s, and was replaced by direct trade between Asia and Europe. This is perhaps the main reason behind the Dutch decision to abandon Burma. Whereas Burma had been an integral part of the VOC’s inter-Asian trade for nearly half a century, the company’s new priorities now made it irrelevant.

It’s easy enough to poke fun at academics, but every once in a while an academic will strike back in a style that is both academically appropriate and wonderfully entertaining for educated lay audiences to read. A mighty fine specimen of this genre is the review article by Carter Finlay entitled “How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America” (Journal of World History 15:229-242).

In 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2002), Gavin Menzies aspires to rewrite world history on a grand scale. He maintains that four Chinese fleets, comprising twenty-five to thirty ships and at least 7,000 persons each, visited every part of the world except Europe between 1421 and 1423. Trained by Zheng He, the famous eunuch-admiral, Chinese captains carried out the orders of Zhu Di (r. 1402-1424), the third Ming emperor, to map coastlines, settle new territories, and establish a global maritime empire. According to Menzies, proof of the passage of the Ming fleets to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Polynesia is overwhelming and indisputable. His “index of supporting evidence” (pp. 429-462) includes thousands of items from the fields of archaeology, cartography, astronomy, and anthropology; his footnotes and bibliography include publications in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, Arabic, and Hebrew.

Menzies claims that Chinese mariners explored the islands of Cape Verde, the Azores, the Bahamas, and the Falklands; they established colonies in Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, California, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Rhode Island; they introduced horses to the Americas, rice to California, chickens to South America, coffee to Puerto Rico, South American sloths to Australia, sea otters to New Zealand, and maize to the Philippines. In addition, Chinese seamen toured the temples and palaces of the Maya center of Palenque in Mexico, hunted walruses and smelted copper in Greenland, mined for lead and saltpeter in northern Australia, and established trading posts or diamonds along the Amazon and its tributaries….

The good news conveyed by 1421 is that there are big bucks in world history: Menzies received an advance of £500,000 ($825,000) from his British publisher, whose initial printing runs to 100,000 copies. The bad news is that reaping such largesse evidently requires producing a book as outrageous as 1421. Menzies flouts the basic rules of both historical study and elementary logic. He misrepresents the scholarship of others, and he frequently fails to cite those from whom he borrows. He misconstrues Chinese imperial policy, especially as seen in the expeditions of Zheng He, and his extensive discussion of Western cartography reads like a parody of scholarship. His allegations regarding Nicolò di Conti (c. 1385-1469), the only figure in 1421 who links the Ming voyages with European events, are the stuff of historical fiction, the product of an obstinate misrepresentation of sources. The author’s misunderstanding of the technology of Zheng He’s ships impels him to depict voyages no captain would attempt and no mariner could survive, including a 4,000-mile excursion along the Arctic circle and circumnavigation of the Pacific after having already sailed more than 42,000 miles from China to West Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines (pp. 199-209, 311).

Portraying himself as an innocent abroad, forthrightly seeking truths the academic establishment has disregarded or suppressed, Menzies in fact is less an “unlettered Ishmael” than a Captain Ahab, gripped by a mania to bend everything to his purposes. His White Whale is Eurocentric historiography, which celebrates Columbus (a thief and fraud, pp. 382-383) and Vasco da Gama (a terrorist, p. 406) without realizing they merely aped the epic deeds of the Chinese. More generally, Menzies, in an unacknowledged echo of Joseph Needham, laments that China did not become “mistress of the world,” with Confucian harmony and Buddhist benevolence uniting humankind. Instead, the cruel, barbaric West, secretly and fraudulently capitalizing on Chinese achievements, imposed its dominion around the globe (pp. 405-406).

The wounded leviathan of Eurocentricism no doubt deserves another harpoon, but 1421 is too leaky a vessel to deliver it. Examination of the book’s central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance: first, that the 1421-1423 voyages Menzies describes could not have taken place; second, that Conti played no role in transmitting knowledge of Chinese exploration to European cartographers; and third, that all Menzies’s evidence for the presence of the Chinese fleets abroad is baseless.

Read the whole thing, if you have access to a print or electronic version of the journal. It’ll be well worth your trouble.

The latest issue of the Journal of World History (vol. 15, no. 2, June 2004) has an interesting article on “Global Migration, 1846-1940” by Adam McKeown. The abstract follows. (Full-text requires subscription.)

European migrations to the Americas and Australia have often been noted as an important part of world history, but movements to the frontiers, factories, and cities of Asia and Africa have largely been overlooked. This paper will show that migrations to northern and southeastern Asia were comparable in size and demographic impact to the transatlantic flows and followed similar cycles of growth and contraction. These migrations were all part of an expanding world economy, and a global perspective suggests ways in which that economy extended beyond direct European intervention. A global perspective also compels us to extend the traditional ending point for the era of mass migration from 1914 to 1930, and to be more aware of how political intervention has shaped the world into different migration systems and led scholars to wrongly assume that these systems reflect categorically different kinds of migration.

Table 1 in this article shows 55-58 million people migrating from Europe to the Americas during this period; 48-52 million from India (c. 30m) and southern China (c. 20m) into Southeast Asia and to European colonies in the Pacific and Indian Oceans; and 46-51 million from Northeast Asia and Russia into Manchuria, Siberia, central Asia, and Japan.

Indians migrated to Malaysia (4m), Ceylon (8m), Burma (15m), and Africa (1m, incl. Mohandas Gandhi), as well as to Mauritius, the Seychelles, and Fiji. Some of the Indians were indentured, but most arrived under labor contracts sponsored by their employer or the colonial authorities. Fewer than 1 million Chinese migrated under labor contracts to Europeans, while many more worked for Chinese employers under various contracts. Most of the Southeast Asian Chinese came from Fujian and Guangdong in South China.

Up to 11 million Chinese traveled from China to the Straits Settlements, although more than a third of these transshipped to the Dutch Indies, Borneo, Burma, and places farther west….

Migration into the broad expanse of North Asia is the least well studied of these systems. Small trickles of migrants had moved into central Asia, Siberia, and Manchuria for hundreds of years, but the Qing government’s gradual relaxation of restrictions against movement into Manchuria after 1860 and the emancipation of serfs in Russia in 1861 set the stage for more massive migration. Both governments actively encouraged settlement with homesteading policies in the 1880s, each partly inspired by the desire to forestall territorial encroachment by the other. Railroad construction in the 1890s further strengthened the migrant flows. Between 28 and 33 million Chinese migrated into Manchuria and Siberia (most of whom embarked on a short sea voyage from Shandong to the Liaodong peninsula), along with nearly 2 million Koreans and over 500,000 Japanese. Another 2.5 million Koreans migrated to Japan, especially in the 1930s. At least 13 million Russians moved into central Asia and Siberia over this period.

Average annual population growth in Southeast Asia, North Asia, and the Americas ranged from 1.45% to 1.72% between 1850 and 1950, while it averaged 0.74% in the rest of the world. If we look at the sources of emigration, annual rates averaged 7-10 per 1000 from Ireland, Norway, and Italy during 1900-1910; and 9-10 per 1000 in South China (Guangdong) and North China (Hebei and Shandong) during the 1920s. (Peak rates reached 22/1000 from Ireland during the famine of 1845-55 and 18/1000 from Iceland during the 1880s.)

Of course, there were also massive internal migrations into coastal cities in China, to tea plantations and textile mills in India, and into industrial areas of northern Europe.

The end of the transatlantic slave trade led to the increased movement of slaves into western Sudan [Darfur?], the Middle East, and areas bordering the Indian Ocean in the late nineteenth century…. Projects such as the Suez Canal and development of an infrastructure for cotton cultivation in Egypt attracted large amounts of local migration, while Lebanon and Syria experienced some of the highest overseas emigration rates in the world [during 1870-1920]. Over 3 million people also took part in the hajj to Mecca from 1879 to 1938….

In addition to the migration of settlers and workers, some of the traditional merchant diasporas continued to flourish. For centuries before the 1800s, these ethnic networks had been some of the most prominent exemplars of long-distance migration….

Of particular interest are the Sindworkies from the town of Hyderabad in what is now Pakistan. After the 1860s they spread from [Bukhara and] Japan to the Panama Canal and Tierra del Fuego, establishing upscale tourist shops that sold “curios” from around the world and becoming prominent carriers of Japanese trade in the Dutch Indies.

See also Muninn‘s recent post on Japanese migration into north China in the early parts of both the 20th and 21st centuries and, more tangentially, Randy McDonald’s recent post at The Head Heeb on Diasporas: Shifting Meaning, Real Intentions. Scott Sommers’ Taiwan Weblog also has an interesting post on foreign teachers as economic migrants in Taiwan.

NKZone‘s Andrei Lankov had another article on North Korea in last week’s Korea Times headlined Breakthroughs End in Naught.

Once every few years the world media discovers that a new historical breakthrough has just taken place in North Korea. These lofty epithets are normally used to describe a new turn in the seemingly endless (and rather fruitless) negotiations between Pyongyang and Seoul or, alternatively, to inform readers that Pyongyang has finally decided to reform its economy.

Being a sort of Pyongyang-watcher for 20 years, I have grown very skeptical about these recurring statements. Indeed, we have witnessed a number of such “breakthroughs” — all of which ended in naught.

In the mid-1980s, Western journalists loved to speculate that North Korea was on the eve of dramatic changes; and so one of the first bouts of media hype about the forthcoming “opening” of the North Korean economy occurred in 1984.

The reason for these hopes was a Joint Venture Law passed by the North Korean parliament in September of that year….

However, it soon became evident that no serious investor was showing interest in North Korea. Ethnic Koreans from Japan, active supporters of Chongryo, opened almost all the joint ventures. And even these people whose pro-Pyongyang sympathies could be taken for granted did not rush to the North with serious money.

Indeed, journalists who hailed the Joint Venture Law in 1984 tended to forget that North Korea had already acquired an unfavorable reputation in the international capital market. In the early 1970s North Korean companies and banks solicited credits from Western banks. In a few years their debt to the West reached some $1.3 billion. In those days, Communist countries were believed to be good borrowers — irrespective of what the Communist leaders thought about the greedy capitalists, they understood the importance of good credit ratings.

To the great disappointment of Western bankers, North Korea proved to be an exception to this rule. Pyongyang did not care much about repaying debts to the USSR and China — and did not see any reason why Westerners should be treated differently. Thus, in the late 1970s, Pyongyang became the first Communist country to default on its loans. Of course, its credit rating was ruined, but the North Korean bosses hardly grasped the importance of this fact.

In the 1980s, however, they learned about the importance of credit ratings the hard way. The Western businesses simply refused to deal with a partner they believed to be unreliable.

During the 1980s, Romania’s Ceausescu and North Korea’s Kim Il-sung had a mutual admiration society, both being determined to achieve national autarky (called Juche in North Korea). But Ceausescu seems to have learned a valuable lesson from the misfortunes of North Korea, and later Poland. He bled Romanians dry in order to repay his foreign loans. In fact, Thomas P. M. Barnett (author of The Pentagon’s New Map) writing in the Christian Science Monitor on 28 December 1989 (a few days after the Ceausescus had been executed) thinks this was Why Ceausescu Fell: His Silent War Against the Romanian People Backfired.

This silent war dates back to 1982, when Ceausescu implemented severe austerity policies designed to retire the nation’s foreign debt by 1990. Why so quickly? The Romanian dictator had witnessed Warsaw’s near default on its large foreign debt. Poland’s subsequent economic collapse convinced Ceausescu that his regime had to avoid this scenario at all costs.

This was the era when pig’s feet were labeled patrioti in Romanian because they were the only part of the pig that stayed in country.

Asiapages reads depressing news about Chinese intellectuals.

A recent survey by the State Commission for Economic Restructuring reveals that China’s intellectuals, a broader term used in China to cover academic scholars or any professionals who have an advanced education, have an average life expectancy of 58–at least 10 years less than the general public.

She observes that “over-eating, over-drinking and little sleep have also been blamed for such short life-spans.”

I was going to post something on the Indonesian presidential elections but, as usual, The Head Heeb provides far better coverage of contextualized current events in the part of the world I monitor–even though the proprietor is away and guests have taken over his kitchen. In this case, Conrad Barwa serves up a 4-course meal: Susilo Bambang Yudhyono as antipasto, Megawati as primo, tough Gen. Wiranto as secundo, and Amien Rais as dolce (far niente).

While there, be sure to scroll down to Daniel Geffen’s informative post about the contested Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

UPDATE: Macam-Macam has more on the Indonesian elections.