From Haijin to Kaihai: The Jiajing Court’s Search for a Modus Operandi along the Southeastern Coast of China, 1522–67

Thursday, January 3, 2013: 1:00 PM
Balcony J (New Orleans Marriott)
Ivy Lim, Nanyang Technological University
The Ming Dynasty was the first dynasty to attempt a full-scale closure of China’s maritime trade to private enterprise through the promulgation of maritime prohibitions. Throughout the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, alternate periods of strict enforcement and lax policing of the prohibitions consequently saw the rise of smuggling and piracy along the southern coast. In the mid-sixteenth century, the reign of the Jiajing Emperor (r. 1522 – 1566) witnessed a new energy directed at the problem of security on the coast that sparked an explosion of piratical activities that took the court a decade to suppress. Lim focuses on the debate by court officials in Beijing over the nature of and proposed solutions to the crisis. Divided between those who proposed continued enforcement and those who favored relaxation of the prohibitions, the policy debate elucidates the differing interpretations of the original prohibition among the officials and the wisdom of pursuing such a negative policy in an era of growing commercialization. Through a discussion of the debate, Lim argues that contrary to the interpretation of the change in policy as a capitulation by the center to peripheral forces, the policy turnaround in 1567 in fact marked imperial acquiescence of private maritime trade and the culmination of the court’s search for an acceptable way to deal with that reality on its own terms.
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