Zheng Jing, Piracy, and State-Building in the Western Pacific, 1663–73

During the 1660s, Zheng Jing, son of the famous Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong) and head of a mercantile empire based in Taiwan and nominally loyal to the defunct, ethnically Han Ming Dynasty, faced a blockade from his Manchu Qing enemies on Mainland China, economic restrictions from Japan’s Tokugawa bakufu, and Dutch harassment of his ships. Piracy, originally meant to overcome this adverse geopolitical climate, had, by 1670, transformed into a positive conduit for him to assert extraterritorial control over trading routes, ports, and Chinese diaspora across maritime Asia at the expense of local rulers and Europeans. Through predation, Zheng Jing further articulated a nascent proto-national identity, based upon the preservation of a lost, authentic “China,” in the creation and legitimation of an expansive overseas empire. This paper argues that frontier-based actors like the Zheng familial organization, despite its ultimate but contingent defeat by the Qing in 1683, possessed significant agency in determining their participation in the state-building projects of the center or even setting their own boundaries.