Sino-Vietnamese Pirates and British Invaders: Maritime Crises and Oceanic Governance in Late 18th- and Early 19th-Century Qing China

At the turn of the nineteenth century the Manchu Qing state confronted its most serious maritime threat since the conquest of Taiwan in 1683. During this period, huge, well-organized Chinese pirate fleets allied with the newly unified Vietnamese state (Tayson regime, 1778-1802) and ravaged the coastal frontier of Southeast China. Worse yet, Britain, hoping to grab a much-needed foothold in East Asia, launched two naval expeditions to occupy Macao, a long-time Portuguese settlement under Chinese sovereignty, in 1802 and 1808. My paper examines how this dramatic combination of transnational and global crises affected the Qing maritime consciousness as well as its notions of maritime territoriality and governance before the full onslaught of Western aggression in the Opium War. It takes the Sino-Vietnamese pirates and British intruders as a prism to view the complex interactions between the adjacent ocean and land space in the southern coast of China. Moreover, my paper explores how various sociopolitical forces attempted to have their interests represented through different constructions of the South China Sea which turned it into both a patchwork of ill-defined sovereignty and “an integrative social space” linked by local patterns of livelihood. As a sort of “nonstate space” in the overextended Qing Empire, the northwestern part of this maritime zone defined the limits of Manchu imperial power and left open the possibility of rich mediations within and without the Sino-centric tributary system. Therefore, the South China Sea should be taken as both areas outside state control and sources of sociopolitical dynamism, rather than the empty center of Asia Pacific. It was not only the geographic background against which the maritime disturbance takes place but also precipitated the creations of events, processes, and structures that span the land-sea divide and transcend national boundaries.