I heard a theory it happened due to unavoidable decadence and corruption where aristocrats controlled key administration and military roles and considered investing into exploration a risk to their consolidated wealth and power on the domestic side, so even if an emperor wanted to focus outwards, he was blocked on both manpower and economics.
Comment on Earl of jizzburg vs Shogun emperor from sun dynasty
darkdemize@sh.itjust.works 4 days agoI’ve heard a theory that China’s relative isolationism during the western world’s era of exploration and colonization was due, at least in part, to their historical practice of female foot-binding. Because of the practice, a large portion of the female population was highly immobile, and the men were were reluctant to leave them behind. I doubt it would fully explain the isolation, but it certainly could have had some influence.
lath@piefed.social 4 days ago
Danquebec@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
If I’m not mistaken, the same issue didn’t happen in England because the lords were allowed to participate in the lucrative world trade.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 4 days ago
Poetic justice if that’s really the reason …
Nautalax@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I think that’s unlikely. The high classes where the practice originated already had plenty of servants who would take care of the family regardless of the presence or absence of the husband. It was commonplace among certain types of officials to have to pick up and regularly move to far off locations way away from their home while serving their terms in an attempt to prevent corruption, and merchants would embark on pretty serious treks across and outside of the empire. There was less penetration of the practice of foot-binding among the lower classes as well as minority groups and with the sheer population of China (roughly equivalent to the entire population of Europe in the middle of the Age of Discovery) even with a widespread adoption of the practice that surely would leave an ample number of bachelors, or men with wives who did not have bound feet, or who did but could be cared for remotely, or even perhaps husbands who just wouldn’t care that much and could echo Liu Bei’s famous quote that “wives and children are as clothing” [i.e. easily replaced] and go on some adventure. Sailors’ wives have long suffered and found themselves abandoned in many times and places throughout history, after all.
Also seems contradicted by significant numbers of overseas Chinese who moved to Southeast Asian countries many centuries back with regular additions whenever turmoil roiled China and also who picked up and went to colonies of other empires throughout the world basically wherever and whenever they were permitted to go. Even at the height of footbinding and in some cases facing incredibly lopsided ratios of like 21 Chinese guys to one Chinese woman at some of these destinations.
I think a more direct contribution would be the sea ban (haijin). At the kickoff of the Ming Dynasty since all nations in the area were in turmoil with massive land conflicts raging, naval control was really on the backburner. Coastal defenses were also terrible and people on the coasts and islands like many others were in dire poverty due to the strife, which all combined to make piracy lucrative and relatively safe… so many became pirates and that became a huge problem on the coasts. Actually some rivals of the founding emperor of Ming like Fang Guozhen essentially rose to power from a start as leading gang of pirates. This was great for overcoming the existing order as a rebel but when you become the existing order as that emperor did, then you want to cancel that sort of route to power. So in an attempt to monopolize government control over wealth at sea and strangle the pirates, private trade was made punishable by death and the only legal trade was supposed to go through official channels as tribute. (Tribute missions basically involved a formal process where a state would send envoys to China, kowtow and acknowledge the superiority of the emperor and give gifts and then receive Chinese goods as gifts in return.) While this was very lucrative to external states since it was the only legal way to access many Chinese goods, it involved taking up the bandwidth of a very overstreched and often distracted government and expense for the reciprocal gifts, guarding and treating the ambassadors etc. was often worth more than the tribute so they had strict limitations on how often this could occur (which was nowhere near the demand for trade from these other states). For some states the rituals were considered humiliating and for anyone generally more inconvenient than freely trading with any Chinese, plus while this exchange of goods occurred at the highest level of government this didn’t really do anything for merchants and other people of means within China who didn’t have access. So ironically the practice instead contributed to illicit smuggling occurring outside of the preoccupied government’s supervision since many were willing to take their lives into their hands over suffering famine and poverty anyway. Inherently illicit networks that the government will fight have a problem of scaling up vs. government endorsed ones although regardless there was quite a ton of money pouring in so sometimes pirate federations would eclipse the actual navy…
The treasure fleets were sent out under the Yongle Emperor under whom, with the deficiencies of the sea ban in mind, it became the policy to develop a huge navy, crush pirates and maximize tribute missions to the point of taking the missions to other nations rather than waiting for them to come to China and shouldering costs there, headed by a charismatic Muslim guy who could favorably appeal to many of the foreign contacts in Southeast Asia. This was immensely profitable and prestigious BUT the problem was that it stepped on a lot of toes. It was backed by the eunuchs who were empowered under the Yongle Emperor as he was disliked by the traditional power structures for the way he came to power but they became weaker under different emperors, coastal elites wanted the local illicit networks to re-emerge that they could turn a blind eye to in exchange for a skim of the profits rather than the official government missions that they couldn’t directly profit from, the landed aristocracy paid taxes for the navy but didn’t really get a share of the government profits so they weren’t fans, on paper it was quite an expense to have a strong navy so that was argued to be foolish considering emerging land based threats although it was actually profitable, etc. so they were discontinued and not revisited. This very dumb policy led to situations like the Ming getting bribed into letting Portugal have the run of Macau so that Portugal could benefit off of trade with everyone in the nearby area in exchange for suppressing powerful Chinese pirates and smugglers who under a sane set of laws that didn’t push them outside of society would have instead been a pillar of the state as merchants were in many European countries at the time. The sea ban was eased and partially lifted near the end of the Ming Dynasty but they still hampered trade quite a lot to their dying gasps with licenses, quotas and restrictions on who you could trade with though it did help the disastrous pirate situation a lot. Sometimes vacillated on the topic.
When the Qing took over they had a big problem with Ming loyalists on the coasts and islands and Chinese civilians fleeing to those areas and SEA (famously the general Koxinga conquered all of the Dutch colonial possessions on Taiwan to found the first Chinese kingdom in the island’s history as a Ming loyalist base from which to attack the Qing). Since the Manchus ruling Qing had a legitimacy problem and feared the thought of these loyalists being able to inspire revolts or recruit at their leisure or empower themselves by raiding for booty, they enacted the Great Clearance which was to have coastal people wreck their property and migrate many miles inland on pain of death so as to avoid being a raid target or source of support. This was also devastating to China’s openness to the outside world (and strengthened the routing of trade via Europeans like at unaffected Macau) and after it was revoked years later a fraction of the people came back but many got wrecked by typhoons which got things off to a bad start. Trade was reopened with the conquest of Taiwan but became increasingly restricted (look up the Canton system and the Flint Affair) some time after people had returned to the coasts and were trading in undesired ways.
At a pivotal time when many states were opening up and expanding their windows and access to much of the rest of the world, the Chinese state was having a really historically bad run of standing in the way of and crushing Chinese people who would have helped with that, making outlaws of them while giving advantages to foreign governments and companies. Then when it became clear that Qing was lagging behind there were so many vultures ready to swoop in to fend off while having to simultaneously chart a tricky course of controversial reform against immense internal opposition that profited from the way things were already.
Really a shame since the more open Tang and Song dynasties had brought so much advancement.
Danquebec@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Amazing info on an intriguing question, thanks!
Now I’m intriguided by the question of why Western Europe wasn’t plagued by the same issues.
To an extent, it was. France famously lagged behind because of land wars in Europe.
But what helped, I think, is the natural borders such as mountains, and all the neighbors being settled people.
Even the sea-based threat that Taiwan was was caused by the Qing’s arrival, which was caused by a land-based threat (the Manchus).