The Southern Expansion of the Chinese People

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Chinese influence, Chinese culture and Chinese power have always moved southward since the first age of which we have reliable historical evidence. When "China" meant the ancient confederacy of states acknowledging the overlordship of the Chou dynasty, Son of Heaven, and covered only the basin of the Yellow River, her influence, and soon her culture, began to penetrate the then alien peoples of the Yangtze valley. A few centuries later political power followed, and by the end of the first millennium B.C. the central provinces of what is now China were firmly attached to the new empire, even if their inhabitants were still very largely native peoples. By the end of the Han dynasty in 221 south China, the modern provinces of Kuangtung and Fukien, had also been incorporated and hegemony was exer-cised over what is now part of North Vietnam. The south-west of modern China remained beyond the frontier. Throughout the centuries that followed down to modern times the southward spread of Chinese civilisation, followed by settlement and political control, contin-ued. The Canton region was fully settled in the T'ang period, and its people still look back to that age (seventh to early tenth centuries A.D.) as the time of greatest colonisation and cultural advance. The Yangtze valley had long been annexed, but the provinces along the tributary rivers which flow northward to the Yangtze were not settled by Chinese of Han ethnic origin until the fourth to sixth centuries A.D. Consolidation of this new Chinese region was completed under the Southern Sung dynasty, when the capital itself was situated in the south China city of Hangchou. The Mongol invaders first conquered the south-west, Yünnan, and their Ming successors (1368-1644) settled that province. Kueichou, mountainous, poor and inaccessible was finally reduced to provincial status under the Manchu (Ch'ing) dynasty in the eighteenth century. This brought the limits of the Chinese empire to the present frontiers of the Peoples' Republic, but the frontier, especially in the region south of Kuangtung province, was not established on its present alignment in earlier times. For long periods China ruled directly in the basin of the Red River, or Tongking, the heart of modern North Vietnam. On the other hand at those periods Yünnan, now Chinese, was then a foreign and often hostile kingdom. The frontier of today is the exact reverse of the frontier in T'ang and Sung times. Then Tongking was Chinese, and the border at Lao Kay faced the kingdom of Nanchao, ruled from Tali in Yünnan: today it is Yünnan which is Chinese, and Tongking is part of North Vietnam. The purpose of this book is to examine the story of the southward expansion of China and her cultural influence both in the lands most directly affected by it (Vietnam, north and south, Yünnan, which ended within the empire) and the further countries of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma, which all to varying degrees came under this influence and acknowledged the power of China. Beyond these countries were others, Malaya, Java, Sumatra and Borneo, which experienced the influence of China and from time to time her political power also, but which did not until the modern inflow of Chinese settlers have such direct and intimate relations as those lands nearer to the frontiers of the empire. Yünnan is a special case, a kind of test to which the whole process of Chinese cultural and political expansion can be subjected. It could be seen as the model which further expansion would follow, if or when it becomes politically feasible; or it can be seen as the furthest probable limit of Chinese incorporation of a region formerly non-Chinese. Therefore the story of Yünnan will be given special attention, partly because of this intrinsic importance to the whole problem, and partly because it is very little known to Western readers. Chinese expansion was not confined to the southern regions; Korea in the north-east was at various times directly ruled by China, and remained a sphere of strong Chinese influence, both cultural and political. China also won from the nomadic peoples of the far north, her age-old foes, the fertile and enormous provinces of Manchuria the North-East as the Chinese call it. The borderlands beyond the Great Wall, the ancient meeting-place of the Desert and the Sown, now Inner Mongolia, an Autonomous Region of the Peoples' Republic, has been very heavily settled by immigrant Chinese from the near-by northern provinces. China, also, from Han times onward, exercised an intermittent sovereignty over the vast semi-desert territory of Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan) in the north-west. This region, too, has been fully incorporated in the Peoples' Republic, and on account of its mineral resources, has received large-scale Chinese immigration. Tibet, for long a tena-cious and dangerous enemy in the T'ang period, was conquered by the Manchus, lost under the early Republic, and reoccupied under the Peoples' Republic of China. Today it is firmly claimed as "part of China". This book will not deal with the northern expansion, which in its cultural aspect has been treated very fully by scholars of Japanese history and those engaged in the study of the nomad peoples of Mongolia.

THE SOUTHERN EXPANSION OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE Chinese influence, Chinese culture and Chinese power-have always moved southward since the first age of which we have reliable historical evidence. In this book Professor FitzGerald tells the story of this southward expansion, both in the lands most directly affected by it-Yünnan which ended as a province of China, and Vietnam, north and south, which was once within the Empire, but has not been so since the end of the T'ang Dynasty and in the further countries of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma, which all, to varying degrees, came under the influence and acknowledged the power of China. Beyond these countries were others, Malaya, Java, Sumatra and Borneo, which experienced Chinese influ-ence, and sometimes her power, but which have not owed allegiance to China for several centuries. Although the territorial southward expansion of China ended with the rise of the Manchu Dynasty in 1664, and her political influence in South-East Asia then declined-due partly to the decline of Chinese sea power and partly to the arrival of European imperialist powers-there followed the massive migration of the individual Chinese, which resulted in the large minorities of Chinese in many South-East Asian countries today. In the second part of his book Professor FitzGerald examines the cultural, economic and political effects of this migration on the countries concerned and its implications for the future. This masterly survey, the culmination of fifty years study of China, was first published in 1972 and is reprinted with a new preface by Colin Mackerras, Professor of Modern Asian Studies at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Many of FitzGerald's comments are prescient and pertinent today, and the book presents the vital historical facts which need to be taken into account in any assessment of the probable future of the area.