Port-City Contacts and Diplomacy in Asia’s Modern Transformation

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony illustrates the making of a world-system in the long thirteenth century, when networks of trade and pilgrimage linked up major cities across the Afro-Eurasian continent and its surrounding seas. Focusing on Asia’s maritime connections, we examine port-cities as nodes of mobility, exchange, hybridity, and power conflict throughout the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods.
Both Sen and Kuo scrutinize the political twists of the history of pre-colonial maritime Asia. Sen unravels the myth about the peaceful encounters in the Indian Ocean before European colonialism. The myth however constitutes a trendy diplomatic rhetoric in both China’s “New Maritime Silk Road” and India’s “Project Mausam” today. Kuo investigates the Chinese adaptation of Japanese southern research compiled in Taipei in the 1930s: removing the Japanese pan-Asian implication, the Shanghai scholars created the historiography of a thousand years of Chinese “colonialization” in the South Seas (Southeast Asia).
Studies of Kwong and Shen deepen the understanding of the relationship between port-cities and their nearby hinterland. Kwong highlights the importance of Anglo-Chinese collaboration in British colonial rule in Hong Kong and Weihaiwei. What benefited a port-city under colonialism however generated hurdles in postcolonial integration, as Shen’s comparative study on Goa in India and Hong Kong in China suggests. The paper also points out ”One Country Two Systems” principle as a solution and its inherent challenge.
We hope to generate discussion about the strengths and limits of replacing the nation-state framework by port-city contacts and diplomacy in the research on Asia’s modern transformation.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Huei-Ying Kuo, Johns Hopkins University

Chair

• Simon Xuhui Shen, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Individual Presentations

• Indian Ocean Chokepoints and Maritime Imperialism before Europeans - Tansen Sen, Baruch College - CUNY

• Learning from the “Enemy”: Producing Southern Knowledge in Japanese Taipei and Nationalist Shanghai in the Long 1930s - Huei-Ying Kuo, Johns Hopkins University

• Collaborative Colonial Governance: Cases of Sir James Stewart Lockhart and Sir Reginald Johnston - Kin Ming Osmond Kwong, Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Goa and Hong Kong: Comparative Port-Cities Development in India and China - Simon Xuhui Shen, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Discussant

• David Ludden, New York University