Zheng He's Voyages & BRI: A Past-Paper Analysis PDF

Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09469-7 “What can the Chinese experience of empire tell us about the Belt and Road Initiative?” Krishan Kumar1 Accepted: 20 October 2021 / Published online: 3 November 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer N...

Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09469-7 “What can the Chinese experience of empire tell us about the Belt and Road Initiative?” Krishan Kumar1 Accepted: 20 October 2021 / Published online: 3 November 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021 Abstract China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), first announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013, has attracted widespread attention, with much discussion as to its meaning and intention. This article argues that one of the best ways to understand the BRI is to see it in the context of China’s two-thousand-year history as an empire. What kind of empire was the Chinese Empire? How did it see itself, and what was its characteristic mode of action? What was the meaning of the “tribute system”? The celebrated voyages (1405–1433) of the Ming admiral Zheng He are taken as a typical example of Chinese imperial behaviour (rather than being seen, as is common, as an aberrant and exceptional episode). By examining this and other aspects of Chinese imperial history, it is hoped that some light might be shed on what the Chinese leadership as in mind with its Belt and Road Initiative, and what the rest of the world should expect from it. Keywords All-under-Heaven · Belt and Road Initiative · China · Empire · Tribute system · Zheng He “My home, Shaanxi province, is the start of the ancient Silk Road. Today, as I stand here and look back at history, I can almost hear the camel bells echoing in the mountains and see the wisps of smoke rising from the desert, and this gives me a specially good feeling.” President Xi Jinping, announcing the launch of the “Silk Road Economic Belt”, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan, September 7, 2013 (in Maçães, 2019: 25). “The Silk Roads are everywhere – not just in Central Asia, but across all of Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas … All roads used to lead to Rome. Today, they lead to Beijing. “ * Krishan Kumar [email protected] 1 Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA 13 Vol.:(0123456789) 730 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads (2018), p. 117. “The problem for us is that China believes in a tributary system; that is the normal order of things to them.” Yoichi Funabashi, senior editor, Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo) (in French, 2018: 30). “Belt and Road” With considerable fanfare, and with the official propaganda machine in top gear, China’s president Xi Jinping in 2013 announced an ambitious and far-reaching “Belt and Road Initiative”(BRI).1 This publicly departed from the cautious policy of the previous leader Deng Xiaoping, to “hide our strength and bide our time.” China, emboldened by the great global coming-out of the Beijing Olympics of 2008, and having more successfully than the West weathered the economic recession that began later in the same year, felt it was time to flex its muscles. With an annual growth rate than had been for many years in double digits, and with an economy poised to take over from the United States as the world’s largest, China considered it had the right to assert its presence in the world. President Xi’s “Belt and Road Initiative”, which avowedly recalled the great “Silk Road” (or Roads) that for centuries linked China with Europe, aimed to make China the centre of a world-wide network of trade, investment, telecommunication, roads, railways, ports and harbours. The “Silk Road Economic Belt”, stretching across the Eurasian landmass, was to be complemented, as of old, by a “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”, a web of sea lanes that connected China with the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Americas. All of this was in the service of what Xi called building a global “community of shared destiny” – and which others feared as an attempt to resurrect the Chinese Empire. To still the fears of China’s Asian neighbours and others further afield, Xi went out of his way to stress the peaceful character of the Belt and Road Initiative. Quoting Napoleon’s well-known observation that China was a “sleeping lion” that when awakened “will shake the world”, Xi told his hosts in Paris in 2014 that “the lion has already awakened. But it is a peaceful, friendly and civilized lion” (in Miller, 2017: 245). The BRI was not about the construction of a new Chinese empire, nor was it a “China club”; it was about enhancing “mutual trust, equality, inclusiveness, mutual learning, and win–win cooperation” (in Frankopan, 2018: 94, 231). Again and again the old Silk Road was invoked as a model of this kind of peaceful and mutually beneficial intercourse. All this was of a piece with China’s history as a whole, which Xi pointedly compared with Western imperialism. “China was long one of the most 1 Initially the project was launched in 2013 under the name “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR). Later, concerned that this sounded too imperialistic, the Chinese leadership changed it to the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). For full accounts of the initiative, see Miller (2017: 30–52); Nathan (2017); French (2018: 257–64); Winter (2019); Maçães (2019); Hillman (2020). For its proclaimed link to the old Silk Roads, together with its implicit renewal of China’s traditional claims to regional hegemony, see Frankopan (2018:89–122); Winter (2019). 13 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 731 powerful countries in the world. Yet it never engaged in colonialism or aggression. The pursuit of peaceful development represents the peace-loving cultural tradition of the Chinese nation over the past several thousand years” (in Zhao, 2015a, 2015b: 962; see also Winter, 2019: 94–5). But many observers, both in the region and beyond, failed to be re-assured by these bland statements of goodwill. For them, the BRI had unmistakable imperial overtones, recalling China’s imperial past and its self-description as the “Central Kingdom” (zhongguo) ruling “all under heaven” (tian xia) (e.g., French, 2018; Brook, 2019: 390–1). No more than any other country in the world today would China admit to being, or aspiring to be, an empire. Empire is today a dirty word; no country claims to be such. But, just as many have seen in recent American and Russian attitudes and behaviour the expression of empire, so it might be helpful at least initially to see China, specifically as shown in the Belt and Road Initiative, as expressing imperial aspirations. To do so, one has to interrogate China’s past. If China has imperial ambitions today, the best guide to that lies in its past character as an empire. For more than two thousand years, from 221 BCE to 1911 CE, China was, by general consent, an empire, the self-proclaimed “Celestial Empire”. That empire formally came to an end in 1911. It was succeeded first by a national Republic (1912–1949), then by a Communist state, the People’s Republic of China (1949-), which remains its current form. Both of these latter states strenuously denied that they were empires. Like Americans in resisting the imperial label, they saw themselves as anti-imperial or anticolonial creations, therefore almost by definition non-imperial. The whole of China’s past, as embodied in its empire, was repudiated as obscurantist and “feudal”. Especially with the Communist regime inaugurated in 1949, China saw itself as embarked on a completely new enterprise, a new beginning. The past had no authority in this new world. If it was referred to at all, it was in a disparaging way, as replete with instances of discreditable and disastrous ventures. That attitude has been changing in recent years. Confucianism, the official ideology of the old Chinese Empire, has been making something of a comeback, recognized by the leadership as helpful in supporting authority in tumultuous and rapidly changing times, not least in the wake of the bloody debacle in Tiananmen Square. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”, as the current regime is officially described, seems to find it helpful to lace a weakening Marxism-Leninism with a strong infusion of Confucianism (Bell, 2008; Ford, 2015). The early years of the empire have been the setting of innumerable popular films and television series, representing moments of heroism and wisdom – as well as threats—that may have much to teach the new generation. There is great pride in the magnificent terra cotta soldiers of the Qin dynasty – some of which have been shown around the world— and other expressions of Chinese achievements in the arts. There are many exhibitions on the Silk Roads, showing China’s pivotal role in what are seen as exemplary expressions of peaceful commerce linking many nations.2 There has been an almost 2 Nor have the Chinese been the only ones in promoting the Silk Roads: Tansen Sen (2020) points to the important role played by UNESCO in popularizing the idea and ideals of the Silk Roads, through 13 732 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 veritable cult surrounding the seven voyages of the famed Ming admiral Zheng He, and the possibility that China might at that time have embarked on a course of exploration and even colonization a hundred years earlier than the Europeans. Even the once reviled Republican period of the Nationalists, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, has now been accepted as having made important contributions to economic development, and Nationalists are acknowledged to have played a part equal to the Communists in the “War of Resistance” against the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s (Mitter, 2005: 297–98; Mitter, 2021). “You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will soon come running back.” Horace’s aphorism seems equally apt when applied to attempts to deny or suppress history. If the Chinese are once more interested in their history, if the past once more seems to be instructive, might a consideration of China’s existence as a long-lasting empire provide some guidance as to what to expect from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and, more widely, China’s rise as a world power? What might it imply, for them and for the rest the world? Was China an empire? To discuss the Chinese experience of empire, and its possible relevance to the current Belt and Road initiative, it is necessary first to see if we can understand what the Chinese themselves may have meant by “empire”. That, it turns out somewhat surprisingly, is a heavily under-researched topic. Timothy Brook, the General Editor of the six-volume Harvard University Press History of Imperial China (2007–13), says that “the subject of ‘empire’ has not been adequately addressed for China”, and confesses that although he had initially hoped to explore that question in the series, he felt in the end that not enough had been done to enable him and the other authors to do so, “so empire became a kind of residual category or label we did not examine.”3 Brook himself has done something to remedy this situation. In a much-cited article, he has argued that the Chinese term for “empire” (diguo) orginally did not have most of the connotations we – as well as most Chinese today—normally associate with the word empire. The ancient texts refer to “empire” (diguo) and “emperor” (huang), but mostly in the sense of an “empire of virtue”, a state governed by virtuous rulers – such as the mythical “Five Emperors” – who, rather like Plato’s Guardians, reject force as the means to exercise power, relying instead on wisdom and justice. This is a metaphorical use similar to such expressions as “the empire of the spirit”, or Thomas Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” (which, when applied to the new United States, was meant precisely to deny that America was or would become an empire of the old-fashioned European kind). Footnote 2 (continued) sponsoring conferences and exhibitions and in proposing the “Maritime Silk Roads” – about which Sen is particularly sceptical—for World Heritage status. 3 Personal communication to the author, December 18, 2016. 13 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 733 For most of the time, Brook claims, the term most commonly used to describe the Chinese territorial state, qualified by its dynastic name, was not empire (diguo) but the “Great State” (daguo), as in Da Song guo, the Song Great State, or Da Qing guo, the Qing Great State (Brook, 2016: 959–62; see also Wang, 2014: 31–2; Dirlik, 2015).4 Often coupled with this was the recognition of the Chinese ruler as the “Son of Heaven”, endowed with the “Mandate of Heaven” (tian ming) to rule “All under Heaven” (tien-xia). By tien-xia was meant the whole known civilized world, usually identified with Zhongguo (the Middle or Central Kingdom) – that is, China itself, though it was only in the nineteenth century that Zhongguo became the common term to refer to the country that Europeans called “China” (and earlier, following Marco Polo, Catai or “Cathay”).5 Principally, it seems, the Chinese referred to their own country simply by using the name of the ruling dynasty. One lived, not in Zhongguo, but in the Great Qing dynasty (Da Qing wangchao), or that of the Qin, the Han, the Tang, the Song, the Yuan, the Ming (Fairbank & Goldman, 2006: 44; Wilkinson, 2012: 19; Ge, 2018: 9). It might seem that the step from “Great State” to “empire”, from daguo to diguo, is not so great (especially given that diguo is an old word, older than daguo, which dates from no earlier than the Song or Yuan Dynasties). In fact however it marked a profound transformation in Chinese thought, reflecting a new sense of China’s changed place in the world. China had once seen itself as the centre of world civilization, and its wealth and power indeed gave it a commanding position in the world economy – a “Sinocentric world system”—for many centuries (Frank, 1998). Even as late as 1750, according to several well-received recent accounts (e. g. Pomeranz, 4 In a later work, Brook attributes the concept of “Great State” to Mongol use, beginning with Chinggis Khan, who around 1211 founded the “Mongol Great State” (Yeke Mongqol ulus). Khubilai Khan, as Mongol ruler of China (1271–1368), adopted the term for China, as did all subsequent Chinese rulers to the end of the dynastic period in 1912. Brook regards the term as preferable to the conventional term of “empire” as understood by Europeans. “They may be the same thing, but that remains to be proven” (Brook, 2019: 8). Tracing the Mongol origin of the concept, Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene, whose work Brook acknowledges for his own account, nevertheless speaks freely of the Mongol Great State as “the Mongol Empire” (2011: passim, esp. 22–3). 5 China, “a term of obscure origins traced to ancient Persian and Sanskrit sources”, was adopted by Europeans to describe the region in the late sixteenth century, “due possibly to the pervasive influence of the Jesuits who ‘manufactured’ ‘China’ as they did much else about it.” The term Zhongguo (or Zhonghua) – “Middle Kingdom”, “Central Country” – was one that went back 2000 years, but it was used in a variety of ways with a variety of referents. It assumed its modern meaning as the name for the nation only in the late nineteenth century, as the equivalent of the Western term “China”. The Chinese adopted it as the description of a Western style nation-state that could deal on equal terms with other nations in the modern international system. Chinese nationalist historiography in the twentieth century then projected Zhongguo back anachronistically to cover the whole period since the earliest rulers, more than 2000 years ago. But “Zhongguo was not a name of the country; it waited itself to be named” (Dirlik, 2015: 2, 5, 7). The late ­19t-century nationalist thinker Liang Qichao lamented: “What I feel most shameful of is that our country does not have a name. The name of the Han or people of Tang are only names of Dynasties, and the name ‘China’ that foreign countries use is not a name that we call ourselves” (in Karl, 2002: 151). It might also be worth noting that the Chinese word for “civilization”, wenming, “is a neologism that was introduced in the late nineteenth century through Japanese translations of Western works” (Kang, 2010: 30). Once again we have to be aware of the amount of “catch-up” that was taking place in late nineteenth century China, and be attentive to differences as well as similarities in any exercise in comparing China to other entities. 13 734 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 2000: Part One; Goldstone, 2009: 20; Mokyr, 2017: 291), China was still the equal of the West in terms of “social development”, as measured by economic and technological levels, average standards of living, urbanism, and education (Morris, 2011: 143–50). No doubt it was this sense of continued superiority that made the Qianlong emperor so famously dismissive of Lord Macartney’s mission of 1793, whereby the British sought to establish formal trading relations—as between equals—with the Celestial Empire, while the Chinese insisted on Britain’s tributary status (CranmerByng, 1957–8; Peyrefitte, 1992: 288–96, 303–6).6 In retrospect, the Qianlong emperor’s proud response can only be seen as an instance of tragic hubris. Only a few decades later, the shattering defeat by the British and the French in the Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1857–8) made it clear that the era of Chinese superiority was over, and that in fact Europe had begun its rise to power well before 1800. China entered on its “Century of Humiliation”, which ended only with the communist victory of 1949. Nor was it only the West that spelled out the message. In many ways it was the humiliation inflicted by the Japanese, for centuries regarded by the Chinese as a tributary state, and whose civilization derived in key respects from China, that more insistently drove home the lesson (French, 2018: 13–53). China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese war of 1895 was traumatic, “ a disaster of inconceivable proportions for the Qing empire …. Overall, the Sino-Japanese War was a major watershed in Chinese imperial history – far more so than the Opium War of 1839–1842, which is so often assigned this significance” (Rowe, 2012: 229–30). The realization of China’s terrible weakness, brough home by the repeated defeats at the hands of the West as well as Japan, forced Chinese intellectuals to rethink the whole classical heritage of Confucianism that had legitimated rule in China ever since the foundation of the unified Chinese state under the Qin and Han (221 BCE220 CE). The result was the more or less wholesale rejection of traditional Confucianism and the social system it was thought to support (wrongly identified as “feudalism”). In its place came a new dominant ideology, heavily inflected with Western thought. The “Heavenly Principle”, based on Confucian thought, was replaced by the “Universal Principle”, derived from Western positivism (Wang, 2014: 61–100). It was within the context of this new thinking that the term “empire” was given a 6 This is the traditional interpretation, which was formulated mostly by British commentators in the nineteenth century and later – for reasons of their own, mostly to do with the perceived need to “modernize “ China – accepted by twentieth-century Chinese scholars (Hevia, 1995: 225–231). As James Hevia (1995) shows, this was not the way that Lord Macartney himself saw the meaning of his mission, nor did he – as normally related – see it simply as a “failure”. Cranmer-Byng also says that “from the Chinese point of view the embassy had gone off quite well” (1957–8: 177). Hevia argues convincingly that what was in play in the Macartney embassy was “not an encounter between civilizations or cultures, but … one between two imperial formations, each one with universalistic pretensions and complex metaphysical systems to buttress such claims” (Hevia, 1995: 25). Certainly there was incompatibility – hence the British did not get quite what they wanted—but also an acceptance of a certain equality and legitimacy of claims and positions as between the British and the Chinese Empires. There is no doubt however that, as Hevia himself accepts, the interpretation – emphasizing Chinese arrogance and blindness – that was quickly formulated by the 1830s had an important influence on British (and more generally European) attitudes and behaviour, as revealed in the Opium Wars and their aftermath. 13 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 735 new meaning. Empire was still diguo, but diguo now acquired new connotations – one that made it possible to compare China with the Western empires, while at the same time allowing it to conceive its past in terms of empire. As with much of the influence of Western thought that entered China in the late nineteenth century, Japan here provided the gateway (once more underlining the great significance for China of Japanese developments in the second half of the nineteenth century). Japan had embarked on a crash programme of modernization and industrialization following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. This had been made possible by a systematic investigation and importation of Western ideas and techniques. The first fruits of this successful adaptation were the crushing defeats of China in the Sino-Japanese War (1895) and of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904), which clearly announced Japan’s arrival on the world stage. Chinese intellectuals could not fail to be impressed by the difference between Japanese and Chinese fates when confronted by Western powers (Chang, 1987). When the Meiji emperor overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, he named his state the “Empire of Great Japan” (Dai Nippon teikoku). Typically, this reflected dual influences, old and new. It drew upon the ancient Chinese categories of “Heavenly Emperor” and diguo, as the empire of virtue (the Sinitic characters for Japanese teikoku and Chinese diguo are identical). At the same time, it was very conscious of the contemporary British and other European empires. In calling itself an empire Japan was proclaiming its similarity to the other great empires that were currently taking over and reshaping the world. Over the next half-century, until its defeat in the Second World War, Japan showed that it was fully capable of playing its part in that global enterprise. The term “empire”, as something equivalent to the Japanese and European cases, entered China in the late nineteenth century (Elliott, 2014). It helped of course that historically there were such close relations between Japanese and Chinese thought. The new use was consciously modelled on the Japanese example, and in so doing it gave the word diguo a meaning that it had conspicuously lacked in most of its traditional uses (Wang, 2014: 33–5; Rowe, 2012: 265–6). But, now that it was decided that China was an empire like other empires, it was possible retrospectively to apply the term to much of China’s earlier history – to show, in fact, that China had had one of the most powerful and longest-lasting empires in the world.7 China, it was declared at this time, was and always had been an empire, in the sense that Rome and Byzantium and other Western states had been or were empires.8 That allowed 7 E.g., Ge: “From the third century BCE, when Qin Shi Huangdi established a unified empire … a Chinese empire (Zhongua diguo), relatively unified in terms of politics, culture, and language, had formed” (2018:4; see also 19–27 for its continuity and persistence in its essential character despite many disruptions). Yuri Pines (2012, 2021) also argues for an “everlasting empire”, showing a basic “ideological” continuity stressing unity and universality over a two-thousand-year period, though he also indicates the practical limits of such a conception, as recognized by the Chinese rulers themselves; see also Brook (2019: 376). 8 Europeans had already begun to speak of “the Chinese Empire” by the mid-seventeenth century, having previously referred to China (or “Cathay”, following Marco Polo) as a “kingdom” (Elliott, 2014: 32–6; Brook, 2016: 962). By the eighteenth century this designation had become common, as shown for instance in Montesquieu’s widely-read The Spirit of the Laws, in his many references to the “vast Empire of China” (Montesquieu, [1748] 1962, I: 122, 125). 13 736 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 for comparisons, for the search for commonalities as well as for what might make China distinctive as an empire. What kind of empire was China? If it can be agreed that China was an empire – that the unified state that Qin Shi Huang, the “First Emperor” (Shi Huangdi), established in 221 BCE, can be treated as an empire in the accepted meaning of the term as used today – what kind of empire was it? All empires, for their very real commonalities, also have their peculiarities, as for instance in the differences between the mainly land empires of the ancient world and the modern overseas empires of the Europeans (Kumar, 2021a: 53–60). Was there a distinctive Chinese way of empire? The distinguished scholar of China Frederick Mote has denied that China was, or should be called, an empire. For him, empire means “a kingdom expanded by conquest to rule over additional territories whose people were distinct in history, language, and culture.” What is mistakenly called “the Chinese Empire” did not do this. “The Chinese emperors, with but few exceptions, did not attempt to extend their direct rule over peoples beyond the pale of their culture and language.” He even questions whether, as is conventional, the term “emperor” is the right one to use in the Chinese case. He prefers to call the first Qin ruler the “First August Supreme Ruler” (Shih huang ti) not, as it is usually translated, “First Emperor”; and he argues that “August Supreme Ruler” (huang ti), not “emperor”, is the term we should use for all succeeding rulers right down to the end of empire in 1911. If we wish to use the term “imperial” in relation to the Qin and succeeding dynasties – and Mote seems to have no problem with that – we should understand it to mean “a new era in the structure and the manner of domestic politics”, a new and higher degree of centralized control and administration than to be found in any of the preceding kingdoms; “it has no particular implications for China’s relations with non-Chinese peoples beyond her borders” (Mote, 1989: 111–12; see also Mote, 2003: 183, 983 n. 7). Mote’s reference to increased centralized control as the central element in what others have come to call the first Chinese Empire reminds us that “empire” has always had an alternative or additional meaning to that of rule over a multiplicity of peoples, the meaning that Mote implies must be the only one. Henry VIII’s famous declaration, in the Act of Restraint of Appeals (1533), that “this realm of England is an empire”, has always been cited as a classic example of that meaning, one that harks back to Roman times. That England was an empire did not necessarily mean that it aimed to acquire foreign territories or control other peoples (though one should not forget that Henry continued to call himself “King of France” as well as of England, as did all succeeding English monarchs to the time of George III). It simply meant that Henry’s rule was sovereign and absolute, and did not allow of appeals to any authority beyond England’ s shores (Ullmann, 1979). If that is what Mote wants to say about the “First August Supreme Ruler” there would be no need to deny that what he ruled was an empire; and again there would be plenty of cases in other parts of the world to compare with empire in this sense. 13 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 737 Expansionism is not essential to empire. As Edward Gibbon pointed out, Rome acquired most of its territories in Italy and beyond – including Carthage in North Africa – while it was still a Republic; the Roman Empire itself added little to those territories (the small remote island of Britain was one of these additions). If, as Mote claims, China was not expansionist, that by itself is no barrier to declaring it an empire. There can be “empire without imperialism”; as the Mogul Empire among others shows (Kumar, 2021b: 285). But China was indeed expansionist, though like all empires periods of expansion alternated with periods of relative quiescence and introversion. There was, again like most other empires, also empire as a process of “internal colonialism”, together with empire as conquest of more distant, “foreign”, lands (Kumar, 2021a: 3–4). Under the Han (202 BCE -220 CE), the northern-based empire expanded to incorporate large sections of southern China and parts of Annam (northern Vietnam); it also established a protectorate over the “Gansu Corridor” to the west, containing the exit route to the Silk Roads through Dunhuang. The Tang (618–907 CE) renewed the expansionist policies of the Han, pushing further out westwards to make tributary states of Tibet, Nepal, and Kashmir, recapturing northern Vietnam, and accepting as tributaries heavily sinicized Japan and Korea. Eventually the Tang’s westward drive was stopped by the Arabs at the Talas River in 751 CE, and they were pushed back to roughly the borders of the Han empire. Again, as with the Han, there were further bouts of internal colonialism, with ethnic Chinese being encouraged to move south to settle the territory south of the Yangzi and make it more firmly part of “China Proper” (Kumar, 2021a: 36–38). Territorial expansion did not continue under the Song (960–1279), and in fact with the conquest of northern China by the Jurchens, leading to the setting up of Jin dynasty, the Song were forced to withdraw into the “Southern Song” state (1126–1279). But though there was no increase of territory during the Song, there was a vast expansion of international trade, and the construction of large ships that made long voyages to the East Indies, India and even east Africa. These voyages remarkably anticipated those of Zheng He in the early fifteenth century (discussed in the next section), just as the comment on them by John Fairbank and Merle Goldman echoes what has often been said about the Zheng He expeditions: “Any modern-minded expansionist looking back on all this growth and creativity can imagine how Song China, left to itself, could have taken over the maritime world and reversed history by invading and colonizing Europe from Asia” (Fairbank & Goldman, 2006: 93). Neither under the Song nor later, under the Ming, did this happen of course, and the reasons for this can make for fascinating counter-factual speculations. But more to the point, the Song experience makes it clear that expansionism can take many forms; territorial acquisition is only one of them, and not necessarily the most effective in terms of spreading one’s culture or economy. We will see in the next section that this pattern of expansionism followed often by loss or a deliberate pulling-back is characteristic of the later as well as the earlier Chinese empire. The causes of cessation could be large-scale internal rebellions, the pressure of the steppe peoples, unusual bouts of drought or exceptionally cold weather (cf. Brook, 2013: 50–78). None of this means that, with those episodes of withdrawal, China ceased to be an empire. What needs to be emphasized here is the 13 738 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 variability of the imperial form. All the historic empires, Western as well as Eastern, show something of the same pattern of continuity and discontinuity, bursts of expansion followed by contraction, a frequent re-orientation and re-thinking forced on them by rebuffs and defeats. Think, for instance, of the French and British empires, both of which suffered the loss of their North American empires, before re-grouping and launching themselves on an even greater scale in Asia and Africa. There has indeed been a strong tendency to see the Chinese Empire as “self-limiting”, if not frozen or “immobile” (e.g., Peyrefitte, 1992: esp. 537–53). This tradition began in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when Western thinkers, such as Montesquieu and Diderot, reversed the earlier admiration for Chinese civilization as dynamic and progressive and saw it instead as stationary or stagnant (Adas, 1990: 79–95; Blue, 1999: 70–8; Hillemann, 2009). The stage was set for the concept of “Oriental Despotism”, also an eighteenth-century invention, to embark on its long career, influencing Hegel and Marx (“the Asiatic mode of production”) and finding a powerful expression in the Sinologist Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism (1957). That in turn became the basis for many of the comparisons of Chinese and Western developments that attributed Chinese backwardness to its “despotic” political system, strangling creativity and innovation (e.g. Balazs, 1964; Landes, 1999: 335–349; Jones, 2003: 159–171).9 The Chinese empire, on this understanding, had to be seen in an almost timeless, a-historical perspective, a 2000-year old empire of remarkable consistency and continuity, sealed-in and resistant to change, despising foreigners and other “barbarians”. A Confucian world-view promoted the virtues of agriculture and economic self-sufficiency, and discouraged commerce and foreign trade Especially to be avoided were the changes that might be forced upon the Middle Kingdom by expansion and contact with alien cultures (Finlay, 2008: 329). The seven voyages of Zheng He There have been, it was admitted in this view of Chinese attitudes, deviations from this course. But they were short-term dead ends; and even what might appear to be evidence of an expansionist tendency has often been interpreted as revealing the contrary. The case of the famous expeditions of the Ming Admiral Zheng He is exemplary in this respect. Sponsored mainly by the third Ming emperor, Yongle (r. 1402–24) – the last voyage was ordered by the Xuande emperor—Zheng He made seven voyages between 1405 and 1433. He commanded a great armada of sixty massive “treasure ships”, together with over two hundred smaller ones, and had on board more than twenty-seven thousand men, of whom twenty-six thousand 9 Hegel acknowledged early Chinese achievements in the arts and sciences, but claimed that the character of Chinese society – its despotic character, the fact that everything turned on the sole person of the Emperor—prevented them from being developed in the way they had in the West. “[E]very change is excluded, and the fixedness of character which recurs perpetually, takes the place of what we would call the truly historical …. [E]verything which belongs to Spirit – unconstrained morality, in practice and theory, Heart, inward Religion, Science and Art properly so-called – is alien to it” ([1830–1] 1956: 116, 138). 13 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 739 were under arms.10 The route took him from the South China Sea, across the Indian Ocean, to the Persian Gulf and the Swahili coast of East Africa. It included regular stops at Qui Nohn in the Hindu kingdom of Champa (now southern Vietnam), Surabaja and Tuban on Java, Palembang and Semudera on Sumatra, Malacca commanding the Strait that bears its name, the coastal cities of Sri Lanka, Cochin and Calicut on the Malabar cost of India, Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, and – in the last three voyages – Aden on the Red Sea and Mogadishu, Brava, and Malindi on the east coast of Africa. The trips involved exchanges of precious and often exotic “tribute goods” between China and the states regarded as tributaries; Zheng He also usually also carried back envoys from the tribute states for presentation to the emperor in Nanjing and Beijing.11 The voyages were abruptly curtailed in 1435, shortly after Zheng’s death. He and his voyages were for a long time forgotten in China. The logs of his voyages were lost or destroyed, as were the designs of his great treasure ships. The shipyards where the treasure ships were built were allowed to fall into disrepair (Lo, 1958). There had always been virulent opposition among the Confucian-trained civil servants to the palace eunuchs, such as Zheng He, who were entrusted by the emperors with the tribute missions. After the deaths of the Yongle and Xuande emperors, the officials regained control (Finlay, 1991: 11–12; 2008: 338; Levathes, 1996: 179–80; Dreyer, 2007: 168–75). Never again in China were there to be expeditions on the scale of Zheng He’s. With that turning away from the sea China gave up the opportunity to be a great, potentially global, maritime power – a position it was on the verge of achieving nearly a hundred years before the Europeans (Finlay, 1991: 4; Dreyer, 2007: 185). Interest in Zheng He revived with the publication, in 1905, of an article, “Zheng He: A Great Navigator of Our Mother Country”, by the influential nationalist intellectual Liang Qichao (1873–1929). Liang saw Zheng He as a Chinese Columbus – a world explorer nearly a hundred years before Columbus. Influenced by the widely popularized view of Alfred Mahan about the importance of sea power in world history, Liang argued that China had once ruled the seas, and could do so once again (Dreyer, 2007: 181–2). But he also inaugurated the official tradition in China of 10 There is much controversy over the size and nature of Zheng He’s “treasure ships”. See for a full discussion Levathes (1996: 75–85); Dreyer (2007: 99–134). Christopher Wake considers that the size of the ships has often been exaggerated, though he agrees that “the scale and scope of the voyages were without parallel in imperial China’s history” (2004: 74–5). Robert Finlay says that “they were the largest longdistance enterprises before the modern age, dwarfing anything that the most powerful European state could produce” (1991: 3). Edward Dreyer concurs: “In world history, there is no prior example of power projection by sea comparable in scale, distance and duration to Zheng He and his fleet, and even afterwards the overseas colonial empires created by the various European powers were sustained by smaller fleets composed of smaller ships” (2007: 1–2). 11 The best scholarly account of Zheng He’s voyages is Dreyer (2007), which also includes a selection of the main primary sources. Levathes (1996) is a lively and more popular account. See also Needham (1971: 389–699). Good bibliographical references in Liu et al. (2014). The Indian Ocean and South Asian aspects are well covered by Sen (2017, 2019). The claims in the best-seller about Zheng He by Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2004), have been discounted by most scholars. See the extended critical review by Finlay (2004). And cf. Brook (2019: 401): “Serious readers are advised to avoid anything written by Gavin Menzies”. 13 740 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 regarding Zheng He’s voyages as not simply-pathbreaking but as essentially peaceful, concerned mainly with establishing a Chinese ecumene in which all the nations of the world traded and interacted peacefully with each other, for the common benefit of all humanity. Such a view of Zheng He’s voyages was promoted during the Republican period (1912–49), and after a hiatus in the Mao years was vigorously revived after his death. A veritable cult of Zheng He developed. Conferences on his voyages were organized, and Chinese museums proudly displayed models of Zheng He’s great treasure ships, with models of Columbus’s diminutive ships the Santa Maria and the Niña alongside for derisive comparison. In 2004, on the eve of the commemoration of the ­600th anniversary of Zheng’s first voyage, Xu Zu-yuan, the PRC’s Vice Minister of Communications, proclaimed what has become the standard official view of the voyages. “They were friendly diplomatic activities. During the overall course of the seven voyages to the Western Ocean, Zheng He did not occupy a single piece of land, establish any fortress, or seize any wealth from other countries. In the commercial and trade activities, he adopted the practice of giving more than he received, and thus he was welcomed and lauded by the people of the various countries along his routes” (in Wade, 2009: 119).12 Western scholars, and some others, have in recent years increasingly questioned this rosy view of the character and motivation of Zheng He’s voyages. They point to what seems the evident meaning of the reason for the voyages given in the Mingshi, the official history of the Ming dynasty published by the Qing in 1739. There it says that the Emperor Yongle “wanted to display his soldiers in strange lands in order to make manifest the wealth and power of the Middle Kingdom.” Zheng He and his associates “led over 27,800 officers and men … they went in succession to the various foreign countries, proclaiming the edicts of the Son of Heaven and giving gifts to their rulers and chieftains. Those who did not submit were pacified by force” (in Dreyer, 2007: 187–8). For Edward Dreyer, this and other sources indicate clearly that the purpose of the voyages was “power projection”. “Zheng He’s voyages were undertaken to force the states of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to acknowledge the power and majesty of Ming China and its emperor … Zheng He’s armada was frightening enough that it seldom needed to fight, but being able to fight was its primary mission” (2007: xii; see also 129, 180). Robert Finlay notes that, with over 27,000 officers and men, “armed to the teeth” with the most advanced weaponry available in the world at the time, “the Treasurefleet of Zheng He was overwhelmingly military in composition.” Unlike the later 12 For a number of other statements of this kind by Chinese scholars and officials, see Finlay (1991: 8); Dreyer (2007: 28–9); Wade (2009: 119–20); Winter (2019: 85–99). The fundamentally peaceful nature of Zheng He’s voyages – expressing a distinctively “Chinese” way of overseas trade and foreign relations, contrasted with the rapacious and imperialist Western way—is also argued by Wan Ming (2004), reflecting a scholarly consensus among Chinese scholars in the PRC (though not necessarily those overseas). Some Western scholars have also echoed this view (e.g. Needham, 1971: 535). 13 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 741 Portuguese and other Europeans, “the Ming expeditions were not seeking territory to conquer or sea lanes to monopolize. Nevertheless, the Chinese armadas had a clear political mission that called for an overpowering military force – to incorporate the countries of maritime Asia within the tribute system of the empire, with the Son of Heaven as the guarantor of political legitimacy and commercial mobility in the great area formally subject to him. For local rulers, the prospect of access to Chinese goods within the tribute system was the emperor’s carrot, while the army aboard the Treasure-ships was his stick … The Treasure-ships were intended not only to dazzle foreign peoples with their wealth and majesty but to overawe potential opposition with their might and firepower” (1991: 8; see also 2008: 336–7). We will consider the tribute system in a moment. First we should further note Geoff Wade’s description of the Zheng He voyages as “maritime proto-colonialism”, with the intent “to create legitimacy for the usurping emperor, display the might of the Ming, bring the known polities to demonstrated submission to the Ming, and thereby achieve a pax Ming throughout the known world and collect treasures for the Court” (2009: 125).13 In a detailed analysis of the conflicts involving Zheng He and his soldiers, he shows how implausible it is to describe the Zheng He missions as “voyages of friendship”. The sources show quite plainly that Zheng He intervened militarily in the internal affairs of foreign states on a number of occasions during his seven voyages. During his return on his first voyage, in 1407 he captured a so-called “pirate”, Chen Zu-yi, a Chinese merchant from Fujian ruling in the important commercial city of Palembang (“Old Port” to the Chinese) in southern Sumatra. The Ming reports indicate five thousand “of the pirate gang” killed, ten ships burnt and seven captured. Zheng He brough Chen Zu- yi back to Nanjing where he was executed. Zheng He’s men were lavishly rewarded by the Yongle emperor, suggesting that that their conquest of Palembang was regarded by him as important. Using the fact that many Chinese had settled in Palembang, the Chinese declared Palembang not an independent city-state but a “pacification superintendency”, and replaced Chen Zu-yi with another Chinese, Shi Jin-qing, as Superintendent. Shi Jin-qing’s descendants continued to rule in Palembang. “Here we have a Chinese colony in Southeast Asia” (Wade, 2009: 129; see also Dreyer, 2007: 55–58). In 1407, early in the second voyage, Zheng He’s men were again engaged in military struggle, this time in Java when Zheng He was able establish Chinese control over the declining Majapahit empire. Zheng He lost 170 men, possibly far more, in the struggle on the island, but the upshot was the recognition by the Javanese of Chinese suzerainty, and the payment of a large indemnity in gold. The emperor Yongle warned the Javanese: “Fail to comply and there will be no option but to dispatch an 13 The Yongle emperor had succeeded to the throne in 1402 after a bloody civil war in which he had defeated and displaced his nephew, the Jianwen emperor (r. 1398–1402). Thousands died, including Jianwen in a palace fire, though it was rumoured that he had escaped and was in hiding. One theory has it that Zheng He’s expeditions were launched to find the missing emperor (Levathes, 1996: 66–74). Another, more plausibly, holds that the expeditions were meant to confer legitimacy on the usurping emperor among his allies and clients in Southeast Asia by displaying his power and largesse (see, e.g., Brook, 2013: 94; 2019: 79–108; Sen, 2019: 160, 185). 13 742 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 army to punish your crime. What happened in Annam can serve as an example” (the Chinese, as the Javanese would know, had just invaded Annam – north Vietnam) (Wade, 2009: 129; Dreyer, 2007: 63). Sumatra featured again, this time in 1415 on the return from the fourth voyage, when Zheng He intervened in a civil war in Semudera in northern Sumatra. Here he captured the rebel Sekandar who had risen against the king of Semudera, Zain alAbidin, recognized by the Chinese. Sekandar was taken to China by Zheng He and like Chen Zu-yi suffered execution. “By capturing Sekandar, Zheng He protected the existing pattern of political authority and the trade it sheltered” (Dreyer, 2007: 81; see also Wade, 2009: 130). Then there was the action that all agree was the most violent and consequential of all of Zheng He’s military activities. This took place in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in 1411, during the third voyage. The Sinhalese king, Alakeshvara, threatened an attack with a force of—it is alleged—50,000 troops on Zheng He’s fleet, anchored in Colombo. By an adroit move, Zheng He landed two thousand men, seized the Sinhalese capital of Kotte, fought off the troops sent to retake it, and captured King Alakeshvara and his family, whom he took back with him to Nanjing (though, unlike the cases of Chen Zu-yi and Sekandar, Alakeshvara and his family were spared execution, on the grounds—as the official record puts it—that they were “ignorant people who were without knowledge of the Mandate of Heaven”). The Yongle emperor then “appointed a puppet ruler to replace the king” in Sri Lanka (Wade, 2009: 130; see also Dreyer, 2007: 67–71; Sen, 2019: 168–82).14 There were other violent encounters, or threats of violence, on the voyages. Thus the Yongle emperor in 1409 warned the Burmese king Na-luo-ta that unless he mended his ways in relation to his neighbours – protected by China—the emperor would order the “Western Ocean” fleet of Zheng He to attack and displace him (Wade, 2009: 130). In 1420 a squadron of Zheng He’s fleet, led by Hang Bao, was dispatched to Bengal to force the neigbouring Jaunpur Sultanate to cease its raids on Bengal. It was accompanied by a mission that showered precious gifts on the Bengal king Jalal ud-Din Muhammad, together with assurances of the continuing favour of the Ming emperor in return for confirmation of the strong trading ties that bound Bengal and China (Sen, 2019: 182–4; Dreyer, 2007: 156–7). Then there is the account of 1597—accepted as based on true sources by several modern scholars— in the novel by Luo Maodeng, Records of the Expeditions of the Three Treasures Eunuch [Zheng He] to the Western Oceans, of Zheng He’s assault with gunpowder explosives on the city of Lasa on the Arabian peninsula, and of his use of force to obtain the submission of the ruler of Mogadishu on the Swahili coast of East Africa (Levathes, 1996: 150; Dreyer, 2007: 84–7; Wade, 2009: 131). This is a formidable record of violence, which seems to have punctuated practically all of Zheng He’s seven voyages. They underscore the strategic importance of the voyages in establishing something like Chinese hegemony in a wide swathe of the region stretching from the South China Sea to east Africa – to be the ruler, 14 Levathes says that Zheng He’s victory in Sri Lanka is “considered the most glorious moment in the history of the voyages”, and prints a poem celebrating it (1996: 115). 13 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 743 in the time-honoured expression, of “All-Under-Heaven” (tian xia), all the known world.15 They should be seen in the context of successful attempts to control all the key nodal points in the Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean trade – Palembang, Semudera, the coastal cities of Sri Lanka and of the Indian Malabar coast, Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, Malindi as a replacement for the Arab-dominated Mombasa on the east African coast. There was also, in keeping with this strategy, the establishment and fortification of Malacca as the principal trading centre of Southeast Asia, commanding the vital waterway of the Strait of Malacca and diminishing the previously dominant position of Palembang. Similar thinking lay behind the Chinese displacement of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, by Cochin, when the traders of Calicut proved recalcitrant to Chinese requests (one account has the Chinese returning after an insult from the king of Calicut and “inflicting no small slaughter on the people of Calicut “) (Wade, 2009: 126, 131; Sen, 2017: 615–7; 2019: 161–8). As Tansen Sen puts it with regard to the voyages, “for the first time in the history of the Indian Ocean, the maritime space from coastal China to eastern Africa came under the dominance of a single imperial power, which intervened in local politics, instituted regime changes, and tried to monopolize all commercial activities related to China” (2017: 611; see also Wake, 2004:75; Wade, 2009: 131; Wang, 2011: 157–66). Robert Finlay is equally emphatic concerning the intent and effect of Zheng He’s voyages. “In the course of the seven Ming expeditions, forty-eight states became tributary clients of the Chinese emperor, many of them for the first time. China became the arbiter of the rise and fall of distant kingdoms. Majapahit Java declined as it was supplanted by China as the major power in maritime Southeast Asia. The city-state of Melaka [Malacca], like Palembang and Brunei, renounced allegiance to Java under the protection of Zheng He’s fleet. Indeed, Melaka’s rise to eminence in the early fifteenth century was solely a consequence of Chinese maritime imperialism” (1991: 10; see also 2008: 336). But is “imperialism” the right term for these Chinese ventures under the early Ming? And to what extent were Zheng He’s voyages exceptional, unprecedented and unrepeated? We need to put them in the larger context of China’s relation to the nonChinese world, and in the longer perspective of China’s history before and after the Ming. The tribute system and the “tian xia trope” Most accounts of Zheng He’s voyages see them as occurring within the Chinese tribute system. This is linked in turn to the “tianxia, all under heaven, trope” (Dreyer, 2015: 1015). Together these constituted the core of the Chinese understanding of the international order and of China’s place in the world virtually to the end of the 15 For the origins and development of tian xia, see Zhao (2006); Pines (2012: 11–43); Wang (2012a, 2012b); Dreyer (2015). 13 744 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 empire in 1911. But, with varying degrees of acceptance, it was also shared by most of the countries of Inner, East and Southeast Asia, and even by several South Asian countries, such as Sri Lanka and the northern Indian states. For them, whatever their differences of interpretation and action, and whatever the degree of independence, China was the “hegemon” at the centre of the hierarchical system in which they found their place (Kang, 2010:10). While it is true that historically there were several civilizational centres in East and Inner Asia – not just Chinese, but also Mongol and Tibetan – it became increasingly clear that China was the dominant one, a situation confirmed when the Qing absorbed many of the Mongol and Tibetan polities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Qing – like the British in their empire – were astute in managing the different sectors of their empire, employing Chinese norms in some, Mongol in others, and Tibetan in the area most subject to Tibetan Buddhism (Brook et al., 2018: 9). But Beijing was the centre of the empire; it was thither that envoys from different parts of the empire and from outside travelled to pay their respects to the emperor. The Qing – themselves of Manchu origin – certainly drew on different traditions in the administration of their empire, and to the end were conscious of their difference from the Han Chinese. But Sinicization was a real and significant process, applying to much in the way the Manchus conducted themselves.16 In particular, the Chinese tributary system proved elastic enough to accommodate the challenges that arose from ruling peoples of different cultures and encountering strangers – such as the Dutch and British – from afar. June Dreyer gives an admirably concise and pointed account of the understanding and working of the tribute system as understood by the Chinese and their tributaries. “Political entities interacted with one another within a hierarchic order based on status. Derived from Chinese ideas over centuries, this world order and the institutions embedded in it had, by the fourteenth century, become widely accepted throughout Asia. In contrast to the Westphalian system, the Sinocentric world order recognizes the reality of inequality among states. Order is maintained under the aegis of a benign hegemonic state personified by the emperor as Son of Heaven, and administered for the benefit of all under heaven. Even those whose cultures did not incorporate Confucianism, such as nomads, conformed to the basic structure since they perceived it in their interests to do so. China served as hegemon in recognition of its cultural achieve- 16 “Sinicization” has become a hotly-debated topic among both Chinese and Western scholars in recent times. See especially the exchange between Evelyn Rawksi (1996) and Ping-ti Ho (1998). But even those such as Rawski who argue that Sinicization was not a continuous or systematic process do not deny that the Chinese emperor – of whatever ethnic origin, Mongol or Manchu – claimed the “Mandate of Heaven” and expected other states in the region to pay homage to the emperor. As Rawski herself says, speaking of the Qing dynasty, “no one can deny that the Manchus portrayed themselves as Chinese rulers” (1996: 834) – and a central part of that portrayal was the operation of the tribute system. In any case, as Ho says, Sinicization does not exclude the absorption of elements from other cultures and traditions – obvious in Chinese history – nor the acceptance of the multi-ethnic character of the empire, also evident from ancient times onwards and characteristic, almost by definition, of all empires. “Sinicization and empire-building were complementary rather than competitive forces” (Ho, 1998: 149). 13 Theory and Society (2022) 51:729–760 745 ments and acknowledged superiority, not from its sheer size or military or economic power. The tribute system, whether regarded as symbolic or disguised trade, was regarded as central to this world order. This system saw the periodic journeys of principals or their envoys to the Chinese capital bearing precious gifts, performing the ketou or obeisance to the ruler of all under heaven, and being presented with costly items in return, as well as with the dynastic calendar and confirmation of their legitimacy as ruler of their states. Proper performance of these rituals was intimately involved with ordering relations – whether political, economic or cultural – in the world writ large” (Dreyer, 2015: 1016; see also Kang, 2010; Wang, 2011: 145-51; Maçães, 2019: 34-5 ).17 It is easy to see how easily Zheng He’s voyages can be fitted into this conception of the tribute system. There were the calls at the important staging posts of the Chinese ecumene, the world of “all-under heaven”. There were the exchanges of gifts, some of them utilitarian, some of them symbolic (including the gifts of exotic animals, such as giraffes); there was the ferrying of local rulers and envoys back to Nanjing to make obeisance to the Chinese emperor. But some of those rulers, we recall, were carried back under duress, in several cases to be executed. Zheng He’s instructions, we should also remember, included the injunction that recalcitrant rulers and chieftains should be “pacified by force.” The tribute system has often been portrayed – as we have seen with the official accounts of Zheng He’s voyages – as benign and peaceful, a harmonious alternative to the cut-throat Westphalian system of competing sovereign states (Zhao, 2006). But it seems clear that it always involved an element of coercion, of force majeure. “When Zheng He’s 26,000 troops marched off his ships and built their fortified warehouses, it surely inclined their hosts to consider that a client relationship with the Ming emperor was an offer that they could not refuse” (Finlay, 1991: 9; see also Dreyer, 2007: 34; Wang, 2011: 157–66). 17 The locus classicus of the view of China as a tributary empire is Fairbanks (!968). There is a wealth of commentary on the idea; for some helpful discussion with references to some of the recent literature, see Hevia (1995: 9–15); Qin (2010: 250–55); Perdue (2015); Brook et al., (2018: 5–9, 57–70). June Dreyer’s statement quoted above may seem too strong to