The first book in twenty years to consider China's ocean frontier as a whole from the legal, strategic and economic perspective.

Water Frontier focuses principally on southwest Indochina (from modern southern Vietnam into eastern Cambodia and southwestern Thailand), which it calls the Lower Mekong region. The book's excellent contributors argue that, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this area formed a single trading zone woven together by the regular itineraries of thousands of large and small junk traders. This zone in turn formed a regional component of the wider trade networks that linked southern China to all of Southeast Asia. This is the 'water frontier' of the title, a sparsely settled coastal and riverine frontier region of mixed ethnicities and often uncertain settlements in which the waterborne trade and commerce of a long string of small ports was essential to local life. This innovative book uses the water frontier concept to reposition old nation-state oriented histories and decenter modern dominant cultures and ethnicities to reveal a different local past. It expands and deepens our understanding of the time and place as well as of the multiple roles played by Chinese sojourners, settlers, and junk traders in their interactions with a kaleidoscope of local peoples.

A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in it China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century. Distant Shores challenges this view, showing that the economic expansion of southeastern Chinese rivaled the colonial ambitions of Europeans overseas. In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, Melissa Macauley explains how sojourners from an ungovernable corner of China emerged among the commercial masters of the South China Sea. She focuses on Chaozhou, a region in the great maritime province of Guangdong, whose people shared a repertoire of ritual, cultural, and economic practices. Macauley traces how Chaozhouese at home and abroad reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority. Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, fraternal, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Swatow. The picture that emerges is not one of Chinese divergence from European modernity but rather of a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development and accelerating levels of capital accumulation. A magisterial work of scholarship, Distant Shores reveals how the transoceanic migration of Chaozhouese laborers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked the Chinese homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction.

This book analyses the origins of security dilemmas in the South China Sea (SCS) and the significance of China’s actions in asserting its claim from the perspective of defensive realist theory. In its analysis, the book argues that security dilemmas in the SCS first arose between China and other SCS claimants, and then between China and the United States. Research in this book provides significant support to the defensive realist theory vis-à-vis offensive realism. It encourages adopting a reassurance policy to reach a peaceful resolution to the SCS disputes between China, the other claimants, and the United States. The book will be useful for policymakers, academics, researchers and students.

This book provides an explanation of Chinese policy towards the South China Sea, and argues that this has been sculpted by the changing dynamics of the law of the sea in conjunction with regional geopolitical flux. The past few decades have witnessed a bifurcated trend in China's management of territorial disputes. Over the years, while China gradually calmed and settled most land-border disputes with its neighbors, disputes on the ocean frontier continued to simmer in a seething cauldron. China's Policy towards the South China Sea attributes the distinctive path of China's approach to maritime disputes to a unique factor - the law of the sea (LOS) as the "rules of the road" in the ocean. By deconstructing the concept of "sovereignty" and treating the LOS as an evolving regime, the book examines how the changing dynamics of the LOS regime have complicated and reshaped the nature and content of sovereign disputes in the ocean regime as well as the options of settlement. Applying the findings to the South China Sea case, the author traces the learning curve on which China has embarked to comprehend the complexity of the dispute accordingly and finds that it is the dynamic interaction of the law of the sea regime and the geopolitical conditions that has driven the evolution of China's South China Sea policy. This book will be of great interest to students of Chinese and Asian politics, international law, international relations and security studies.

Argues that Qing China was not just a continental empire, but a maritime power protecting its interests at sea.

China's Encounters on the South and Southwest. Reforging the Fiery Frontier Over Two Millennia discusses the mountainous territory between lowland China and Southeast Asia, what we term the Dong world, and varied encounters by China with this world's many elements. The essays describe such encounters over the past two millennia and note various asymmetric relations that have resulted therefrom. Local populations, indigenous chiefs, state officials, and rulers have all acted to shape this frontier, especially after the Mongol incursions of the thirteenth century drastically shifted it. This process has moved from the alliances of the Dong world to the indirect rule of the Tusi (native official) age to the Qing and recent Gaitu Guiliu efforts at direct rule by the state, placing regular officials in charge there. The essays detail the complexities of this frontier through time, space, and personality, particularly in those instances, as today on land and sea, when China elects to pursue an aggressive policy in this direction. Contributors include: Brantly Womack, Kenneth MacLean, Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Bradley Davis, Jaymin Kim, Alexander Ong, Joseph Dennis, Sun Laichen, John K. Whitmore, Kathlene Baldanza, Kenneth M. Swope, Michael Brose, James A. Anderson, Liam Kelley, and Catherine Churchman.