Lineage Society on the Southeastern Coast of China: The Impact o ...

to maintain security along the coast.³¹ This maritime prohibition (haijin) carried the stern warning that not even a plank was allowed at sea and effectively jeopardized the livelihoods of the coastal populations—long involved in the active junk trade (developed during the earlier Southern Song and Yuan dynasties) with Japan and Southeast Asia.³² As a result of the ban, many Chinese merchants were driven overseas to sojourn or settle at port cities such as Melaka, Batavia, Hirado, and Nagasaki and on offshore islands, where they became part of the international trade network spanning the China coast, Southeast Asia, Japan, and beyond. Other merchants were forced into covert and illicit activities, especially during the sporadic periods when the court rigorously enforced the prohibition.³³ By the 1560s, as suppression of the illicit trade activities along the coast grew more stringent, acts of piracy by maritime traders and privateers along the China coast became increasingly rampant, culminating in what Ming contemporaries sometimes labeled a rebellion: the wokou crisis of the Jiajing reign (r. 1522–1566).

Mainland Chinese historical scholarship has adopted a largely conservative stance towards the sixteenth-century wokou crisis. In the 1930s and 1940s, influenced no doubt by the political situation in China during that time, scholars looked upon the crisis as an invasion by Japanese marauders and focused on the devastation caused by the wokou and the resistance of the Ming court.³⁴ Such an approach expended little effort to explain the nature of the wokou, and this approach continued into the 1950s and 1960s, when—due to the influence of the Korean War and other contemporary events—wokou scholarship became laden with the propagation of nationalist patriotism (which led, in a way, to the cultivation of Qi Jiguang as a national hero).³⁵ Only in the late 1970s and 1980s, as discussion of the embryonic capitalism in sixteenth-century China gained currency, did scholars began to reexamine the nature of the wokou themselves and to consider the wokou crisis as a manifestation of antifeudal, procapitalist struggles of the littoral societies against the Ming regime’s prohibition on private maritime trade.³⁶

Japanese scholarship on the wokou issue, in contrast, was largely built on the foundation of studies of Sino-Japanese diplomacy published