Mapping China and the Question of a China-Centered Tributary Trade System

Mapping China and the Question of a China-Centered Tributary Trade System:

Does it make sense to refer to a Chinese “tributary system?” A number of influential Western scholars, including John Wills Jr., James Hevia and Laura Hostetler, have argued that it does not—largely on the grounds that previous China scholars, John K. Fairbank “and his followers” in particular, have over-generalized its historical significance. The result, however, has been that much of Fairbank’s painstaking and valuable research on the structure and function of the tributary system has been ignored. Although Fairbank may well have overestimated the degree to which Chinese assumptions about tribute shaped Qing policy toward foreigners, it seems absurd to suggest that they were of no consequence whatsoever.

Takeshi Hamashita provides a valuable perspective on tribute (gong) that avoids the extremes of both Fairbank and his critics. His China: East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives (2008), makes a powerful case for the existence of a long-standing, vibrant, multifaceted and organically evolved “network of [tributary] relations linking the center and its peripheries, including the provinces and dependencies of the [Chinese] Empire, rulers of native tribes and districts, tributary states and even trading partners.” In other words, the tributary system provided a framework—both land-based and maritime—for economic and other interactions in which multiple actors played multiple roles. It may have been a “Sinocentric” system, as Hamashita avers, but it was certainly not a static or a monolithic one. As Song Nianshen emphasizes in a recent online article (see “Bibliographical Note” below), the tributary system “was an institutional mechanism mutually constructed by both the central and peripheral [East Asian] regimes.”

A balanced analysis of the so-called tributary system requires, then, a historically sensitive appreciation of its assumptions and its institutions, its theories and its practices, its goals and its actual outcomes. This kind of understanding compels us to consider, among other things, exactly how the offering and acceptance of “tribute” were conceived (by all parties; not simply the Chinese), and how much flexibility the system allowed. Clearly any conception of the tributary system that suggests a stagnant, “unchanging China” is hopelessly wrong-headed. Yet to ignore or downplay the importance of the tributary system as an important historical and cultural frame of reference for Chinese emperors and officials would be equally misguided.