100 Boundaries and Beyond
outpost. Under such conditions, the continued heavy reliance on the land
force for coastal defenses underwent no substantial changes.
Nevertheless, there was always a minority school of thought in the
perception of the haifang that subscribed to a more sensitive and forward-
looking approach, and offered views critical of the traditional strategy. Xu
Guangqi, Shi Lang and Lan Dingyuan were among the scholar-strategists
who adopted this position. They had vision and innovative ideas. While
Xu’s expansionist approach was adventurist in nature and its rejection
was to be expected, the latter two skillfully tailored their perception to
βit the traditional haifang concept, hoping that by doing so their views
would stand a chance to be considered.
Despite the self-imposed limits on expansion, the imperial gover-
nments during the late Ming and high Qing pursued an active and
relatively effective policy of coastal defense. Even in decline, the
Ming authorities fared better along the seafronts than they did on the
northern frontiers. During this part of the Ming-Qing period, the imperial
governments did not lose any of their maritime domains. When they
allowed the Portuguese to enjoy a leasehold in Macao, they saw this move
as a way to contain the barbarians.^152 Nevertheless, the net gain during
the period was the prized territory of Taiwan. Given the fact that both
the Ming and the Qing governments were sensitive to βiscal constraints,
their approach was necessarily cost-effective and therefore rational.^153
It worked reasonably well until the Opium War.
- K.C. Fok, “The Macao Formula: A Study of Chinese Management of Westerners
from the Mid-Sixteenth Century to the Opium War Period”, PhD diss., University
of Hawaii, 1978, provides an in-depth discussion of this point. - John E. Wills, Jr., has rightly pointed out that such defensive policies “made
excellent realistic sense for late imperial China, with ... its impressive but rather
thin and passive bureaucratic control”. See his Embassies and Illusion, p. 188.
However, Wills’ critique that the policies ended in self-destructive clinging to
illusions and forms is a harsh one, as this paper has shown.
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