The tongking gulf through history: A geopolitical overview

Since 2005, a series of significant developments has been unfolding in the Gulf of Tongking area under the rubric of an ambitious project called "Two Corridors and One Rim." Proposed by Vietnam in 2004 and enthusiastically responded to by China, the term "Two Corridors and One Rim" appeared in the official joint declaration and agreements signed in Hanoi during Chinese premier Wen Jiabao's visit in October 2004. The two corridors in question link Yunnan and Guangxi with Hanoi and Hai Phòng, the hub of northern Vietnam's political and economic life, while the rim draws together Guangxi, Guangdong, Hainan Island, northern and central Vietnam, and Laos. This project soon became the driving force of new Sino-Vietnamese economic relations. Only fourteen months later a superhighway was built that made the Guangxi capital of Nanning and the Southern Pass less than two hours apart by car. On both sides of the Sino-Vietnamese border, ten highways are pushing toward each other, plus two high-speed railway lines linking Hanoi with Yunnan and Guangxi. By 2012, people in Guangxi will "breakfast in Nanning and lunch in Hanoi." With all this activity, the Tongking Gulf suddenly became a new and exciting growth point for both China and Vietnam. Big money began pouring in; land prices skyrocketed. Guangxi officials happily proclaimed that from "the nerve end" of China, Guangxi would become the pivot of traffic between China and ASEAN countries.¹ From a historical point of view, however, as this Introduction will show, what all this activity means is that the Gulf of Tongking has just come full circle. The gulf region was the earliest pivot of traffic between southern China and the area we now know as Southeast Asia, and the world beyond. All the proposed "Two Corridors and One Rim" routes overlay major regional contact zones that have existed for thousands of years. Various peoples, under different names, used these departure and arrival points for commercial and other exchanges. On this rare and fortunate occasion, scholars and politicians agree, and our interests overlap. This newly emerging form of regional integration refocuses interest on this millennial area - the former Jiaozhi Sea and its surrounds - and on the forces that linked or separated the peoples who inhabited it. Two matters are particularly striking when one considers the Gulf of Tongking in the last three decades. First, although adjacent to Guangdong - the earliest Chinese province to open up through the economic reforms espoused by China's leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s - Guangxi grew only slowly during the two subsequent decades, merely providing labor and foodstuffs for Guangdong's economic expansion. Guangxi's own economic takeoff required the opening of northern Vietnam. Second, if it took Vietnam to make Guangxi's maritime connections alive and meaningful, it also took Vietnam to provide Guangxi with the overland connections that would make the Yunnan-northern Vietnam-Guangxi region into the new Golden Triangle of Growth. In short, the recent "Two Corridors and One Rim" project crystallized the significance of Vietnam for the development of Guangxi, over land and by sea. This was the background in which an international workshop entitled "A Mini Mediterranean Sea? The Gulf of Tongking Through History" was held in Nanning, in March 2008, jointly organized by the Australian National University and the Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences. The Mediterranean idea appealed to us because we sought an alternative framework beyond the obviously inadequate, and indeed often misleading, framework of nation-states for this region. The viewpoint of a "mini-Mediterranean" allowed an open and experimental approach to the understanding of long-term, large-scale historical change in an area that does in some way share similarities with the Mediterranean. Like the European sea, whether in terms of geography, of the mingling of peoples and cultures, or of material exchanges, the Tongking Gulf has long formed a center of exchange and a regional ensemble with its own long-standing local integrity. When the gulf region is viewed this way, we discover a quite different picture from that advanced in existing (overwhelmingly one-dimensional and state-centric) histories of the places we now know as "Vietnam" and "China." To balance this conventional and vertical perspective between the two, contributors to this book in their various ways have tried to illuminate the different eras and areas of the gulf's history from a horizontal angle. This point brings us back to Guangxi. As suggested by its 1980s and 1990s experience, Guangxi's importance can only be properly understood in a regional context. From the perspective of central China, Guangxi was a remote and underdeveloped area for thousands of years and contributed little to the glory of Chinese civilization. Chinese nationalist historiography has thus abstracted Guangxi, together with neighboring Guangdong and Hainan Island, into a timeless "China," irrespective of their dozens of peoples and languages, their vastly different historical experiences, and their often opposite interests. The marginalization of these peoples in Chinese history, and the denial of their role in shaping the history of the Gulf of Tongking, has also served the cause of Vietnamese nationalist historiography. The "north" became reconstituted as a constant threat throughout history, and political actions originating there, however accidental in genesis, were treated as deliberate and concerted, operating with one will and to one end. In this discourse, "Vietnam" became a single entity persisting from time immemorial, leading to "a strangling obsession with identity and continuity" in late twentieth-century scholarship,² and a "fervent belief in the unshakable unity of the 'Vietnamese people',"³ in the minds of anti-colonial Vietnamese nationalists and sympathetic foreigners alike. This book challenges these earlier perspectives. By trying to put the former principalities and peoples in the area we now call northern Vietnam back into a coastal context and, conversely, by putting coastal Guangxi back into what is now "Vietnamese" territory, where historically appropriate, its chapters reveal a complex pattern of interrelationships going back more than two millennia. As French scholar Denys Lombard persuasively argued, during the last two millennia at least southern China and the lands surrounding the South China Sea were so interwoven by overlapping networks of exchange and cultural interactions that they formed an ensemble which can fruitfully be compared to the Mediterranean as analyzed by Fernand Braudel.⁴ This is particularly true in regard to the Gulf of Tongking area of modern Vietnam, the only Southeast Asian region that shares a contiguous coastline with southern China (see Map 1). The following chapters represent an effort to foreground the essential players whose interactions shaped the Gulf of Tongking's history, while more distant political centers in central China or Hanoi are pushed somewhat into the background for, at many different times in the past, central governments were far from the driving force for change in the gulf. This refocusing of attention reveals the Gulf of Tongking as a historical arena, a place in which multiple players helped shape each other's histories. This is another sense in which the Tongking Gulf recalls Braudel's Mediterranean, a region he described as having "no unity but that created by the (Figure presented) movements of men, the relationships they imply, and the routes they follow."⁵ As with the Mediterranean, cultural interactions accompanied trade among the peoples of the gulf region over the millennia, although our sources for it are often less direct at the local level than for commercial exchanges. Nevertheless, regionally specific economic and cultural factors can be traced during the gulf's long history as a center of exchange, as this Introduction will show. Because the long history of the gulf region has been divided up into fragmentary units, or even largely ignored in state-centered studies, it seems useful to provide a broad chronological overview of the major geopolitical factors that shaped the gulf region over the two millennia in which the detailed explorations of individual chapters are located. That is the task of this Introduction. Following the structure of the book, it is divided into two broad parts: the first covers the era from the Neolithic to the tenth century, when an independent state emerged from old Chinese Jiaozhi (or modern northern Vietnam); the second surveys the nine centuries that followed, in which only two states came to share the maritime shores of the Tongking Gulf.