RCCHC "China and the World: Historical Interactions" Talk Series - Taiwan-Registered Junks and the Changing Geographies of Maritime Trade and Public Finance in Late Qing Fujian

CWHI Talk seriesProf James GerienChen talkbanner

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Date

24 Nov 2025
Organiser

Research Centre for Chinese History and Culture, Department of Chinese History and Culture
Time

11:00 - 12:30
Venue

SHA106, PolyU Student Halls of Residence

Speaker

Prof. James Gerien-Chen

Enquiry

Ms Carmen LAW 34008979 rcchc@polyu.edu.hk

Remarks

This talk will be delivered in English

Summary

After Japan’s colonization of Taiwan in 1895, officials hoped to regulate the junk-borne trade between the island and the Fujian coast. Junks newly registered in Taiwan, however, led to the proliferation of jurisdictional questions between customs officials, foreign consuls, and Qing tax collectors over a variety of maritime spaces that ultimately revealed contradictions internal to the treaties between the Qing and foreign imperial powers. Was jurisdiction a matter of a ship's type (steam vs. sail), its registration, or the owner or origin of its cargo? Drawing on multi-sited archival research, this talk examines how such junks ultimately shaped broader debates about Sino-foreign trade in and beyond the treaty ports, local versus central power in the Qing empire, and strategies of Japanese imperial expansion in the context of capitalist competition.

Keynote Speaker

Prof. James Gerien-Chen

Assistant Professor of History at the University of Florida

James Gerien-Chen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Florida and received his PhD in History from Columbia University in 2019. This talk is part of his first monograph-in-progress, titled Between Empire and Nation: "Registered Taiwanese" in South China, 1895–1950, which situates the transimperial registered Taiwanese at the margins of Japan's imperial expansion, China's transition from empire to nation-state, and Chinese migration. Using multi-lingual archives, it reconstructs how local disputes raised broader debates between Japanese, Qing/Chinese, and British officials that concerned state power and commercial competition: in addition to this talk on maritime trade, it examines the themes of defining subjecthood/citizenship, channeling investment in industrial enterprise, investing in urban development, and interdicting smuggling.

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