To put the very real current fact of the growth of Chinese power and its maritime dimension into perspective, one has first of all to go back in time. There has always been a Chinese interest in the sea, originating essentially in the age of the Song dynasty (from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries), more particularly to the southern Song (1126-1260): from their capital of Hang Zhou, south of present-day Shanghai, a maritime area was established in which junks engaged in mostly commercial activity. After the Mongol era of the thirteenth century, which did not conflict with this interest, Chinese maritime affairs reached what might be called an apogee at the start of the fifteenth century under the Ming dynasty: Admiral Huang He undertook a number of spectacular voyages towards the Strait of Malacca and beyond into the Indian Ocean. But after the first third of the century, under the combined effect of many factors, maritime interest declined and China concentrated—reverted—to inland matters. During the following centuries, from the Portuguese to the British and then the Japanese, the sea was to become more the area from which the foreigner came, the barbarian, the enemy. Starting with the Treaty of Nanking (1842), sovereignty was ceded many times under the system of concessions within the large ports and certain inland cities. Between 1937 and 1945 Japan, which had already annexed Taiwan (by the Treaty of Shimonseki, in 1895), even occupied what was the major part of ‘useful China’.

The seminar recalled this historic background and evoked the present-day return to this memory of China’s maritime splendour. It dealt particularly with the post-1945 period, and above all post-1954, a period during which a sort of reverse movement occurred: from the cordoning off of the shoreline of the Maoist period to the maritime opening-up to which the growth of power of modern China is largely due. At first, after 1949 and China’s turning to communism—thus forming with the USSR a very ‘continental’ partnership—interest in the sea appeared to be hardly more marked than during the preceding centuries. After the outbreak of the Korean War, and in particular by his declaration of 27 June 1950, President Truman drew the Iron Curtain along the Asian shoreline, principally Chinese, by promising the help of the United States not only to South Korea but also to Taiwan, the Philippines and to the French in Indo-China, where the latter were having difficulty confronting the Viet Minh, by now supported by China. In 1954 the Geneva Agreements on Korea and Indo-China (July), followed by the Manila Pact and the setting up of the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO, September), locked the system in place. A number of Cold War crises, such as those of the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1958, followed by the Vietnam War in the 1960s (with the establishment of a ‘maritime Ho Chi Minh trail’ whose role is worth re-evaluating), crystallised Sino-American antagonism.

This front line remained tense at least until the 1970s, when Mao once again began talks with the United States of the Nixon era, which was itself looking for a way out of the Vietnam mess. From 1979 and the adoption of the Four Modernisations, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, Beijing looked once more towards the sea: the setting up of exclusive economic zones on the coast allowed Communist China to accept foreign investments, and to turn the zones into industrial centres aimed at exports and large-scale maritime commerce. The time had come to develop exchanges, communications and cooperation: along the Chinese coast the front line changed progressively into a north-south axis of growth, from the Korea Strait down to the Strait of Malacca.