Overview

Lo Jung-pang, a renowned professor at the University of California, Davis, completed a 600-page typed manuscript entitled China as a Sea Power, 1127-1368 in 1957, but he died without arranging for the book to be published. Bruce Elleman, who found the manuscript in the UC Davis archives in 2004, has digitized the manuscript and edited it for length and accuracy. Lo Jung-pang argued that during each of the three occasions when imperial China embarked on maritime enterprises (the Qin and Han dynasties, the Sui and Tang dynasties, and Song, Yuan, and early Ming dynasties), the beginning was made by coastal states when China was divided, the height was reached when China was strong and unified, and the decline took place when China weakened, the people became absorbed by internal affairs, and the policy of the state became directed to the north and the west. These cycles of maritime interest, lasting roughly five hundred years, corresponded with cycles of cohesion and division, strength and weakness, prosperity and impoverishment, expansion and contraction. Today a strong and outward looking China is again building up its navy and seeking maritime dominance, with important implications for trade, diplomacy and naval affairs. Events will not necessarily follow the same course as in the past, but Lo Jung-pang's book suggests questions that can be raised for study as events unfold in the years and decades to come.

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9789971695057

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Bruce Allen ELLEMAN is Research Professor in the Maritime History Department at the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College.

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