Abstract
The legacy of the Zheng family, especially Zheng Chenggong (1624-1662), who seized Taiwan from the Dutch in 1662, and his son and successor, Zheng Jing (1642-1681), who ruled over the island for the following two decades, has been appropriated for various nationalisms across the Taiwan Strait since the beginning of the Cold War. Despite vast political differences, scholars in mainland China and Taiwan position the two men along a continuum ranging from loyalists of the ethnically Han Ming dynasty (1368-1662) determined to recover the mainland from the Manchu Qing (1644-1911) to founders of an independent maritime state. This paper will compare these present-day representations to the actual motives of the Zheng family during the seventeenth century. As I show, Chenggong and Jing adopted different political positions based upon the changing situation on the mainland and the state of their lucrative overseas trade with Japan and Southeast Asia. Their shifting stances opened up multiple contingencies for their movement. These, in turn, had profound ramifications for the contested present-day interpretations of Taiwan's status and the Chinese presence in the East and South China Seas.