Sea Control - Sea Control 576: Rescuing Heritage from Humiliation with Tommy Jamison

Episode Date: June 7, 2025

Links1. Sea Control 379: Pacific Wars 1864-1897 with Dr. Tommy Jamison2. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power and Primacy, by SCM Paine, Cambridge University Press, 2002. 3. The Pacific’s New Navies: An Ocean, It’s Wars and the Making of US Sea Power, by Tommy Jamison, Cambridge University Press, 2024. 4. Tommy Jamison Linkedin.

Welcome aboard the Sea Control podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm Walker Mills, and my guest today is Dr. Tommy Jameson, an assistant professor of strategic studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. We're going to discuss his new article, Rescuing Heritage from Humiliation, the Navalist Reinterpretation of the Sino-French and Sino-Japanese Wars, which was published in the October issue of the Journal of Military History. Tommy, welcome back. You did a great episode with us on Sea Control number 379 to talk about your doctoral dissertation and connections between China and Latin America and ex-Confederate Navy stuff, which was super fascinating. So we're excited to have you back. Can you tell the listeners a bit more about your background? Well, of course, I'm thrilled to be back on the podcast with you, Walker, and I appreciate you giving me the time this morning to discuss some of my latest musings about naval history and about what that history means for the present. As mentioned, I'm a professor here in Monterey, California, at the Naval Postgraduate School.

I'm a historian by training of the United States in the world, which is kind of an academic-y way of saying that I focus on what the United States does in connection to the global environment. Maybe back in the day, we would have called this just a plain old historian of U.S. formulations or foreign affairs. And I have a regional focus in the Pacific world over the long durée, over a long temporal horizon dating back to the 19th century, and how that period, though it seems quite remote to us today, black and white photographs, archaic spellings and the like, is really vital context for understanding our present moment and is alive, not just as history, but as real, hard-nosed, political, sensitive issues in places like Beijing, Taipei, and Tokyo. Tokyo today. I also served for a while on active duty as a Navy intel guy, which may or may not have sparked my long-term interest in naval history and how it ramifies down to the present. Yeah, so we think it's super fascinating stuff, and we're happy to have you on. A reminder to the listeners, all the opinions here are our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might otherwise be associated. So starting out, your article

focuses on the People's Republic of China's, or more specifically, some historians' reinterpretation or revision of two different conflicts, the Sino-French War and the Sino-Japanese War, both wars that I probably couldn't have just pulled out of a hat of my own knowledge of world history. So can you give us kind of the cliff notes of the naval history of those conflicts to give us some context in cages? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. You're not alone there, I think. And that's kind of a shame because both these conflicts bear in some important ways on some of the really important questions of the 20th century. The Sino-French War is a conflict that's fought, as you would guess here, between France and China, but it's mostly fought over what's

going to become of Southeast Asia, what we today call Vietnam. And then obviously the Sino-Japanese War is fought between Japan and China. And it tends to be dwarfed by the second Sino-Japanese War, or what we know as World War II, and doesn't get enough historiographical attention devoted to it as a result. Neither of these conflicts do, I hasten to add, particularly because, as mentioned, they end up giving us a really, really interesting and important background about what's coming in terms of the French and the American wars in Vietnam and then the Second World War and indeed the modern geopolitics of strategic competition in the Western Pacific today. 1883, Sino-French War kicks off. Lots of proxy fighting in Southeast Asia between the Chinese

forces in Southeast Asia and the French. That fighting spreads to mainland China, China proper, And the Chinese Navy is defeated and defeated decisively. The South Sea Navy is defeated decisively at something called the Battle of Fuzhou, in which the French sail upriver and sink the Chinese South Sea fleet without losing a vessel with very low casualties on the French side. And it is a total catastrophe for the Qing Dynasty's Southern Navy, and one that is interpreted widely as an indictment of China's status as a maritime power, and indeed as a civilizational power. Something similar happens in the 1890s in the first Sino-Japanese War. This is a conflict fought between Japan and China. The core issue is the status of Korea and whether it's going to be in a Chinese orbit

or a Japanese orbit. And again, naval power is vitally important to the outcome of this war. The ability of Japan to move forces across the sea into mainland Asia is obviously critical to projecting power ashore and defeating the Chinese. And that war is kind of decided by two naval conflicts, most importantly, the Battle of the Yalu in September of 1894, in which the Japanese newly made navy, this navy that's been created since the 1880s, actualized out of virtually nothing, defeats and decisively destroys the Qing navy at sea. Admiral Ting goes to sea with a force that most Western observers believe is the dominant one in East Asian waters. Most people expect the Chinese Navy to come out on top of the Japanese, and they crumple away like so many leaves in the

fire, as Alfred Thayer Mahan might say about a maritime power that doesn't have solid feet underneath it. It's a disaster, and it ends up being read as a disaster for subsequent generations, all the way down to the Maoist period, of Chinese naval ineptitude, inefficiency, and even corruption within the Chinese naval establishment that sells out the Chinese people. So these are basically seen as like the bad wars of Chinese history and the inefficiency, the ineffectiveness of Chinese maritime power and maritime assets, despite the fact that they have been developed over about the course of a generation and that the Chinese government has spent a lot of money on, is seen as an indictment of Chinese civilizational standing, not just

internationally, who read this as a barometer of China's kind of backwardness, to use a phrase that would have been operative at the time, but also within China. This causes a lot of soul searching about what really needs to be done to revitalize China and to rejuvenate it. And that question has been one of the motivating debates in Chinese history all the way down to the reign of Xi Jinping. I want to follow up and talk about, ask about more of the way that these conflicts were kind of internalized and viewed by the PLAN and the PRC. But first, we got to ask, what got you interested in these specific conflicts? Yeah, and I think critically, too, like the way they're interpreted. And that's really kind of a practical story. It grows out of

when I was doing field research in China, in Tianjin, which is like the port city outside of Beijing. And I had an afternoon off. And so I went out to this memorial on the coast of Tianjin, just outside of the city center. And it's called the Dagu Forts Memorial. And you see these in older history books.

Sometimes it's the Taku or T-A-K-U Forts Memorial. And right now it's not just a memorial. It's also something called the Patriotic Education Base. It's like a kind of place that Chinese schoolchildren will go to and they will sort of take in the nature of Chinese history in the same way that we would like, I don't know, go to the mall to look at the Lincoln Memorial. And I had some observations or some expectations about what I would see there. I expected to see these forts and see them as artifacts, as memorials of something that the Chinese call the century of humiliation. The century of humiliation that runs from 1839 down to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. And my expectation was to walk in there and see this as two of the most shameful, as really shameful moments in this long, this long litany of insults that are levied by foreign powers against against China and its late imperial history.

And that was definitely true. You walk through and you see all these imperialists and their funny pith helmets walking through China and causing great destruction. And that's being preserved by these memorials. So my first expectation was essentially met. The second hypothesis I had was that, OK, this is also going to be something of a criticism of an indictment of the way China approached naval and coastal defenses in the late imperial period. And it's going to repudiate that. It's going to say they got it wrong. We should have done something else. And I think for most of the history of China, be it nationalist China or China, you would have gotten that sort of sense from the presentation of these materials for a popular audience, that the Qing really got it wrong, this dynasty really got it wrong, and we should do something different. And for Mao, that would have been people power, would have been people's war. It would have been a radical use of popular violence to resist asymmetrically foreign technological overmatch. But when I walked in the museum in, well, eight years ago, so 2016, right, what I found was a set of exhibits that were really curious and celebratory of the way that Ching had embraced novel technologies in the 1880s and the 1890s to build what were fairly sophisticated fortifications and coastal defenses, but hadn't gone far enough. and engaged in a full-scale reconstruction of the military to support and take on board

new scientific and technological developments to resist symmetrically what the foreign imperialist powers were able to project ashore. And the slogan that you could see all over this patriotic education base wasn't, what a shameful thing that happened, we should do something different. It was those who lag behind will be bullied. It's only through strength and wealth that you can achieve peace and prosperity. And I said, wow, okay, that's very different from what I expected. I'm surprised by this. And I wonder if there's a story to be told. And indeed there is in terms of naval development about a new appreciation of the heritage of Chinese technological development in this period and a legitimate Jason and justification of what is

happening in the 21st century in terms of China's contemporary application and mobilization of new technologies to protect itself. Wow. Yeah, that's a fascinating anecdote. Yeah, I have a deep personal interest in how things are memorialized and monuments. And my undergraduate thesis was about that, like how monuments get reinterpreted over time. As a Marine, I think that it's right in line with your whole services culture, right? Because Marines, they memorialize stuff all the time. And then they look back on that history and that heritage, and they use it in a really sort of instrumental way. So I'm cognizant of that as well. And I think we'll get a chance to talk about that in a few moments. Totally. I think you sent me this right after the Marine Corps ball.

So right before the Marine Corps, we had our Marine Corps ball at our unit. And so you're thinking about history and the kind of manipulation of in use of history to build culture. With that kind of context, how you came to this, and then with the overarching context of the conflict, how have the views of these conflicts changed? I mean, that's kind of what you're writing about, right? And specifically to the PLAN, the People's Liberation Army Navy, what's the story there? Yeah, the story here is like a historiographical story, which is the fancy way of saying it's a story about how historians have studied history or changed history, the basic writing of history over time. And the big demarcation here is from a malice period to a period of reform.

and now a period of real, like, embrace of these wars. And if I was to be really kind of dramatic and stark about this, I would say you have a period of condemnation and then an appreciation of these wars as tragedy. And then now in the 21st century, certainly since like the 20-teens to the present, you have a glorification of these conflicts, which is really ironic in that the contemporary Chinese historical establishment,

when it is cooperative, for actually some really good reasons, some very sound reasons in terms of following the evidence where it should lead, but also as a propagandistic kind of adjunct of the People's Liberation Army Navy, is finding in this defeat and what people have seen in the past as humiliation, a source of heritage and pride. So the way this works is like in the malice period, people look back on this defeat, these series of defeats, and they say, okay, great, this failure is like a test case in the experiment as to whether or not China can take on board advanced technologies and then use them as a means to resist foreign imperial pressure. That test, that experiment failed. So let's do something different. And for Mao Zedong at all, that's

something else is people's warfare. It's an emphasis on anthropocentric conflict, an emphasis on people power as a way to resist asymmetrically the technological superiority of adversaries, Be they the Americans, the French, eventually the Russians, certainly the Japanese during World War II and so on. And actually, hey, we the Maoists have some really good evidence of this working in our successes, partial or otherwise, in wars with all of the aforementioned powers. And that works pretty well and good until just the nature of violence, the nature of warfare begins to change, maybe radically, maybe incrementally in the 1980s in the late Cold War, when there's more and more appreciation of the role of technology in conflict. And that's pretty much indisputable after PLA observations of U.S. success in the first Gulf War. That war is not a war that's won by people power. That is a war that is won by technological overmatch. And that sets off a wave of People's Liberation Army reforms that are more open to technology and more open to more open to technology and more open to material material success.

the emphasis on material success, I suppose, to human factors. You know, this is brought about like on the ground by new leadership in the PLAN. Leo Huaqing comes to the fore in the 1980s. That's right when Deng Xiaoping is in power and is encouraging market reforms. There's more liberalization in Chinese society. And he articulates a kind of PLAN that doesn't look like a People's Navy, but rather looks like something that's more akin to a Soviet Navy or even a quasi-imitation of the United States Navy, things like an emphasis on aircraft carrier, blue water combatants, and so forth.

And during that period, folks are looking with new kind of freedom at the historical record, and they're not just engaging in a blanket condemnation of the late Qing's wars, of the Sino-Japanese War and the Sino-French War. They're finding all sorts of examples of things that can be celebrated,

celebrated or at least remembered not as an unmitigated failure or disaster, but rather kind of as a tragedy that China should see through the eyes of pathos and then perhaps learn from. And then by the time we get to sort of our generation and like Wu Zhongli comes into the fore in the People's Liberation Army Navy,

and you get not just an aspiration to build a blue water force, but an actual blue water force, the kind of history that's both professional and academic and public facing and propagandistic that's produced for a mainland audience in terms of museums, films, TV shows, is not only looking at the late Qing Navy as a tragic force, a tragic set of circumstances, but rather looking at it as a genuine set of achievements, which surely it was,

that can be celebrated and should be seen as the first step in China's long road to modernization and to the creation of a sophisticated PLAN that's capable of engaging in high-end warfare and using that across a spectrum in a joint environment. So from humiliation, something that should be condemned in the Maoist era, to a tragedy that could be rehabilitated as a kind of didactic lesson in the Deng Xiaoping era, to something that is glorious and should be celebrated as an early experiment and Chinese naval modernization that actually works with some important caveats in the 21st century. And so if I can kind of summarize to make sure that I'm following this correctly,

the history is changing for reasons that are both important to the military. The military is looking at reforms and looking for a heritage to kind of latch onto. And then from the historical and political perspectives a somewhat looser control state control over historians are allowing historians during this period to kind of re-evaluate and then a change in political leadership also means that the kind of dogmatic more dogmatic history then is allowed to change is that those are kind of the different factors that are feeding into this yeah i think that's fair right so once there's as people get more liberal access to the sources and they're under less dogmatic pressure, I think that's the right word for it, by the malice political apparatus.

They come up with more clear-eyed and objective assessments of what happened. And those assessments tend to be more positive. And then a proxy of that is that that comes along at just the right time for a People's Liberation Army Navy that is looking for a heritage and is able to find that in this newly rediscovered history, this newly revised history, and mobilize it for a domestic audience and legitimate what is kind of weird, the building of a Blue Water Navy for this large continental superpower in eastern eurasia which is then leading me to our next question is why should we care and we in a broad sense you know simsec audience uh united states uh people interested in the united states navy why why is this an important story for us um why

should we be paying attention to this so what right you know blah blah blah old unhappy far away things and battles long ago like what's the what's the point here of this um the chinese would call it like a spit war people were having a spit war going back and forth about the nature of this kind of stuff right blah blah blah um well i i think it's important because it speaks to a hypothesis i have about military history um as heritage which is that the kind of things that we choose to memorialize and commemorate tend to be predictive of the sorts of missions and tasks that we prioritize in the present. So the stuff that we remember about the past

tends to act as a prop for the stuff we want to do in the present in a, hey, why are we doing this stuff today? Well, it's because we've always done this sort of stuff. Just look at our heritage, look at what we have done successfully in the past. With that in mind, we can look at this revisionism. We can look at this emphasis on a newly

technologically grounded and materially sophisticated People's Liberation Army Navy and its appreciation of its late Qing past and see a kind of see a pathway for the future to see that this is an emphasis and to see that it's an emphasis that's likely to carry forward into the 21st century. And it's something that we should be sensitive to because of course the historiographical nature of the late Qing's wars could change again and And if different things are emphasized about the past, that might be useful to us as tea leaves about what's coming in the present. So, for example, I think you could tell a really compelling story about the Sino-Japanese War as a classic blue water Mahanian battle for sea control at the Battle of the Albu, the Japanese win, and then are able to project shore, force a shore as a result of that victory. If you're commemorating that, if you're finding heritage in that event, that might suggest an emphasis on one type of People's Liberation Army Navy as a blue water force that's interested in engaging the U.S. symmetrically in a decisive sea battle.

If we see more and more emphasis on things like the role of maritime militias in the late Qing period, of which there were some, or asymmetric coastal defenses to wit coastal-based artillery and sea mines, torpedoes, that might suggest something else about the future aspirations of the People's Liberation Army Navy and what it will prioritize going forward. So I think we should care about the way in which societies and in particular militaries preserve their past, because that tends to be quite indicative of what they're going to prioritize in the present. And it's very useful to military leaders as a way of gaining legitimacy and justifying their actions to constituencies that might be skeptical. Like, I don't know, other services, the army that might look at this massive expenditure on the Navy and say, why are we doing this? Why is this useful? Well, past precedent would be an extremely powerful argument to justify why you should take finite resources from the army and then invest it in blue water capabilities in the 21st century. I keep saying this, but I think that's really fascinating and I can't help but think about the Marine Corps right now as there's discussions about, you know, what way should the Marine Corps go and there's always that it's always back to our naval roots back to our amphibious roots. So let's pull out, you know, a kind of obscure, like the, I think the defense battalions, you know, which I think we've talked about on SimSec before, but let's pull out this kind of niche obscure organizational type that we have from the history of the Marine Corps and say, oh, you know, we've done this for a long time, which there's a lot of value there and there's truth there. But it's also, I think, like you're saying, intentional history making to link present to the to the past and make, I guess, make people feel more comfortable about things that are perhaps more new.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, the Marines, I think, are very sensitive to this. their heritage conscience. And one of the other things that you could maybe care about here is that if you are proposing a major organizational reorientation, if you want to reconfigure the nature of your organization and its modus operandi, it might be worth mobilizing as a preparatory measure, a sense of history and finding precedent and examples of where you have succeeded in the past and this sort of thing, and then using that as a way to win what is really kind of an ideological struggle amongst members of an organization for what is legitimate and what is not legitimate behavior. I think if we think about the force structure of the Marine Corps in

the 21st century and the 2020s, that might have been a useful step in going forward and winning over a larger constituency of the Marines. I also want to ask you, I think you started out lecture article with an analogy to the U.S. War of 1812, right, which our listeners, maybe those from the U.S. are probably more familiar with. And I'm curious if you can explain how you tied that into stuff that seems like it's going on in a different time period on, you know, the far side of the world and what the analogy is there. Yeah, yeah. So the analogy here is exactly to this process of, is motivated by exactly this process of how militaries mobilize history and heritage to justify expenditures, priorities, and operations. And the United States Navy engages

in something that I think is quite similar to what the People's Operation Army Navy is up to in the 21st century and does so with some very established and significant naval boosters stroke historians who are writing in the late 19th century, just as the United States is beginning to build a great power fleet. People with names that will be instantly recognizable, like Alfred Thayer Mahan, a historian who writes about the War of 1812 and finds in this conflict a sense of heritage and precedent that justifies a U.S. turn towards the sea, and Theodore Roosevelt, who writes his thesis at Harvard College on the War of 1812 and then uses that time and time again as a kind of like mental

crib sheet for explaining why the United States should invest more and more in sea power, which again, as in the case of the People's Republic of China today, is kind of a radical thing because in the 1880s and 90s, there's an argument, and that's a pretty cogent one, that the United States shouldn't build maritime power at all because it's a secure continental empire in the western hemisphere, and it doesn't need to waste a whole bunch of money on a battle fleet. Well, these navalist historians look to the best example they have, the War of 1812, which, by the way, is a defeat for the United States, but nonetheless find in it all sorts of examples of naval heritage that justify not only why the United States should build a battle fleet navy, but why such a thing

is exciting. It's sort of like sexy and glorious, and a democratic constituency might be interested in funding it. And the results of that are pretty spectacular. It's the creation of the new navy in the 1880s and 90s that will defeat the Spanish empire in the war of 1898. The mobilization of history as a prop is crucial to that story. It's crucial to the building of a major U.S. battle fleet. And I think in the 21st century in China, the revision of history has likely has been quite useful to justifying and explaining, even in an authoritarian context, why you should be using a limited pie of resources to build a blue water fleet in China today. Then I think the kind of ultimate question that probably the listeners want to know,

How might the PLAN's imagination of itself change in the future, and how is this going to change or impact their operational and strategic decisions, right? So knowing what we know, not that we have a crystal ball, right? That's not the historian's job. But what do you think the takeaway is here? What do you think this can tell us about the present and the future? So, A, if you're interested in where the PLAN is going, you should be cognizant and interested in how it is framing its own past, because that is going to have some predictive value. So whether this is a celebration of China's role as a blue water force, you should be interested in that. If it's a celebration of the Chinese Navy purely as a prestige piece that is serving as a barometer or a facsimile for civilizational attainment, that's something that we should be cognizant of.

This could all just be theater, naval theater, and not actually designed to be operationally relevant. Or if there's an increasing emphasis on asymmetric naval defenses as a way of finding and legitimating the long prehistory of anti-access area that we see in the 21st century. So what the PRC and PRC-based historians and PRC-based propagandists are conserving and celebrating about the past has some predictive value about what might be pursued in the future. But there's also an affirmative story here for information court fair professionals or for people who are interested in the crafting of narratives to think about this period and to encourage some skepticism and criticism about it. It could be that one of the best ways to limit the scope of Chinese naval expansion and modernization in the present through non-kinetic means is to have a real, encourage a real intellectual debate about whether or not this is a good expenditure of resources in China, particularly as it comes under increasing resource strain as a result of the slowdown in its economy. Is this revised history essentially a fantasy? Is it what the historians or Michael Howard would call nursery rhyme history that we tell to ourselves that doesn't have any basis in sound fact or judgment? Now, as I've said, I think there's good reason that these professional historians have revised

their understanding of the Sino-French and Sino-Japanese War to be more sophisticated and nuanced. But if you're interested in attacking the way that nuanced and sophisticated history has been mobilized into heritage for the support of the modern PLAN, that seems like it's totally fair game for an information warfare professional. It also seems like within that, there's a question of, hey, okay, the Chinese talk a lot about joint operations, but we know from our own military, which has been legitimately quite purple for a generation now, the inter-service rivalries are still quite keen, and people really go to the mat over the resources that are allocated to them

by Congress. That's presumably a factor for the modern People's Liberation Army and Air Force and Navy. So if you can encourage factualism between these forces as they squabble over resources and encourage friction, that would be quite a useful thing to do as well if you are interested in impeding the ability of the People's Liberation Army, Air Force, and Navy to conduct joint operations. These are all kind of like affirmative things that could be done, and they all grow out of the fact that history is a contested thing and the contested use of it, the mobilization of it in this revised form is something that has been utilized very politically and therefore is something that can be critiqued with political and maybe even military motives in

mind. If you've sparked, and I'm sure you have, an interest in some of the listeners about this particular period or this particular stuff, do you have a couple of recommendations for where, I guess, could be books, articles, you know, media that someone could go to take this a little further? Because I think this is still a little bit outside of like go to your local library and ask for a book on the Sino-French War or PLAN historiography. Yeah. Well, first of all, we definitely, it's like crying out that we need a better book or set of books on the Sino-French War, particularly because of the ways in which that's going to allow us to have a better understanding of what happens in the 20th century in Vietnam. But the book on this, I think that has

remained the standard for a while now, is by S.C.M. Payne, who's a professor at the Naval War College, and it's just called The Sino-Japanese War. It's short, it's impactful, and it captures is much of the context here that has informed my discussion of the political mobilization of history by the People's Liberation Army Navy. So I would point to pain as an excellent departure point for anyone who's interested in learning more about the first Sino-Japanese War, which you absolutely should be if you have any interest in how we got to this present moment of whatever we're calling it. It was strategic competition under Biden. I imagine we're going to get out the document and change it back to a great power competition in about a month when Trump comes back

into the White House. But if we want to understand this moment, the first Sino-Japanese War is really quite pivotal, and Payne's book is the one I would recommend for that. Awesome. And then I'll just caveat my comment earlier. There's probably like one or two places in the world you could walk into your local library and get a book off the shelf on the Sino-Japanese War, and like Monterey, California is probably one of them. And the library is probably, I don't know if you could see it from your office, but they'd be like, oh yeah, sure. That's right over in section two. We got a whole, we got a whole section on it. Well, you know, as well, they should first library in California and they're quite proud of that fact. And it's, it's resourced, um, uh, it's resourced

to, to support it's kind of, you know, singular position in this little micro history of the Pacific. Yeah. Shout out to the Dudley Knox library and the librarians there who do a great job. Um, but I think unfortunately that's about all we have time for today. Uh, but I'd like to thank my guest again, Dr. Tommy Jamieson, for discussing his article, Rescuing Heritage from Humiliation, the Navalist Reinterpretation of the Sino-French and Sino-Japanese Wars, which was published in the October issue of the Journal of Military History. And then we always ask, Tommy, where, if anywhere, can our listeners find you online? And then what are you working on next? Great. Thank you so much, Walker, again,

for having me. It's very gracious of you. You can find me online via LinkedIn or via Twitter, and you might look forward to my forthcoming publication of the Pacific's New Navies and Ocean, Its Wars, and the Making of USC Power coming out from Cambridge University Press in January 2025, and that's available for pre-order on Amazon or the Cambridge University Press website. Awesome. We will look for that. And am I right in thinking that that's the kind of culmination of what you were doing for your doctoral dissertation? So what we previously talked about on Sea Control 379, which we'll put a link to as well if the listeners want to get a taste of that. That's exactly right, and I appreciate it. Thanks again, and we will see you next time.

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