Southeastern Coastal Provinces Research Articles

Tropical cyclone hazards analysis based on tropical cyclone potential impact index

Tropical cyclone, a high energy destructive meteorological system with heavy rainfall and gale triggered massive landslides and windstorms, poses a significant threat to coastal areas. In this paper we have developed a Tropical Cyclone Potential Impact Index (TCPI) based on the air mass trajectories, disaster information, intensity, duration, and frequency of tropical cyclones. We analyzed the spatial pattern and interannual variation of the TCPI over the period 1949–2009, and taking the Super Typhoon Saomai as an example have examined the relationship between the TCPI and direct economic losses, total rainfall, and maximum wind speed. The results reveal that China’s TCPI appears to be a weak decreasing trend over the period, which is not significant overall, but significant in some periods. Over the past 20 years, the TCPI decreased in the southern China coastal provinces of Hainan, Guangdong and Guangxi, while it increased in the southeastern coastal provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian and Taiwan. The highest values of TCPI are mainly observed in Taiwan, Hainan, the coastal areas of Guangdong and Fujian and Zhejiang’s southern coast. The TCPI has a good correlation (P=0.01) with direct economic loss, rainfall, and maximum wind speed.

Chinesische Einflüsse auf die Lexik der Bahasa Indonesia

Summary The author traces Chinese influence on the Bahasa Indonesia. He lists Chinese loanwords in present-day Indonesian giving etymologies and discussing their assimilation process. The majority of these loans have their origins not in P’u-t’ung-hua but in the dialects of the South Eastern coastal provinces of China: Chekiang, Fukien and Kwangtung. Especially the dialect of Southern Fukien, also known as Amoy Chinese, had great impact on the language habit of Malay-spenking Chinese settlers in the Indonesian archipelago. Bahasa Indonesia has absorbed a lot of these words which are now being widely used in the present-day spoken language of the Republic of Indonesia.

The Maritime History of Late Imperial China: Observations on Current Concerns and Recent Research

Vol. 6, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1985 THE MARITIME HISTORY OF LATE IMPERIAL CHINA: OBSERVATIONS ON CURRENT CONCERNS AND RECENT RESEARCH Robert Gardella* Interest in Chinese maritime history has heightened both in China and abroad over the past several years. Perhaps this reflects the realization that, after a lapse of some five and a half centuries since Zheng Ho's flotillas plied the oceans of Asia, both the People's Republic of China (hereafter PRC) and Taiwan are playing increasingly active roles in world maritime affairs. As if symbolically to confirm a renascence of nautical consciousness, the PRC in July, 1985, celebrated the 580th anniversary of the first Ming expedition of 1405-07. Several important scholarly compilations concerning Zheng and his voyages were published in conjunction with this event, and a new museum commemorating the great navigator was inaugurated in Changlo ^. ¿ -ft) , have for centuries played important roles in Chinese domestic and overseas trade. The Miaodao Archipelago ;& ßj $% ¿ft offthe northern Shandong coast, to cite a further example, has long been a convenient maritime bridge to the Liaodong Peninsula, Korea, and Japan, and also a haven for fisherfolk, smugglers, and pirates.1 1 Was littoral China literally marginal in cultural, political, and socioeconomic terms? Perhaps the strongest single case yet made to affirm this contention is Jack Wills' excellent article, "Maritime China from Wang Chih to Shih Lang: Themes in Peripheral History."12 Wills addresses the crisis era of the Ming-Qing transition from the perspective of the southeastern coast, makes a number of suggestive rather than conclusive cross-cultural comparisons with Europe, and stresses the inherent limitations of regional economic and political autonomy in seventeenth century China. In striking contrast to the polycentric Mediterranean world described by Fernand Braudel, maritime China never developed, nor was allowed to develop, institutionalized foci of power and profit. As Wills concludes, "Cheng Ch'eng-kung was neither a Shih K'o-fa nor a K'ang-hsi; Amoy was not a Venice or an Amsterdam."13 Although idiosyncratic power structures centered on one or another extraordinary individual could and did arise along the coast as continental power waned during the late Ming, they proved evanescent in the face of the revived central power of the Qing conquerors.14 8Fairbank, 1983:9-16. 9Dian Murray, 1979:xvi-xxi. 10Fairbank, 1983:9-10. 11As the location of numerous relics of Chinese navigation and overseas trade, in July, 1985 the Miaodao Archipelago became the site of China's first maritime history museum. This is located in the harbor area of Miaodao Tang, the main anchorage for this chain of over twenty-one islands. 12WiUs, 1979:203-238. 13WiUs, 1979:234. 14WiUs, 1979:203-204,234. 52Robert Gardella As Wills himself has been the first to recognize, the availability of new European and Asian archival resources and the findings of recent monographs promise greatly to extend our knowledge of maritime China from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.15 To cite two recent examples, Lynn Struve's account of the Southern Ming has substantially clarified the sequence of events by which southeastern coastal provinces became involved in the anti-Manchu resistance of 1644-1662, including the Zheng family's creation of a tenacious maritime power base in the region (1984). Ng Chin-keong's pathbreaking study of Amoy's rise to prominence in China's overseas trade from 1683 to 1735 explores the local bases for that port's success. Ng traces the institutionalized networks of profit linking Amoyese merchant-shippers and their official collaborators with Taiwan and Southeast Asia (1983). While not a mirror image of the Mediterranean maritime tradition, China's own seaborn heritage arguably deserves to be accorded greater significance. The originator of the Mediterranean maritime paradigm himself has lately come to acknowledge the Far East as the "greatest of all the world-economies." In the concluding volume of his Civilization and Capitalism, Fernand Braudel declares that "we are gradually becoming more clearly aware of a 'network of maritime traffic comparable in volume and variety to that of the Mediterranean or of the northern and Atlantic coasts of Europe'" which extended from Egypt to Japan.16 Braudel locates the axial focus of this Asian...