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during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Sino-Vietnamese water world was a region further linked by the dynamics of a covert, illegal, but highly utilitarian exchange: the iron of China for the rice of Vietnam. The rice surpluses of Vietnam were important to the burgeoning Cantonese population no longer able to feed itself, but Vietnamese law forbade the exportation of rice. At the same time the Chinese were barred from exporting the iron so greatly desired across the border that Vietnamese officials often waived their own regulations for Chinese junks that brought it in by reducing or eliminating the customary port duties. Because each country needed products from the other and open trade was not possible, a well-established smuggling operation, in which the line between smuggling and piracy was often very thin, resulted.
Finally, there was at all times within the water world a pool of potential pirates. Most numerous among them were the fishermen who almost always had trouble making ends meet, merchants and petty traders whose businesses had failed, outlaws, whose last recourse in fleeing from justice was the sea, and other ne'er-do-wells whom Wei Yuan indiscriminately labelled as "scum of the coast". In short, these were the flotsam of the earth, who, after having been pushed off the land, found themselves in desperate straits at the water's edge.
Their combined energies gave rise to the petty piracy of part-time fishermen-pirates that flourished along the Sino-Vietnamese border for centuries. Petty piracy was a small-scale affair consisting of limited groups of between ten and thirty men who possessed at most a single junk or two. Although such gangs might come together and disperse several times in the course of their activities, each functioned as a single, independent unit whose members were simultaneously connected to no other groups. Survival was their goal and their tactics consisted of sporadic raids and hit and run attacks.
Was there then some kind of ecological or environmental crisis which can account for the dramatic upsurge in Chinese piracy at the end of the eighteenth century? The answer appears to be "no", for although ecology can explain why piracy persisted within the water world for centuries, there seems to be no major environmental crisis that can provide a single-handed explanation for the growth of piracy. The overall