The War of the Pacific (1879–1884) and the Sino-French War (1883–1885) put the Pacific’s newly made navies to the test after a decade of naval racing. These two wars are rarely compared, despite occurring more or less contemporaneously and employing many of the same technologies. In the War of the Pacific, Chilean victory transformed the Chilean Navy into the “preponderant force in South America.” As a hemispheric matter, the Chilean newly made navy also became a credible danger to the “Old Steam Navy” and soon the US “New Navy’s” nearest pacing threat. Strategic defeat in the Sino-French War masked Chinese tactical successes that would guide the Qing Empire’s self-strengthening efforts in the coming decades. Defeat was not a refutation but rather confirmation of the need to cultivate an effective navy, spurring on the expansion of the Beiyang Fleet until it became the dominant power in Northeast Asia by the early 1890s. In an era of vicious anti-Chinese racism in the United States, the Qing’s possession of a modern navy created debate and cultural anxiety in California.

Departing from the conventional narrative that views borders exclusively as a source of hostility in inter-Asian relations, this book tells a story of how two revolutionary states launched movements and pursued policies that echoed each other as well as collaborated in extending their authority to the border to temper the transnational tendencies there – a process that the author characterizes as “joint state invasion,” which challenges both the Scottian narrative of state evasion and the Tillyan model of state formation. The Guangxi-northeastern Vietnam border is geographically, economically, and ethnically diverse and includes highlands, lowlands, and access to the Gulf of Tonkin. State activities at the border in the second half of the twentieth century were initiated in the context of historical precedents of successful, and equally importantly, unsuccessful state intrusions into the borderlands. There was a qualitative difference between state activities on the Sino-Vietnamese border that began during the Cold War and those that came before, where “distracted states” facing continuous wars were often unable to devote adequate resources to the task of border making. More importantly, limited coordination between the successive Chinese governments and the French colonial state left the border people significant “wiggle room” to circumvent the political authority.

In contrast to the British, the French advances in Indochina were initially not concerned with the suppression of piracy, even though piratical activity was prevalent in Vietnamese waters from the mid-nineteenth century. The Vietnamese authorities, meanwhile, lacked the naval capacity, both to keep its rivers and coastal regions free from pirates and to fend of the French incursions. Piracy in the Gulf of Tonkin increased from the 1860s, as Chinese pirates congregated to Vietnam after the efforts to suppress piracy in the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca were stepped up. The main activity of the pirates was the abduction of Vietnamese, particularly women and children, who were trafficked to China, but also men who were trafficked as involuntary coolies. In the 1870s, the French Navy dispatched several antipiracy expeditions to the Gulf of Tonkin, and succeeded largely to suppress the piracy. The label piracy, however, continued to be used to denote any group of bandits or opponents of French colonial expansion in Vietnam. Doing so served to justify the colonisation of Indochina while resonating with a cultural demand for exotic adventure and horror stories in France.