China’s withdrawal from Indian Ocean trade was internally driven

Evidence

Once the Portuguese had rounded what was for them the Cape of Good Hope (and perhaps even before they reached that point), these voyagers had become actually an analogue of the Chinese who preceded them: we refer, of course, to the “seven massive” imperial expeditionary fleets commanded by the Muslim admiral Cheng Ho between 1405 and 1434 (Cheng Ho died that year) that had already confidently assayed these waters for trade and plunder. The Chinese ventures that with their fleets of junks carrying sometimes as many as 40,000 people, amounted to convoys of “impressive intercontinental missiles” according to William Appleman Williams. With its fleets the Chinese Empire successfully challenged the Arab and Muslim traders who had already grown accustomed to their own domination of the East African and Indian Ocean commercial trades. This did not please the former masters of the trade of these seas, but it did not seem to matter. Whatever the weight of their resistance it never amounted to enough to be included among the reasons speculated to underlie the apparently sudden imperial decision to forego further adventures in the area. The withdrawal would seem to have been an affair internal to the Chinese Empire. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 541