In the long-term history of East Asia, China’s activities at sea loomed large in two distinctive periods during the Song (960–1279) and the Ming (1368–1644), respectively, but not before and not after. One thus wonders why and how the same culture and the same tradition obviously failed to generate a linear growth in maritime activities in the manner, say, of the post-Renaissance Europeans who eventually went on to colonize the globe after Christopher Columbus and Vasco de Gama, ruthlessly surpassing the passé seagoing power of Ming China. The secret was in China’s peculiar political economy which this chapter spells out.