The Chosŏn relationships with the Ming and Qing Empires have been the subject of English-language scholarly inquiry for more than a century. If we include research published in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, the number of publications reaches well into the thousands. Most of these works revolve around the notion of a tributary system in which Chosŏn, as the putative model tributary state, submitted to the political and cultural power of the Ming and Qing courts not only out of geopolitical necessity but also from an unwavering ideological commitment to what we might term authentic human civilization (K. hwa, C. hua 華) as embodied in the Confucian classics. The infelicitous result of much of this work is an analytical structure that plunges East Asian diplomacy into an essentialist and indeed Orientalist mire bereft of strategic thought or even human agency beyond the implication of an ever-unknowable and not entirely rational...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
