Remaking the Chinese Empire: Manchu-Korean Relations, 1616–1911

Yuanchong Wang王元崇
Cornell University Press (2018)
xiii, 285 pages : illustrations, map

Remaking the Chinese Empire examines China’s development from an empire into a modern state through the lens of Sino-Korean political relations during the Qing period. Incorporating Korea into the historical narrative of the Chinese empire, it demonstrates that the Manchu regime used its relations with Chosŏn Korea to establish, legitimize, and consolidate its identity as the civilized center of the world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state.

For the Manchu regime and for the Chosŏn Dynasty, the relationship was one of mutual dependence, central to building and maintaining political legitimacy. Yuanchong Wang illuminates how this relationship served as the very model for China’s foreign relations. Ultimately, this precipitated contests, conflicts, and compromises among empires and states in East Asia, Inner Asia, and Southeast Asia – in particular, in the nineteenth century when international law reached the Chinese world. By adopting a long-term and cross-border perspective on high politics at the empire’s core and periphery, Wang revises our understanding of the rise and transformation of the last imperial dynasty of China. His work reveals new insights on the clashes between China’s foreign relations system and its Western counterpart, imperialism and colonialism in the Chinese world, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia. Most significantly, Remaking the Chinese Empire breaks free of the established, national history-oriented paradigm, establishing a new paradigm through which to observe and analyze the Korean impact on the Qing Dynasty.

Contents

Conquering Chosŏn : the rise of the Manchu regime as the Middle Kingdom, 1616-43
Barbarianizing Chosŏn : the Chosŏn model and the Chinese empire, 1644-1761
Justifying the civilized : the Qing's contacts with Chosŏn, Annam, and Britain, 1762-1861
Defining Chosŏn : Qing China's depiction of Chosŏn's status, 1862-76
Supervising Chosŏn : Qing China's patriarchal role in Chosŏn, 1877-84
Losing Chosŏn : the rise of a modern Chinese state, 1885-1911.

Biography 

Yuanchong Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of History, University of Delaware.  He specializes in late imperial and modern Chinese and East Asian history. He received his B.A. from Shandong University in 2002, M.A. from Peking University in 2006, and Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2014. He was a visiting scholar in the Institute for Korean Studies at Yonsei University in Korea from 2010 to 2011, and a visiting scholar in the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo in Japan from 2011 to 2012.

Publications

“Santiandu ‘Daqing huangdi gongde bei’ man han beiwen zai yanjiu” 三田渡“大清皇帝功德碑”滿漢碑文再研究 (A restudy on the Chinese and Manchu inscriptions of ‘Stele of the Honors and Virtues of Emperor of the Great Qing’). Zhongguo bianjiang xue 中國邊疆學 (Borderland Studies of China) 3 (October 2015): 271-308.

“Claiming Centrality in the Chinese World: Manchu–Chosŏn Relations and the Making of the Qing’s ‘Zhongguo’ Identity, 1616–1643.” The Chinese Historical Review 22. 2 (2015): 95-119.

“Civilizing the Great Qing: Manchu-Korean Relations and the Reconstruction of the Chinese Empire, 1644–1761.” Late Imperial China 38. 1 (2017): 113-154.