Late Nineteenth Century Ching-Chosŏn (淸-朝鮮) Union of Upper State (上國) and Subject State (屬邦/屬國) – 上屬體制
Presented by CHUN Jihoon
PhD candidate at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (AREA Ruhr doctoral program on Transnational Institution Building and Transnational Identities in East Asia)
Registration
Talk is scheduled for 8:00—9:30 AM Pacific/California; 5:00—6:30 PM Central European (Summer) Time
Register for the event here!
Ching-Chosŏn (淸-朝鮮) mutuality during the late nineteenth century is the key aspect to characterize the East Asian political upheavals during the nineteenth century. In order for the bilateral relations to be duly understood in their intrinsic subjectivity, the official discourses produced by the ruling elites of both dynasties at the time – instead of any interpretive frames projected onto them later on, such as ‘tribute/tributary system’, ‘multilateral imperialism introduced by the Ching to Chosŏn’, or ‘Zongfan (宗藩) system’ – should be critically examined anew. Existing primary historical sources indicate that 上國-屬邦 (“upper state”, “subject state”), and 屬邦體制 (“subject state-system”), encapsulated such Ching-Chosŏn interdependency particularly during the late nineteenth century. 上國 was matched with “confederation”, “federal government”, “central government” (of a (con-)federal union), among other terms, in corresponding texts of some prominent Western legal treatises translated in East Asia since the 1860s. Also, the term 屬邦/屬國 (subject state, dependent polity), to be paired with 上國, tended to signify semi-sovereign (半主) polity that depended on more powerful polities’ protection, as did 屛藩 (outer vassal) and 藩屬 (vassal dependency).
大淸國屬高麗國旗, 通商章程成案彙編 (1886)
This complementing pair of 上國-屬邦, which was used to officially designate the Ching-Chosŏn dyadic union by the contemporary elites, suggests a hierarchy of sovereignty, composed of superior sovereignty of higher-authority upper state as the protector, and subordinate sovereignty of subject state as the protected. The superior sovereignty of upper state within the East Asian context seems to have been represented as “suzerainty.” The Ching-Chosŏn union was such that suzerain-vassal (or overlord-lord) relations and protectorate, both in Western sense, on the one hand, and a (con-)federal polity in a Confucian imperial formation, on the other, were all synthesized in a transcendental construct for coordinated military and diplomatic functions to its one grand negotiated sovereignty. The appellation of 皇淸朝鮮, or imperial-Ching-Chosŏn, may connote such an East Asian construct.
恢復朝鮮得勝捷圖 (1894), Sino-Japanese War Prints in the British Library.
About the Speaker
CHUN Jihoon, PhD candidate at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (AREA Ruhr doctoral program on Transnational Institution Building and Transnational Identities in East Asia), is currently working on a dissertation project titled “"Cherishing the Small, Serving the Great" [字小事大] Collapsed upon "Public Law of All Nations" [萬國公法]: Ching-Chosŏn [淸-朝鮮] Union of Upper State and Subject State During 1882-1895.” The project examines Ching-Chosŏn contemporary elites’ perceptions of each other’s polity in the context of how the interpretations, doctrines, and power rationales of "international law" became manifest in their bilateral relations. In 2019, he conducted field research at Tsinghua University and Shanghai University. At Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2018, he taught a seminar course on North Korean leadership and Juche (主體) Ideology. As Korea Foundation Junior Scholar, he was affiliated with the North Korea International Documentation Project of the History and Public Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholar in Washington, D.C., in 2014.