In the third decade of the twenty-first century the geopolitical situation in Northeast Asia is still tightly connected to the relationships between China and the two Korean regimes on the Korean Peninsula. What makes such relationships uniquely complicated is the prolonged transformation of the East Asian world order since the nineteenth century, when European colonialism arrived and clashed with the long-standing international order in this region with China at its center. For several centuries Korea had been in the cultural and political sphere of the Chinese empire, no matter which ruling house governed Korea or China. Thus a review of the history of Sino-Korean relations is a precondition for the exploration of present-day Korean and Northeast Asian issues. Empire and Righteous Nation examines the history of China–Korea relations since late imperial times and deftly demonstrates that understanding the historical developments of the bilateral relationship is essential to seeing the full ramifications of historical legacies and grasping the current situation.
Empire and Righteous Nation reviews China–Korea relations during the past six hundred years in three chapters. Chapter 1, titled “China and the Chosŏn State: The Making of Sino-Korean Relations, 1392–1866,” discusses Sino-Korean relations from 1392, when the last Korean dynasty, Chosŏn (1392–1910), was founded and swiftly established a hierarchical relationship with the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), to 1866, when the French launched a military expedition against the Koreans in response to the execution of the French missionaries in Korea. As this chapter shows, Chosŏn embraced neo-Confucianism and identified the doctrine of righteousness as the basis for its relationship with China, in particular Ming China, within the China-centric tributary framework. China and Korea shared the Confucian and familistic principles supporting and lubricating the cross-border framework (37–38). By reviewing the Imjin War of the 1590s, in which China and Japan fiercely competed with each other on Korean soil, this section endorses the argument made by some scholars such as JaHyun Kim Haboush that “the discovery of Korean identity in a national sense took place when the country was under immense pressure by its neighbors, China and Japan” (21). With the arrival of modern European powers in the early nineteenth century, this traditional geopolitical order changed as “two parallel processes” between China and Korea appeared: “One was the gradual improvement in connections between the Chosŏn and Qing states. … The other process was the slow encroachment of Western powers on the eastern Asian international system with the Qing as its center” (68).
Chapter 2, “The Internalization of East Asia: China, Korea, and the World, 1866–1992,” addresses the two parallel processes and examines the rise of Chinese nationalism and Korean nationalism in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. The chapter points out that Korean nationalism grew up in exile following the March First Movement in 1919, in the wake of which a group of Korean nationalists established a provisional government in exile in Shanghai. Simultaneously, Korean communism was nurtured in exile in China and Russia and from the outset maintained a close and complicated relationship to the Russian Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese Nationalist Party, a situation contributing to the increasing factional struggles among Koreans in the 1930s during the anti-Japanese war (100). The politics among overseas Korean political groups eventually led to political purges in both Pyongyang and Seoul after 1948 with the establishment of regimes supported by the Soviet Union in the North and the United States in the South. The unexpectedly quick triumph of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China's Civil War and the foundation of the People's Republic in October 1949 that joined Moscow in the Cold War complicated the political situation on the Korean peninsula (110–112). Then came the Korean War, which “created the framework for China–Korea relations for the rest of the twentieth century, and in some respects into the twenty-first” (121). In the following Cold War context the two Koreas competed with each other. In the 1980s an industrializing South Korea and a post-Mao opening-up China started to cooperate with each other in international trade, while North Korea became more conservative as it focused on outwardly playing Moscow and Beijing against each other and internally on the political movement centering on the Chuch'e ideology. In August 1992, not long after the Soviet Union had collapsed, Beijing and Seoul established full diplomatic relations, a dramatically frustrating event to North Korea that further damaged the Pyongyang–Beijing relationship (131-133). Facing the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the unexpected “two Koreas” policy of China, North Korea, which still sticks with a “One China” policy, had to fight for its very survival.
North Korea's difficulties reflect the limitations of the ways China, the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Russia, have tried to deal with the evolving situation on the Korean peninsula. Chapter 3, “China and Korea Today,” exposes the difficult situations encountered since 1992, including the great famine in North Korea in 1994–1995, the nuclear issue of North Korea, Beijing-led Six Party Talks, South Korea's “Sunshine Policy” toward the North, North–South confrontations along the border, the intercontinental ballistic missiles tests conducted by the North, and the deterioration of Beijing–Pyongyang communications. The chapter examines China's great dilemma in its Korea policy, illustrated by the sharp discrepancy between the high politics in Beijing toward Pyongyang and the popular preference to South Korea among the Chinese public (151). It is exactly in this sense that Westad points out in the conclusion of the book that “China's Korean policy has led it to the worst of all worlds as far as foreign perceptions go: A rising great power that is fearful of playing a transformational international role, even at its own borders, while protecting an abominable regime and opposing a popular and democratic one. It is not the best starting point for China as a future world power” (172–173). By reviewing the recent history, Westad offers an ideal prescription to the issue at the very end of the book, pinning hope on progress in arms control and détente on the Korean peninsula and China's let-North-go policy “when the regime starts to unravel” (173).
Empire and Righteous Nation, based on the Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures that the author delivered at Harvard University in 2017, skillfully offers a rich and informative chronology of Sino-Korean relations. Rather than presenting a single key argument, as scholarly books usually do, Empire and Righteous Nation takes a long-term historical perspective to bring out the ramifications of historical changes and developments, something I applaud. The early twenty-first century is the first time since the 1840s that scholars inside and outside of East Asia see a powerful China and envision the rise of a new Chinese order that sometimes cooperates or even compromises with its Western counterpart. There is no doubt that Korea, both the North and the South, needs to struggle with its own position within this new order. Therefore, we need to know the history that Empire and Righteous Nation lays out so well.
Empire and Righteous Nation, however, takes a linear and progressive approach to interpreting non-European history that implicitly negates the rationale behind the framework of Sino-Korean relations before the arrival of European colonial forces to Korea. The narrative is not free from the legacies of West-centric historiography. It is illuminating that the book takes as the divide 1866, when the French launched a military expedition against Korea, instead of 1876, when Japan forced Korea to sign the very first European-style treaty in the history of Korea (which is equally Europe-centric per se). The term “internationalization,” in Chapter 2, is undoubtedly based on European/Western standard, downplaying the ways that Korea had long been internationalized in its relations with China. Similarly, Empire and Righteous Nation, like so many other books, embraces the assumption that the China–Korea relationship should be and must be headed in the direction of the European/Western international order established by the Peace of Westphalia. Until that moment comes, China's relations with Korea, both with Chosŏn Korea in the tributary system in late imperial times and with North Korea since the middle of the twentieth century, are abnormal and problematic. We are left to ask a question left to us by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Why, with the exception of the 1590s war, did no large wars or draconian colonization occur on the Korean Peninsula before Western principles were imposed upon the region? In other words, why was Korea able to maintain its political autonomy, social stability, and territorial integrity before the modern world order prevailed through violence, treaties, commerce, religion, and international law, even during the Qing period when Chosŏn Korea served as a tributary state to Qing China and “knew how to use the correct phrases and forms of behavior toward the Qing” (64–65)? The recent description of Qing China as an agent of “imperialism” in Korea cannot blur this question. Empire and Righteous Nation does not seek to address the question, but it provides excellent material to help today's readers re-examine the difference between the Europe-dictated international system and the East Asian international order and to rethink the discrepancy between the Western narrative of Sino-Korean relations and the East Asian one.
Empire and Righteous Nation helps sharpen debate on the future of Korea, in particular the potential reunification for the peninsula. The book critically points out the predicament the Koreans are in: Although the Koreans “are less and less keen on allowing any foreign power, including China and the United States, a major role in determining how Koreans will unify their country” (160), “it is also very clear that the Koreans alone cannot put an end to the country's predicament” and they “will need the assistance of neighboring countries, the United States, and the world at large” (3). To many observers, it is self-evident that for the Koreans to reach reunification through national self-determination, as Woodrow Wilson proposed more than a century ago, will be difficult if not impossible. Koreans struggled for national independence throughout the twentieth century, but eventually ended with the division of the nation and the separation of thousands of families living in Korea, China, Japan, and Russia. During the past six centuries Korea has never been free from the shadow of other powers, and whether it will attain such freedom in the future remains unknown. This is the source of the anxiety over the uncertainty of the Korean issue, both inside and outside the peninsula. Empire and Righteous Nation addresses this very feeling and shows deep concern over global security and international humanitarian goals. The book should be on the reading list of scholars of East Asian history and international relations who truly care about the future of Northeast Asia and the entire world.
