5
PERIPHERIES
How China, Korea, and Japan Have Understood One Another since the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Three Stages in China’s Understanding of the World
Before launching into a discussion of how China and the states on its periphery understood one another, I should explain how, from ancient times to the present, Chinese people understood the relationship between the world and the self. Generally speaking, this understanding passed through three stages.1
The first stage was quite long, basically stretching across the whole of traditional China, from the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods all the down through the Ming and Qing dynasties. As Han civilization and traditions enjoyed great power across East Asia, with no competition from other strong cultural forces, China lived in an era in which it seemed it had no mirror to look into. This era gave rise to the notion of All-under-Heaven, in which China was the center, and the so-called Four Barbarians were on the periphery. This era also gave rise to the notion of the tribute system. Across the centuries, even though China’s actual knowledge of the world went well beyond the limits of Han China, and foreign relations with the states on China’s periphery were not conducted only in terms of the simple relations between the central state and tributary states,2 China nonetheless was still accustomed to imagining itself as a huge “Middle Kingdom” at the center of All-under-Heaven.
The second stage was one in which China had only one mirror. I view the period that began in the late Ming to the present, when Westerners arrived in Japan, China, Korea, and Southeast Asia, as the opening of a process of globalization that extends down to the present day. I should say that, since the late Ming, and especially after the Ming-Qing period, when faced with challenges from the West and comparisons to the West, Chinese people began to seek a new understanding of the world and of China—these were, of course, monumental steps forward. This new understanding, however, was based on a system of reference that treated the West as “Other.” From arguments in the late Ming that Western learning had emerged from Chinese sources (Xi xue Zhong yuan), to debates in the late Qing about treating “Chinese learning as the foundation, and Western learning for practical applications” (Zhong ti Xi yong) and vice versa, to the debates about science and life following the May Fourth period, and even down to the “culture fever” of the 1980s—all of these cultural moments involved searching for the self in one mirror.3
The third stage, what I call the era of “rediscovering oneself through many mirrors,” should begin now. Although the West is extremely important mirror, everyone knows that one mirror is not enough, and we will ask: Does this one mirror give an accurate reflection? Is this the only mirror that we can use to see ourselves? Do we need one angle or many angles, in other words, do we need mirrors other than the West? In the past, China rarely made a conscious effort to see itself from the perspectives of its neighbors in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, India, or Mongolia. In fact, the comparison of China and the West can only provide a crude measure for understanding ourselves. China can begin truly to understand what “the world” and “China” really are only through comparisons with countries with which we seem to have fewer differences and with which we may have shared some traditions, even if now we have different, independent cultures.
For these reasons, I am particularly interested in northeast Asian countries such as China, Japan, and Korea. As a historian, however, I also want to point out in this chapter that although these countries of Northeast Asia may be close to one another geographically and have many aspects of their traditions that overlap and share the same historical sources, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries down to the present day, the relationships between them have been filled with biased ideas, enmity, and distrust. Little seems to have changed today. What I discuss, then, is in the past but continues to influence the history of our present moment.
Drifting Together, Drifting Apart: China, Japan, and Korea since the Seventeenth Century
The relationship between these three countries is a large topic, and I cannot go into great detail here. In this chapter, I stick to materials from the seventeenth century and later—roughly equivalent to the Qing dynasty in China, the latter Joseon dynasty in Korea, and the Edo period in Japan—to discuss how these three countries, all of which are now seen as part of the “Northeast Asia” region, saw one another, including the mutual enmity between them. During the Ming and Qing periods, Japan, Korea, and China moved from being all part of “one family” to finding one another unrecognizable. This process reflects at a deep level the collapse of “Northeast Asia” as an identity that originally was formed on the basis of Han- and Tang-dynasty culture. The gradual process of estrangement and slide into mutual disregard were the result of a major internal fragmentation of what appeared to be one civilization within Northeast Asia.
We can see clearly this major change in East Asian cultural identity that occurred across the Ming and the Qing through records of mutual exchanges and observations made by Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese people. The numerous Records of Embassies to Beijing (Yan xing lu) published in Korea, letters and documents concerning diplomatic visits from Korea to Japan, as well as “brush-talk” (bi tan) documents and other records from Nagasaki, have all been the subject of growing attention in recent years. These materials offer a glimpse into the disintegration and fracturing of the “Eastern” world.4 In the era when the Great Qing Empire was flourishing to its fullest, the Korean emissaries sent to China witnessed an imperial scene that was no longer “Chinese.” At the same time, the Japanese who conducted brush talks and inquiries with Chinese sailors and merchants cast a cold eye on their neighbors, who were growing ever more unfamiliar. From these documents we see a mutual disdain and guardedness between Japanese and Chinese people that, though subtle, was based on their respective national chauvinisms. In the eyes of Korean and Japanese from this era, one China had become two: on the one hand, there was a historical and cultural China, rooted in the China of the Han and Tang dynasties that existed in their memory and imagination. On the other hand, there was the China that actually existed before their eyes, the practical and political China that was represented by the Qing Empire. In that era, although they may have held deep respect for the historical and cultural China that they remembered, they had begun to despise the practical and political China. We can also see Korea and Japan measuring each other up to see who was the real representative of cultural orthodoxy in the region.5
From “Tributes to Heaven” to “Missions to Beijing”: How the Joseon Dynasty Saw China after the Ming
From the middle of the seventeenth century onward, as Qing-dynasty China continued to believe in a two-thousand-year-old worldview that took itself as the center of the world, Korean people arrived at a very different view of China. Although the Ming dynasty had been wiped out, over a long period of time the Koreans showed a real nostalgia for the Great Ming and a sense of dissatisfaction with the Qing Empire, referring to the Qing Empire as “barbarians” and calling the Qing emperor the “barbarian Emperor” (Hu huang). During the Qianlong period of the Qing dynasty, a Korean emissary to Beijing named Kim Chong-hu wrote in a letter to Hong Dae-young (1731–1783), who had been an emissary to the Qing court, that “After the Ming, there is no China. I do not blame them [the Chinese] for not yearning for the Ming, but I do blame them for not yearning for China.” In their eyes, China (Zhonghua or Zhongguo) originally referred to a civilization, and thus if Chinese civilization was not to be found in the Qing state, then they “would rather be among the lowly of the Eastern Barbarians than to be counted among the nobility of these people.”6 Koreans of this era had long since stopped thinking of the Qing Empire as “China.”
For these reasons, it was difficult for them to understand why Han Chinese would submit to the Great Qing Empire’s rule. During the Qianlong reign, Kim Chong-hu told Han Chinese literati quite bluntly that Korea had deeply held memories of the Great Ming, which had sent troops to attack Japan and provided them with an indispensable lifeline in their battle against Japan. However, for the Manchu Qing state, which had attacked Korea and coerced it into signing unfavorable treaties, they harbored a deep hatred. He said:
During the Wanli reign (1572–1620), the [Japanese] bandits streamed into Korea … and the Wanli Emperor dispatched the armies of All-under-Heaven and expended the treasure of All-under-Heaven and put down the invasion in seven years. Two hundred years hence, the happiness and well-being of the people are all the gifts of the Wanli Emperor. The onslaught of the [Qing] bandits in the final years [of the Ming] may have been caused in part because of this [defense of Korea]. Thus our country believes it may have been the cause of the fall [of the Ming], and our lamentations for the dynasty continue to this day.7
In their heart of hearts, the Koreans felt that when they came to the Qing Empire, they were no longer coming to pay tribute to the Son of Heaven, but were simply coming to Beijing on business. They were no longer, in cultural terms, pilgrims, but rather were, in political terms, obedient servants. For these reasons, the records written by these emissaries largely came to be referred to as Missions to Beijing and not Tributes to Heaven. More than a century after the fall of the Great Ming, memories of the dynasty remained clear as ever in Korea, all the way down to the times of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1796) and Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820).
I found it significant that the Koreans were very proud of the way they insisted on continuing to wear clothing in the Ming style and looked down on the new styles of clothing adopted by the Qing Empire. When they wore their clothing in the Ming style, they saw themselves as culturally superior to the Qing. According to their descriptions, the customs of the Qing Empire were already in decline and were no longer a part of Hua-Xia (cultural China) because Confucian rituals in China could not match the purity of those found in Korea. This destruction of ritual orthodoxy and disintegration of Confucian learning gave even more reason for Koreans not to identify with the Qing in terms of culture. Those Korean emissaries who had from the beginning seen the Manchu Qing as barbarians because of their customs and scholarship had even less regard for the Qing state.
Beginning in the seventeenth century and across another three hundred years, the Koreans discovered that the Manchu emperors had misgivings and a sense of anxiety toward Han cultural traditions. These misgivings led them, on the one hand, to promote Confucian learning as a way to silence Han gentry elites, while using high-handed methods of the literary inquisition (wenzi yu) to intimidate educated people. The Koreans attributed this cultural transformation to changes in the race of the rulers of the state, believing that these changes occurred because the emperor was “barbarian” (Hu) and not Han and, therefore, the bloodline of Chinese culture was no longer purely Chinese and had fallen into utter decline. Some believed, in fact, the words written by one Korean emissary: “Now, in All-under-Heaven, the institutions of China (Zhonghua) are preserved only in our country.”8
Who Is China? The View from Japan in the Edo Period
From the seventeenth century onward, even though political and cultural exchanges diminished with an isolationist Japan, a brisk trade continued with the port city of Nagasaki. In books such as Changing Situations between China and Foreigners (Ka’i hentai), Daily Record of the Office of Chinese Interpreters (Tō tsūji kaisho nichiroku), and Overview of Maritime Relations (Tsūkō ichiran), we see numerous records of questionings of Chinese travelers to Nagasaki. The Japanese officials who oversaw these inquiries were not just interested in whether ships arriving in Japan were carrying works by Catholic missionaries, which were considered heretical. Many of their questions sought information about political and military issues in China. One book, for example, quotes an official named Hayashi, who said, “The northern barbarians [that is, the Manchus] seized China forty years ago, but none of these events have been recorded in official histories, so we have no way to distinguish between what is true and what is false.” They inquired, therefore, about whether China was at peace, whether there were any talented men outside of the imperial court, where key defenses against Japan were located, and where important places from ancient and contemporary times were located, and so on. From these questions, we can see what the Japanese were thinking.9 At the same time Korean emissaries made numerous goodwill visits to Japan, and the Japanese were keen to find out information about China from the Koreans, who once again were making tribute visits to China. For example, in the twelfth year of the Shunzhi reign (1655), not long after the Qing had taken power, people in Japan were at a loss to understand the changes under way in China. When a goodwill mission (Tongsinsa) from Korea came to Nagasaki in the tenth month of that year, Hayashi Hōto, the son of Hayashi Gahō (1618–1688), had a long list of questions ready for the visitors. According to records made by Jo Hyeong (1606–1679), a diplomat and ambassador to Japan, Hayashi Hōto’s questions included: “What has happened with the military of the Great Ming? Have the fifteen provinces [of China proper] fallen into the hands of the Qing? Are they continuing to use the calendar based on the reign of the Shunzhi emperor? Has the family line of the Ming emperors been maintained? Are Zheng Zhilong and Wu Sangui alive or dead? Did Li Zicheng of Shaanxi and Zhang Xianzhong of Sichuan escape with their lives?” In this case, the Korean ambassador gave a cautious answer, saying only that “the territories [of China] are far away, and they did not know such details,” but the embassies sent by Korea (as well as the Japanese residence at Busan) always served as an important source of information about China for the Japanese.10
Additionally, when Chinese trading ships traveling to Nagasaki were blown off course into other areas of Japanese waters, they often engaged in written conversations with Japanese literati who were sent out to intervene. These conversations left behind precious written materials that offer a glimpse into the subtle and complicated relations between Chinese people and Japanese people.
When people from foreign lands arrive for the first time, they will often be the object of local peoples’ curiosity and, for this reason, the first impression is often important. Like the Koreans, Japanese people were also taken aback by the clothing worn by Qing officials, because they were quite different from official Chinese imperial clothing described in the historical record. The Japanese asked detailed questions and spent a great deal of effort to record what they saw, and even made illustrations not only to show their strangeness but to express their low opinion of the Qing state. According to Shinoba Seizaburō, the rise of the Qing state led Japanese people of the time to recall the Yuan dynasty, which, in turn, led them to be hostile toward the Manchu Qing.11 For these reasons, after providing a description of the colors of officials’ clothes, the Japanese writer did not forget to add another comment: “The founding emperor of the Qing unified Tartary with China, and rules China wearing the clothing of foreigners from the north, which we see here.”12 Since the Qing no longer wore clothing that was in line with tradition, and since their own clothing could be traced to the proper sources of antiquity, then it was of course the case that ancient Chinese culture could be found in Japan—and not China. It was not only the color of clothing in China, but also music, customs, and history that had all lost their relation to tradition. According to one Honda Shimei, “In your country [that is, Qing-dynasty China], you shave the hair on the top of your heads and wear clothes that are different from ancient times. How can this accord with the rites set out by the Duke of Zhou?”13 Some Japanese people even went so far as to question the legitimacy of the Manchu Qing Empire because of this decline in cultural traditions.14
Japanese people at this time believed that the China of the Han and Tang dynasties had vanished, and the arrangement of positions between the Middle Kingdom and the Four Barbarians had been turned inside out. Although they acknowledged that China was a major country and that Japan was a smaller one, they believed that Japan should be referred to as the “Middle Kingdom,” because only a cultural centers “whose waters and soil are superior to all others and whose personages are the most brilliant in the world” could be called the Middle Kingdom.15 When they saw Han Chinese, then, they were keen to argue:
In ancient times, Empress Jingū conquered the Samhan [three early kingdoms of Korea], and her brilliance illuminated the world. From that time until now, the line of imperial succession has continued without interruption, earning the trust of the people for many generations. How could this not be an ideal form of rulership? Indeed, it is the glory of our land.16
In contrast, they argued, China lost its former glory. As one Japanese scholar put it, “Nowadays the elegant clothing and styles of emperors in former times have been swept away, and everyone has fallen into wearing the stinking queue. The customs of this country are not worth discussion.”17 During these years, then, many in Japan felt a mixture of caution and loathing toward China.
The Qing Empire: Stuck in the Vision of All-under-Heaven from the Han and Tang Dynasties
It is true that, from as far back as the time of the Wanli reign of the Ming dynasty (1572–1620)—when Matteo Ricci had arrived in China—that Chinese people had begun to reach a new understanding of the world. After seeing Ricci’s map, Li Zhizao acknowledged his own sense of shock upon discovering this new knowledge about the world: “The lands of the world are so vast, and are yet but a grain of millet when compared to the heavens, and my home province and town are just the tip of this grain of millet.”18 Later Qu Shisu would also say in his Comments on the Chronicle of Foreign Lands (Zhifang wai ji xiao yan), “According to this map, China occupies one-tenth of Asia, and Asia occupies one-fifth of All-under-Heaven. Therefore, outside of the Spiritual Country of the Red Region [chi xian shen zhou, that is, China], there must be another nine Spiritual Countries of the Red Region that are just as large.” He recognized that, when China took saw itself as a great country, it was a little bit like a frog at the bottom of a well. At this time, the traditional Chinese view of All-under-Heaven began to break apart and collapse, and people came to accept this new version of the world. For these reasons, those strange images and tales of foreign lands that came from the Classic of Mountains and Seas or Record of the Ten Continents came to be displaced by accurate knowledge brought by Westerners. By the time of the Qing dynasty, even major official publications, such as the authoritative Bibliography of the Emperor’s Four Treasuries (Siki quanshu zong mu), which was completed during the Qianlong reign (1735–1796), classified books such as Classic of Mountains and Seas, Record of the Ten Continents, and Classic of Divine Wonders (Shen yi jing) as fiction, not geography. This decision shows an important change in official understandings of geography and the idea of All-under-Heaven. It also shows how people of that time accepted the results of evidential investigation (kao suo) and seeking facts (ze shi), which is also to say that in the century that passed between the time that Ricci arrived in China and the Qianlong reign, views handed down from ancient China about foreign lands (and, by extension, about China itself) had already moved from an imagined All-under-Heaven to a sense of the real “Myriad States” (wanguo).19
Let us return, then, to the problem of East Asia. People in China were also cautious and uneasy about the rise of their neighboring countries to the east and about possible confrontations with them. After protracted efforts to control piracy in the mid-Ming and the intervention in the Imjin War (1592–1598), an official named Zhou Kongjiao wrote that Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea and attempt to stand up as a rival to the Ming Empire demonstrated that “although the dynasty had not had an enemy in two hundred years, it now has enemies from this day forward.” Seeing the threat from Japan, he called on the Ming empire to prepare itself, “lest a surprise turn of events results in a catastrophe that brings despair.”20 The great majority of Chinese people, however, felt no such sense of urgency; this was even more true for the rulers of the Qing. China at this time remained mired in the idea that it was the center of All-under-Heaven, the central state in the tribute system. If we look at paintings such as The Myriad States Pay Tribute to the Emperor (Wanguo lai chao tu), we can see how learned elites and the court still thought they were like the China of the Han and Tang dynasties, receiving ambassadors from different countries who had come to pay obeisance.21 It was because of this outlook that the Qing court maintained its blind optimism and self-regard and why the Qianlong emperor treated the Macartney Embassy from England with such disdain.
But this was only one narrow point of view. It is very clear that, from the middle of the seventeenth century onward, the West was beginning to move into the East, and the three countries of East Asia were beginning to part ways. Even if the Qing Empire was waiting for “the myriad states to pay tribute” and put on the airs of a great country toward Japan and Korea, in terms of culture, neither Japan nor Korea identified with the Qing Empire anymore, and they certainly did not recognize the Qing’s ability to represent “Chinese culture.” By the end of the nineteenth century, these cultural fault lines and mutual hostilities would become even clearer with the unfolding of the Meiji reforms in Japan, Japan’s annexation of the Ryukyu Islands, and the colonization of Taiwan and Korea following the First Sino-Japanese War.
Parting Ways: Did an East Asian Identity Still Exist after the Seventeenth Century?
When we see how groups observed one another, we also come to see those blind spots that are so difficult to discover on one’s own; even more so, we see their differing outlooks and perspectives. Historical records written in Sino-Korean (or hanmun) show us Koreans’ opinions of the Ming and Qing dynasties and let us see the substantial break in Koreans’ views about their political allegiance to China, their duties as a tributary state to China, and their cultural identity in relationship to China. At the same time, Japanese materials also show Japan’s desire to establish an independent international order, as well as the rise of particularism and ethnocentrism, as thinkers from Yamaga Sokō (1622–1685) down to Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) all contributed to a line of thought that held that Japan was a “central state.”22 For these reasons, from the times of the Imjin War and the fall of the Ming (1644) onward, Japan had largely abandoned its posture of cultural identification with the Chinese Empire. How, then, did this transformation in East Asian countries’ views toward the Chinese Empire affect the international situation at the time, as well as the history and ideas of subsequent decades? This is a question that we still need to discuss today.
In recent years, many scholars in Japan, Korea, and China have taken a liking to talking about the problem of “Asia” or “East Asia.” Sometimes these discussions seem to operate with the unspoken assumption that “Asia” or “East Asia” is a cultural region that corresponds to “Europe” or “the West.” But if we say that this East Asian world really exists, then we are only talking about events that took place before the seventeenth century. If, as I have argued, all of this began to change with the seventeenth century, then it is the case that by the end of the seventeenth century the countries of East Asia no longer enjoyed mutual trust, close political relations, or a shared identity. What existed in the Han and Tang dynasties may have been an East Asian cultural community, but this has already broken apart, and what people now look to as a new East Asian cultural community is far from being established.
For these reasons, I believe that if we wish to promote mutual trust and cooperation between “China” and its “periphery,” then we must first examine this period of history and search for a new basis for cultural identity.