Dissertation Title
Chosŏn Korea’s Grand Repositioning: Qing China, Ryukyu Kingdom, and the End of the East Asian World Order, 1860–1895
Chair: Cheehyung Harrison Kim
(Proposal Defended: September 2023)
Dissertation Abstract: My dissertation examines how Chosŏn used its close relationship with the Qing during the transformation of East Asia’s regional order in the late nineteenth century. Rather than treating Chosŏn’s close ties with the Qing simply as dependence or subordination, I show how Chosŏn rulers drew on Qing power as a resource for political security amid Japanese expansion, domestic instability, and uncertainty about the emerging international law system. By comparing Chosŏn with the Ryukyu Kingdom, my project further reveals that these dilemmas spread beyond the Korean peninsula across the Qing-centered regional order. This raises a serious question: how do politically vulnerable communities pursue survival when the strategies available to them might themselves be ethically problematic? Reliance on Qing power provided Chosŏn with political security, on the one hand, while simultaneously constraining its independence, on the other. My dissertation argues that Chosŏn rulers, while recognizing that Qing military intervention could encroach on Chosŏn’s sovereignty, chose to use Qing power to maintain domestic stability in the face of mutiny, coups, and foreign expansion into the Korean peninsula, all of which carried not only political but also ethical implications.