Chosŏn-Qing Informal Diplomacy and the Opening of Korea, 1876
Presented by Dr. Song Yeol Han
Informal diplomacy refers to the process of personal interactions as crucial elements that often determined the sustainability and efficacy of diplomatic relations between states (Sowerby 2016). The informal diplomacy in early modern East Asia and, in particular, was a site of diplomatic and cultural exchanges to create legitimacy and means of control over internal as well as external challenges. This study focuses on Chosŏn’s informal diplomacy with Qing that foreshadowed Chosŏn Korea’s new diplomatic engagement with Japan in the 1870s. The gunboat diplomacy and economic penetration by Euro-American industrial powers in the nineteenth century required East Asian states to gather intelligence on changing geopolitical conditions and formulate diplomatic counterstrategies.
This study shed light on Kang Wi (姜瑋, 1820–1884), an intellectual who lived at the margin of established social and international order in East Asia. Kang Wi was exposed to both China and Japan in a crucial period, during which both states and individuals were invested heavily in strategic thinking. He had cultivated great potential for Chosŏn Korea’s new diplomatic engagement in the late 1870s. Comparing Kang Wi’s personal account with official diplomatic accounts produced, circulated, and archived by aristocratic court historians provides a unique window that led us to reexamine the process the political and intellectual process toward the 1876 peace agreement as a culmination of Qing and Chosŏn’s concerted effort to grapple with geopolitical uncertainties and anxieties.
About the Author
Dr. Song Yeol Han is a lecturer at East Asia International College in Yonsei University, Wonju campus. Dr. Han is a cultural and intellectual historian of Modern Korea and specializes in the study of Korea’s cultural, intellectual transformation through a comparative understanding of Korea’s recent past in the context of East-West and Intra–Asian connections. He is working on a book project titled “Beyond Nation: Sinographic Network and Korean Nationhood.” By examining the cultural and intellectual history of sinographic literature and transnational discursive practices in modern Korea, it offers a new approach to the question of China and its relation to Korea and how that complicated political and social agenda in the making of Korean Nationhood. Before coming to Yonsei University, he taught at Dickinson College and Seton Hall University.
For more on Dr. Han’s research, see his dissertation: