조선후기 중화론의 이면과 그 유산

Korean Elites’ Consciousness of Little China under the Qing Dominance and Its Legacy on the Threshold of the Modern Era

With emphasis on Korean consciousness of themselves and others, this article looks at the two-sided consciousness of Little China, which flourished among Korean elites in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By examining what situational factors made the consciousness of Little China a mainstream political ideology in Chosŏn society, this article also examines the real concept of culture, which the elites stressed as evidence for Korea’s Chineseness (hence, ‘Little China’). In doing so, this article employs a methodology in which the Korean designations of the Qing Manchus are compared with those of the Ming Chinese. In a sense, the Ming-Qing change provided Korean elites with a good opportunity to break from the conventional Sino-centrism and develop their own self-consciousness. In the course of the Ming-Qing transition, in fact, the Korean elites attempted to do so by refusing psychologically and ideologically to participate in the new Sino(Manchu)-centric world order in the East Asian sphere. Up to this point, few differences are found in the cases of Japan and Vietnam of the time, which underwent the same international situation in which the Ming Empire was ended and replaced by the Manchu Qing Empire. The question, then, is this: What would fill the ideological vacuum caused by the disappearance of Ming China? Unlike the Japanese and Vietnamese elites who generally made efforts to fill it with their own selves, the Korean elites wanted to fill it with the old China, or the Confucian civilization of the ethnic Han Chinese. In other words, by identifying themselves with the deceased father (the fallen Ming), they were eager to maintain their cultural and national identity, which was not be tarnished with the barbaric Manchu culture. In short, the Korean elites developed their self-consciousness not by relativizing China objectively, but by internalizing it subjectively. By doing so, they sought to overcome the ideological and psychological crisis caused by the new Manchu dominance. The more eagerly they pursued a break from the new Manchu China, therefore, the more tightly they were tied to the old Ming China. This intellectual trend subsequently served as an ideological and practical obstacle to cope more effectively with the new order, which, led by the industrialized imperial powers, infiltrated the East Asian sphere on the threshold of the so-called modern period.