2011/01/01 by Adam Bohnet · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Chinese history and philosophy #Japanese History and Culture #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories #Ideology #China #Empire #History #Identity (music) #Ancient history #Genealogy #Chinese society #History of China #Demography #Gender studies #Political science #Sociology #Law #Aesthetics #Philosophy #Politics #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1163/157006511x604013
openalex publication_date 2011/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract Numerous Ming Chinese took refuge in Chosŏn Korea during the early seventeenth century. Despite the supposed sinocentrism of Chosŏ’s elites, refugees from China were treated as belonging to the category of submitting-foreigner ( hyanghwain ), a protected but distinctly humble social status that had been used primarily as a tool for settling Japanese and Jurchen from Chosŏn’s frontiers. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, however, the Chosŏn court considered it incongruous to include Ming Chinese descendants in that category. Chinese lineages were thus distinguished from other submitting-foreigners and reclassified according to the considerably more prestigious category of imperial subjects. This paper explores this change, seeing it as part of a trend in the Qing Empire and indeed in Eurasia as a whole in which identity and subjecthood became increasingly bureaucratized, and loyalties treated as absolute.