05/02/18: 23rd Annual Gaston Sigur Memorial Lecture: Empire and Righteous Nation: 600 years of China-Korea Relations–A Discussion with Dr. Odd Arne Westad

Transcript

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Good evening everyone. We’ll go ahead and get started. I recognize many of the faces in the room. For those of you who I don’t recognize, my name is Dr. Benjamin Hopkins. I’m the Director of the Sigur Center here at the Elliott School. It’s my great pleasure to welcome you for our 23rd Annual Lecture. This evening, we have a distinguished guest from Harvard this evening, Professor Arne Westad. Before I introduce Arne however, it’s my pleasure as well to say a couple of words about the Sigur Center. The Sigur Center, for those of you who don’t know, is the university’s center for Asian studies. We have a long and illustrious history and for our namesake, Gaston Sigur, some of his family’s here this evening and I’d like to recognize them. Paul and Susie Sigur are upfront joining us for this evening’s lecture, both of whom are Elliot School alumni. I’ll spare them the years, but in the not too distant past, and I should also note the remembrance of Paul’s mother, Estelle, who passed away peacefully in November of 2017 and we were very sorry to hear of that loss.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
With that said, it’s my pleasure to introduce Professor Arne Westad, who is the S.T. Lee professor of US and Asian relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Before coming to Harvard in 2015, Arne was the school’s professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science [LSE], where he arrived as a professor in 1998, the same year I arrived at the same institution in my first year of undergraduate studies.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Now, while at LSE he directed the LSE IDEAS Institute, which is a leading center for international affairs, diplomacy, and strategy. Then, like any good academic, he jumped the pond to join us over here in 2015. A leading global thinker, he is an expert on contemporary international history and on Eastern Asian region particularly. His numerous publications include The Global Cold War, Third World Interventions, and The Making a Modern Times, which was the winner of the Bancroft Prize, amongst other many recognitions. He served as General Editor for three volumes of the Cambridge History of the Cold War and is the author of the Penguin History of the World, presently in its sixth edition. He has also authored Restless Empire: China in the World since 1750, which was published in 2013, and the winner of the Asia Society Book Award, and just recently published The Cold War: A World History, hot off the presses in autumn of 2017.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Today he will be speaking to us about his new book project, which is both a return to form with its focus on East Asia but also an extension of his repertoire back in time. He has entitled today’s talk, Chinese-Korean Relations, Empire and Righteous Nation, 600 Years of China-Korea Relations. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Professor Arne Westad.

Professor Arne Westad:
Thank you very much Ben for that wonderful introduction. It’s great to be back in Washington. It’s wonderful to be back at GW – one of my favorite institutions this side of the pond because it’s done so much to develop research in the areas that I’m interested in. Not just here at the Sigur Center at the Elliott School, but in more general terms as well. Dealing with Asia, dealing with the Cold War, the things that I’m most preoccupied with. It’s wonderful to meet up with old friends. Ben said, I’ve known him since he was an undergraduate at LSE and it’s been wonderful to see that he has really made his mark in terms of international affairs and history, and done so here. Good match if I may say so, both for GW and Ben. But also a number of other people who I see in the audience who I’ve interacted with over the years here in Washington.

Professor Arne Westad:
I want to thank the Sigur Center, I want to thank the Elliott School of International Affairs, and Ben of course especially for inviting me to do this lecture. I also want to, since I had a chance to talk a little bit with Gaston Sigur’s family before we started up here, to recognize Gaston Sigur in his role, maybe first and foremost, as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs during the Reagan administration. I had the privilege of working on Mr. Sigur’s papers in the Reagan Presidential Library. Both of them were released not long ago, and some of his efforts have a very direct connection to what is the situation today between United States and South Korea.

Professor Arne Westad:
That was one of the many issues that he worked on us as Assistant Secretary and where I think quite a lot of progress was made at the time, some of which didn’t quite materialize later on, but may in part, I’ll get to this later on, form a pattern for some of the interactions that we see on the Korean peninsula today. So it’s doubly meaningful to be here tonight to give a lecture in his name.

Professor Arne Westad:
It’s a pretty tall order that we have before us tonight, ladies and gentlemen. It’s not easy within about 50 minutes, which is what I promised them, that I would stick to, to give an overview of a very important bilateral relationship over a period of roughly 600 years. I will divide this into three parts. In the first part, the first 15 minutes or so, I will deal with 500 years of China-Korea relations, in the second 15 minute interval, I will deal with about 100 years of China-Korea relations, and in the third part, I will deal with the last two weeks or so of China-Korea relations. I think that’s about right in terms of where people’s interests are. But one mustn’t forget the first part in order to try to make sense of what is going on today.

Professor Arne Westad:
That’s the reason why I chose this particular topic and why I’m making a small book that Harvard Press will publish probably at the beginning of next year on this topic coming out of these lectures. I gave a first version of the lectures at Harvard last year, then they went into three lectures over three consecutive evenings. I also have done versions of this in Beijing and in Seoul. I’m looking forward to the discussion of them here. Now I’ve done the three capitals, but now I’ve done it here in Washington as well.

Professor Arne Westad:
So first of all, the title. The title is always important when you try to address something, particularly if you do it as an undergraduate lecture, but also when you do it for a broader audience. So why on earth have I called this lecture, “Empire and Righteous Nation”? Now let’s start with “righteous,” and not surprisingly, that refers to Korea. It doesn’t mean that all Koreans are righteous. It doesn’t mean that any Korean states at any point or any form has necessarily been a righteous state. But the term is used here to indicate that a search for a righteous approach to domestic and international affairs has preoccupied generations of Koreans very, very much. Perhaps more than what you’ve seen in many other countries.

Professor Arne Westad:
Some of my Korean friends say that I mix up “righteousness” and “rectitude,” which are not exactly the same, but I’ll talk more about that later on in terms of the overall approach. But do bear in mind that slight tongue in cheek reference to righteousness that’s here in the title. Before I get to the Korean definition of the interactions, we have to start with China. The reason why we have to start with China is because China is the empire of the title. The heavier, if you like, of the two entities. In order to understand something about China’s relationship with Korea over this long period of time, I think it makes sense to think a little bit about what an empire is.

Professor Arne Westad:
Now, empires come in many different forms and in different shapes. They’ve been around for a very long time, at least for 5,000 years, since the Assyrian Empire around 2000 BC. So what is it if we try to compare these various forms of empire that connect them? A central authority obviously connect them. If there is no central authority, there is no empire. There also has to be a systematic form of thinking to regulate the relationship between the center and the various peripheries that exist within an empire. That’s roughly where the comparisons end, because after that, empires tend to be very different and behave very, very differently.

Professor Arne Westad:
Some empires colonize externally, not all empires do. Some employers are born more or less in the shape that they have later on and can stay with for a very long time. If you think about it in the European context, Ireland for instance, Nigeria, both settled by colonialists coming from the Imperial center. That tends to raise a certain reference to Korea and the Korean experience in this, being on the borders of the imperial center. But in this case, Chinese settlements in Korea were exceedingly rare during the period that we’re looking at. There were people who settled on both sides of the border, but in very, very small numbers and certainly very different in terms of numbers from the only real attempt at settling foreign colonialists in Korea, which was during the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, when more than one million Japanese settled in Korea. That was a much bigger wave than anything that you saw during the long period of China-Korea interaction.

Professor Arne Westad:
If you really want to go back in time, and I think this makes sense for people who want to look at this relationship, it is useful to think about the similarities and the differences between the Qing and Han Empires in China, or in the Chinese area, and the Hellenistic and Roman Empires in the West. Not because of the similarities between the two or the differences, so much that of them created the format for empire in Asia and Europe. Some of the aspects of these formats have been with us for the last 2000 years and are probably still around when we discuss what empire means in a sort of broader sense.

Professor Arne Westad:
On the Chinese side, I think what most of the various Chinese empires that have developed since Qing and Han, and there have been many of them of course, what they have in common are first and foremost, two things. There is on the Chinese side, a sense of cultural centrality within its wider region. The region is in many ways, by all of these Chinese empires going up to the People’s Republic today, a definition of their world. But it’s also important to see this within a framework of China’s orientation, and this is what many Westerners get wrong. China has always been oriented eastward, towards the Eastern seaboard, with some very brief exceptions. During the Tang Empire for instance, and maybe briefly during the Song. But for most of Chinese history, its orientation has been towards the east, away from the rest of Eurasia but towards Korea, towards Japan, towards Vietnam. I think that’s important. Cultural centrality, but within a direction in terms of where the gaze is turned.

Professor Arne Westad:
Secondly, in terms of connecting these various empires, going from the Han and up to today, a strong emphasis on hierarchy. Hierarchies internationally, hierarchies domestically, and through that an emphasis on bureaucratic governance. This is what Benjamin Schwartz calls this tremendous weight of the state in China and in Chinese governance systems. Many empires and many national states have an emphasis on the state for understandable reasons. Russia, for instance, is often used as an example of this, but you find other European examples as well, but there was nothing quite like China in terms of the longevity, the durability of this emphasis on the state as being at the center of Chinese civilization and Chinese society. I think it’s important to bear that in mind when we think about its foreign relations as well, which brings us to the tribute system. I promise to bring up the tribute system in this talk tonight and I will.

Professor Arne Westad:
The tribute system is, as my Harvard predecessor John King Fairbank defined it, was a system to which China, through – in slightly different ways and he was open to that – through various empires regulated its relationship with its wider reach. Now I must confess that the more I have looked at this in terms of Chinese foreign policy over the past 2000 years, the more it has struck me that the tribute system has been more of a system at Harvard than it ever was in Asia. There is no doubt that tribute existed and that it was important, and there is no doubt that various Chinese empires integrated their neighbors, particularly culturally, in a very deliberate kind of way. But it was done differently towards different areas and at different times. So emphasizing these differences is essential for understanding the relationship between China and Korea because there is no other relationship within the region that it can really be compared to.

Professor Arne Westad:
It’s a different kind of relationship, today and in history than what China has with any of its other neighbors, and I think that is important. So tribute existed but there was no unified system. There were different frameworks of tribute, of trade, of terminology, of the East that governed this longer period in terms of China’s interaction with the outside world. So the two Chinese empires that we cover tonight are the Ming and the Qing. The Ming, as most of you here will know, runs for almost 300 years from the 1360’s to the 1640’s or thereabouts, and the Qing from the 1640’s to 1912, also for almost 300 years. So these are long time periods, right? These are qualities that survived for a very long period of time – also by Chinese standards, by the way. That is important because if you look at the relationship between China and Korea, that sense of durability, endurance in terms of how the qualities were organized, has a very significant impact on the relationship itself.

Professor Arne Westad:
It also has a great deal of impact in terms of how the two sides saw each other. How authority, for instance, is understood. I often, when I lecture on this, draw on Max Weber’s and his typologies of the state with regard to this, both on the Chinese, and as we’ll hear later on, on the Korean side, what Weber calls “traditional authority.” If there’s going to be anything that’s meaningfully called tradition, it has to be around for a while. That’s true, I think, for these two Chinese imperial institutions and even more so for the Joseon on the Korean side of it, we’ll get to a little bit later on because it lost it even longer. What’s particularly important with Weber, is not so much the characterization and sometimes had been made into a caricature. It is whether this insistence that, and I caught him on this, the bureaucratic administration as in China means “fundamentally domination through knowledge.” So that emphasis on knowledge lasting for a long period upon the accumulation of knowledge as a ordering factor within these empires and how it deals with the outside world. That’s where I think the emphasis ought to be, not on an integral system or of political integration, but on how knowledge is used from the Chinese perspective, first and foremost, to understand the world around them because some of the elements of that knowledge are still with us today and that’s something that I think is crucial. It’s not just crucial for China, of course, it’s true with other empires as well. Knowledge reframe empires, right? In general. I think Ben can tell you a great deal about this. And that’s important, but it’s particularly important when you deal with an empire, which is acting towards immediate and contiguous neighbors.

Professor Arne Westad:
But Russia perhaps is the only other modern example that we have of that kind of imperial expansion. Which then brings us to nation, and this is the more controversial part of what they have to say initially. So Ming and Qing China, they’re many things, but no one can meaningfully imagine them as nations. There were empires consisting of different pots with an imperial institution at the center, which was deliberately transnational, always was. It had to be because there were so many different people’s groups, identities or where which it ruled. Under one predominantly leads an attempt at expanding a central culture. Absolutely. But with an emphasis necessarily on difference and differences. But if we don’t draw the similarities over to Korea, does it make sense to speak of 20th century Korea, as I do indirectly in my title, as a nation.

Professor Arne Westad:
So historians have tried their best to be good at this, at eluding that question by simply pointing to the great coherence in cultural and linguistic terms of people who today live on the Korean peninsula, right? A process that goes back in genetic terms at least 3000 years. And it’s relatively interrupted, the relatively uninterrupted. In linguistic terms and many of you here will know this modern Korean, derives from middle Korean, which in turn derives from, you probably guessed it, old Korean, which has its roots in some form of proto Korean. You know, if you go back 2000 years or so. So this is something that’s been around for a very long time and there is still two ways about that. You can’t get away from that. There is a continuity in these particular terms, which is of course not everything right, but is significant in terms of the population and in terms of the language that they speak.

Professor Arne Westad:
But some of this, as I wrote it elsewhere, it’s a typical historian’s copt, right? So not everything that is distinct becomes a nation. In any meaningful sense of the term. I like, quite alright, the Oxford English dictionary definition of a nation, they say that nation is specified as a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture or language inhabiting a particular state or territory. So that definition emphasizes something in common and it emphasizes co-location, which is in my view, about as far as you can go when you are talking about nations. If you want to be more specific than that, you always get into trouble.

Professor Arne Westad:
So one of my older colleagues at LSE on a [inaudible 00:22:49] was the one who first pointed out with great force that in order to understand nations, you have first to understand nationalists, right? And his was very much a contemporary European take on the concept of nation. Gellner said nationalists create the nation not the other way around, right? And that’s been followed up by other people, they said, no we never see tradition on this, totally a myth, it’s more recent, all of them who query and challenge the concept of nation in terms of how it’s being created and I’m in favor of all of it. I think it’s, I think it’s very, very important to do, but I also think it’s important to see differences between different cultural traditions in terms of how you understand that cohesiveness that we sometimes put under the heading of “nation.”

Professor Arne Westad:
So “Korean,” is defined in terms of its history possibly in terms of it’s an ethnicity, certainly in terms of its culture and civilization, something which became particularly important against the Qing. Being in it, at least for me in a meaningful comparative sense, much of what those who defined concepts of nation in 19th century Europe seem to have been looking for. So therefore I think it’s meaningful at least for the sake of debate. If you think about Korea going back at least to the late 16th century as some kind of national, a proto nation, in terms of its cohesiveness, probably wouldn’t have been a wrong [term] otherwise.

Professor Arne Westad:
Okay, so what then about the righteousness in all of this? Now righteous in classical Chinese is “yi” or “we” in Korean, which means defined in different forms, moral fitness, loyalty, fidelity to principles, possibly also rectitude. I mean meaning the quality of being correct or being true. But I particularly like righteousness. I mean the state or quality of being righteous and just. And the reason I like that so much is that in this classic Neo-Confucian concept coming out of 11th and early 12th century China, that’s where most of the discussion has been. What does it mean in a Confucian context to be righteous or to be just? How do you organize your life and your state and your society in order to live up to those kinds of ideals? How do you fight for it when necessary?

Professor Arne Westad:
It’s not unimportant that in this context that the Korean popular army that was raised against Japanese invasions into 1580s was named the Righteous Army or we’d be wrong, right? This has a significance in terms of the definition and that’s not the same thing you’re saying that all Koreans are righteous, but it is saying that this concept has had a particular meaning in Korean Neo-Confucianism that goes all the way up to today. And I think it also plays a role in terms of the days reductions between China and Korea, and the United States and Korea for that matter. So let me then just provide a brief overview of Korea and China coming out of the late 14th century and why the late 14th century? Well, this is because the Ming and the great Joseon Dynasty were created roughly at the same time.

Professor Arne Westad:
I never meant very much about the same kind of things. So the Ming was about a revitalization of Chinese tradition. But it was about regulating China’s relations to surrounding states. It’s fascinating to look in the late 14th early, 15th century, how quickly that ordering of China’s relationship with the outside world appears on the main agenda, right? It was something that they were really preoccupied with. In that sense, the Ming was a project. It was a specific project connected to various forms of Neo-Confucian thinking.

Professor Arne Westad:
But if the Ming was a project, the Joseon in Korea was even more of a project connected to the same kind of ideas. It could be said to be in many ways the supreme Neo-Confucian project, right? Because it was so distinctly ideological, ideological within the sense of state building. But what did it consist of? I think it’s important to understand that as an attempt at a complete remaking of Korean society, according to the principles of Neo Confucianism. It was very narrow in many ways, but it was also deep in terms of what the state and significant parts of society outside of the state eventually came to do. So state and society were structured according to the moral principles that the Joseon elites saw as governing the universe; harmony, hierarchy, family, self-cultivation and learning.

Professor Arne Westad:
And not so surprised to hear this, the concept of righteousness: how you should live your lives. So Joseon was an ideologically driven state to a remarkable degree for as long as it lasted, all the way up to the beginning of the 20th century. It was also remarkably successful to the degree that it survived the biggest challenge of the time, which was very much as Korea is today, being caught between China and Japan. To expanding Chinese empires, the Ming and the Ching, and the reconstitution of Japanese power.

Professor Arne Westad:
And it outlasted all of the political rearrangements in China and Japan simply by going on and on and on and never giving up, which again, is very much, I think, dependent on the ideological framework that underpinned it and the conviction about these values. Surviving the great East Asian wars, which I don’t have time to go into today, of the late 16th century, was quite a feat. And the Joseon were able to do it simply because the refuse to capitulate, because capitulation would have meant giving up on these ideas that they believe govern not just Korea, but governed the region or for that matter that govern the universe. So ideology is a very important part of this.

Professor Arne Westad:
From that idea also came the concepts of China, when the Qin then replace the Ming in the early 17th century. With the Korean idea of that transition being that it was fundamentally illegitimate. Now, the Korean state was not suicidal, so it didn’t try to proclaim to everyone that the Qing, the new project that they’re taking power in China, was illegitimate.

Professor Arne Westad:
But it’s no doubt that there’s your evidence from Korea for that time period to show that that’s what they actually believed. To the point of thinking that civilization – at least in the 17th century – that civilization was a lost cause in China and it therefore had to be preserved in Korea. And from that period comes this idea, which you can sometimes find in Korea, even today, North and South, that Korea is – to some extent compared to China -civilizationally superior.

Professor Arne Westad:
It has been able to keep ideas intact that have not quite worked out on the Chinese. Now Koreans have always been divided under this, right? So the majority of Korean elites, when you get into the 18th century, possibly even the late 17th century, we’re happy to make the peace with the Qing, because it figured within the Korean world system. The system had to have a center and that center was China. More about that in a little bit.

Professor Arne Westad:
But it also meant that much of this relationship was undertaken with a significant degree of skepticism. And thinking again about current China-Korean relations, I mean where much of this comes from, North and South. And this is what so many policymakers in this town do not get, that that has always been there, right? Or at least it’s been there for a very, very long time in the Qing-Joseon case, accept the Qing as rulers of China.

Professor Arne Westad:
Accept a vassal relationship to the Qing state paying tribute to Qing emperor, but set up very clear regulations from the Korean perspective in terms of interactions with China limiting tribute missions. For instance, going in both directions so that the incorrect understanding, or righteousness if you like, or on Neo-Confucianism, should not spread in Korea because that would be very bad. So for about 300 years, the Koreans were able to stick to this.

Professor Arne Westad:
This came under pressure only much later, when the Qing, very much inspired by the West in the late 19th century, started to reinvent themselves as a more ordinary imperialist. Not the kind of traditional relationship that had existed between China and Korea. But up to then there was a certain ritualism that was important, you could call it if you like, a very uncommon form of sovereignty on the Korean side.

Professor Arne Westad:
The idea that Korea existed in a special relationship with China, which was the [inaudible 00:03:32] under which Koreans operated. But in a way, by accepting limitations to Korean sovereignty, The Joseon were able to solidify its domestic power. I sometimes think about this a little bit like Western European elites and United States after the Second World War; a role that was gradually taken over by the European Union.

Professor Arne Westad:
You give away some sovereignty in order to rescue the state and the roles of the elite within the state, right? But you never give up on the idea of sovereignty per se, and that resides in your own country. That’s a similarity with China and Korea that I find actually quite meaningful. On the other hand, one has to be extremely careful. We’re thinking that all of Korea’s relationship in this long period to China is mere pretense and this is an era that you sometimes find among young Koreans today. There’s sort of a very Realist, with a capital R, approach to China, Korea relations over a long period of time, basically saying, “Oh, all of this is something we had to do because they forced us to do it.” That’s also not true. I mean the relationship, ideologically, is much deeper than that. If you look at Korean texts from the early Qing era, you find that it’s full of it. The perception on the Korean side, or China as the center of most things, it’s something that has lost it for a very, very long time, certainly up to the 20th century. In some ways even to the 20th century. And when I teach this, I often quote, I can relate Korean Neo-Confucian, a guy called Yi Hangno, who wrote under the impact of the Opium Wars in China in the early part of the 19th century in reaction against Western thinking that would replace China with Western ideas as the center of world development. And Yi was a Korean Neo-Confucian, what a particular conservative one either point or way. I mean, Yi was regarded as being one of the most interesting political philosophers of his time. This is something he wrote in the 1840, I’ll quote it.

Professor Arne Westad:
A little bit of length, but it’s an important quote. So this is what Yi writes after the Qing empire has lost its first wars against the British [from “Sinifying the Western Barbarians”]. “When Chinese civilization encounters a barbarian people, the barbarians are transformed by Chinese ways into a civilized people. Barbarians look up to China and they are delighted to receive its civilizing influence. This is the way things are, this is the natural order of things. This is the way human beings ought to feel. China is like the root, a plant supplying nourishment for the branches and leaves. It’s like the hands and feet, the protected belly and chest of the human body. This can never change. These Europeans, referring to the British, these Europeans come from a land far away from China. So it’s only natural that their customs are quite different from Chinese customs. Like children of peasant households in Korea, though they study Confucian writings as hard as they can, they can never grasp the structure and organization of those writings as well as children from families that have been studying Confucianism for generations.” And on and on it goes like this. This is not just pretense, right? This is a fairly deep understanding of China as being at the center of what is a common culture, a common civilization of which Korea is also part. It’s not the same thing as recognizing any kind of Chinese state, but it’s a way of recognizing China’s cultural centrality. So in my view, this only starts to change very late in the 19th century. And it starts to change in pretty catastrophic ways under pressure from emperors in Japan and from domestic pressures because of rebellions and political dissension within Korea itself, right? Some of which not all of which, some of which has set off by foreign interventions. So as I said earlier on, the Qing empire, which also goes on for a very long time, much longer than most people in the West in the 19th century thought that it would, it fights back, right? And one of the ways in which it fights back is that it tries to transform its relationship to surrounding states in the image of Western appearance. So, from the 1870s on, China very much starts to redefine its relationship with Korea as say France or Britain would do with regard to its colonies. And it’s no chance of working. I mean, in my view and most historians view.

Professor Arne Westad:
For two reasons, one is that it does violence entirely to the traditional relationship that had been established between the two countries. But also because of the rise of Japan that happened simultaneously. So this is what then leads to the 1894-95 war between China and Japan. The first war that China [inaudible 00:09:20] loses against another East Asian state and a war that’s very much fought over the relationship with Korea. And I think this is something that influences Korea very, very deeply, but in different kinds of ways. People think differently about this, not just in terms of the ideologic competition of Korea, which I’m going to talk more about in a second, but also because of the idea or different ideas of what China really tried to do in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Some would say, what China was trying to do was to protect Korea against Japan.

Professor Arne Westad:
But others would say the Chinese and the Japanese were two thieves on the same market. Both of them were out to dominate Korea. They only did it in very different ways. What is really important to me is that it is during this time period that what you could call modern Korean nationalism comes of age. In many ways, this is Korea’s deepest tragedy. That many Koreans stopped to envisage themselves as the very first population group in Asia as a nation.

Professor Arne Westad:
As an integral nation, just as the time when Korea loses its national independence and becomes a Japanese colony, which is in itself a gradual process, I think that all of Korea’s history in the 20th century and up to today is influenced by that relationship and by that set of events. It’s not going to give rise to an intensity of Korean nationalism, which is still with us today in two other different folds, which do have something in common.

Professor Arne Westad:
So one is what you could call the … For lack of a better word, a traditionalist approach to Korean nationalism. The [inaudible 00:11:32] Syngman Rhee approach to Korean nationalism. Rhee was the first Korean to get his PhD from the United States from Princeton in 1910 the very year in which Korea lost its notional independence to Japan. And what he wanted to see was a return to the roots of Korean nationhood the way he saw it, supported by more than organization and technology.

Professor Arne Westad:
So it’s not traditionalism in terms of, I mean, it’s a reinvented tradition, as most traditions are, right? But it’s still something that he believed echoes out of the Korean past. And the alternative coming roughly at the same time, slightly later is Korean communism, also intensely nationalist with, very gradually up to 1945, Kim Il-sung becoming the key figure mainly as we know, thanks to his role in working with the Soviets.

Professor Arne Westad:
Now the Korean communist tradition is very interesting, because in it you also find deep echoes of Korea system. I mean, the idea that Korean communism is just something that’s constituted in some very problematic ways in the 1920s, doesn’t really make that much sense. What is more important I think in terms of the relationship with China, is that Chinese and Korean communism grew up roughly at the same time and got intertwined. Chinese Communist party was from the very beginning uncertain whether Korean communism should be regarded as separate from China. I think that’s something that also lasted for a relatively long period of time. And as we know today, and several of the people here on the audience have worked on this, we have a lot of Soviet documents that show this very, very clearly. How difficult it was for the Chinese communists to figure out that Korean communism was a separate tradition from the old. Some of that I think is still with us today. What bound them together? What bound Chinese and Korean communism together was the fight against a common enemy. Meaning first and foremost Japan, but also the traditions that they saw within their own countries as holding their communities back. And one thing that I always feel sorry that Rhee would put emphasis on is the degree to which the Koreans who lived and worked in China on the 1920s and 1930s for that matter, both in communist and nationalist areas, how they came to define much of the ideas about what a modern Korea would be.

Professor Arne Westad:
We have some literature on that, but not very much. So the idea here, both on the traditionalist and the communist side is the need to find a specific Korean modality, free from Japanese occupation and in some form of communication with Korea’s past. When learning from the mistakes of the Joseon as they saw it, but also having some kind of relationship with other forms of nationalism in East Asia. And maybe first and foremost through China. That’s a pretty tall order.

Professor Arne Westad:
I mean, it’s not easy to do, particularly at the point where you have already lost your national independence, right? And most of this happens in exile away from your own country. This helps me to understand the intensity that the ideological framework for competition within Korea was fueled by after the Japanese collapse in 1945. I think the idea, which is very much held in Korea, both North and South, that the division of Korea in the late 1940s came out of the Cold War. It came out of the Sino-Soviet US set of rivalry. I think that’s only partially true. I think it also came out of the ideological division among Koreans themselves. I mean, how really difficult that is to recognize today. I sometimes go as far when I really want to provoke my Korean friends by saying that, I don’t think it’s entirely farfetched that after 1945 for the first three years or so, there were real opportunities for a united Korea if there had been any willingness among the traditionalists and communists on the peninsula to pursue that kind of path. Later on it became more difficult, when the Cold War hardened as an international system, it became much more difficult to do. But I do think that parts of the responsibility for that not happening after the collapse of the Japanese empire, actually has to do with ideological developments within Korea itself. Not all of it, but some of it does. And this of course then leads to the tragedy, the ultimate tragedy of the Korean, which I won’t have time to go into in detail here today. But of course it’s the defining part of what happened. It’s not just in Korea but in all of Eastern nations of the day.

Professor Arne Westad:
The Chinese involvement in the Korean war is also an enormous significance for understanding China, Korean relationship today. The idea that any Chinese hold that China was sacrificed its own in order to protect Korea against Western imperialism is something that is very, very deeply held in China. Even among the more contemporary generation of policymakers. And that’s sort of why the end of the Maoist era in China – I mean it lived on, I think – up to the group of leaders that are around there now through to the Deng Xiaoping reforms.

Professor Arne Westad:
This sense, that there is some kind of responsibility, particularl responsibility because of it’s sacrifice during the Korean war, that China has all of Korea, not just the North but for that matter the South as well. And of course you can hear the echoes here of that earlier time period that I spent so much time here on explaining. So where does that leave us in terms of China and the two Koreas today?

Professor Arne Westad:
So as we’ve seen recently, not only is this a complicated relationship, but it’s also a very uncertain relationship. I’m just back from Beijing where I spent a lot of time discussing Korea with Chinese friends and colleagues and others. The current Chinese leadership is absolutely convinced that they have to be connected to whatever solution comes out of the conflict on the Korean peninsula. And for that matter of US policy, both with regard to North and South Korea.

Professor Arne Westad:
The Chinese are aware of the weaknesses of the North Korean state. Maybe more aware of it sometimes than what people are in other countries. I generally, when I teach this, go as far as saying that I’ve never met any informed Chinese. I mean, people who actually work on this problem, who believe that the North Korean state is going to survive. They think it’s going to go in one form or another. They don’t like that idea. They want to postpone it for as long as possible. What China wants more than anything else in state terms on the Korean principle is stability. But that’s not the same thing as believing that North Korea, even with its current reforms is an entity that would survive on its own. If they listen more to the Chinese, of course that’s another matter. If they went through the same transformation in social and economic terms that China has gone through, they could survive, they could even flourish.

Professor Arne Westad:
But as I said, I’ve yet to meet any Chinese who believe that the North Korean leadership is actually willing to do that, in a form that the Chinese would recognize anyway. Because some of this is also based on more recent history, the North Koreans coming in the mid 1990s where according to Chinese estimates at least half a million people starved to death, which is not a good advertisement for any regime in terms of what you are capable of doing, when you need to reform yourself, and when you need to transform your policies.

Professor Arne Westad:
So, what is the most likely outcome in terms of the situation that we have today. I mean, China has invested a lot in trying to put pressure on the North Korean regime to come to some kind of negotiated reduction of tension. Including crucially negotiating about the North Korean nuclear arsenal. What was really striking this time when I was in Beijing was that absolutely everyone I spoke to underlined the need for eventual full denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. I didn’t find a single person who said what you sometimes can here in this term, that the relationships North Korea now should be about arms limitation rather that denuclearization. But you can see how that goes together with all the Chinese policies, right? I mean, particularly if things on the Korean peninsula are going to get unstable for internal reasons, the last thing that Chinese want to see is that happening under a circumstance in which a nuclear weapons could possibly be on the loose, right? That’s a worst case scenario from a Chinese perspective. Big question is of course, how much influence China actually has in North Korea? And my view of that is that it is limited and in decline. So, that’s the other thing that is often misunderstood. In Washington, is that China could fix this. China can’t, but it could play a positive role and it should play a more positive role than what it has played so far particularly in working together with United States, maybe most crucially of all working together with South Korea, which is the last best hope that the Chinese have more long-term for stability on the Korean peninsula. This is what makes the current Chinese position so immensely contradictory. And I think it’s only possible to understand in light of the post that I’ve been reviewing today. It’s clear to any Chinese who wants to see that China’s interests, more long term, lie with South Korea with which it has a very powerful relationship in economic terms, but also increasingly in cultural terms.

Professor Arne Westad:
So I mean, in all parts of Beijing or Shanghai or Tianjin or Hangzhou where I was recently, where you could always think that you’ve been transplanted to Korea: K-cosmetics, K-pop, K-surgery, lots of it around. Popularity of South Korean television, lots of soft power, all the kind that you wouldn’t find elsewhere. So some people, again, very often in the United States would write this off in time and say, “This doesn’t matter, it’s the power relations that matter.”

Professor Arne Westad:
I think that would be wrong. Young Chinese today have a very powerful impression of South Korea as a country that has got a lot of things, right, including sort of [inaudible 00:24:21] as they would say. Things that have not been solved in China or things that they do not particularly like about China, and the government needs to take that into consideration. And additional costs to the tremendous significance of economic and technological cooperation that happens between the two countries.

Professor Arne Westad:
So to me the solution is not so much an attempt to return to the past in terms of negotiations, but to try to think, can you? To try to think about how we can get hopefully through the next stage a meeting between Kim Jong-un and President Trump that doesn’t blow up on all of us. Two people actually sitting around the table talking about the only thing that at the moment really matters, which is a denuclearization and the peace treaty, and I think they have to come together. On this I actually do agree with some of the points that the Chinese make. You can’t look at one without looking at the other. What the Chinese would want to get out of this is some kind of guarantees that they’ve looked at what happened in Germany in 1990, 1991 and they do not want to repeat of that under any circumstances. So, for China to accept a form, an integrated, if not united Korea, that still has a close security alignment with United States is out. I mean, China is not going to accept that. So if one on the US side thinks that the German solution is possible, a united Germany within NATO is possible in the Korean peninsula, forget it. The idea that China could be confronted with a fait accompli in Korea, forget it. China would take action to prevent that. That’s how significant Korea is with China. So the stakes are incredibly high with regard to this, right, even when you get to the negotiating stage. So this is what I’m hoping for the region, I mean we now have a unique opportunity to get people to sit down and to talk about these things. And also just because before we’ve been unsuccessful, does that mean that we shouldn’t try again? Absolutely not. This is the best opportunity probably in our lifetime so far that we’ve seen for dealing with some of these issues.

Professor Arne Westad:
We don’t know whether it will be successful, but I do think that the overview of China-Korean relations that are given tonight give us some hope that in terms of the values and ideas and concepts, images that go into it, that that past can actually play a positive role with regard to a solution of some of our current problems. So maybe this is just the historian in me being too optimistic. Normally historians are not optimistically, we’re quite a pessimistic race. But on this I do see some of the echoes of the past actually playing to our advantage. So thank you very much. [Audience clapping]

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Well, thank you Arne for, I think what we all can agree, was the very thought-provoking and in-depth consideration of the long history of the Korean-Chinese relations and how that continues to affect today. I won’t abuse my position of the chair greatly, I have one comment and then one question, then we’ll open to the floor. My comment is that at the end as you were portraying the cultural capital that Korea now exerts in China, that the K-pop in Shanghai and such.

Professor Arne Westad:
The K everything.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Yeah, the K everything in Shanghai. I was looking over my notes and how when you were talking about the Joseon civilization project that it very much echoed the constancy or continuity through that. My question actually goes back to something you mentioned with regard to the Joseon in the earlier period. And I’d be interested in both hearing its current manifestation if there is one. But you characterize the relationship between Qing China and Joseon Korea as an uncommon form of sovereignty, in which China performs a [inaudible 00:28:52] and as you portrayed it, Korea accepts that limited external sovereignty in order to solidify its internal sovereignty. And I thought it was interesting that you almost contradicted but offered a paradox and then comparing that to a contemporary situation, namely the United States and post-war Europe.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Given my own specialty of South Asian history, I also heard residences of the princely states within British India and the idea of paramountcy. And it also brought to mind some of my own current work in which British legal scholars in the 19th century, very contrary to the way political science thinks of it today, did not see sovereignty as indivisible, but rather saw it as infinitely divisible.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
What is indivisible according to these scholars was independence. So, I wonder if you could maybe, if it applies at all, that uncommon form of sovereignty that you talked about in the Imperial context of the early modern period. Does that resonate today and does that give a template or idea of where this might be moving forward?

Professor Arne Westad:
That’s very good. So, if we start with the latter, will Korea, like all other countries in Eastern Asia, see a China that is more predominant economically, strategically, politically, and eventually militarily, than what we have seen over the past 150 years? That’s certainly true. I think one has to be very careful with believing that China – you hear this very often – I think part of the reason why my last China book, Restless Empire sold so well, particularly in this part of the United States, inside the beltway, is that some people believe that the region now is returning to High Qing, returning to what East Asia looked like around 1750.

Professor Arne Westad:
I don’t see that. Nationalism in China has been on the rise. China is, in my view today, an empire in form that has begun to think of itself as a nation state, which is problematic. But nationalism has also been on the rise everywhere else. So the idea that China today could deal with Korea, not to mention a country like Vietnam on its southern border, in terms of anything that could meaningfully be construed as as sovereignty or even tribute, I think is very, very far-fetched. Countries have tried to do that sort of thing to Vietnam in the past and it’s never ended well.

Professor Arne Westad:
So in that sense, that solution is out, right, for today. But if we go back and if we think about how the 19th century is infinitely interesting with regard to this in Asia as a whole. From the Ottoman lands and all the way to Japan, right? Because you have so many different kinds of sovereignty and sovereignty of connection. So various forms that are at play, some of which come from within Asia and some of which come from elsewhere, not just from Europe by the way, but also from other parts of the Middle East. And they become very, very quickly – and India is the best example of this, of course – they become hybrid, right? This is how international law is created in many ways. Out of that colonial moment, but not just in a form that can be dictated by European empires and that’s what the princely states meet, right, in the Indian context. And this is what the difference between sovereignty, the divisibility of sovereignty, and the special position to use the legal term, of independence, actually have to tell us that very often this is about capability. It’s about capability. First of all, it was in terms of imagining different kinds of world order, sorting how things are supposed to work, but also practical capability. In terms of what you are, or capacity, you know, what you are able to do, where you would prioritize your efforts.

Professor Arne Westad:
And on that I see a direct connection both to Ming and maybe especially as you indicated too, early Qing China with regard to Korea. So one of the reasons why the idea of a Chinese colonization of Korea was never on the table with exception of very, very brief periods, was that China’s imperial attention was needed elsewhere. Why on Earth create difficulties in a relationship that is reasonably well-established? Here you can see, 19th century British presence in India coming out very, very clearly, when there were so many borders to be defended, when there were so many people that you had to subordinate because if you didn’t subordinate them, they would do very bad things to you, at least where you imagined a threat. That was not the case between China and Korea. And I think that’s significant even for today, the special sense of ordering.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Wonderful. From the floor. Questions? Comments? Yes, sir.

Q&A #1:
So I have a question here. As a nominated speaker, I just really appreciated your sophisticated presentation and trying to come up with a highly simplistic thought process to understand your point. It seemed to me that you are trying to argue in this presentation that traditional Korea was living under the shadow of the Chinese empire. And i order to deal with this and in order come to terms with this, really very high luxury from China. So the Korean educated elite, they developed a very distinctive identity. That is harder to describe identity, right? So ideology is more important than political views. So that’s my understanding of your presentation, right? I guess my question for you is in the 20th century, so how two Koreas, right, there are two Koreas. How do they deal with this very distinctive legacy, right? So [inaudible 00:05:50] told Xi [Jinping] that ideology is the most important thing for society, but how about South Korea? So do we still consider South Korean people continuing this traditional way of viewing themselves in this [inaudible 00:06:05] world? We find that studying of righteousness, or this is something that are different, today’s South Korea? So that’s my question.

Professor Arne Westad:
Again, it’s a very, very good question and it’s an important one primarily because of misunderstandings in this country and elsewhere about how some of these discourses work and do not work in Korea, or in China for that matter. So ideology, I think is quite useful to think about in this context, but only if you define it as a kind of operative system in a way. If you think of ideology the way we sometimes think about this in the past, many of you are too young to pick this up, Marxism, Leninism, right, or ideologies that come out of particular forms of religion – think Europe back in the 17th century, great religious wars. Then I think one is missing the point. This is informal rather than formal. It’s about manners of thinking, of understanding the world, that come out of the past and that people think would be helpful in order to understand today’s world. United States is very much like this as well. There’s a deep sense of what United States is about, which in my view constitutes, at least in foreign policy terms, an ideology, right? It’s a way of trying to understand how the world works, which is sometimes successful and sometimes less successful, but that’s sort of the main point. The main point is that it’s there and that it comes out of one’s experiences and one’s thinking about [inaudible 00:07:48] situation and in the past. That I think is true also in the Republic of Korea. Sometimes when you’re in downtown Seoul these days, you will sort of forget that because it seems to be a very international place and things of course have happened very much over the past, yes, now two generations. One and a half generation that’s transformed the country because of its tremendous economic growth and the social changes that have gone with them. But if you look at it in terms of people’s preferences, both in social terms and in political terms, I think you still find very deep echoes of that past in South Korea. I’ve been fortunate enough to teach at a couple of the best universities in Seoul and it’s very interesting to see how young people in Korea today understand that legacy of the past. They certainly narrow it down. That’s true for people everywhere, but in terms of the relationships that come out of that particular kind of Confucian background that I’ve talked about, I still see quite a lot of that that is there today. I probably, and this is the crux of my answer, I think to your really good question. I see more of that in Korea than what I see in China. China is more cut off from its past than what Korea is. I think that has a lot to do with recent Chinese history. I think it has to do with language, language changes. It’s harder for young Chinese now to go back and read a text from the past. You could argue of course that that’s true for young Koreans as well, but many of these would be available in Hangul translation, right, from classical Chinese. So, that sense of Korean identity, that it is somehow in a communication with the Korean past. That’s something which I think people who have not spent considerable amounts of time there do not rate highly enough. And I think when we think about the potential for solutions, political solutions on the Korean peninsula, it’s well worth bearing that in mind.

Jisoo Kim, Director of GWIKS, Q&A #2:
Thank you so much for your fascinating talk. I really enjoyed it. I have a conceptual question. So when you use the term righteous nation and you’re explaining about your usage of the term. So, I guess my question is sort of related to his question. So are you trying to refer, to my understanding is, you were trying to refer “righteous nation” to a certain period, but then are you trying to sort of use that concept onto modern Korea as well? In other words, are you using in your research right now, are you using “righteous nation” to refer to Korea, either early modern or modern Korea, trying to see some continuities there. So I guess in your answer, it seems like you are, in that case – what I want to know more is your usage of righteous. You did explain, but I think it’s not enough. As a scholar of Joseon history, I kind of want to ask more and ask for you to elaborate on your usage of righteous. The concept of righteous army that first emerged in the Imjin War. And, actually I edited the book, my late advisor’s book. JaHyun Kim Haboush’s book.

Professor Arne Westad:
Oh yeah. Great.

Jisoo Kim, Director of GWIKS, Q&A #2:
The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation.

Professor Arne Westad:
It’s a great book.

Jisoo Kim, Director of GWIKS, Q&A #2:
And there she discusses about how the concept of nation emerged and challenges the Western notion of nation there. But, so, are you trying to extend that notion in using the term “nation,” or so what is, well, because I think just explaining that it was, I mean, Joseon Korea was an ideologically-driven state. Righteous was obviously a very important principle and concept of Confucianism. But I think there should be more explanation, because here if you were to use “righteous nation,” I think I would like to hear more of your usage on the term.

Professor Arne Westad:
Sure. And why that is particularly important among all the Neo-Confucian concepts that could have been picked. Yeah. So, if I’d had time today, I would have gone back and discussed some of the literature, including the one that you contributed to, on the late 16th century, which is in a way a seminal moment for defining the practical content of Neo-Confucian culture in Korea. This is true for any ideology. Ideologies only prove themselves when they come up against a kind of situation that they have to provide meaning to. Not necessarily a solution to, but that ideology has to be able to explain what’s going on. And part of the reason for the longevity of Neo-Confucianism in Korea is that that’s exactly what it did is to sort of explain why Korea was attacked from the outside, why it ended up in this situation. It was because it was there, the Korean state was there, the Joseon state was there, to protect these Confucian values, of which righteousness is one, against attacks from the outside and tried to undo this established world, right? So in that sense, it was perfect, right, because it explained that totally. So the reason why I use this for this lecture, which after all is intended mainly to bring us up to today’s situation in Korea, is that I think that of all the Neo-Confucian concepts, righteousness is the one that has preserved Korea in terms of identity up to today, but also the one that has made the inner Korean strife that has gone on over the past three generations, so difficult to resolve. Because of the belief in one’s own righteousness and the righteousness of one’s aims, which I think was as deeply held by those who created modern day South Korea as those who created modern day North Korea. It’s just that it’s different, right? It’s different in terms of the form of state and social organization that was created, but it’s very deeply held and that’s the part that I think is really important for today. So those who think that you can negotiate with North Korea in a way, believing that North Korea would in the end negotiate itself away in a kind of, sort of, East German kind of solution, I think are entirely wrong because even in, now, in the third generation of revolutionary leaders in North Korea, the idea that they are the last best hope for the Korean nation, in total, is very strongly held and it can only be understood out of these concepts that their actions are righteous. They come out of a period of weakness, subordination, terror for the Chinese nation during the Japanese occupation, which they understand and many people in the South understand, not just as an attempt to colonize in Korea, but exterminating the Korean nation. That’s the reason I think why these concepts have to be taken seriously today because they are distinguishing features of the two states that were created in Korea in the latter part of the 20th century.

Tian Han, PhD, #3:
Okay. I got to speak. So I’m Tian Han, I’m a second year PhD student in the history department here. So my question is specifically about what do you think of the importance of communist ideology and also the communist way of governing the state in Chinese-Korean relations because I think in the history of China’s foreign relations, some scholars like Professors Niu Jin and Chen Jian actually emphasize on the importance of this communist ideology in China’s foreign policy. I’ll ask, how would you think of this communist ideology in China-Korea relations and also, I’m thinking that if you think in terms of these communist ideology lens, it’s probably come to a more pessimistic picture about nowadays situation in Korea because we see two communist countries, whereas South Korea, America, Japan are all democratic, so it’s a big division here. So I would like to hear your opinion on this issue. Thank you.

Professor Arne Westad:
That’s a good question. I think, the work of people like [Professor] Niu Jin, who by the way is not with us at Harvard for the semester and my friend and colleague Chen Jian is important for understanding this, but in a way I think that it’s more historical than contemporary. So, this is what I tried to underline in my remarks earlier on is that, one has to understand that both of these phenomena in a way come out of a common route, right? They have a lot to do with each other. There’s this discussion among Chinese communists in the 20s and 30s is whether Korean communism should really be a branch of Chinese communism, right, because they are so closely connected. What happened later with Korean communism, I think, establishes it also in the Chinese image as being something that is related to but also very different from communism in China. It is a very difficult question. It’s hard to say when that actually happens. The way I see it, is this was a gradual process from the establishment of the North Korean state and up to now. The idea on the Chinese side, it’s always been there, that communists in Korea ought to learn more from China, but also the realization of the unwillingness of Korean communists to do just that is not something that has come about over the last five years. It’s something that has been there since the 1950s. So whenever China has tried to significantly alter the course of Korean communism, they have failed in doing so. Even on the occasions back in the 50s, as many of you would be aware, when they were able to act in conjunction with the Soviets, even then, Korean communism, Korean communist organizations were strong enough within their own territory to completely blunt these attempts. And I think that realization is there in Beijing now. What I see in China is a particular relationship that’s not so much created by the relationship between two communist states. The distinctions are too significant for that, but more one that is historical and to some degree sentimental that goes back to the Korean War that we fought and lost a lot of our own young men for this country and implicitly fought for this regime, right, for the North. So we therefore have a stake in all of this. We cannot be shut out from it, right, which I think is not always a helpful position to take, but it certainly is one that is understandable.

Professor Arne Westad:
North Korean communism on the other hand, has taken a direction that many Chinese find increasingly hard to recognize. There are elements in Korean communism as practiced in the North Korean state which are very far from any kind of Chinese model of communism. The emphasis for instance on ethnicity, even race that you find in some of the North Korean discourse. And that you do find sometimes directed implicitly against China is of course very hard for the Chinese to swallow. One of the things that people in this city ought to look at more closely is the degree to which the North Korean regime over the past few years have been able to turn on China when China acted in ways that North Korea did not like, both domestically and in more public terms. So I was, not on this occasion, on the last occasion I was in Beijing, I was by some Chinese officials who work on North Korea. They presented me with a long list of complaints against North Koreans. They did this not because I asked for it, but I think because they believed that it was necessary to point it out. One of them goes as follows: This is from 2016. A North Korean circular. This is a domestic circular on China where it refers to China as, “This country styling itself a big power is dancing to the tune of the United States when defending its mean behavior with such excuses that it was meant not to have a negative impact on the living of the people of the DPRK, but to check its nuclear program. If the country keeps a prior economic sanctions to the DPRK.” They say the country. They never say China. “If the country keeps applying economic sanctions through the DPRK while dancing to the tune of someone often misjudging the will of the DPRK, it may be applauded by the enemies of the DPRK, but it should get itself ready to face the catastrophic consequences in its relations with us.” Now, this is the kind of talk that sets off the alarm bells in Beijing, right? And not in terms of lack of influence, but in terms of what could really go badly wrong in that relationship, particularly when we’re thinking about the country on its border that has its own nuclear program.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
I think we have time for one more question.

Young-Key Renaud, Professor Emeritus, GWIKS:
Hi, I’m Young-Key Renaud. Actually, when you think of the word Koreans use when they think of China, with its “sadae,” meaning like “serving the great.” I think this is very much related to the condition notion that many perfecting Koreans always go for the best, not necessarily the biggest country. So it relates very well to the current situation. They go to America to study certain things. Maybe to France to study something else. So they, they, and then all the impartation of different thought systems, they have done it themselves. They were not proselytized. So when you think of this, even through this system, it is really not losing something to maintain their independence. I think it is really some of them, they really admired in the Chinese civilization. They were persuaded by the value of different systems and also ideas. So, they are not afraid of criticizing big powers today. More confident in dealing with [inaudible 00:25:04]. So, we don’t have to say they were really forced to do this, or they had to do it. I think a lot of it was voluntary. The whole city system should be actually considered in a bad light and very word, “the righteous,” I agree with Jisoo. I think we might try to look for another word because in some sense every civilization, everybody thinks they’re righteous. Don’t you think?

Professor Arne Westad:
Well, to some degree I think that’s true. I think there are differences of degree though, that are important here. The concept of righteousness is never played – if you compare China and Korea – has never played in the whole of the Neo-Confucian era in China, as much of a role that it clearly did in Korea, right? So it was a favored term. It was not non-existent in China and elsewhere, but it seemed to have attracted for a very long period of time, a particular attention in Korea. Now, linking that to the first point that you made, which I entirely agree with, I wonder, and this is purely speculation, but I sometimes wonder whether that has to do with being the smaller country within the region and needing to find some way of defining itself against somewhat intrusive, certainly bigger, and sometimes rather violent neighbors. There has to be a particular quality to being Korean.

Young-Key Renaud, Professor Emeritus, GWIKS:
I think Koreans are in fact very proud to be part of that greatness. So it’s not just a matter of survival. They actually were proud to be able to kind of do the things Chinese would do. Because they were culturally, philosophically, and scientifically persuaded in modernity. They wanted to be part and not miss the boat and same thing goes on today.

Professor Arne Westad:
Sure. But don’t you also think that there was a need within all of that, that I fully agree with, to distinguish what was Korean?

Young-Key Renaud, Professor Emeritus, GWIKS:
Yes, of course. It’s like the invention of the Korean alphabet. They studied all the theories, but they said it was proper for them, it was something else. And they were not afraid of inventing one after using it for thousands of years.

Professor Arne Westad:
Right, right.

Young-Key Renaud, Professor Emeritus, GWIKS:
Like Chinese characters.

Professor Arne Westad:
Sure.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Well, I think that fully takes us to time. Arne, you transported me back to my first year as an undergrad in the Hong Kong theater and being properly put in my intellectual place, shall we say. Thank you very much for an expansive and engaging talk, which is befitting for our commemorative lecture and thank you as well to the audience for coming in and joining this evening with us.

Professor Arne Westad:
Thank you very much. That was great, thank you.