조선후기 조선중화주의와 그 해석 문제

초록

Even after the king of Chosŏn walked out of a mountain fortress and capitulated to the Manchu emperor in 1367, Korean officials and intellectuals never regarded the Manchu emperor as the authentic Son of Heaven. Even though the Chosŏn court sent tributes to Beijing on a regular basis and all of the Choson kings received investiture from Manchu emperors since then, Korean officials firmly believed that they were superior to the Manchu in terms of culture, more specifically, the Confucian culture. They thought that the outer world, including China, was fatally tarnished by the barbaric Manchu and Confucian orthodoxy only survived in the land of Choson. Not surprisingly, their cultural and spiritual reliance on the fallen Ming China became more strengthened under the Manchu dominance. This intellectual trend led the Korean ruling elites to be confident that the legitimacy of Confucian culture had been transferred to Chosŏn Korea from Ming China, which they believed had already been tarnished by the barbaric culture of the queued Manchu. This confidence even developed into a national ideology and contributed to the successful recovery from the national crisis caused by the surrender to the barbaric Manchu on one hand. On the other hand, it prevented Korean elites from adopting the new Manchu-dominated world order and subsequently led them to employ an extremely isolationist policy. This paper critically reviews the contemporary Korean scholars’ interpretation of the consciousness of Chosŏn zhonghua, while emphasizing the politico-intellectual trend in the late Choson Korean since the Korean surrender to the Manchu Empire in 1637. Chosŏn zhonghua was a belief that the Chosŏn nation succeeded the gist of the Chinese Confucian culture and eventually became zhonghua after Ming China was completely destroyed by the Manchu in 1644. The majority of Korean scholars interpret the Chosŏn zhonghua thought, which flourished until the turn of the 1900s among the main society of Chosŏn intellectuals, as the growth in Korean pride and the spiritual escape of Korea from China. This paper, however, argue that such an 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 into the East Asian sphere on the threshold of the so-called modern period.