Joshua Van Lieu

Followers

161

Following

286

Public Views

Dr. Van Lieu is a historian of early modern and modern East Asian politics, thought, and critical international relations. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Washington in the histories of Chosŏn Korea and Late Imperial China. Dr. Van Lieu has served as assistant editor and book review editor of The Journal of Korean Studies and the associate editor of Acta Koreana. He is currently is an associate professor of history at Keimyung University . He has published on nineteenth-century Qing-Chosŏn tribute politics, the historiography of reform movements in late Chosŏn Korea, the roles of state Guanti cults in Ming, Qing, and Chosŏn narratives of state legitimacy, and critical approaches to historical international relations. His current projects include a paper on the transnational politics of translation in late nineteenth-century Korea and China and monographs on pre-colonial historiographies of Chosŏn factionalism and on the transformation of Qing-Chosŏn tributary practice in the context of the global modern of the long nineteenth century.
Supervisors: James Palais, R. Kent Guy, and Clark Sorensen
Address: Department of History
College of Humanities and International Studies
Keimyung University
1095 Dalgubeol-daero
Daegu 42601 SOUTH KOREA

less

Craig Clunas

University of Oxford

Josiah Heyman

University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)

John P DiMoia

Seoul National University

B. Harun Küçük

University of Pennsylvania

Angela Ndalianis

Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn

Anthony Pym

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Oliver P Richmond

The University of Manchester

Richard Bellamy

University College London

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Wei-chieh Tsai

National Chung Cheng University

InterestsView All (36)

Uploads

Articles by Joshua Van Lieu

The Guan Yu Cult and Joseon-Qing Visions of State Legitimacy, 1882-1894

The Review of Korean Studies, 2019

The Joseon Guan Yu cult was a staple of informal and popular Korean histories written in the firs... more The Joseon Guan Yu cult was a staple of informal and popular Korean histories written in the first half of the twentieth century. In these highly critical and often mocking accounts, the cult comes to signify an irrational refusal of the modern typical of the perceived Joseon failure to cope with the realities of global imperialism. The Guan Yu cult, however, was more than this. Qing military officers deployed to Seoul from 1882 to 1885 presented plaques to Joseon Guan Yu temples which, through the lens of the Guan Yu faith, located the legitimacy of the Joseon state in its submission of tribute to the Qing court. King Gojong composed ritual and stele texts that shared the Qing officers’ faith in Guan Yu but interpreted his divine interventions in Joseon affairs not as the product of Joseon loyalty to Qing but rather of the inherent legitimacy of the Joseon state and throne. The seriousness with which the Joseon throne took the Guan Yu cult is apparent in the controversy at court in 1893 concerning the punishment of an official who publicly condemned lavish state support for the cult. The facile dismissals of colonial-period histories obscure the fact that the cult was one arena wherein Joseon and Qing understandings of Joseon state legitimacy and the nature of the Joseon-Qing relationship clashed at time when the two states were engaged in an often tense process of redefining their relations in a rapidly changing geopolitical environment.

Korean Translations of Vietnam: Relocating the Great Han Empire in World-Historical Precedent

The Journal of Transcultural Studies, 2018

Chosŏn-Qing Tributary Discourse: Transgression, Restoration, and Textual Performativity

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2018

In 1864, a fire destroyed the Chosŏn-Qing frontier market for Qing merchants at Kyŏngwŏn on the T... more In 1864, a fire destroyed the Chosŏn-Qing frontier market for Qing merchants at Kyŏngwŏn on the Tumen River. Unable to supply timbers himself, the Kyŏngwŏn magistrate asked his Qing counterpart across the river in Hunchun, for permission to fell timbers in Qing territory. This request was to evolve into a series of violations of frontier protocol that eventually necessitated a Chosŏn diplomatic mission to Beijing to restore frontier order. Read uncritically, the tributary discourses that facilitated these interactions between Qing and Chosŏn suggest a timeless relationship borne of the forces of the cosmos itself. Taken as empirical accounts, the discourses reveal little of how the two states interacted along their border. Employing close readings of Qing and Chosŏn intergovernmental communications, this article argues that the most important question is not what these texts are about but rather what they do. Emerging scholarship in international relations and other fields employing models of a Chinese tributary system must be careful in using tributary discourse naïvely to reconstruct the policy and ideological commitments of its participants. To do so is to mistake the performative for the descriptive.

The Tributary System and the Persistence of Late Victorian Knowledge

Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2017

In his 1968 edited volume, The Chinese World Order, John K. Fairbank famously presents his “preli... more In his 1968 edited volume, The Chinese World Order, John K. Fairbank famously presents his “preliminary framework” for a Ming–Qing tributary system. The recent rehabilitation of the tributary system in International Relations scholarship is surprising because debates over the concept ultimately judged a tributary-system model deeply problematic. I therefore ask: (1) Can we speak of states as ontologically stable entities over centuries? (2) How might we distinguish a totalizing tributary system from tributary practice in order to allow for a diversity of context? (3) If we return to the tributary system as the lens through which we understand “China,” what elisions must we thus tolerate? Ultimately, the current manifestation of the tributary system is not an innovation but rather a return to an older school of nineteenth-century China-watching.

A Farce that Wounds both High and Low: the Guan Yu Cult in Choson – Ming Relations

Journal of Korean Religions , 2014

Scholarship on Chosŏn gratitude to the Ming in the wake of the Imjin Wars stresses Chosŏn loyalis... more Scholarship on Chosŏn gratitude to the Ming in the wake of the Imjin Wars stresses Chosŏn loyalism and nostalgia for a lost civilizational order then only remnant as a final human outpost on the Korean peninsula standing firm before the tides of northern savagery. There was a very different undercurrent, however, in which the Chosŏn officialdom of the capital saw the Ming as irrational and even culturally alien, if not barbarous, violators of propriety. This paper examines these tensions and contradictions through the construction of Chosŏn state temples to Guan Yu, known in his deified form as Kwan Wang, at the close of the sixteenth century and the roles the cult and its temples played as a discursive space in which the Ming and Chosŏn governments negotiated the nature and dynamics of their relationship.

The Politics of Condolence: Contested Representations of Tribute in Late Nineteenth-Century Choson-Qing Relations

The Journal of Korean Studies , 2009

After the death ofthe Choson Queen Dowager Cho in 1890, a Qing mission arrived in Seoul to presen... more After the death ofthe Choson Queen Dowager Cho in 1890, a Qing mission arrived in Seoul to present the Guangxu emperor's letter of condolence. In accordance with established precedent King Kojong greeted the envoys outside the city and publicly prostrated before the imperial missive. Western scholars have long understood this event as an illustration of Kojong's willing submission to the Qing Empire and evidence ofthe persistence of "traditional " tributary relations into the modern era. The Choson government, however, actively negotiated for months with Qing officials in an ultimately failed effort to cancel the mission. Choson and Qing officials devoted such time and energy in debate not because they were especially concerned with maintaining ancient ritual forms but rather because they were acutely aware of theimpact the public display of tributary ritual would have on Western interpretations of Qing claims to imperial dominion over Choson. Despite continual Choson resistance, Qing officials thus planned and executed the condolence mission as a propaganda exercise for Western consumption in order to secure recognition of Qing authority over Choson. This Qing representation of the condolence mission and the tributary relationship in turn has come to inform decades of Western scholarship on late nineteenth-century Choson-Qing relations.