In This Issue

This issue is unique in two ways. First, its Article Section is devoted entirely to the historical relations between China and Korea(s) from the Qing to the modern period. Second, the three articles in the Section are written by scholars currently working in three different nations—US, China, and South Korea. It has been our goal to present transnational scholarship on a concentrated subject and we are glad that we are able to do it with this issue.

The first piece, written by Sun-Hee Yoon, examines the little-known relationship between the early Manchu rulers and the crown princes of the Choso ?n Kingdom from 1636 to 1644. Using such primary sources as Shenyang Daily Record, Yoon is able to reconstruct the details of how the Manchus had used “a multiplicity of registers of power” to subjugate the future power-holders of Choso ?n when the latter were hostages in Shenyang, the capital city of the Qing Empire before it took Beijing in 1644. While being allowed to continue their training with Confucian classics, the Choso ?n princes and their companies were invited, as honored guests, to battlefields, imperial ceremonies, horse riding, archery practice, and hunting trips by their Manchu rulers. The Manchus’ use of varied “cultural” ways to dismantle Choso ?n’s loyalty to Ming China, Yoon argues, demonstrates their skills to “maintain a broad coalition of allied peoples speaking different languages and operating within distinct political circumstances and traditions,” a practice that the Qing would employ in its control of Central Asia and other parts of their empire after 1644.

Donggil Kim’s article addresses the origins of ethnic Korean minority in China’s Northeast, using newly available local archival sources and declassified materials from the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Archives. Nearly half of the 2·1 million Korean farmers, who had migrated to China as a result of Japan’s “Korean Pioneering Policy,” had returned to Korea after Japan’s surrender in August 1945, but many others were persuaded to stay by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who wanted their aid in its war efforts against the Guomindang (GMD). By the early 1950s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) worked out a complicated formula by which many of the remaining 800,000 Koreans obtained Chinese citizenship. The successive political campaigns in the 1950s, however, alienated ethnic Koreans and exacerbated their identity crisis, as many of them regarded North Korea as their true motherland and China only as a legal motherland. Only after their ties with North Korea had been cut off for nearly two decades did ethnic Korean Chinese accept their status as a Chinese ethnic minority, emotionally and psychologically.

The complication of the contemporary relationship between China and North Korea is the subject of Jong-Seok Lee’s article. The two nations’ relationship, characterized as an “alliance forged through blood” during the early Cold War era, experienced dramatic twists in the late 1970s through 1990s as China began to pursue “reform and opening-up” and normalized diplomatic relations with the United States, Japan, and South Korea, while North Korea remained largely unchanged and, worse, felt betrayed. But China’s interest in seeking “peace and stability” on the Korean Peninsula compelled it, on the one hand, to maintain “strategic cooperative relations” with North Korea and, on the other, to pursue “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” The two nuclear tests conducted by North Korea, respectively in 2006 and 2009, forced China to support a UN Resolution condemning North Korea’s provocative actions, although China did not actively and consistently participate in the sanctions. Instead, it tried to engage North Korea with increased economic connections in order to secure its stability, which China saw as vital to its own national interests. During the post-2009 years, as Lee indicates, China and North Korea were both caught in a dilemma: distrusting each other while remaining dependent on each other. Strained relations between China and North Korea ironically rendered the international sanctions useless and forced the West and South Korea to modify their respective policies toward North Korea.

In our Forum, Hanchao Lu shares with us his very rich and spirited conversation with Professor Perry Link, a legendary China scholar who is also an American participant in modern Chinese history. The conversation contains many rarely known anecdotal details for such historical events as June 4, 1989 and the publication of the Tiananmen Papers, which many China scholars may find valuable and fascinating.

Finally, on a both professional and personal note, this issue will conclude my service as the editor-in-chief of The Chinese Historical Review. I was called upon in the spring of 2003 by the Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) to “revive” the journal, which was then titled Chinese Historians, never imagining that I would have such a long and profound association with the journal as a person primarily writing outside the field of Chinese history. It has been my privilege and honor to work with Professors Hanchao Lu and Alan Baumler, my two esteemed, talented, and devoted co-editors, who have worked with me, with the first-rate professional integrity and intellectual creativity, for the past twelve years. I want to thank them wholeheartedly and wish them well as they continue to lead the journal to the next stage. I would also like to use this opportunity to thank the journal’s contributors and peer reviewers, the members of the editorial boards, CHUS presidents and officers, various donors and institutional sponsors, including especially my home institution, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and its wonderful History Department, for their trust and generous support, without which I do not think it would even be possible for the three of us to revive the journal, much less to elevate it to the present level.