Sixiang Wang honored for book that reframes 3 centuries of Korea-China relations
Sean Brenner/UCLA Humanities
Sixiang Wang’s work was lauded as “storytelling at its best, yet always in service to the author’s broader themes.”
| November 18, 2024
For his first monograph, Sixiang Wang took on a monumental task: reframing diplomatic relations between the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea and neighboring Ming China from the 1250s through the 1640s.
His research, published in “Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China,” (Columbia University Press, 2023) revealed a story more nuanced than it appears on the surface.
Now, Wang, a UCLA associate professor of Asian languages and cultures, has been recognized for his innovative approach to the subject matter with the 2024 Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies. The award has been presented annually by the UC Berkeley Center for Korean Studies since 2022.
Wang, who also is associate director of the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, said the conventional thinking about Sino–Korean diplomacy has been that the Ming Empire set up tributary relations with its neighbors and Korea acted as a loyal vassal, following all of China’s rules.
“What is actually going on is something much more complicated,” he said. “If you look closely, you realize that it is actually a conversation going on in a shared, mutually understood code. If you can identify the references and the symbols, you’ll see there’s actually a complicated dialogue going on. My approach was to try to uncover that and see how it’s working.”
In announcing the award, the Center for Korean Studies praised Wang for his methodology — drawing from an extraordinarily wide range of source material ranging from poetry to court records, from travelogues to diplomatic memorials — and for how he presents his narrative.
“This is storytelling at its best, yet always in service to the author’s broader themes,” the announcement said. “With the astute use of sources, and nuanced approach to reading against the grain, Wang shows a bracing way of rethinking the centuries-long history of Sino–Korean relations.”
The period of Korean and Chinese history covered in Wang’s book has been explored previously by scholars writing in Asian languages. But Wang’s text is the first to present the subject matter for an English-speaking audience that is generally less familiar with the contextual vocabulary and cultural norms he covers.
Studying such a diverse array of source material enabled Wang to illustrate in new ways the sophisticated strategies and subtle tactics Chosŏn used to construct and legitimize its place within the Ming imperial order.
“To really understand what’s going on, we can’t just look at one type of record; we have to look across different genres and materials horizontally because they’re interacting with each other,” he said. “Each of these genres has its own literary conventions, and you have to be aware of how they operate.”
Wang, who will receive a prize of $10,000, said he hopes the award attracts more attention to Korean studies, and East Asian Studies more broadly, at UCLA.
“In North America, there are only a handful of us working on Korea before the 19th century — UCLA is one of the few universities that has faculty working on pre-modern Korea, and has more than one faculty member, at that,” Wang said.
He said he also hopes the book’s reception reinforces the value of drawing from the past for context about contemporary society. Many aspects of Chosŏn–Ming dynamics are reflected in relationships today between powerful countries and their less-powerful allies.
“Korea’s story is a story not of big empires and how they compete with each other, but more so a story of the middle guy, which most countries in the world can relate to,” Wang said. “They aren’t powerful enough to dictate everything, but they still have to figure out how to work with their situation.” Wang will be honored in a ceremony at UC Berkeley on February 7, 2025.