15세기 후반 조선의 서북면 방어와 명의 遼東 진출

Abstract

This article examines the way Chosŏn responded to Ming's expansion into the Liaotung region, with the focus on the lines of military communications from Liaoning to Amnok River and on the military installations from Fushun to Amnok River, the second of which were constructed in 1469. Significant here is that Chosŏn was not simply dragged into the Ming hegemony which not only had been gradually stepping into the Liaotung Peninsula but also steadily overweighing the northwestern borderlines of Chosŏn and the left wing of the Jianzhou Jurchens. Rather, Chosŏn did employ an active engagement policy in this new geopolitical reality, in which process to counterplot the hegemonic discourse of Ming, to rationalize its military activities on the ground of the Chosŏn-Ming alliance, and to defend its own security. Moreover, while acknowledging the Ming-led regional order over the Liaotung Peninsula, Chosŏn fittingly used the Ming hegemony against the hostilities of the Jianzhou Jurchens across its own borders. What should not go unnoticed here is the fact that the Chosŏn state in the fifteenth century tried to maintain a sense of balance in the middle of the Ming's hegemonic intervention escalating into armed tension between Ming and the Jianzhou Jurchens on the one hand and causing conflict between Chosŏn and the Jianzhou Jurchens on the other. It is the diverse strategies of engagement and counterbalance within the framework of the Ming hegemony that characterized Chosŏn's foreign policy predicated on the rule of state security. Hence, mobilizing the proactive counterstrategies as above can be taken as a kind of defensive realism. This approach will enable us to reconsider the complex and multilayered interactions among Chosŏn, Ming, and Jianzhou Jurchens from a diachronic perspective and to deter an ahistorical hypothesis of tributary system in premodern East Asia.