Jing Liu
Jing LIU earned her PhD at Syracuse University. She is currently Assistant Professor at the Institute of China Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on Northeast Asian history, specifically Sino-Korean relations, trade, and knowledge production and dissemination in the 16th-17th centuries.
Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
Session
The Imjin War, also known as “The Japanese Calamity of 1592,” “The Rescue of Korea,” “The Glorious Conquest of Korea,” or “The East Asian War,” was the largest military conflict of the sixteenth-century in terms of the number of combatants, yet it still remains obscure outside of East Asia. This is despite the fact that the war was witnessed and chronicled by Western observers and its outcome had significant and far-reaching implications for the subsequent histories of all the major belligerents and indeed, for international trade in the region. It marked the most serious challenge to China’s international hegemony in East Asia prior to the nineteenth century and featured the integration and deployment of the latest military technologies from both the West and the belligerent states. Its memory continues to impact relations between China, Korea, and Japan in both the cultural and diplomatic realms. Bringing in primary sources from all the major participants and examining the impact of this war down to the present, the papers in this panel seek to redress this omission by focusing on several key facets of this seminal conflict, ranging from strategy and alliance building, to the production and dissemination of nautical knowledge, to the creation of extensive genealogies to document positive participation in saving the Korean state from destruction at the hands of the Japanese invaders. Together, the papers demonstrate the permeability of borders and boundaries of various kinds, helping to highlight the broader global significance of this war and suggests fruitful areas for future comparative research.