Before the modern era of sovereign nation-states, polities around the world did not have strictly defined borders. So how did empires think about the boundaries of their power and influence? Where was the political and cultural line between “us” and “them”?
In the case of China, there was a longstanding conceptual division of people into two categories: Hua (civilized, Chinese) and Yi (barbarian, foreign). Hua referred to people who were firmly within the Chinese political and cultural sphere. They were settled agriculturalists or urban dwellers, governed by Chinese bureaucracy, influenced by Confucian rites and values and - at the elite levels - conversant in Classical Chinese literature. Yi, by contrast, referred to peoples outside this category. Conceptually, they were considered fully distinct from the Chinese and essentially ungovernable. But the practical reality was more complicated than the hua-yi idea.
During the 2000+ years from the mid-Zhou to the Ming dynasty, China expanded and contracted geographically. In this process, the empire absorbed and transformed some neighboring peoples, slowly shifting them from Yi to Hua. As the empire changed size over time, successive dynasties continually debated how to categorize neighboring peoples. Were they completely foreign or were they partially transformed through their interactions with China? Could they ever be fully enmeshed in the Confucian world? And if so, should China try to make that happen?
This hua-yi distinction was especially important when Chinese governments faced conflict with neighboring peoples. Should China try to extend its power to rule over fractious neighbors? Should China work to maintain their separation from these neighbors? Or perhaps encourage neighbors to fight one another to deflect them from causing problems for China?
The hua-yi distinction deeply influenced how Chinese scholars and government ministers framed debates about foreign policies.
This context helps explain why Phung Khac Khoan engaged in brush talks with Yi Sugwang and (more importantly) why he composed literary poems for the Ming Emperor. By demonstrating his mastery of Confucian scholarship, he was asserting Dai Viet’s place within the community of “civilized” peoples. But, as it turned out, this was not enough to achieve his goal.