China ups ante in ancient-kingdom feud
with Korea By David Scofield
A growing political rift with China is exactly
what South Korea doesn't need right now, given that
relatively unfettered access to China's markets and
labor is vital to keeping the Korean economy growing.
But the unresolved ethnic parentage of Koguryo, a
1,400-year-old kingdom that stretched from Inner
Mongolia in the north and included most of what is today
North Korea in the south, has put the two nations on a
collision course, and China isn't blinking.
Both
South Korea and North Korea, however, are mute and
seemingly paralyzed by this latest affront and example
of China's much-vaunted "peaceful rise", one that could
have territorial, military and strategic implications
that eventually could benefit Beijing - but not the
Korean Peninsula or North Asia. The deafening silence
from Seoul and usually obstreperous Pyongyang stems in
large part from economic reliance on China and
historical deference to Beijing at a time when North and
South should be working together to counter what appear
to be China's politically motivated claims.
Just
last Friday, China revised its Foreign Ministry website,
deleting reference to Korea's Koguryo Kingdom. Also last
Friday, South Korean lawmakers were denied visas to
visit related Koguryo tombs in China, Beijing citing
procedural delays. South Korea has endured a host of
Chinese transgressions, such as Chinese hackers, at
least one from a government-run institute, breaking into
10 sensitive South Korean government security websites.
Hardly a murmur of protest.
The kingdom dates
from 37 BC and endured countless battles and attacks
until AD 668, when it was absorbed by the unifying
southern kingdom of Shilla. For Koreans, Koguryo is more
than a historical relic, it was the first and largest of
Korea's three founding kingdoms (Shilla and Paekje being
the other two), and a pillar of Korean identity. But
despite South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's "quiet
diplomacy" behind the scenes, China's leadership has
been increasingly vigorous in claiming Koguryo as its
own, strongly alleging that it was governed by one of
China's many ethnic minorities.
The ethnicity of the Koguryo kingdom is still
hotly debated among scholars of early Korean history. Some
say the language spoken in Koguryo was linguistically
closest to Old Japanese. Indeed, there are those
who believe Koguryo was actually ethnically Old Japanese,
and still others who say the Old Japanese actually migrated
from what is today North Korea and the Chinese
northeast.
The issue has been growing since
China's high-level interest in revising local history
came to the fore in February 2002 under the banner of
the Northeast Asia Project, a history study that has
received unprecedented political and financial support
from Beijing. The budget of some US$2.2 million and keen
political interest by senior figures in an area that for
all intents and purposes is not in dispute was prompted
by Pyongyang's application to UNESCO (the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in
2001 to have Koguryo-era tombs and murals, cultural
trophies of the kingdom, registered as North Korea's
first World Heritage site. (Only a few kilometers are
disputed along the China-North Korea border, but this
has never been high on China's agenda.)
China
then applied to register still more of the tombs on its
side of the Yula (Amok) River as a World Heritage site
as well. If UNESCO designated the tombs as Chinese
cultural artifacts, then the kingdom that produced the
tombs would logically be Chinese - North Korea becoming
historically Chinese.
UNESCO accepted Korean
and Chinese claims UNESCO ruled on July 1 and
accepted claims from both North Korea and China to have
ancient tomb complexes in both territories accepted by
the international body as World Heritage sites. The UN
body, however, steered well clear of indicating national
parentage of the kingdom itself.
Undaunted, the
Chinese wasted no time in furthering their claim over
the kingdom. Last Friday they removed all references of
Koguryo - as a period of Korean history - from Chinese
Foreign Ministry website. Chinese academics, all on the
state payroll, have been revising history fast and
furious, with new "evidence" and "findings" being
dutifully published by the state-controlled media.
Cultural artifacts that once only interested a
handful of archeologists and anthropologists have now
caught the attention of political scientists and
international-relations specialists, as China's claims
to the kingdom and, one would assume a claim to the
lands it occupied, could have very real ramifications on
contemporary Korean politics and the regional balance of
power.
Many South Koreans are slowly awakening
to China's unique approach to political archeology.
Perhaps a good thing, some analysts conclude, for at
least now South Koreans will begin to realize that China
is not the all-benevolent fraternal ally many naively
believed it to be.
So what of the ever-bombastic
North Korean leadership whose nation's cultural fabric
is being threatened? The silence is deafening, but
perhaps not surprising.
North Korea is even more
beholden to China than South Korea, as the state
functions largely through support from China. Chinese
pipelines guarantee a subsistence fuel supply, and
China's maintaining the 1961 Treaty of Friendship,
Cooperation and Mutual Assistance is the country's only
remaining security agreement. North Korea's first
dynastic leader, Kim Il-sung, may have been installed by
Josef Stalin, and the unparalleled growth of the Kim
personality cult may have far exceeded what even Stalin
could imagine, but it was China that reclaimed the North
for Kim Il-sung, prolonging the Korean War for two years
in the process.
Today, when regime-change
options for North Korea - part of the "axis of evil" -
are discussed in Washington, it is the reaction of China
and its emphatic declarations that it will not tolerate
US troops on its border that often quash the idea. Any
change in the system in the North could lead to a
destabilizing power vacuum, the theory goes, prompting
China to enter North Korea to restore order and
guarantee the geographical integrity of the area, as
prescribed in the 1961 treaty. Here, mutual assistance
would be the key justifying China's intervention.
China's strategic eye for North Korea ports,
airfields It's in a post-Kim - now Kim Jong-il -
regime scenario that China's latest, highly public,
historical claim becomes most concerning. Treaty
obligations could well be used as legal justification to
enter the country militarily, while China's historical
claim over the territory could ensure the enduring
presence of Beijing's troops, giving China access to
North Korea's eastern ports and airfields, ensuring
power projection potential (vis-a-vis Japan) far beyond
China's possibilities at present.
China has
never been as important to Koreans on both sides of the
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as it is today. China has
become South Korea's largest export destination, and
while the two economies will be locked in competition
for foreign markets in the near future, today it is
China and its demand for exports that are keeping the
South Korean economy from slipping into recession. For
North Korea, it is China's fuel aid that keeps the
military's wheels greased, and it is China that ensures
North Korea's political survival.
But it is not
only economics that makes the North and the South so
feckless in the face of China's politically motivated
(China says its own interest is purely historical
accuracy) Koguryo claim, it is also history. Prior to
Japan's colonization of Korea at the beginning of the
20th century, Korea was a vassal state of China for much
of the previous 400 years. This client-patron
relationship that endured for centuries, coupled with
the deep cultural, ideological ties, has left an
enduring legacy of respect for China within Korean
culture and has strongly affected the Korean psyche.
Korea has been criticized for being quick to
react to even the slightest transgression by either the
United States or Japan, while China often gets a pass,
even when the transgressions are great. Three weeks ago,
Seoul's National Intelligence Agency discovered that a
group of Chinese hackers, at least one from a
government-run institute in China, had hacked into
sensitive computer networks at 10 South Korean
government institutes related to national security. The
breach, characterized by officials as severe, lasted at
least a month. Yet the incident has been downplayed by
the government, with little follow-up by the media, nor
any public outcry.
Last Friday, a group of South
Korean lawmakers were forced to delay a trip to China to
visit the tomb sites in China's northeast because
Chinese government officials delayed issuing visas,
citing procedural issues. Tainted Chinese food exported
to South Korea, poaching of Korean fish stocks on both
sides of the sea border - there is no shortage of
"incidents" involving China. And yet it seems nothing
the Chinese do can is sufficiently egregious to raise
the ire of Koreans. The Koguryo Kingdom issue may change
that and South Korea may demonstrate some backbone.
If nothing else, China's apparently politically
motivated revision of local history may prompt Korean
academics throughout the peninsula, North and South, to
pool their resources and work together. While North
Korea remains uncharacteristically mute, South Korean
politicians and scholars are hoping they can turn this
into an opportunity for the two Koreas to join forces.
They could forge a meaningful, mutually beneficial
intra-Korean initiative that isn't predicated on South
Korea's traditional blank-check policies of
rapprochement and turning a blind eye to Pyongyang's
repression of its people.
David
Scofield, former lecturer at the Graduate Institute
of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, is currently
conducting post-graduate research at the School of East
Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, United
Kingdom.
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