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Northeast Asia's intra-mural mural
wars
By David Scofield
SEOUL -
The nuclear dispute isn't the only defining issue
involving China, North Korea and South Korea. Culture
wars, too, are being waged diplomatically as well as
passionately over little-known but breathtakingly lovely
tomb murals in Northeast Asia and what these paintings
say about more than a thousand years of human
development, art and religion.
Except for
historians of 6th-century East Asian culture, few people
 know of the controversial
Goguryeo tomb murals tucked away in China's remote
northeast, but North Korea also claims the art and tombs
depicting life, death and an afterlife. And,
problematically for both Beijing and Pyongyang, they are
found on both sides of the China-North Korea border,
with implications for the history of the Manchurian
region.
South Korea, with the financial
resources and academic and political muscle to argue its
Korean Peninsula patrimony, has been muted in arguing
the case of the Goguryeo murals, its close economic ties
with China being a primary reason for its reticence.
North Korea, too, diminished in resources but
desperately depending on China, has been all but unheard
on the issue. China, meanwhile, has mounted a powerful
campaign, the Northeast Asian Project, launched in
February 2002.
Chinese officials are fond of
likening their relationships with North Korea and
Vietnam as being as close as "lips and teeth". Here, the
teeth are in evidence, although North and South Korea
are offered a rare opportunity to act in concert to
assert their historical claims and shared national
ancestry.
And when the case for declaring an
international cultural site is brought before the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), China is expected to prevail -
largely because its rivals have been quiescent about the
1,500-year-old cultural relics.
The tomb murals
date from around AD 500 during the Goguryeo period, 37
BC-AD 668. The exquisite, still vividly colored murals
depict daily life and sustaining mythologies. So far
about 70 murals have been found, mostly in the Taedong
river basin near Pyongyang, the Anak area in South
Hwanghae province, and in Ji'an in China's Jilin
province.
A leading power during the Three
Kingdoms period, Goguryeo occupied the present territory
of North Korea and also held sway over the vast
Manchurian region for some 700 years until the late 7th
century AD, according to Korean academics. By the 4th
century, Goguryeo had been firmly established as a
powerful kingdom and frequently clashed with China,
while successfully containing its southern rivals, the
academics argue.
Murals would lift image of
famine, suffering
Pyongyang academics plan to
reapply to UNESCO's World Heritage Committee to
designate the Goguryeo murals around Pyongyang as a
declared a North Korean World Heritage Site, the first
in that nation. This would be a boon to a country that
receives little international attention, and scant
positive notice, for activities that do not involve
nuclear weapons, missiles, drugs, famine, refugees or
depraved indifference to human life. It would also give
international validation to the Korean nature both of
the murals and also of the kingdom to which they
belonged.
Researchers from the state-funded
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have plans of their
own. They have been actively studying the kingdom to
which the murals belong as part of a long-running
Northeast Asian history project called "Northeast
Progress" and have concluded that Goguryeo was a client
state of China, giving Beijing claim over the kingdom
and its artistic legacy.
The Chinese academics
and researchers hope to have the Goguryeo tomb murals in
Ji'an declared a World Heritage Site during a UNESCO
meeting in Suzhou next June. That the Ji'an murals are
in Chinese territory is without question, but the ethnic
legacy of these works becomes more complicated south of
the Yula (Amok) River.
Goguryeo is considered by
Koreans to be the first kingdom of Korea. If China is
successful in proving its claim to the murals and by
extension the Goguryeo kingdom, what of Korea's
southwest kingdom of Paekche, which was founded by the
son of the founder of Goguryeo?
Officially, the
North Koreans have been relatively quiet on the matter,
their studied silence a testament to the influence of
China, their only benefactor.
During the Cold
War, North Korea received from its Chinese and
then-Soviet patrons a steady infusion of technology and
resources necessary to sustain the country and guarantee
its strategic defense against the US nemesis forces
located in South Korea. In those days neither China nor
the Soviet Union - themselves balancing a mutually
uneasy relationship - would allow much foreign influence
in North Korea, lest it upset their own delicate
strategic equilibrium.
Today, however, both
China and Russia regard North Korea as a difficult,
anachronistic and dangerous neighbor, and technology,
other resources and financial aid have slowed to a
trickle. Russia and the other states and regions of the
former Soviet Union are far more interested in
maintaining good relations with capitalist South Korean
than in fortifying the world's last Stalinist enclave.
China cows Koreas in mural
dispute
China remains the only nation with the
means, the influence and the political will to prop up
the failed North Korean state. That will appears to be
waning, however, as evidenced by China's decision to
suspend its North Korean oil pipeline operations last
spring. Pyongyang is still smarting from that decision,
keenly aware of its dependence on Beijing and, hence,
unlikely to openly challenge what it considers China's
irredentist claims in regard to the murals.
Ad
hoc groups of South Korean historians, however, seem
intent to join the battle, belatedly coming together to
challenge what they consider China's remapping of
history. The independence and inherent sui
generis state of 2,000-year-old cultures in East
Asia will be a hard issue for either the Chinese or the
Koreans to argue definitively. But the coming together
of Koreans sharing their collective academic muscle
opens the door for greater academic exchange between the
two Koreas, a real step forward. Given its relative
freedom, the major intellectual responsibility lies with
Seoul.
The Koreans, however, are latecomers,
giving China's advance in the mural issue. If the South
Korean government does not urgently and vigorously
challenge China over the murals through sound academic
and historical initiative - regardless of possible trade
impact - then the Chinese may well prevail in their
claim to the murals. Then the Koreans, both North and
South, could "lose" 700 years of history.
Official South Korea's lackluster approach to
the murals, however, contrasts sharply with its
long-standing and vigorous support to rectify what it
calls "historic distortions" involving Korea and its
North Asia neighbors. The most prominent of these has
been the so-called Sea of Japan "error". South Korea
successfully lobbied the International Hydrographic
Organization (IHO) for more than a decade to change the
name of the current "Sea of Japan" to the "East Sea",
while issues of greater gravity involving China - like
the disputed murals - elicit a decidedly understated
reaction.
The government offers rewards to
students and "netizens" who find and challenge
historical errors - most errors center on the Sea of
Japan issue. The website About.com received more than 20
e-mails a day for more than a year from a South Korean
group calling itself the Volunteer Agency Network of
Korea (VANK), insisting that the website rectify its
"error" in using the name "Sea of Japan" instead of
"East Sea" to describe the sea to the west of Japan.
About.com finally changed the name, it said, not
necessarily because it agreed with the South Korean
geography activists but because the e-mail bombardment
was so annoying. (Asia Times Online has received similar
e-mails but still describes the body of water as the Sea
of Japan.)
Yet China's declaration that Korea's
founding kingdom was not Korean, if true giving China
some historical claim to what is today North Korea,
encourages the South Korean government to assert mildly,
"We will act in a way that will not upset our diplomatic
[read 'economic'] relationship with China." There
appears to be little interest in the murals from the
geographical renaming activists in VANK, and Korea's
"West Sea", the body of water between Korea and China
referred to as the Yellow Sea by the International
Hydrographic Organization, is not being challenged by
South Korea.
Next June, when the murals'
sovereignty case is argued before UNESCO, China will
present more than six years of effort and an enormous
amount of data to support its case. Beijing has devoted
more than US$2 billion to its Northeast Asian project,
yet South Korea, despite the resources to counter China,
has not react in an organized way to China's mural
campaign.
Given Seoul's tepid response in
challenging Beijing, a robust Korean response appears
highly unlikely. And Koreans could well see their
cultural legacy subsumed by China, losing a historical
pillar of Korean identity and facing the prospect of
future territorial challenges from Beijing.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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