China yawns at Goguryeo spat

Despite South Koreans’ emotional reactions to what they see as a challenge by China to Korea’s ancient history, the Chinese media have generally ignored the matter since a series of comments in July that aroused Koreans’ ire. A Chinese editor in Beijing said that residents there are mostly ignorant of the dispute or are indifferent to it.
The dispute over Goguryeo, an ancient kingdom that held sway in northeastern China and the northern part of the Korean Peninsula from 37 B.C to 668, began in 2002 when China began a research project on the history of northeastern China. Scholars participating in the project interpreted the history of the kingdom as that of an ethnic minority state under Chinese influence. That angered Koreans, who see the kingdom as a direct ancestor of modern-day Korea.
The dispute flared up in July, when some Chinese state-run media repeated those claims at just about the time the Unesco World Heritage List enrolled relics of the kingdom. The new world heritage sites are located in China and in North Korea. Xinhua News Agency, the People’s Daily and other major media called the kingdom a regional Chinese government.
“Goguryeo was subordinated to the Chinese royal families and was a regional administration that received its authority from Chinese dynasties,” Xinhua reported on July 2. The People’s Daily said the kingdom, inhabited by Koreans at the time, was “an ancient Chinese ethnic minority.”
The reports triggered a firestorm in South Korea and prompted the government here to lodge official complaints with Beijing. Politicians, government officials, scholars and press have rebutted those claims, often emotionally, since then.
But Huo Yongzhe, deputy editor-in-chief of China Business Weekly, a magazine published by China Daily in Beijing, said the dispute between South Korea and China is rarely mentioned in the media. “Is there a historic dispute between the two countries? I have not seen any reports,” Mr. Huo said. “Nobody around me is talking about it.”
He added that the Chinese public, in general, has been agitated about another dispute over more recent history. The Asian Cup soccer competition that saw Japan prevailing over China in the championship match triggered an outburst of Chinese rancor over Japan’s military operations there in the late 1930s.
“Frankly, I have not heard about the ancient kingdom and the related matters,” Mr. Huo said.
The Korean Cultural and Public Information Center at Seoul’s embassy in Beijing, which monitors media reports in China, also said Chinese news outlets have rarely mentioned the Goguryeo dispute since the spate of reports in July. Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV once reported on the matter, and another report appeared last week in Cankao Xiaoxi, an Xinhua-owned news organ that translates foreign news items into Chinese.
Despite the general media silence, one well-known Chinese literary critic has criticized his country’s historians’ attempts to claim Goguryeo as China’s own. In contributions to a current affairs magazine and to a newspaper on Aug. 1 and 13, Zhu Dake reportedly criticized Beijing’s northeast China historical project of the past five years as an effort to advance a political agenda. Although he did not cite Goguryeo or other specific examples, he said the 200 historians from 30 organizations that have been working on the project were attempting to prove that the Han Chinese, the country’s majority group, is the center of Chinese civilization.

by Ser Myo-ja