China’s ‘gross mischaracterization’ of the Korean War
The Chinese government’s attempt to reframe the war as a struggle against American imperialism is both overly simplistic and a gross mischaracterization of what actually transpired
Pyeng Hwa Kang, Special to National Post
In his recent speech commemorating the 70th anniversary of his country’s involvement in the Korean War, Chinese President Xi Jinping touted China’s resolve against the “imperialist invaders.”
The “imperialist invaders,” whom President Xi charged with having “fired upon the doorstep of a new China,” refers to the United Nations forces who were sent in to support South Korea during the 1950 North Korean invasion and fought in a bloody war that lasted for three years, devastating my homeland and leaving incalculable losses behind.
Seventy years later, the heart-wrenching stories of the great conflict, from family separations to mass starvation to the countless orphans it created, still very much haunt the memories of South Koreans.
Among those “Western aggressors,” as China’s leader dubbed them, were more than 26,000 Canadian soldiers, 516 of whom never returned. They were Canadian fathers, brothers and sons, who paid the ultimate sacrifice by giving their lives for the cause of freedom in a distant land on the other side of the Pacific Ocean — a fledgling democracy that just threw off the colonial yoke of the Japanese Empire.
It is therefore outrageous, and frankly outright repugnant, to see some prominent Chinese-Canadian groups praising China’s participation in the Korean War against Canada and trying to legitimize China’s distorted history in Canadian public discourse.
China’s convenient reframing of the Korean War not only is disrespectful to the dead and their descendants, but is also a continuation of Communist regime’s ongoing campaign to distort history. The consensus in the international community is indisputable: the Korean war was initiated unilaterally by North Korea’s Communist regime, a fact firmly recognized by the United Nations Security Council.
Uncontested, too, is the critical role that UN member countries played in the war. In the April 1951 Battle of Kapyong, for example, Canadian forces, along with units from Australia and New Zealand, faced the blunt head of the Chinese Spring Offensive and successfully fended off a massive assault from the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army, despite being heavily outnumbered (in some instances five to one), thereby securing a strategic access route to the capital city of Seoul.
If one asks whether the sacrifices of those who answered the call from the four corners of the world to come to South Korea’s rescue in its darkest hour were worth it, there’s no need to look further than South Korea itself. The country has achieved an unparalleled economic surge since the 1970s, in what is known as the “miracle of the Han River.”
A global leader in high-tech, electronics, automotive industry and higher education, South Korea has been a member of OECD since 1996 and has consistently placed among the top dogs, boasting the fourth-largest economy in Asia and the 11th-highest gross domestic product in the world in 2019. For a country the size of the state of Indiana, and for a country that was one of the world’s poorest barely half a century ago, I’d say that it did a pretty darn good job. Its bet on democracy and capitalism paid off.
On the other hand, we all know how North Korea turned out: a perpetual obsession with nuclear arms; state-sponsored terror; mass famine; grotesque violations of human rights; and a government that is both reclusive and threatening toward its neighbours.
The Chinese government’s attempt to reframe the war as a struggle against American imperialism is both overly simplistic and a gross mischaracterization of what actually transpired. A total of 60 countries assisted South Korea in the war: 16 with military support, six with medical support and 38 with material supplies and other aids. In other words, the Korean War was not some confined conflict between two close nations; rather, it was a unified, deliberate and magnanimous engagement on the part of the international community to defend South Korea’s sovereignty and its freedom against the Communist incursion from the north.
Thus, to suggest, as President Xi did, that the participation of all these countries — including Ethiopia, Turkey and the Philippines — somehow amounts to “American imperialism” and a collection of “Western aggressors” is untenable. This is nothing more than a sly attempt to rewrite history to fit into a fundamentally flawed narrative.
More broadly, China’s brazen effort to muddy history corresponds seamlessly with the creeping actualization of President Xi’s “ Chinese Dream “: its illegal expansion into the South China Sea through the construction of artificial islands and military bases; censorship within China and of other countries through the use of diplomatic bullying and geopolitical and economic pressure campaigns; and breaking its promise to maintain Hong Kong as a self-governing territory, violating it’s own “one country, two systems” policy.
This clear instance of the Chinese leadership’s attempt to rewrite history and its false romanticization of the Korean War spring from an immoderate nationalistic ambition, the parochiality and toxicity of which have been exposed recently by the Chinese backlash toward the K-Pop giant BTS for discussing the shared sacrifice of Americans and South Koreans during the war.
What this reveals is an unbridled regime that lacks in the moral consciousness of history and humanistic values and is therefore undeserving of the title of global leader. That title, which is in essence a title of respect and of class, cannot be earned by the pervasive bullying of neighbouring countries, nor by brandishing a thuggish attitude in the pursuit of becoming the world’s sole superpower.
Should China continue down this path, President Xi will ensure that the Chinese Dream will never be free from the incessant and well-founded suspicions of the international community, and the Chinese project will soon find itself shunned by most regions of the globe.
National Post
Pyeng Hwa Kang is a recent doctoral graduate in law from the University of Montreal.
Originally published at https://nationalpost.com.
