The 'Hwandan Gogi' controversy
Recently, at a press conference on Dec. 12, President Lee Jae Myung created a controversy by simply asking a question. He asked if the "Hwandan Gogi" should be considered as part of the research and discussions on Korean history. Sounds like an innocent question, but the response was overwhelming in condemnation of the president for even suggesting that the "Hwandan Gogi" be considered as a authentic historical document.
The "Hwandan Gogi" is a document allegedly compiled in 1911 by a man named Gye Yeon-su but not published until 1979 by Yi Yu-rip. It contains four separate “gogi” — old records. (As an aside, for those of you who speak a little Korean, the word “gogi” is not your familiar food from the barbecue restaurant. There are Chinese characters for this and they mean “old” “record.”)
There is scholarly unanimity about the record as a forgery and that it cannot be taken seriously. However, as soon as I say that, I can hear the chorus of objections — the “believers” in the "Hwandan Gogi" — let’s abbreviate it as HDG — come after you with a vengeance if you say the work is a forgery. That in and of itself is proof that it is a forgery because it is a matter of “belief” — of “faith”— like a religion, for those who say it’s a true document. It’s not treated as an old document that needs to be analyzed and verified. It’s a matter of belief, and if you question it, the accusations fly from the “true believers” — they accuse you of being a stooge of the Japanese, and they go off on how Korean history has been corrupted by the Japanese who purposely destroyed the records and the proof of the glory of old Korea in the prehistoric past.
It’s not a pleasant experience to be accused by the HDG people of being a shoddy scholar, one with a closed mind, a stooge of the Japanese and in league with the establish history community — they call them the “pulpit historians” because the have a position at a university. Korean history at the university is criticized as inherited from the Japanese by Yi Byeong-do of Seoul National University — he is portrayed as a great villain. They have nothing good to say about him. He was in the unfortunate position of being in place during the 1910-45 Japanese era, and in the early days of Korea’s liberation.
I agree, partially, that the establishment history narrative in Korea is distorted, partially by the Japanese, mostly by the historiography theories of the 20th century — the problem is basically that Korea tried to fit into Western models and it just doesn’t work. My own position is that the university establishment on Korea history is probably only 80 percent correct, while the opposition — the HDG group — is 100 percent incorrect.
One of their arguments is that Korea controlled most of Asia in prehistoric times. That a proto-Korean group, the Dongyi, invented Chinese characters, and that the Three Kingdoms of Korea — Silla, Baekje and Goguryeo — were all located on the Chinese mainland, not in Gyeongju and the places we know on the peninsula.
With all of these unsubstantiated, rather unbelievable claims, it is no wonder President Lee quickly backtracked two days later, Dec. 14, saying that they were not asking for HDG to be evaluated or researched, but that they were just raising the question as to how funding is being used.
The problem for Lee is his advisers. His advisory board includes some figures who are deep into advocating the history as portrayed in HDG. The reason is political. To claim land holdings far beyond today’s Korean borders, and to claim glory and honor of ancient ancestors — all this is very appealing to some politicians. And it plays well when campaigning — people like to think of their nation as glorious. It’s a kind of ultra-nationalism.
There is, however, a deeper problem. And that is, the same people who are advising the president today have been successful, politically, in the past. They saw to the stopping of funding for Harvard’s Early Korea Project, an excellent scholarly program that produced books and held conferences all based on solid archaeological and early historiographical evidence. It was at Harvard, and the Korean funding sources were borrowing the prestige of a great university.
The project began in 2006, but in 2017 the HDG people accused Harvard’s EKP of producing “colonial history” — to interpret that, as we’ve seen above, if one does not accept the HDG point of view, of the mythical greatness of an imagined early Korea, and rather, if one produces archaeological evidence and real scholarship, it contradicts the HDG story. It was then that the HDG group with its connections in the government in 2017, like those more recently that pushed Lee over the edge, they held hearings at the National Assembly and decided that the Harvard project contradicted the nationalistic story being told by the HDG group, and funding for Harvard’s Early Korea Project was cut off. Abruptly.
Today, the public, the universities and the historians have stopped the government from proposing a legitimate study of HDG. Lee has backtracked and is not supporting the ultra-nationalistic HDG group any longer, it appears. Is it too much to hope that the Korean government will once again support archaeological research on Korea at Harvard? That would be the best resolution of this issue.
It’s funny that the HDG group today is saying, “we just want to examine the issues in an academic setting” — which was the opposite of what they did when they told Harvard they didn’t want to discuss their research and their findings. What goes around comes around.
Mark Peterson (frogoutsidethewell@gmail.com) is a professor emeritus of Korean studies at Brigham Young University in Utah. The views expressed here are his own.