How Chinese was Chinese history?

By Kyung Moon Hwang

At this extraordinary moment in South Korea, amid a historic presidential election campaign following the arrest of an impeached president, it seems silly to bother reacting to yet another ignorant, irresponsible remark from Donald Trump. But predictably, Koreans are upset because China’s President Xi Jinping might have told him that their country “was once part of China.”

This column has already detailed the complex “love-hate” historical relationship between Korea and China, so there is no need to go over this again. But we can take this small controversy as an opportunity to further consider the workings of Chinese, rather than Korean, history.

This is because, regardless of whether Xi actually said such an absurd thing, it’s clear that the Chinese government, monopolized by the Chinese Communist Party, has cultivated such a view to solve a fundamental problem with Chinese history itself.

The common belief among Chinese, and many others, is that China boasts a long unbroken history as the Middle Kingdom that bestowed civilization to its neighbors while often ruling over them as well. But such a view is mostly just another modern nationalist myth, in this way similar to the idea that Korean history dates back 5,000 years.

Furthermore, much of Chinese history was not even Chinese. One of the fascinating features of “Chinese history” was that, throughout the cycles of dynastic rise and fall in political form, nearby peoples outside the kingdom’s boundaries greatly influenced, and often controlled, the development of Chinese civilization.

Following the ancient mythological era, the earliest unified polity was the Qin dynasty of the third century BCE, which militarily consolidated vast territories but quickly succumbed to the forces of what became the Han dynasty. Thereafter, for every “Chinese” dynasty such as the Han, there was an extended period of fragmentation or rule by non-Chinese conquerors, such as the Khitan, Jurchen, Mongols, and Manchus.

Even the famed Tang dynasty, which was contemporaneous with Korea’s “Unified Silla” kingdom, was infused with a wide range of cultures, peoples, and rulers, including from central Asia. Many of these smaller groups on the margins became absorbed into greater China, but others, such as those that formed what became Korea, were able to resist Chinese control, even as they were influenced by Chinese civilization.

At the turn of the first millennium, the Han dynasty, which helped initiate the process of founding a coherent Chinese state, built scattered fortresses to anchor small colonies on parts of the Korean peninsula, but this was well before there was such a thing as Korea. Just as important is that one of the native “barbarian” tribes on the peninsula whom the Chinese described so colorfully grew into a formidable kingdom and eventually overran the main Han outpost, located in what later became Pyongyang.

This kingdom, Goguryeo, fiercely fought off Chinese attempts to invade and absorb it until Goguryeo itself fell to the joint forces of the Tang and another peninsular kingdom, Silla, in the 7th century. But when the Tang quickly tried to secure Chinese rule over the entire peninsula, Silla successfully repelled this effort. Thus was born the “tribute system” of ritual diplomatic relations, designed to keep the peace and Korea’s autonomy, which more or less became the norm until the 19th century.

So to use this ancient relationship as the basis for claiming that Korea was once a part of China is like stating that England was once a part of Italy, since the Roman empire, which had similar outposts on what later became England, was geographically centered in territory that (much) later became Italy.

Or perhaps Mr. Xi was referring to the Yuan dynasty of the 13th and 14th centuries, when the Mongols conquered both China and Korea, and indeed much of Eurasia. But actually Mongol control over China was much more comprehensive and direct than over Korea, and in any case it was not a matter of Korea being part of China.

This interesting complexity of Chinese history reached a peak in the Qing dynasty of the 17th to 20th centuries. This last “Chinese” dynasty was actually a product of the Manchus, offshoots of the Jurchen, who rejected the notion of assimilating with the majority Han Chinese, whom they had conquered, after all.

But ironically the commonly-recognized, modern version of China resulted from this extended period of foreign rule: The Qing dynasty doubled the territory of the preceding Ming by absorbing the regions of Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, and of course the Manchus' homeland of Manchuria. Little wonder, then, that even today identification with “China” among those living in these areas is somewhat questionable. Indeed, these people would identify much more with China’s multi-national history than with any sense of Chinese nationalist history.

Since it established control in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has in fact used this cosmopolitan history to promote the idea of a multi-cultural China of many ethnicities, including Koreans living in Manchuria today. Like the dynasties of the past, however, the Communist dynasty has manipulated history to legitimate and perpetuate its rule, and so, in a typical autocratic ploy, it has turned to stoking nationalism as well.

In familiar service to strongman politics, then (see also Russia and Turkey), the Chinese government deploys both nationalism and imperialism, an “imperialist nationalism” if you will, based on a distorted glorification of the past. That seems to be the real story behind the diplomatic faux-pas concerning Korea.

Kyung Moon Hwang is a professor at the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of "A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative" (Second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).