By Sunny Lee
Korea Times Correspondent
JIAN ― "You see the road ahead? That was newly paved with the tourism cash largely by South Koreans. The economy of this village has upturned significantly thanks to South Koreans," said Jin, a Chinese tour guide.
Encouraged by the tourists' impact on the local economy, and to lure even more, the provincial authorities promoted this remote town to a city. Now, South Korean tourists make up 80 percent of the entire tourist pool that this fringe city in northeast China attracts.
What has brought the swarm of South Korean pilgrims here?
Although the North Korean city of Nampo is nearby, they are not here to satiate their prying instinct to peep into the forbidden land of the Dear Leader.
Their reason lies in that this town houses a stone monument and a handful of tombs that belonged to an ancient kingdom called Goguryeo - a dynasty that ruled over parts of today's northern China and the northern half of the Korean Peninsula from 37 BCE to 668 AD.
South Korean tourists who come here also take an arduous walk up the steep mountainous steps of Onyeosanseong (Mt. Wunu in Chinese), which was Goguryeo's first capital, founded by Jumong, its first king.
For South Koreans, coming here is like coming on a pilgrimage. It is a self-discovering, identity-defining journey. Koreans regard the kingdom as the forerunner of their nation. For them, Goguryeo symbolizes the identity of Korea.
In fact, the stone slab, commemorating the legacy of King Gwanggaeto of the kingdom, erected in 414 by King Jangsu as a memorial to his deceased father, remains one of the primary sources for the history of Goguryeo. It also indicates that the ancient residents of the kingdom were Koreans.
And it had been regarded that way until 2004 when China claimed Goguryeo as its history on the grounds that most of Goguryeo's territory today belongs to China.
"That move by China deeply hurt the feelings of Koreans," said Park Won-chul, a lawyer with Kim & Chang, a major law firm in South Korea.
"We don't lay our claim to the territory that once belonged to Korea. But for China to say the kingdom's history is part of Chinese history and the history of the people who once lived there are all part of Chinese people's history, is a grotesquely preposterous argument," Park said.
This summer, Park led a group of some 60 South Koreans here, including college students, housewives, academics and high school students, following in the footsteps of their ancestors.
They are members of the Young Korean Academy (Heung Sa Dan), a non-governmental group in Korea, founded by Korean patriot Ahn Chang-ho (1878-1938).
"If we follow the Chinese logic, then Goguryeo's history started in China and Koreans who are descendents of the Goguryeo people are also Chinese! China shouldn't warp history to suit its current political needs," Park Byung-sup, a high school history teacher, said.
The Chinese move, commonly referred to as the "Northeast Project," was initiated by China in 2002 to provide the appearance of academic and scientific validity to its assertions about Goguryeo.
Two years later, the Chinese move caused a wide public uproar in Korea when the Chinese Foreign Ministry deleted references to Goguryeo from its Web site section that covered Korean history.
Some fear that China's assertion potentially makes much of North Korea its historical territory, and thus could serve as justification for future Chinese claims on North Korea if there is a sudden "upheaval" in the North.
Others view it as part of China's initiative for national unity to integrate the histories of its 55 ethnic minorities, some of whom live on the fringes of the region.
As the ongoing flap between Korea and China was hurting the bilateral relationship, and as more Koreans became suspicious of its otherwise flourishing relationship with its biggest economic ally, China's special envoy Wu Dawei then flew in to Seoul.
The two governments hammered out a verbal agreement to calm the matter after nine hours of negotiation.
On May 27, 2008, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a regular press briefing that both China and Korea had the "common understanding" that both sides would not allow the issue "to become an obstacle to the bilateralrelationship."
But critics point out that the two neighbors actually didn't follow up on the issue, didn't engage in a serious discussion seeking a tangible solution to the volatile issue, saying that the two nations rather hurriedly moved to seal the historical scar that didn't produce any written bilateral statement, potentially leaving room for a repeat of the episode.
Indeed, for the two nations to sweep the sensitive issues under the rug just to maintain the status quo may as well have been a short-sighted measure, while the fundamental emotional debris between the two peoples are still floatingaround, ready to erupt again.
In Jian, inside the King Gwanggaeto Monument Hall, for example, a Chinese tourist was chatting with a Chinese security guard there, apparently assuming that no Koreans in the vicinity understood the Chinese language.
"So, all these Koreans came here just for the big old stone?" he said. Apparently, he seemed to have concluded that the Koreans were here to express their desire to reclaim land that once belonged to them.
"They are making an useless attempt. If they claim this is part of theirterritory simply because it was once part of their history in the past, then Americans should also return their land to the native Americans, too," he said.
Not far from the Chinese, there was a Korean tourist, looking at the stele. As he was gazing at it, he quietly spoke to another Korean tourist next to him: "Remember, history comes around and goes around. In 1,000 years from now, this place may no longer belong to China."
Sometimes, a language barrier is a good thing. If the Chinese and the Korean had known what the other was talking about just a few steps away, the scene might have escalated into something confrontational.
As it happened last week, Zhan Debin, an expert on Korea at Fudan University in Shanghai, wrote in the Chinese vernacular newspaper, the International Herald Leader, that China should "guard against Korea's territorial demands," arguing that the move reflects Seoul's "increasing nationalistic sentiment and cultural superiority mentality."
Such a Chinese perspective is partly sparked by some Korean travelers in China who drew the attention of the Chinese authorities when they waved a Korean flag on Mt. Baekdu (Mt. Changbai in Chinese), which is regarded as holy by Koreans, or when they tried to take a group photo by unfolding a big placard in front of them that read "Goguryeo is ours!" while they were on a tour, for instance, here in Jian.
These activities certainly got on the nerves of the Chinese government. China expressed its disapproval of such behavior by confiscating the placard and made the Koreans delete the relevant pictures from their digital camera.
Observers say this familiar and often repeated incident is the result of the fact that both the Korean and Chinese governments have avoided addressing the problem.
Park, the lawyer, took the example of Korean orphans who were adopted in the United States and European countries. After growing up, they then visit their biological country.
"We don't ask these people to change their citizenship back to Korean again. Goguryeo is the same. We don't demand China return it back to Korea. But we should recognize the underlying duality is part of history and work together to find common ground, rather than keeping mum and not doing anything about it while we all know it is a potential political tinderbox," he said.