Should Korea, China tackle sensitive Goguryeo issue?

By Sunny Lee

BEIJING — Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang is making back-to-back visits to both Pyongyang and Seoul this week. The unprecedented outreach should be welcomed particularly at this time when the two estranged Koreas display a communication vacuum as China’s “shuttle diplomacy” may help fill the void.

Beijing plays a special role on the Korean Peninsula, given its geopolitical proximity. It hosts the six-party talks, an international meeting designed to prod Pyongyang to halt its nuclear programs. China is also one of a handful of countries that have diplomatic relations with both Koreas. And it is the only country in the world that has access to the North’s leadership on a regular basis.

China’s popular tabloid Global Times Monday put Beijing’s unique position vis-a-vis the Korean Peninsula this way: “Only Chinese leaders are able to visit North and South Korea in rapid succession.”

While the purpose of Li’s visit to Seoul can be multifarious, gleaning from media reports reveals “confidence building” is among them.

Zhang Xinsen, the Chinese ambassador to South Korea, wrote a signed piece in a local newspaper Tuesday, expressing the hope that Li’s visit “can strengthen high-level communication between the two countries and deepen mutual political trust.”

That’s a step in the right direction. And the first step should be for the two countries to acknowledge there were a few missteps since the two established diplomatic ties in 1992 and face them.

Yet so far, the prevailing official narrative characterizing the two neighbors’ relationship has been mainly on underscoring how much progress the duo has achieved on the economic front.

For example, the typical spin goes: China has become South Korea’s largest trading partner and South Korea has become China’s third. Officials of the two countries also use the number of direct flights between the two nations to back their point: over 820 flights a week. If that’s not impressive enough, they then resort to the fact that there are as many as 6 million people traveling between the two nations a year, all in an effort to highlight the quantitative expansion of bilateral relations.

Unfortunately, the record on the qualitative side remains poor.

The two neighbors have a few tinderbox issues they have largely swept under the rug, which they pretend not to see. One of them is Goguryeo.

In the late 1990s, China quietly launched the so-called Northeast Project in an effort to provide the appearance of academic and scientific validity to Chinese assertions about Goguryeo, an ancient Korean kingdom. Most of Goguryeo’s territory today belongs to China.

The Chinese move was belatedly known in South Korea and caused a wide public uproar in 2004 when the Chinese Foreign Ministry deleted references to Goguryeo from its website section that covered Korean history.

Koreans 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.

The episode made Koreans suspicious of its otherwise flourishing relationship with its biggest economic ally.

When the flap between Seoul and Beijing over Goguryeo was hurting the bilateral relationship, Chinese senior official Wu Dawei flew in. The two governments subsequently hammered out a verbal agreement to calm the matter.

Critics point out the measure was a quick fix, and both the Korean and Chinese governments avoided addressing the problem. They saw the move as sweeping the sensitive issue under the carpet to maintain the status quo, while fundamental differences remained unresolved.

With a lack of communication, there was also information asymmetry. For example, the Korea didn’t get a fuller explanation from China why the latter embarked on the Northeast Project.

“The reason for China’s initiating the Northeast Project was driven by the Chinese fear that once the two Koreas become united and stronger, Koreans might lay claim to land that once belonged to them,” said a Chinese person who had intimate knowledge of the issue.

What was even more striking was what he said subsequently about the involvement of Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea. “Before Kim Il-sung died, he called in a group of North Korean scholars and instructed them: ‘My generation has not solved the Goguryeo issue. I want you to conduct thorough research on the matter so that our next generation may see the solution.’ Kim Il-sung’s words were later discovered by the Chinese side and they became greatly alarmed,” said the person.

“That was the real trigger that prompted China to take preemptory measures by initiating the Northeast Project to counter possible future territorial claims by a unified Korea,” he said.

If the Chinese interlocutor’s claim reflects the internal discourse of the Chinese government, then what is understood by Koreans as China’s territorial ambitions is actually a response to a Korean initiative, which has yet to be substantiated.

Unfortunately, what resulted was asymmetric understanding of the matter, which bred mistrust between the two neighbors who respectively believed it was the other side who had territorial ambitions.

It has been 19 years since the two nations established diplomatic relations. In Asia, the age is also the time when a person enters adulthood. The duo now should embark on a mature relationship, which means engaging in a frank and honest dialogue about sensitive topics.

South Korea should take the initiative as the matter is directly related to whether it can gain China’s support for Korean unification. Unfortunately, some high-profile actions by some South Koreans in China drew alarm from the Chinese public.

“I used to support Korean unification. I thought it’s their own affair. But when I saw a group of Korean tourists taking a group photo by unfolding a big placard in front of them that read ‘Goguryeo is ours!’ while they were on a tour of China, I began to have second thoughts,” said a Chinese blogger on Sina.com, China’s largest micro-blogging site.

Seoul and Beijing should stop being diplomatic about the important issue that has upset so many people on both sides. If unattended, the tinderbox may easily explode when it is sparked by the high temperature of nationalism, which is rising on both sides.