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Something is up when there's a move in China to make Goguryeo part of Chinese history. Since February of 2002, it has been pursuing something called Don Buk Gong Jeong, "Northeast Progress," a state-funded effort to place the history of Goguryeo under the history of China with a five-year budget worth the equivalent of W3 trillion. In June of this year, the Guangming Ribao, a daily scholarly publication of the Chinese Communist Party, claimed that "Goguryeo is part of China."
UNESCO's World Heritage Committee is set to meet in Suzhou, China, in June 2004. On the agenda will be the reconsideration of North Korea's application to register Goguryeo wall murals in Pyeongyang as UNESCO World Heritage, something that was once tabled because of Chinese obstructionist tactics, and to consider an application for Goguryeo wall murals located in Chinese territory. If North Korea's application is again left unaccepted and only China's site receives this recognition, then we might have an absurd situation in which Goguryeo becomes officially recognized as part of Chinese history.
Political calculations have to be involved in one way or another when China invests such an astronomical amount of funds for a state project about an historical issue. One can deduce that this is part of a highly advanced strategy, that it wants to reassert its claims over its Northeastern region, where ethnic Koreans reside, and, based on this, it wants to be able to take a swipe the historical justification for reaching into the area that is North Korea. The Guangming Ribao is taking the wild step of giving up on the claim that history in Pyeongyang was Chinese up to the point the capital was established there, and claiming that Goguryeo history after Pyeongyang became the capital classifies as Chinese history as well. The Guangming Ribao's demand from out of the blue, to "stop politicizing scholarly issues," is exactly what we would like to say.
Meanwhile, our government is just watching this seizure of Goguryeo history by China, almost as if oblivious. We should put our specialists in this area together immediately to formulate a response, and, if necessary, work to establish a structure of active cooperation with North Korea to deal with the matter as well. We need to show this "Northeast Project" for what it is, and, if there are found to be problems with it, we need to be assertive as to what the problems are. And while there should on the one hand be systematic gathering and analysis of the results of China's Goguryeo research efforts, there should also, over the long run, be a program to strengthen our own research in Goguryeo history, which has long been close to a vacuum.
December 6, 2003
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