The Marmot’s Hole

Rep Hwang U-yeo (GNP) of the National Assembly’s Committee on Education criticized Chinese school textbooks for distorting Korean history. Going through a number of Chinese middle and high school history textbooks, Hwang documented several cases where elements of Korean history were distorted, minimalized, or misrecorded. For example, one upper-level middle school history textbook claims that Pyongyang was the capital of the Shilla Kingdom - something that would come as quite a surprise to residents of Kyongju. Another lower-level middle school history textbook produced by Shanghai Education Publishing characterizes the ancient Parhae Kingdom NOT as an independent nation, but as an regional government within the Chinese Tang Empire.
Most Chinese history textbooks also fail to make any mention at all of the Kojosun (’Old Chosun’) Kingdom, which spent much of the Bronze Age slugging it out with the Chinese (Han Emperor Wu-ti eventually conquered the kingdom in 108 BC).
The People’s Educational Publishing House’s “World History,” used by 70-80% of Chinese schools, goes as far as to calling into question both the originality and scientific nature of Korea’s hangul alphabet, claiming that “in the 15th century, Chosun tried to meld Chinese [and Korean] by creating an alphabet of 28 letters.” Other textbooks claim that hangul was invented “using the phonemes of Chinese characters as a reference (?).”
Also criticized were Chinese textbook assertions that only Kim Il-sung and his followers participated in a long-term armed struggle against the Japanese, and that the Korean War resulted from an American invasion of North Korea.
Said Rep. Hwang, “Even though Chinese textbooks seriously distort Chinese history, the Foreign Ministry and other government bodies have completely failed to formulate an official response,” and “for China and Korea to have a future-oriented and constructive relationship, it’s necessary to quickly form a body to take responsibility [for correcting the distortions and errors].

You know, sometimes, I wish these guys would spend at least half the time they do bitching about other countries’ history books instead looking into the load of horseshit otherwise known as history being passed on to their own students here in Korea. Fuck Chinese and Japanese textbooks - Korean textbooks distort the nation’s past, too, and those distortions cause more harm to this society than anything studied in Chinese and Japanese schools. If a nation persists in whitewashing its own past, it shouldn’t be surprised when its people fail to address properly festering issues that refuse to go away.
By the way, as a guy who has taken a keen historical interest in all those fun-loving barbarians who used to roam the Manchurian plains, the debate surrounding the history of the Parhae Kingdom is an interesting one - emotionally charged nationalist rhetoric aside. Three nations currently claim Parhae as their own - China, Korea, and occasionally Russia (who, more accurately, claim that Parhae is neither Chinese nor Korean) - and questions abound as to the nature of the Parhae state and the society over which it ruled. Anyway, for those who read Korea, check out Park Hyun-bae’s Parhae Site - it fuckin’ rocks. Period. Also getting props is Kyungsung University professor Han Kyu-ch’eol for his terrific site on Parhae history (mostly Korean), which includes an English abstract of his A Study of the History of Parhae (worth reading!). And while you’re at it, take a look at Yi Taehui’s 2001 piece to the Asia Times entitled “A handbook for good Koreans,” which is a brief look at the way in which Korean textbooks deal with history and concepts of “nationhood” and “independence.”

And, as always, highly recommended is the Korean History Project (”Where the past is always present!”) - perhaps the finest online history resource on the ‘Net.