Goguryeo Controversies - Speculative Motives

Speculative Motives

Much of the scholarship on the Goguryeo controversy has focused on China's strategic intentions towards the Koreas, and presumptively dismiss the validity of Chinese scholars' historical claims. Yonson Ahn, a Korean scholar who has studied Korean comfort women and historical debates in Korea and Japan, writes that historians such as Quan Zhezhu, Sun Jinji, Kim Hui-kyo, and Mark Byington "perceive the launching of the Project as a defensive reaction to preserve China’s own territorial integrity and stability." Various explanations advanced for China's interest in northeastern history include: South Korean irredentism over Jiandao (Gando in Korean), privileges granted by South Korea to Koreans in China, and the possible collapse of North Korea. Modern Chinese nationalism, which in contrast to Korea is not based on a "pure blood line", stresses unity in diversity and a supraethnic "Chinese people", or Zhonghua minzu. China also has an interest in promoting stability and the territorial status quo in its border territories, in order to tackle the advanced cross-border problems of drug trafficking, fundamentalist religious proselytism, ethnic separatism, and illegal immigration. An interpretation which suspects aggressive Chinese motivations is inconsistent with China's own "peaceful rise" rhetoric and with its record of peacefully settling 17 of 23 of its territorial disputes with substantial compromises.

On the other hand, some Chinese scholars perceive the Korean nationalistic sentiments of some Koreans in both North and South Koreas as threatening to its territorial integrity. In fact, there are proponents in both the Korean liberal and conservative camps advocating for the “restoration of the lost former territories.” Chinese scholars are afraid of border changes when the North Korean government collapses. Because there are more than 2 million ethnic Koreans living in China's Jilin province, China fears that they might secede from China and join a newly unified Korea.

On the whole, the Goguryeo controversy is more significant to Koreans than Chinese. Reasons for this imbalance include the fact that in modern Korean nationalism, Goguryeo's history is presented as a contrast to Korean history in the 19th and 20th century, where it was a "feminine and helpless victim of imperialism". Another founding tenet of Korean nationalism is to establish cultural independence from China. For example, in the 20th century, Koreans switched the central figure in their founding myth from Jizi, a Chinese human sage, to Tangun, a god.