In an op-ed piece published in today’s International Herald Tribune, Philip Bowring warns that for all the attention paid to popular nationalism among Chinese youth, nationalism in Korea potentially could be just as damaging to regional stability.
While the recent flap over imports of U.S. beef dominates the headlines and the US-ROK strategic partnership remains a sore subject for many Koreans, I would argue that it is the relationship between Korea and its larger neighbor China that is the most fraught with the complications of extreme popular nationalism.
Korea and China have had long historic ties dating back to a time before there was even a “China” or a “Korea” as we understand those terms today, and that gets us to the crux of the problem: the extension back through time of present day national boundaries, definitions of ethnicity, and geopolitical concerns.
For all their historical links with China, Koreans sometimes like to see themselves as kin, however distant, of the non-Han peoples of mainland Northeast Asia now under Chinese and Russian rule.
The surge in national sentiment owes much to the fact that few southerners now see North Korea as a real threat. Pity has replaced fear. But China