Post-350: “Scolded by the Thief”: China’s Resentment of THAAD Missiles in Korea [News Translated]

It was during the now-forgotten MERS Virus Panic of Summer 2015 that I first heard of “THAAD” (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, a U.S.-made anti-ballistic missile system).

Public places in Seoul were largely empty at the time, with the great masses afraid of inhaling a gulp of MERS-tainted air and staying home. Schools and hagwons were closed by the thousands; cafes were deserted; tourist spots, likewise. The TV news at the time consisted of wall-to-wall MERS coverage, as more infected persons were discovered and some began to die. A war panic, without the war.

Anti-government protestors, though, kept vigil, as they always do, at the broad avenue in front of Gwanghwamun [광화문] in central Seoul. As so many of those normally out and about were hunkering down during the MERS Panic, these protestors were more visible than usual. I was there. I was not particularly afraid of MERS and used the opportunity to take full advantage of the emptiness of the streets. (The final MERS death toll was 36, almost all of them elderly; I don’t think there was ever evidence of any sustained general airborne transmission.)

I recall vividly two things from Gwanghwamun on that MERS days: (1) The unusual daytime silence, and (2) The handful of predictably dour protestors, some masked to prevent MERS. One of the protestors’ placards had the word THAAD on it. “What’s THAAD?” The placard called for U.S. military expulsion from Korean soil. I guessed THAAD must be something the U.S. military was doing. (See post-318, “A Glance at the Gwanghwamun Protestors, “. I will repost the photo here:)

(Note #1: Some would call the group behind that burgundy placard above “친북성향” [“Rather Friendly Towards North Korea”], a kind of political slur in South Korea. These groups are worth watching because they are political spearhead groups, by which I mean that they are the first to speak up on issues that often get traction. Their influence is much greater than the vote totals that their explicit parties can secure.) (Note #2: THAAD will, as far as I can tell, be under ROK-Army control and not USFK control, so the sign is factually incorrect in that it insinuates the USFK is bringing in THAAD. [See Post-#318 for a translation of the slogans on the placard.])

A few weeks ago, the THAAD deal between the U.S. and ROK was finalized and the deployment process begun. There was some opposition from the left-wing Democratic Party [더불어민주당], who performed well in the recent elections, but the issue was never put to a vote in the National Assembly. It was simply a government initiative. Full operational readiness for THAAD, they say, will be at hand before the end of 2016.

My impression in mid-2015 was that THAAD had very low awareness in the Korean public mind, and Koreans I asked about it had never heard of it. By this summer (2016), a year later, it has become perhaps the top international political story in Korea, and a significant one for East Asia as a whole.

China has been publicly resentful of THAAD.

The Korean Democratic Party organized a visit to reassure China about THAAD, sending some of its top parliamentary figures. The visit may not have achieved much, according to a news report which I will translate here:

Final thoughts:

1.) The Democratic Party of Korea (더불어민주당) is, curiously, is still called the “opposition party” [야당] in the Korean press despite winning more seats than the government party (Saenuri Party 새누리당) in the April 2016 election. No party now has a majority.

2.) I recently re-read the first-ever account of Korea written by a Westerner, the journal of Hendrik Hamel [published 1658]. I can’t help but be reminded by this Korean delegation of the regular tributary visits and payments that Chosun Korea made to China. Hamel talks about these some length in his book. (Hamel and the other shipwrecked Dutchmen were held against their will in the Kingdom of Chosun [i.e., Korea], and the Chosun king was very afraid of the Chinese learning about the Westerners. He locked them up when a Chinese delegation visited.)

3.) Whether you agree that a walk down the above path of historical analogy is valid or not, at least you’ll agree that this THAAD issue is a metaphor for bigger things.

4.) A similar deployment just twenty-five years ago would never have generated a high-profile official state visit to China no matter how angry China was — I say this with certainty because until August 1992 there were no official ROK-PRC relations at all and thus no official state visits.

5.) Say unification occurs. Unified Korea would share a long border with Manchuria, China. Some Koreans feel that they have historical claim to parts of Manchuria.

I have known some ethnic Koreans from China [조선족] who have come to Korea. One, born in the 1970s, is married to my friend M.P., now in Texas. Another, P.G.H., a male born in 1988, gave up on Korea in late 2015 and returned to China because the jobs he was getting were of the “handing out flyers” sort. His Korean was rather worse than mine. The reason he gave us, though, for giving up on Korea, was that all his friends were in China. Another ethnic-Korean-from-China, K.J.H., born 1991, majored in linguistics in China, briefly taught English there (though we have only ever spoken Korean and she says she knows English only ‘academically’) and got TOPIK-6 (the highest Korean level) after coming to South Korea last year. She says she can’t understand most of the TV news, which makes me feel relieved. These ethnic-Koreans-from-China seem certainly culturally more Chinese, but they may seem something different to Chinese, I don’t know.

Anyway, this pool of Koreans-in-China is several million strong.

I was once handed a leaflet in front of Tapgol Park in Jongro, Seoul [종로 탑골공원앞] by a thin and grinning ajeosshi in his fifties or so, the type you’ll find somewhere on a mountain trail on a sunny Saturday drinking magkeolli alcohol. Why did he give me, an obvious racial foreigner, his four-page-long Korean-language leaflet? I’m glad he did, but he’d not have been able to know I could read it. The rambling treatise, as far as I could understand it, called for “reclamation” of “our land.” This would mean parts of the Chinese provinces of Jilin and Liaoning on the below map, and maybe even some of southern Heilongjiang: