Posted on 04/21/2017 10:07:58 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In fairness to Trump, he heard that directly from China’s president (or so he says). What was he supposed to do, be skeptical of Chinese nationalist propaganda?
If you can’t trust Xi Jinping to shoot straight with you about a western-allied country within China’s sphere of influence, who can you trust?
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week, Trump said Xi told him during a recent summit that “Korea actually used to be a part of China.” The comments sparked outrage in Seoul and became an issue in South Korea’s presidential race, prompting the foreign ministry to seek to verify what Xi actually said.
“It’s a clear fact acknowledged by the international community that, for thousands of years in history, Korea has never been part of China,” foreign ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuck said at a briefing in Seoul on Thursday…
“This is clearly a distortion of history and an invasion of the Republic of Korea’s sovereignty,” conservative Liberty Korea Party candidate Hong Joon-pyo said through a spokesman.
Politically, that’s a bit like idly observing that Crimea contains a lot of ethnic Russians. An alarming possibility, though: Maybe Xi didn’t say that to him. Maybe Trump simply misunderstood, and now, because he seems not to realize which details he should and shouldn’t share publicly about his discussions with China’s leader, South Korea’s leadership is left to wonder erroneously whether Beijing is planning to include them in its “one China” plans a few decades from now. More from the Telegraph:
“I suspect that Mr Xi said, in effect, that Korea was part of China because it was overwhelmingly under Chinese influence historically and Mr Trump bought that,” said Rah Jong-yil, a former South Korean ambassador to both London and Tokyo.
“It shows his shocking ignorance of the situation in north-east Asia,” he told The Telegraph. “That is very disturbing to us”…
There is a growing body of nationalist thought in China that ancient Korean kingdoms were part of the Chinese empire and that modern-day nation states should similarly fall within Beijing’s exclusive sphere of influence, Mr Rah said.
If the South Koreans had any sort of troll game at all, they would have responded by claiming that Mexico’s president recently reminded them that the U.S. used to be part of Mexico. That would have been an amusing phone call between Trump and Pena Nieto.
As a Twitter pal said, what would make this even more darkly funny is if Trump started reminding everyone that China used to be a part of Japan. Does he really have no sense of the nationalist sensitivities in the region or how nervous U.S. allies there are about China’s growing power, especially after the White House ditched TPP? His tough talk towards China as a candidate might have reassured them but it’s been nothing but sunshine with Beijing since that phone call with Taiwan’s president. What looked like a looming “U.S. and Russia isolate China” long-term play by the White House during the transition increasingly looks more like a “U.S. and China isolate Russia” strategy. (Neither is likely to work, but still.) Imagine watching that play out in Tokyo or Seoul and suddenly finding Trump repeating Chinese talking points about the Korean peninsula.
Ah well. So long as he has an “armada” in the vicinity to help protect South Korea from the menace to the north, they’ll forgive him. Once they’re done forgiving him for BSing them about that armada, that is.
South Korea dismisses #Trump's remark that Korea was "part of China." pic.twitter.com/DtHa4gOSHe
— Jeffrey Guterman (@JeffreyGuterman) April 20, 2017
Actually, North Korea was conquered and run by Imperial China.
Actually he’s right. It was briefly under the Tang dynasty and later fully conquered by the Mongols.
I worked for a company years ago that had a number of Chinese software types. In our engineering group we had two young guys who were Korean. They would literally walk with one shoulder rubbing the wall as they passed each other in the hallways, avoiding all eye contact. Sitting with our guys in the cafeteria and just a few tables away, about a dozen Chinese... You could cut the tension in the air with a knife.
What the Chinese didn't know was that one of our Koreans could speak their language. My ignorance here, I wasn't aware of any difference but assumed there were some dialect distinctions. Our Korean buddy would tell us all the disparaging things they were laughing and joking about at the expense of both our Koreans AND American employees, black and white. Everybody was fair game to them.
Agreed, I wouldn’t know either.
And by quoting the Chinese President, now Xi must explain his remarks.
You mean like Barack “57 States” Obama?
And Hawaii is not a part of Asia. Right Baraq?
5.56mm
But the point of that war was that the Sui dynasty was attempting to re-assert its control of Korea (and even then China did hold on to much of Korea anyway), which had been customary under several dynasties for many hundreds of years.
And Korea again fell to the subsequent Tang dynasty (668 AD).
The point about holding Korea did not imply that China held it continuously or always completely.
>History and geography are not his strong suits.
Trump and the Chinese primer are correct. Korea used to be part of 2 different Chinese empires. The Koreans just really dislike the idea that they’re always someone’s bitch.
The problem is that the Chinese seem to feel (as the Muslims do, for example about Spain) that if China EVER controlled a piece of territory or briefly explored there (Tibet, Korea, Taiwan, South China Sea) that they own it forever, regardless of the desires of the people who actually live there.
I wanna hear any Korean Presidential candidate explain the history of the USA. For extra credit explain Texas coming into the Union.
Koreans and Chinese. Indignant that they are seen as the same. Does anyone else find this funny?
Allahpundit is a Queens guy and eats at the T Bone Diner on Queens Blvd and 70th Ave in Forest Hills, so he can’t be Erickson.
Shouldn’t Korea be telling the Chinese to stop lying about Korea? What does Trump have to so with it?
As an aside, a Chinese Guy in his 30’s my Boss does Business with said he had never heard of Mao’s Cultural Revolution when my Boss asked him about it. He looked at my Boss like he was Nuts when he attempted to tell him about it.
Reminds me of the Liberal’s success in removing the Confederacy from the History Books and the Public Square.
Very true.
They feel as they have dibs.
This gives me hope for the restoration of the Spanish Empire.
Yes, many times.
Yes, like the English and Irish fighting. Can anyone tell the difference? Indians and Pakistanis, Israelis and Arabs, Hutu and Tutsi
But the Chinese aren’t lying.
It may not seem like a relevant matter to us, but it certainly is in Asia, where people have long memories and put a remarkable value on precedent.
But to tell it to the Chinese?
China >>>> Korea
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