China edits Asian regional history, again.

Many people have never heard of the Kingdom of Koguryo, and if Beijing has its way, many people never will, instead hearing of the Koguryo ethnic people from northern China and the Koguryo regional government, in stark contravention to acepted world history, and an agreement reached by China and neighboring Korea in August.

Despite recent assurances and the delivery of an agreement between China and Korea to recognise the ancient Asian Kingdom of Koguryo, Chinese authorities have continued with a 'campaign' to distort regional history and to depict China as a single continuous sovereign entity.

In August 2004 China made a formal 5 article declaration and a pledge to cease efforts to misdirect regional history following an April incident in which a website published by the Chinese foreign ministry integrated elements of Koguryo's history with Chinese history, creating the impression that the kingdom was part of China in support of the widely held misconception that China has been a single unchanging entity throughout much of its history.

After representations were made to Beijing by Korea, Chinese officials erased all historic information concerning Koguryo and the Korean peninsular prior the unconditional surrender of Japan, of which Korea was an unwilling colony, and the establishment of the Republic of Korea in the late 1940s.

In the latest incident, China breached the August agreement by publishing an international journal directly identifying Koguryo as a integral and historical component of Northern China.

The journal, published in both English and Chinese and on sale in 180 countries, breached the earlier agreement and angered Korean officials by depicting the Kingdom of Koguryo as being a localised minority government subject to central Chinese rule, and not as a sovereign entity over which China had no authority.

Despite renewed representations by the Korean Government, China has yet to act to correct the latest publication and has not announced any intention to acknowledge the existance of Koguryo as a sovereign state in future publications.

Since the founding of modern China, Beijing has undertaken what has been described as a "Systematic adulteration of historical facts", particularly in regard to elements of Chinese sovereignty and the single Chinese identity. Including issues of sovereignty and rule in Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and a number of islands that are internationally recognized as being part of Japan.

Chinese authorities have made a number of attempts to conceal or divert attention from regional histories showing that territories claimed as part of China have at times been sovereign states that have been integrated into or annexed by China, and have tried to alter perceptions on the composition and internal history of China, including numerous publications that describe the 'liberation' of Tibet and the recent remodelling of the history of Hong Kong that does not acknowledge that Hong Kong was almost uninhabited and held no value at the time of its ceding to the British, or that the majority of its population are descendants of refugees fleeing from mainland China.

The incident comes soon after anti-Japanese elements within China accused Japan of watering down accounts of the Sino-Japanese war by summarising campaigns, not explicitly including individual war crimes, and not recognising Chinese statistics, which often vary greatly from internationally accepted numbers.

China has yet to accept any comparison between their complaints over Japanese textbooks and Koreas representations over the alteration of the history of Koguryo in Chinese books.

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit