Chinese warfare blockbuster fuels anger in South Korea

Across China, warfare epic “The Battle at Lake Changjin” is filling cinemas and shattering field workplace information. The movie, set within the Korean Peninsula and offers with the bloody 1950-53 Korean War, is on the right track to be the largest grossing film on the earth this yr.
The film has been met with fierce criticism in South Korea, elevating the chance that the movie might not even discover a native distributor.
To many South Koreans, the movie is one other propaganda piece stuffed with historic inaccuracies that has been bankrolled by the Chinese authorities to incite deeper patriotic emotions amongst “Gen N.”
Some critics level out that the film has been launched to coincide with the a centesimal anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.
The movie tells the story, from the Chinese perspective, of one of many bloodiest encounters of the 1950-53 Korean War
Others are offended that the Chinese individuals are being advised that the nation’s “heroic” volunteers introduced peace to the peninsula by way of their self-sacrifice, and demand Beijing is making an attempt to rewrite historical past.
“China is very powerful economically and they are becoming more aggressive towards their neighbors, and it appears they think that power gives them the right to alter history,” mentioned Han Ye-jung, a lawyer within the Seoul workplace of a global authorized agency.
“I think that [South] Korean people are angry and disappointed about this,” she advised DW.
‘Another example of propaganda’
Han mentioned she is just not shocked concerning the newest film, highlighting that one other Chinese-made warfare film, “The Sacrifice,” was as a consequence of be launched in South Korea in September. Instead, the film was met with such fierce opposition from veterans and politicians that the native distributor canceled its launch.
In a press release, the Korean Veterans Association described the discharge of the The Sacrifice as “an act of contempt against war veterans and patriots who participated in the Korean War.”
“It is an anti-national act that goes against the system of liberal democracy to show to our young people today a propaganda film describing Chinese soldiers as heroes when they were actually part of a war that infiltrated our country,” the affiliation added.
According to Han, The Battle at Lake Changjin is one other instance of propaganda. She says North Korea began the three-year battle by invading the South, then Beijing got here to Pyongyang’s help after the UN forces had pushed the North Korean army nearly to the Chinese border.
Directors Chen Kaige, Dante Lam and Tsui Hark pose for pictures with crew members of the movie “The Battle at Lake Changjin”, throughout a red-carpet ceremony on the Beijing International Film Festival, in Beijing, China September 20, 2021. (Reuters)
“If China had not helped the North and attacked the South, then the war would have been over much earlier and hundreds of thousands of people would not have died,” she mentioned. “Instead, the fighting went on until 1953, the damage to the South was terrible and we still live on a divided peninsula.”
“That is the reality of the Chinese attack on Korea, not what they are portraying in this movie,” Han added.
What occurred at Lake Changjin?
The movie tells the story, from the Chinese perspective, of one of many bloodiest encounters of your entire battle.
In December 1950, six months after the preliminary North Korean assault had compelled the South’s troops again to the ever-shrinking perimeter across the southern metropolis of Busan, the UN — led primarily by the US army — had superior past the pre-war border and was approaching the Chinese frontier.
Some 30,000 US troops had superior to Lake Changjin — identified within the West as Chosin Reservoir — once they had been all of a sudden confronted by eight divisions, or 150,000 recent Chinese troops.

The US managed to extricate the majority of their troops by street to the port of Hungnam, from the place they had been evacuated.
Nearly 18,000 US troops had been killed, captured, wounded or listed as lacking. On the Chinese facet, there have been greater than 48,000 deaths. Many additionally misplaced their lives as a result of horrible climate circumstances.
‘Whitewashing of the truth’
The movie comes at a time when Beijing and Washington are at geopolitical, financial and army loggerheads.
Chinese state-run newspaper The Global Times claimed that the movie has “pushed the patriotic sentiment of people across the country to a peak amid the tense China-US competition.”
It additionally reported that “many residents” in Shenyang in China’s northeastern Liaoning province, “spontaneously came to mourn the heroes by laying flowers” on the graves of males killed within the battle.
The Global Times cited a retired army officer as saying that he went to observe the movie on the day of launch, and that he would “dash forward like the old generation,” “if the order is given.”
Rah Jong-yil, a former diplomat who was 10 years outdated when the warfare broke out, slammed the movie as propaganda “nonsense.”
“But it is troubling,” Rah mentioned. “The Chinese say they were fighting for North Korea and resist US aggression, but Beijing was acting in its own interests at the time and did not want to see Korea unified and supported by the US on their border,” he added.
“They want to change the narrative of what happened before and during the war, which is dangerous as Chinese people have no way of knowing that it is propaganda,” mentioned Rah, who has vivid recollections of battles raging near the village from the place he had been evacuated for security.
“We Koreans know that we were attacked and invaded by the North Koreans and then the Chinese,” he mentioned. “This is just whitewashing of the truth. But who can stop the Chinese government telling their people these things?”