I like how the media is bashing President Trump for repeating something that Chinese President Xi said to him during their recent meeting in Florida:
Following his meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, Donald Trump made a shocking admission of ignorance to the Wall Street Journal, on the subject of China and North Korea: “After listening [to Xi] for 10 minutes I realized that…it’s not so easy.” Trump has been called out for having his views on such an important geopolitical issue shift dramatically in a matter of minutes. He also may not know who rules North Korea.
Right before that line about listening to Xi, though, Trump said something arguably even more shocking. He claimed that “Korea actually used to be a part of China.” This is a glaring historical inaccuracy that has, somehow, not yet enraged South Korea, which is usually extremely defensive about suggestions that it is lesser than China or has ever been dependent on it.
Trump also made it clear in the interview that when he says Korea “used to be a part of China,” he is talking about the entire Korean peninsula, not just the North. Here’s the full quote:
[Xi] then went into the history of China and Korea. Not North Korea, Korea. And you know, you’re talking about thousands of years …and many wars. And Korea actually used to be a part of China.
“No respectable historian would make such a claim,” said Kyung Moon Hwang, a history professor at the University of Southern California and author of A History of Korea, when I asked him via email to assess Trump’s statement. [Quartz.com]
You can read the rest at the link, but here is the Korean reaction to the quote:
South Korea on Wednesday dismissed the controversial remark reportedly made by U.S. President Donald Trump that Korea was “part of China” as untrue and not worthy of response.
“Whether that is true or not, Korea hasn’t been a part of China for thousands of years and it is an historical fact that the international community acknowledges and no one can deny it,” a foreign ministry official said on the condition of anonymity.
“It is worthless to respond to this kind of story,” he added.
Controversy is growing here after U.S. online media reported that Trump made that remark in an interview with the Wall Street Journal while sharing what was discussed with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in their recent summit held earlier this month.
In the story titled “Trump weirdly says Korea was part of China, which is totally wrong and could enrage South Korea,” Quartz reported that Trump quoted Xi as making the remark during the summit.
It is not clear if and in what context Xi said so, nor is it certain whether it is an accurate quote or an error that possibly occurred in the process of interpretation. The remark was not mentioned in the WSJ interview. [Yonhap]
So it is a remark with no context and was not in the actual WSJ interview and we are all supposed to get enraged by this? Even if the remark is true, people instead of getting upset with Trump should get upset with Xi. Considering China’s ongoing Northeast Asia Project is it any wonder Xi would claim to Trump that Korea was once part of China? The Northeast Asia Project has been going on for years where the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) have been claiming that the ancient Koguryo kingdom in Korea was founded by a Chinese minority tribe. They have even registered Koguryo sites with UNESCO with no mention of the kingdom being Korean.
This is all likely being done to set political conditions for the possible Chinese domination of North Korea if the Kim regime was ever to collapse.
