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- Lake Changjin is set to be the highest grossing movie in China this year.
- The movie takes place in the Korean Penninsula, during the 1950-1953 Korean War.
- The movie depicts Chinese soldiers as bringing peace to the Penninsula
- South Koreans see the movie as China stoking patriotism and rewritting history.
Chinese war blockbuster fuels anger in South Korea
Across China, war epic The Battle at Lake Changjin is filling cinemas and shattering box office records. The film, set on the Korean Peninsula during the bloody 1950-53 Korean War, is on course to be the world's highest grossing movie of 2021.
But the movie has been met with fierce criticism in South Korea, raising the possibility that it may not even find a local distributor.
To many South Koreans, the film is another propaganda piece filled with historical inaccuracies and bankrolled by the Chinese government to incite deeper patriotic feelings among the country's younger generation.
Others are angry that the Chinese people are being told the nation's "heroic" volunteers brought peace to the peninsula through their self-sacrifice, and insist Beijing is trying to rewrite history.
"China is very powerful economically and they are becoming more aggressive toward their neighbors, and it appears they think that power gives them the right to alter history," said Han Ye-jung, a lawyer in the Seoul office of an international legal firm.
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The movie depicts China holding off US troops against all odds in one of the pivotal battles of the Korean War. That the fighting broke out when North Korean troops invaded the South is rarely explained in China's accounts.
North Korea started the three-year conflict by invading the South, then Beijing came to Pyongyang's assistance after UN forces had pushed the North Korean military virtually to the Chinese border, Han said.
"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 said. "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," she said.
https://www.dw.com/en/chinese-war-blockbuster-fuels-anger-in-south-korea/a-59502113
- The movie takes place in the Korean Penninsula, during the 1950-1953 Korean War.
- The movie depicts Chinese soldiers as bringing peace to the Penninsula
- South Koreans see the movie as China stoking patriotism and rewritting history.
Chinese war blockbuster fuels anger in South Korea
Across China, war epic The Battle at Lake Changjin is filling cinemas and shattering box office records. The film, set on the Korean Peninsula during the bloody 1950-53 Korean War, is on course to be the world's highest grossing movie of 2021.
But the movie has been met with fierce criticism in South Korea, raising the possibility that it may not even find a local distributor.
To many South Koreans, the film is another propaganda piece filled with historical inaccuracies and bankrolled by the Chinese government to incite deeper patriotic feelings among the country's younger generation.
Others are angry that the Chinese people are being told the nation's "heroic" volunteers brought peace to the peninsula through their self-sacrifice, and insist Beijing is trying to rewrite history.
"China is very powerful economically and they are becoming more aggressive toward their neighbors, and it appears they think that power gives them the right to alter history," said Han Ye-jung, a lawyer in the Seoul office of an international legal firm.
---
The movie depicts China holding off US troops against all odds in one of the pivotal battles of the Korean War. That the fighting broke out when North Korean troops invaded the South is rarely explained in China's accounts.
North Korea started the three-year conflict by invading the South, then Beijing came to Pyongyang's assistance after UN forces had pushed the North Korean military virtually to the Chinese border, Han said.
"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 said. "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," she said.
https://www.dw.com/en/chinese-war-blockbuster-fuels-anger-in-south-korea/a-59502113
