well, as korean american, i feel obliged to pitch my two cents.
first of all, this is "non news". what the heck, japanese people dislike chinese people? surprise surprise.
of course, generally speaking, many japanese have a historic amnesia, particularly around the time japan invaded China. so a lot of japanese people actually do like china in the historical sense. admiring china's rich history. but in modern times, china is communist and even though that doesnt really matter for japan, the japanese focus on recent current events. like chinese fishing ships headbutting japanese ships. stuff like that.
and to be fair, China WAS winning over a lot of her neighbors. this thread is actually related to the "india is not britain" thread as we are now talking about a lot of countries trying to contain China.
So China was in dispute with many other countries over Spratlys and well, border disputes are nothing new under the sun. There is no particular reason why an average korean walking around Seoul to give a sh17 over this. In fact Korea and China had a blossoming of friendship since South Korea ditched Taiwan for China. All the sudden south koreans found themselves,getting very rich from trading with China. and South Korea's liberal politician had a "let's have an even handed approach to foreign policies.". which is just another way of saying, let's put some distance with uncle sam. so, naturally Chinese leaders were overjoyed by this turn of events.
We have to step back and look at this from the Chinese perspective. The Chinese people are a people haunted with the question, "how the f@ck did we go from the world's leading civillization to the world's butth0le?". chairman Mao said, "let's go bring some balance to the world and become a Great Nation!". but chairman Mao was a communist and an incompetent when it comes to economic matters so his "great leap forward" really f@cked up that country. Then he said, "oh crap, now everybody is going to blame me for this sh17" so to protect himself, he started the Cultural Revolution to get rid of his political enemies. Now China just went from hell to the very bottom of hell. It is hard to believe that at this time in history, North Korea was richer than both China and South Korea.
So these Chinese Red Guards grew up and now are high ranking members of the government now. And they sit around wondering, why did all that sh17 happen? But none of them wants to talk about this sh17 openly, because they were Red Guard members who were closing down schools, burning books, and dragging their own mothers to "reeducation centers" for being class reactionaries.
Then chairman Deng came along and China decided to ditch Soviet Union and Richard Nixon had a moment of epiphany: "not all communists are the same!". so china started to do things the Taiwanese way even though they still called themselves communists and South Korea eventually said, "hmmm, these new chinese guys are not so bad."
So Korea and China became friends and China's economic power grew, she suddenly realized that other nations are actually listening to what she had to say. Those guys in Beijing started saying, "you Tianemen students, just shut the f@ck up. we are making China a rich and powerful nation.". and so the common people in China started chanting, "powerful china! powerful china!" even though they were in many ways being shat upon by the Chinese leadership. Just google and you can see many instances of communist party officials thieving from ordinary Chinese and perverting justice.
Now you say something long enough, you start to believe in your lies and thats what beijing officials started doing.
let's go back a few hundred years further. China and Korea have a very long history of friendly relations. in fact, the Chinese cant point to a single time in its 5000 years of history when korea did something really bad to China, because there were no such instances. Naturally, Chinese dont really fear or hate Korea for that reason. Both China and Korea were agrarian societies and they were both pretty pissed off at horse riding people, aka mongols, manchus, etc, because these horse riding people, it was their major industry to swoop down and on farmers and steal their stuff and kidnap women. Did you know that the mongol marriage ceremony is a pm enactment of a kidnapping? in anycase, China and Korea pulled the same rope, because they both had these annoying neighbors to the north who wouldnt leave them alone. Now China was a big country then just as it is now and Korea was a small country then as it is now. So Korea had to "submit" to chinese power. what this meant was that they had a Big Brother Little Brother relationship for hundreds of years.
Now skip forward again to modern times. See, the Chinese want to get back to the "natural state" meaning, China is a "middle kingdom" in the truest sense of the words where China is at the center if human civilization. Koreans are very proud people and dont want to be "little brother" any more, but when China keeps throwing money at her, it is hard to resist.
BUT something had changed.
When all this stuff was going on, North Korea got cheesed. WTF they said. Kim Jong Il said, "hey you fake socialists! you have betrayed all your ideals and us! f@ck you!". normally this sort of thing dont mean anything to the Chinese, but the North Koreans started to threaten China with, "we are going to collapse you mofos! and when we do, we are going to inundate your country with north korean refugees! and you will have to see a an american korea on your border!"
even though korea is a small country, it is a very important country for China since it is right next to Beijing. So the Chinese started to coddle North Korea and said to South Korea and United States, "trust me! i can keep north korea in line!" mand USA and sotputh korea believed China, because people generally believe in things that they want to believe in.
But Kim Jong Il is a born d1ckhead and started sinking south korean ship, which in itself is bad enough, but started shelling artillery on south korean neighborhoods. Naturally ordinary south koreans woke up and said, "oh what the f@ck, what the f@ck, hey China, arent you our friends? you said you keep north koreans in line!". and the Chinese response was, "we LOVE you koreans, in fact we love you so much that we love BOTH Koreas!". Then the Chinese started to fulfill their obligation as military alliesmto the North and protected North Korea diplomatically.
So now we have Korea with a conservative president and jumping back into the arms of Uncle Sam and she is now saying, "im sorry Uncle Sam, i thought you, me, and China all could live happily ever after, but now i have seen the light.". now Korea is even warming relations with even Japan. And trying to woo India as well. of course lots of countries tried to woo india in the past, but failed. we'll see how this all goes.
But while all this was going on the whole South China seas thing was also going on. and in the mist of this, chinese fishermen begun to murder south korean coastguard and the chinese internet people started blaming the coastguardmen" now the koreans who used to not care at all are now thinking, "oh man, the Chinese want to make us their vassels again. f@ck China."
so here we are in 2012 with chinese, indian, and korean trolls all pointing fingers at each other.
Chinese Korean relations probably wont improve unless China deals with the North Korean problem. if they play their cards poorly, they might even see a NATO, the pacific version forming in our life time.
