Searching for the Historical Truth
China wants to stabilize the northeastern region and cope with shifts in the international order of Northeast Asia. To this end, China tries to unite multiple ethnic groups in its northeastern region to integrate their historical identity, and consolidate the national identity of Korean-Chinese into Chinese citizens and prevent national unrest.
One of the obvious attempts by China is the Northeast Project that was conducted from 2002 to 2007. China had conducted the Project in order to consolidate and integrate the history of Gojoseon, Buyeo, Goguryeo, and Balhae, the ancient kingdoms of Korea, into Chinese history. The project embodies the following logical fallacy: “All historical activities that carried out in the current Chinese territories are parts of Chinese history”. For example, although the Northeast Project was concluded 15 years ago, China has removed the traces of Goguryeo’s Bakjak Fortress near Yalu River(Amnok River) from world history textbooks published by famous publishers around the world, and had built Hushan Fortress on the same zone, stubbornly insisting that the fortress belongs to the Great Wall.
China has tried to extend the scope of the Great Wall since late 1990s. The National Administration of Cultural Heritage(国家文物局) had announced the length of the Great Wall as 6,000 km in the mid 2000s and as 8,851 km in 2009, and then extended it to 21,196.18 km in 2012. According to the announcement, the Great Wall and its ruins span from the Heilongjiang Province in the northeast to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the northwest. The announcement caused great controversy in the world academia as the Chinese deviated significantly from the statistics previously known regarding the Great Wall of China. Back when the Wall was listed a UNESCO World Heritage Site, UNESCO defined the Great Wall of China as a military structure that ranged 6,000 km in length from Shanhaiguan in Hebei Province, to Jiayuguan in Gansu Province.
The Great Wall of China is literally “Ten-Thousand Ri Wall” in Chinese, ri (or li) being a unit of distance measurement that is approximately 500 meters by modern standards. Thus, the 6,000 km mentioned on UNESCO records equates to roughly 10,000 ri. However, China’s recent announcement increased the distance of the Wall by approximately 40,000 ri, which was significantly different from the historical facts. Most of all, controversy surrounding the Great Wall in history was further amplified, because the Wall included all castles built by Han Chinese and other pre-modern ethnic people that had resided in Northeast Asia.
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