China is going to invade Korea?

from Libertas Ventus

Not really, but it's a reasonable prediction given Chinese citizens' surprising high (and increasing) level of national resentment against Korea.

The Chinese internets is rampant with hate-posts fabricating how Korean Professors/Scientists are "discovering" certain chinese national heroes are of "korean orgins". The list is long, and among the most ridiculous are : Chairman Mao, Sun Yat-sen, and Yao Ming...

Most of these are grassroots movements with anonymous users posting the articles, but that doesn't stop all the leading news portals from picking up the news. The reason is quite simple - hate sells.

QQ.com, one of china's leading internet portals, actually put the article in their "news center" (新闻中心) and it received 99707 comments as of july 31st. Here are a select few:
"How would Koreans even exist if I didn't donate my sperm there!" from 墨 of qq.com
"Koreans are the result of a cross-breeding between Americans and pigs" from 霹雳 of qq.com
"The best way to make them shut up is to invade their country!!!" from anonymous from 广东珠海 of 163.com

Ironically, Japan is no longer China's national enemy #1 after supposedly donating great amounts of money after the Wen Chuan earthquake (numbers vary, popular estimate is around 4 million USD), and China returned the favor by donating at least 100 thousand USD after the June 14th quake in northeastern Japan. This after trashing Japanese restaurants and upturning Japanese brand cars in protests of scales and animosity unseen since june 4th, just 4 years earlier when Japan was trying to get into the UN Security Council!

As I've said, most of the articles are user generated and not from state media. However, in China with media freedom as it is, articles against the party's agenda are never published (try looking up 苏丹 - Sudan in Chinese - on any of china's news portals, you'll find little more than how many track participants the country is sending to the olympics. Eight. They'll compete in the 1500m, 800m, and 400m runs.)
If you're really paranoid (I know I am), you might suspect that the government might actually be encouraging the mounting Chinese-on-Korean resentment.

Maybe it's merely the party's need of an outside enemy after Japan turned friendly (Eurasia is no longer the enemy! It's always been Eastasia!)
Or maybe...




QQ's article page:
http://news.qq.com/a/20080731/001419.htm
QQ's article comment page:
http://comment4.qq.com/axel/comment.htm?site=news&id=942239
Sina's article comment page:
http://comment.news.163.com/news_guoji2_bbs/4I6OV8270001121M.html

Japan donates 930 thousand USD for china's earthquake relief:
http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2008-07-30/204616030014.shtml
China donates 100 thousand USD to japan after the quake:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2008-06/20/content_8409325.htm