Courtesy of Park Eunjin

Jessie looks like a K-Pop star. Tall, thin. All sharp angles, softened only by the impossible length of her eyelashes. She wears crop tops, mini skirts, and fills her social media with photos of her in bikinis, lounging on far flung beaches. Heads turn as she enters a room. “They come up to me,” she says, eyes lowered. “In bars, in restaurants. Always in Korean.” A pause. “But when I answer in Chinese, when they realize where I’m from, they just walk away. No words. Just absence.” I feel sad for how this must make her feel. To be so openly ignored. Her solution? “Sometimes I tell people I’m from Singapore or Taiwan, just so they might be a bit nicer to me.”

I see anti-Chinese sentiment everywhere in Korea, but never in the way Jessie and the thousands of other international students do. They arrive in droves — 70,000 last year, according to official statistics — drawn by K-pop, the gleam of modernity, the unfiltered access to Instagram, the promise of a world beyond the watchful eye of Chairman Xi. For the most part, they speak of Korea with admiration, captivated by its energy and freedoms. The only complaints? The food, sometimes. The way they’re treated, more often.

And then you open the newspapers. Chinese people accused of rigging elections, buying up Seoul, turning the air to dust, stealing culture — an endless litany of grievances, some real, many exaggerated, others imagined. Once you recognize the pattern, you see it everywhere, woven into the discourse. It is normalized to a worrying degree. Entire organizations exist to scour the internet for perceived slights, and when they find them — bam — the machine lurches into action. Dramas are canceled. Events boycotted. Public sentiment whipped into a storm and sent northward.

It unsettles me. Coming from Europe, I am no stranger to national rivalries, to stereotypes reinforced by media and comedy. But there, a line exists. Certain things remain unsaid, at least in polite company. Here, I don’t see that line. People speak of China — and of Japan — with a bluntness that would turn heads elsewhere. The accusations come easily, unchallenged, unexamined, as if they are merely stating facts.

Of course, every nation prefers to externalize its struggles. It is far easier to direct blame outward, to drape oneself in superiority and condescension, than to confront the uncomfortable truths within. Korea is no exception. Anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese sentiment are not merely social undercurrents but ideological pillars, wielded by the two major political parties as both shield and sword.

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© The Korea Times