Yun Dong-ju’Chosun people’ controversy, Chinese media “requires expert research”

A signpost at the entrance of Yun Dong-ju’s birthplace in the village of Longzheng, a Chosun Autonomous Region, Yanbian, Jilin Province, China. yunhap news

Chinese portal Baidu (百度) marked poet Yun Dong-joo as’Chosun tribes’ among controversial people, and the Chinese media insisted that “experts should start to test and analyze.”

“Yun Dong-joo was born in China, and at the time of birth, Korea was under Japanese occupation, before the official founding of the country,” said the reporter published by the People’s Daily, an agency of the Communist Party. He emphasized, “As for the nationality of Yun Dong-ju, experts from both countries should come and analyze it.”

He also criticized Seo Kyung-deok, professor at Sungshin Women’s University. The newspaper said, “It inflates the controversy over the Kimchi debate between Korea and China to inspire national sentiment in Korea. This is because Professor Seo protested against Baidu on the 16th, saying that Yun Dong-ju incorrectly described the nationality as’China’ and the nation as’Chosun tribes’.

Baidu Encyclopedia introduces poet Yun Dong-ju as a Korean-Chinese with Chinese nationality. [바이두 캡처]

On this day, Weibo, which is called the Chinese version of Twitter, posted the hashtag’#A Korean professor asked to change the nationality of a Korean-Chinese poet to Korea#’, which became a popular search topic and received more than 300 million views.

This is not the first controversy over the nationality of Yun Dong-joo. Controversy continues when the Chinese authorities restored Yun Dong-ju’s birthplace in Longjing, a Korean-Chinese Autonomous Region in Jilin Province, in 2012, and erected a monument at the entrance with the word “Chinese Korean-Chinese Patriotic Poet” written on it. Longjing Myeong-dong village was the home of immigrant Koreans at that time.

Experts say that Yun Dong-ju wrote poetry in Korean and had a clear identity as a Korean. In the section titled’Pe, Kyung, Jade, and the Names of These Exotic Girls’ in the poem’Starry Night’, Chinese Han Chinese girls were sometimes referred to as’exotic girls’.

Reporter Jang Joo-young [email protected]