The Korean War and the Criteria of Significance in Chinese Popular Culture

Abstract

General interpretations of war, like firsthand accounts of battle, tend to be friendly toward the side of the writer and hostile toward the enemy. There are notable exceptions of course, but the Korean War seems especially vulnerable in this regard. In that conflict, all sides claim victory for themselves, no treaty has been signed, and forty years after the armistice the war's impact throughout the Pacific re gion is palpable.1 Open doors and open discussions among erstwhile enemies have softened cultural and historical mindsets, especially for Chinese and American scholars enjoying the recent spate of publications, notably in Chinese, on the Korean War. This discussion reveals more tension and complexity than we ever knew before among Chinese leaders on the decisions and events leading up to China's entry into the war. But the portrait of China's just position throughout the war persists. Chinese soldiers continue to be referred to as beloved people (zui keai de ren), the term used in the title to a popular story written by Wei Wei, a military writer, in 1951. Wei Wei's story is one of the most common references in conversations with Chinese people, old and young, scholars and non-scholars alike, and it serves as a starting point in this discussion of Chinese popular culture.2 Standing in con trast to the largely enduring themes in the Chinese discussion, the portraits of the Korean War in the Western literature have long been complex and even conflicting, building as they do upon the familiar