True Aim of China’s Northeast Project

Among the 107 research papers published as part of China’s Northeast Project, which will officially end in February, over half of them have been found to be related to Korea. In addition, over 70 percent of the 51 papers whose research topics are irrelevant to relations between Korea and China have been found to be related to either Goguryeo (48 percent) or Balhae (26 percent), Korea’s ancient kingdoms.

This is over five times the number that a senior official of the Northeast Project of the Chinese Academy of Social Science announced in September 2006. “Korea-related research topics make up less than 10 percent of the Northeast Project,” the official said.

Those figures were disclosed by Lee In-cheol, a senior researcher of the Northeast Asian History Foundation, in a dissertation he contributed to Strategy 21, a journal published by the Korea Institute for Maritime Strategy. Lee analyzed 114 research papers of the Northeast Project, both announced or unannounced, between 2002 and 2005. Lee was the first person to unveil the overall picture of the Northeast Project.

Korea had only been able to identify the topics of some 70 research papers that the Northeast Project had taken through the Internet between 2002 and 2004. Korean media outlets belatedly began to pay attention to China’s Northeast Project only after the project publicly disclosed the abstracts of its 18 research topics on the Internet last September.

Excluding seven confidential research topics, Lee obtained information on all the remaining 107 research topics - 50 in 2002, 45 in 2003, seven in 2004, and 12 in 2005 – and analyzed them in accordance with subject matter, persons, and affiliations.

According to his analysis, Korean ancient history accounted for 30 percent, relations between Korea and China 16 percent, history of northeastern provinces 25 percent, relations between China and Russia 16 percent, Korean peninsular issues five percent, China’s territory theory three percent, and others five percent. Among them, topics related to Korean history or the Korean peninsula, including Korean ancient history and relations between Korea and China, accounted for 51 percent.

Ninety-seven researchers were involved in researching the 107 topics, and most of the scholars participating in the project were from China’s three northeastern provinces or Beijing. In particular, in 2002, a professor at Jilin University carried out an unofficial consignment project dubbed, “Truth over the Unification of the Korean Peninsula and the Impact of Unification on China.” Lee’s project supports the argument of Korean scholars who have argued that the Northeast Project is China’s research project to prepare for the unification of the Korean peninsula at the national level.