Xinhua Says North Korea is Aggressor in Korean War♧

My name is Daniel. I was an English teacher in Seoul, South Korea, and am now a writer who has

published three books including South Korea: Our Story by Daniel Nardini.

                       For a long time North Korea as well as Russia (then the Soviet Union) and China

have always said that the United States had started the Korean War, and why these two nations aided

North Korea during the Korean War (1950-1953). This had been the stance for decades. Well, when the

Soviet Union fell, the Russians learned that then North Korean leader Kim Il-sung had gone to Moscow to

talk to Josef Stalin on a bold plan to attack South Korea. When Stalin approved of the plan, then North

Korea attacked South Korea. This information was discovered in the Moscow archives that had been opened

up after 1991. The original doc-umentation on the planned North Korean attack has shown conclusively that

North Korea was the aggressor in the war. After this information became available in the West, it was also

becoming available to Chinese scholars in China. For many Chinese scholars, this was a shocking

revelation. In 2010, Xinhua (China official news agency) International Affairs Journal revealed for the

first time that North Korea had started the attack and that Seoul fell three days later. It was the first

public admission that North Korea was the one responsible for the war, and not the United States. Many

Chinese scholars have since expressed the same thing privately, but in China it remains a sensitive

topic (especially among the remaining Chinese soldiers who fought with the North Koreans in the war.

They certainly do not want to be accused of aiding an "aggressor"). Since then, the Chinese govern-

ment has avoided the topic of who started the Korean War first. What they have done is try to paint

China and those Chinese soldiers who fought in the war as heroic, brave, courageous and fighting

in the defense of the motherland (China, not North Korea). They have tried to paint in textbooks, in

movies and in TV series in China that the Chinese People's Volunteers (as they are called) fought

against American imperialism trying to swallow up all of Korea and then threaten China itself.