“Out with China! Out with the Chinese Communist Party! Out with Xi Jinping!”shouted a group of protesters gathered in a square in the center of Gyeongjua city of South Korea where medieval kings are buried under 20-meter-high hills that serve as stone and earth burial mounds of the ancient kingdom of Silla (from 57 BC to the 10th century). This week, Gyeongju was the epicenter of a regional summit, the Asia-Pacific Cooperation Forum (APEC), in which the Chinese president participated.
Relations between neighbors have long been Beijing and Seoul they go through many tugs of war. From Chinese economic retaliation after South Korea deployed a US missile defense system, to allegations of illegal fishing in Korean waters, to claims of cultural appropriation. Furthermore, both towns carry a series of historical grievances. Now, anti-Chinese sentiment is growing more than ever in South Korea.
There is a noisy current of extreme right which embraces a series of conspiracy theories that suggest that China, together with North Korea, has infiltrated agents into Parliament with the intention of ending South Korean democracy. Former President Yoon Suk-yeol used this to denounce electoral fraud in last year’s legislative elections and justify the short-lived martial law that he decreed in December 2024. Yoon is currently in preventive detention accused of insurrection.
Some controversies have arisen on Korean social networks because several establishments in the country, such as cafes and restaurants, announced that they would refuse to serve Chinese customers. In the last decade, according to a survey by the East Asia Institute, Sinophobia has increased in South Korea from 16 to 71%.
Protests, some massive and others represented by a single individual, continually break out in various parts of South Korea against something or someone related to China. On Saturday morning, in the historic center of Gyeongju, a university professor named So Gilsu was demonstrating because, according to him, Xi Jinping had told Trump a few years ago that Korea was part of China. “They want to plunder our history,” he said.
Under this atmosphere, the current South Korean president, Lee Jae-myung, has tried to balance between the traditional security alliance with the United States and his country’s dependence on China, its main trading partner and a vital market for its exports. Lee decisively won the presidential election last June after six months of extreme political unrest and massive protests in Seoul as a result of former leader Yoon’s attempted self-coup.
South Korean president met with Trump on Wednesday in Gyeongju, whom he honored with the highest decoration of his Government, the commitment of 350,000 million dollars of South Korean investment in the United States and a gold crown. There were also anti-American protests in several cities in the Asian country because many do not understand the vassalage of their Government to a president who has boasted of the commercial blackmail carried out against his theoretical allies. But these demonstrations are more recent and less noisy than the anti-Chinese ones.
Trump He left Korea on Thursday, absenting himself from the summit and handing over all the limelight to the Chinese Xi Jinping, who took advantage of the void left by the American to monopolize all the spotlights and meet with other world leaders on the sidelines of the event. The Chinese leader, who had not visited South Korea for 11 years, met host Lee for the first time.
Xi, while Trump was back home celebrating halloween, He launched before the world and business leaders present in Gyeongju a plea in defense of free trade and multilateralism, a line opposed to Washington’s current policies of raising trade barriers and signing bilateral agreements. APEC, paradoxically, was an invention of Washington in 1989 to narrow the region’s economies through trade. In the joint statement of the 21 member countries of this group (although only 14 leaders attended), however, there was no mention of the multilateralism that Xi promotes.
On Saturday, during the closing of APEC, which will be held next year in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, Xi presented to the rest of the leaders his proposal for the creation of a world body to regulate artificial intelligence. “A Global AI Cooperation Organization could establish governance standards and boost cooperation, turning AI into a public good for the international community,” he noted.
A couple of days before the end of the summit, in downtown Gyeongju, there was another small anti-Chinese protest. Although, in this case, the protesters were not attacking Xi or espousing conspiracy theories that communists want to steal their democracy. It was a demonstration for the “kidnapping” of a giant panda called Fu Bao, the son of Chinese pandas, but born in a South Korean zoo, where he spent his first years until Beijing, as stated in the loan contracts for these animals, demanded his return. The protesters demanded that their beloved Fu Bao return to South Korea.