[The Chinese news media, in brassy editorials, has urged boycotts of South Korean products. Students, retirees and taxi drivers have led protests against South Korean businesses. Tourism officials have ordered several mainland travel agencies to cancel group trips to South Korea. Frustrated nationalists have vowed not to eat kimchi or Korean barbecue.]
By
Javier C. Hernández, Owen Guo and Ryan Mcmorrow
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Police
officers standing guard outside a Lotte Mart in Beijing on Thursday.
Credit
Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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BEIJING
— He usually went there for
neon-orange jars of citron tea with honey, jumbo packets of dried seaweed, and
cartons of eggs that seemed to be perpetually on sale, 15 for eight renminbi,
or about a dollar.
But this time was different. Li Xin, a
retired store owner, showed up at a Beijing branch of Lotte Mart, a South Korean
supermarket chain, with a message.
“Get out of China!” Mr. Li, 66, a tall man in
a fraying green parka, shouted at the entrance to a Lotte Mart store in central
Beijing. “We don’t want traitors!”
A wave of anti-South Korean sentiment has
broken out across China after the South’s embrace of an American missile
defense system that China says can be used to spy on its territory.
The Chinese news media, in brassy editorials,
has urged boycotts of South Korean products. Students, retirees and taxi
drivers have led protests against South Korean businesses. Tourism officials
have ordered several mainland travel agencies to cancel group trips to South
Korea. Frustrated nationalists have vowed not to eat kimchi or Korean barbecue.
The furor poses a test for President Xi
Jinping of China. On the one hand, Beijing is seeking to harness outrage
against the missile defense system, which officials see as a threat to China’s
dominance in the region. On the other, Chinese leaders are eager to maintain
good relations, especially as South Korea grapples with a political crisis
consuming its president, Park Geun-hye, who had supported greater military
cooperation with the United States.
The backlash against South Korean businesses
has divided the Chinese. Some say it is necessary to counter American military
might in Asia. Others warn against such nationalism, arguing that China should
find more amicable ways of engaging South Korea, a close economic ally.
“Peace is most important,” said Liu Yuanyuan,
25, an employee at a German pharmaceutical company in Beijing. “Countries
should not threaten one another.”
Much of the ire against South Korea has
focused on Lotte, a conglomerate that operates 112 stores with some 13,000
employees in mainland China. The company, which entered China in 2008, has been
overwhelmed with protests and scrutiny by the authorities since it decided to
provide land in South Korea for the deployment of the American antimissile
system.
As of Thursday, the Chinese authorities had
closed nearly half of Lotte’s stores in the mainland, citing safety violations,
the company said in a statement. One store was fined about $3,000 for using
hand-radios that emitted “illegal wireless signals.” On Wednesday, the
authorities ordered the monthlong closing of a chocolate factory jointly owned
by Lotte and the Hershey Company of the United States after the results of a
fire inspection.
Protests erupted again at Lotte stores this
week after American officials announced that they had begun to install the
antimissile technology, known as the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense
system, or Thaad, in South Korea.
In Zibo, a city in the eastern province of
Shandong, protesters held banners demanding that Lotte leave China. “The safety
of our motherland cannot be violated,” a 30-foot banner read. In Xuchang, a
city in the central province of Henan, employees at a mall stood in rows
holding banners protesting Lotte and singing the Chinese national anthem.
And in Beijing, there were scattered voices
of discontent, including Mr. Li’s.
He said he had first heard about Lotte’s land
deal on WeChat, a popular messaging app, where a petition calling the company a
“traitor and enemy of the Chinese people” was circulating.
“I had a lot of hope for the future of China
and South Korea,” he said. “Now I worry South Korea is changing.”
In Kunming, a southern city, students at
Yunnan Minzu University posted a sign denouncing Lotte on the door of their
dormitory.
“Seoul is tiny and insignificant!” the sign
read, according to a photograph provided by one of the students, Liu
Guomengchen, 21. “Empower my big China!”
Ms. Liu, who studies environmental design,
said she would stop buying South Korean cosmetics and other goods.
“These things are totally dispensable,” she
said. “China is becoming more and more powerful. Countries like South Korea and
the U.S. see our rise as a threat, so they want to work together to weaken us.”
The Chinese news media has played a central
role in fueling the protests. An opinion article by Xinhua, the official news
agency, last month suggested that Lotte was an accomplice in an effort to
undermine China and that it was no longer welcome in the country. An editorial
in China Youth Daily last week urged a boycott.
For all the bombast in the news media, some
have urged restraint, questioning the wisdom of efforts to drum up criticism of
South Korea.
Zhang Mengjie, 29, who adores South Korean
boy bands like BTS, said boycotts of South Korean goods and artists were
irrational.
“These stars are just there for
entertainment, they don’t want to engage in politics,” Ms. Zhang said. “They
have nothing to do with it.”
Referring to the people who were protesting
against Lotte, she added: “I don’t think this is real patriotism. They just go
with the flow, act impulsively and use extreme rhetoric.”
For Chinese citizens with relatives and
friends from South Korea, the backlash has created anxieties.
Dong Mengmeng, 24, a ski coach from the
eastern province of Anhui, is planning to get married next month to her South
Korean fiancé, Jung Jaeyoon, 27, in Gyeongju, South Korea. But she said that
because of the tensions she had been unable to secure tourist visas for 11
Chinese relatives to attend the ceremony.
“I’ve been hijacked by patriotism,” she said.
Ms. Dong said she was often in tears and that
her mother was afraid to inquire about the status of her visa application
because she was worried that she would be harassed.
In response to the Lotte protests, a poem
mocking the government’s efforts to drum up nationalism circulated on social
media this week:
In the morning I hate America,
At noon I hate Korea,
In the evening, I hate Japan.
When I don’t I have a lot of time, I squeeze
in hate for Taiwan and Singapore.
At night when I dream, I hate Vietnam and the
Philippines.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the
establishment of formal ties between China and South Korea. But in a sign of
the tensions between the two countries, there is no plan in place yet to
celebrate the occasion.
Analysts said that the protests might be
short-lived and that Chinese leaders probably did not want to stoke too much
animosity with elections looming in South Korea.
“These initiatives would typically peter out
quite quickly,” said Pal Nyiri, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who
studies Chinese nationalism. “The government has been following the same
policies — fostering nationalism and then using it, but also being wary of it
getting out of hand.”
Many Chinese people are already finding it
difficult to uphold a boycott, given the preponderance of popular Korean goods
— makeup, face masks, kimchi — on the shelves of Chinese stores.
Zhang Xin, an electrician, stopped at a Lotte
store in Beijing on his way home, and bought a bag of ribs to make lunch for
his wife. He said he supported the boycott.
“South Korea is always blustering at China;
they are arrogant,” Mr. Zhang, 49, said. “In the future, I will shop here
less.”
Su-Hyun Lee contributed reporting from
Seoul, South Korea.