Is South Korea Leaning Toward China? Questioning the Contemporary Application of the Japanese Narrative About the Historical Korean Peninsula–China Linkage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Japanese often frame the history of East Asia in a “Japan versus China” dichotomy, and they have long embraced a “national narrative” that emphasizes the linkage between the Korean Peninsula and China in the traditional Confucian worldview. The narrative asserts that the peninsula has been culturally and geopolitically “attached” to China, and it has served as an important ideational backdrop to Japan's positioning in the changing regional security environment. In this article, we analyze the origin and contents of the Japanese national narrative, and examine how it has influenced both the Japanese view of the peninsula and policy‐making. We focus on how it has reemerged in the post‐Cold War and the rising China era, and how it has been particularly applied to frame current South Korea–China relations. We then turn to analyze whether contemporary South Korean policies toward China offer evidence in support of the narrative. We conclude that the Japanese concern that South Korea could eventually “get pulled into China's orbit” is a highly unlikely scenario, and that the Japanese narrative exhibits a time lag in incorporating contemporary factors into its historically generated storyline. South Korea's understanding of regional politics is intrinsically different from that of the pre‐modern periods, and its relations with China are more complex than this particular Japanese narrative would suggest. Its interactions with China are guided by contemporary economic, political, and sociocultural considerations about the national interest, and the reality of the divided peninsula in the post‐Cold War period.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".