Chinese article admits N. Korea began war in 1950

JoongAngDaily ^ | 6/25/2010 | Christine Kim, Chang Se-jeong

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

A feature article from a Chinese magazine was struck from the Internet after news spread that it stated that the Korean War was started by North Korea’s invasion of the South.

The lengthy feature in Xinhua’s International Herald Leader, timed for the 60th anniversary of the start of the war, had a time line that stated: “The North Korean military crossed the parallel on June 25th, 1950 and Seoul was taken in four days.” The article was widely distributed among Chinese news portals and agencies.

After news of the story spread in Korean yesterday, the original article was found to have been deleted from all Web sites it had been posted on, including Xinhua.

Textbooks for Chinese students still teach that the conflict was a civil war started by an invasion by the United States of the North. Pyongyang has always insisted the same thing.

A diplomatic source in Beijing who asked for anonymity said the initial publishing of the article received a lot of attention because it was “the most detailed and direct explanation of the North’s invasion of the South in the Korean War by a [Chinese] state-run news agency.”

Kim Young-hwan, a professor of Chinese studies at Namseoul University said, “If the Chinese government did erase the articles, it may be because they’re being sensitive to North Korea’s stance.”

[Frank_2001]

“Even in the late 1970’s my company delivered computers to China...”

Charlton Heston in the final scene of “Planet of the Apes” comes to mind when I read things like that;)

[wolfcreek]

“South Carolina demanded that the U.S. army abandon Fort Sumter, which was refused. When the ultimatum deadline passed, an artillery barrage ensued, lasting until the fort was surrendered. Once the Confederates had fired, full-scale war quickly followed.”

The North could of avoided the conflict. It takes 2 to start a fight.

[sherlocksathome]

You are leaving out the main key that led to the conflict. The south was building an Army because Lincoln (a known anti slave advocate) looked as if he was going to win the election. After Lincoln was elected and the south had their army, he said the south could keep their slaves. This was because he saw the issue dividing the country. At that point the south didn’t care. They felt Lincolns announcement was a day late and a dollar short. They still wanted to separate from the union even though their original reason no longer existed. The war was inevitable in retrospect. It boiled down to whether or not the laws and rights of our constitution were going to be enforced by the feds or not.

[Verginius Rufus]

The Republican Party all along had taken a "free soil" position--not to allow the expansion of slavery to the territories, while not trying to interfere with it in any state where it was legal. That was Lincoln's position too, and any sensible Southern politicians should have realized that there was nothing Lincoln could do in the short run. That's why 8 of the 15 slave states took a "wait and see" attitude and still were in the Union when Lincoln was sworn in on March 4, 1861.

Ironically the Deep South states, by jumping the gun, ensured the end of slavery. In those states the slaves either outnumbered the whites or were almost as numerous as the whites.

In all of the slave states, the majority of the whites were not slaveholders so had no direct profit from the institution. They may have bought into the need to maintain the system to ensure white supremacy, but racism was just as prevalent in the free states--Tocqueville thought that prejudice was even stronger where slavery no longer existed, and some free states forbade free persons of color from settling there.

[Verginius Rufus]

The Constitution doesn't say whether a state may secede. Obviously South Carolina believed that it had a legal right to leave the Union, and therefore to reclaim any lands within its borders which it had handed over to the federal government. If the federal government had agreed to leave, the attack on Ft. Sumter wouldn't have happened.

It was said of South Carolina that it was too small to be a nation and too large for an insane asylum. They were nuts to secede and nuts to fire on Ft. Sumter, but the majority of the people of South Carolina were on the winning side in the war--slaves were over 50% of the population in 1860.