Why America Forgets—and China Remembers—the Korean War

Foreign Affairs | Rep. Mike Gallagher and Aaron MacLean

The CCP’s Dangerous Historical Distortions and the Struggle Over Taiwan.

Seventy years ago this week, the armistice that froze the Korean War was signed. During a year of savage battlefield maneuvering and two more of bitter stalemate, nearly 40,000 American troops gave their lives. Several thousand more allied troops also died, as did millions of Koreans, many of them heroically in combat against communist aggression, and even more as its civilian victims. The southern half of the Korean peninsula, now a thriving democracy, took decades to recover. The northern half never has, remaining impoverished, oppressed, and a source of instability.

The median age of surviving U.S. Korean War veterans is around 90. Recognition of their service has been unforgivably muted despite their valor in some of the most grueling combat American troops have ever faced. But the more general U.S. lack of interest in the war’s strategic lessons is also remarkable—and dangerous.

In China, by contrast, the “War to Resist America and Aid Korea,” as it is officially known, has never been forgotten. And in recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has been aggressively seeking to revive the public’s interest in an idealized version of it. In March, an essay in the CCP’s top theoretical journal praised how the Chinese army “defeated the world’s No. 1 enemy armed to the teeth on the Korean battlefield and performed mighty and majestic battle dramas that shocked the world and caused ghosts and gods to weep.”

Read the full op-ed HERE.