The Jellybean Cake & Dessert shop in Toronto is an unlikely battleground for East Asia’s online history wars. But when the Korean bakery in Canada’s largest city wished its customers a “Happy Korean New Year” on Instagram this month, it found itself at the heart of a bitter series of disputes that have marred South Korea’s relations with China.
The Lunar New Year, China’s principal holiday, is thought of by many as “Chinese new year”. But it is celebrated in several other Asian countries too — including Korea, where it is called Seollal.
Jellybean’s manager told me the bakery was deluged with messages from Chinese internet users demanding the store “stop stealing our culture”. That escalated into what seemed to her an orchestrated campaign of abuse, with the bakery and its staff receiving direct communications and voice messages describing Koreans as “pigs”, “thieves” and “slaves of the Chinese”.
A flood of scurrilous one-star online reviews appeared, dragging down its previously high Google review score as anonymous users trashed its cakes and claimed its customer service was akin to being “treated like a dog”.
The manager said much of the abuse appeared to have been co-ordinated through a single China-based internet forum. She stressed that the bakery also received messages of support from Chinese internet users, including from the local community.
The Jellybean controversy mirrors a high-profile furore playing out on the other side of the world, after a woman wearing a traditional Korean hanbok dress was one of several representatives of China’s ethnic minorities to carry a giant Chinese Communist flag at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
That image struck a nerve with some Koreans, determined to resist what they regard as Chinese efforts to appropriate cherished symbols of their national identity. It follows a similar row in 2020 over the provenance of kimchi, after a Chinese nationalist tabloid claimed China had set the “international benchmark” for fermented vegetables.
Together with the controversial disqualification of two young South Korean speed skaters from the 1,000-metre event, in which China went on to win a gold medal, the hanbok controversy triggered an outpouring of anti-China sentiment that culminated on February 11 in protesters tearing up the country’s flag outside the Chinese embassy in Seoul.
While some have claimed that the presence of Korea’s national dress in the ceremony constituted a denial of South Korea’s sovereignty, others have made the reasonable argument that members of China’s sizeable Korean minority — some 2mn people — have a right to self-expression too, including within a context of devotion to the country of which they are citizens.
But, as with all discussions surrounding cultural appropriation, context matters. At the opening ceremony of the Beijing summer Olympics in 2008, organisers showcased China’s diversity by dressing up children from the country’s ethnic Han majority in the national dress of its 55 recognised minorities. Representatives of the minorities themselves were absent, their cultures reduced to adornments.
This time, when the woman in the hanbok dress helped carry the Communist flag, she did so alongside representatives of China’s persecuted Tibetan and Uyghur minorities. Also taking part were members of the Chinese military and security forces, directly implicated in the extinguishing of minority rights inside the country and the threatening of neighbouring states abroad. That is what many Koreans saw.
Of course, almost all national claims to exclusivity over cultural practices are inherently ahistorical; neither the Lunar New Year nor fermented vegetables “belong” to any one nation and South Korea’s own massed ranks of online nationalists often give as good as they get.
I am reminded of an apocryphal story in which a Turkish envoy is said to have registered to Stalin his country’s protest that the presence of Mount Ararat, which is in Turkey, on the Soviet Armenian flag constituted a territorial claim. Responding, Stalin is said to have noted the crescent on the Turkish flag: “Are you claiming the Moon as part of Turkey too?”
Toronto bakery is burnt by a cultural appropriation feud
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