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Question

The recent announcement of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) of China that the length of 'The Great Wall' of China is over 20,000 km has received attention and backlash from the media and academia of Korea. What is this new claim about? And what is the Chinese government's purpose behind it?

Answer

At the 7th Cultural Heritage Day ceremony held on June 5, 2012 in Juyongguan (居庸關), one of the Great Wall heritage sites near Beijing, SACH Vice Director Tong Mingkang (童明康) announced that the total length of the 'All-Time Great Wall' of China is 21,198.18 km, reported Gwang Ming Daily News, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China. According to this announcement, the Great Wall and its heritage sites stretch from Heilongjiang Province (黑龍江省) in the east to the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in the west, and the heritage sites, including ramparts, trenches, annexes, structures, small castles and related facilities, number 43,721.

This announcement was made based on the conclusion drawn from the Great Wall Protection Project (長城保護工程)　undertaken under the Great Wall Protection Ordinance issued on October 1, 2006 in the name of Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶). This project was designed to protect the Great Wall heritage sites from the serious ongoing destruction caused by various development projects underway across China and regulate the use of those sites, and attempted at accurate survey and assessment of the remaining Great Wall resources. Both the SACH and the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM) of China have worked on this project that has taken about five years to complete, from the beginning of the Great Wall of the Ming (明) survey in 2007 to the confirmation of the Great Wall heritage sites by the SACH in May this year.

The controversy over the Great Wall survey result announced by the SACH was due to the striking deviation of the result from the existing perception of the Great Wall known to date. On the UNESCO homepage, the Great Wall of China is defined as 6,000 kilometer-long fortifications that start from Shanghaiguan (山海關) in Hebei Province (河北省). As 6,000 kilometers is slightly longer than 10,000 Li (里) in the Chinese unit of distance, the Great Wall is also widely known as the '10,000-Li Long Wall.' In the new SACH announcement, however, the Great Wall is about 40,000 Li long, a great deviation from the existing common knowledge of its length.

Accordingly, the SACH gave up the old name 10,000-Li Long Wall and came up with the new name 'All-Time (歷代) Great Wall' for the wall surveyed in this project. The controversy was fueled further by the fact that the 'All-Time Great Wall' included the walls built by all the peoples active in Northeast Asia during the premodern times as well as those built by the Han Chinese. For instance, to the perplexity of Koreans, the heritage sites of Korean ancestors as longtime rulers of Manchuria, fortresses in Koguryo and Balhae areas, were included in the 'All-Time Great Wall,' being reduced to Chinese heritage. As is known so far, the Rao Ben Gang (老邊崗) earth wall built by Goguryo and located in Jilin Province (吉林省) and Mudanjiang (牡丹江) Bian Qiang (邊牆) built by Balhae and located in Heilongjiang Province are included in the 'All-Time Great Wall' list. People's Republic of China is a multinational country composed of the Han Chinese and fifty-five ethnic minorities, with the Han Chinese being an absolute majority. Though small as they may be in size, the fifty-five ethnic minorities occupy a wide range of strategically important and resource-rich areas, making it important for the Chinese government to contain their tendency for separation.

Accordingly, China has come up with a new ideology called the 'Unitary Multinational State Theory,' which purports that all the ethnic groups within China are components of the 'Chinese nation,' and that it is a real entity naturally formed through historical experiences from pre-historic times to this date, not a recently created political concept. The Unitary Multinational State Theory is the theoretical background of the SACH announcement. In other words, this project attempted to make the Great Wall unitary by integrating the walls built under different historical circumstances in the areas of northern ethnic minorities in present-day China into a 'single' object, instead of limiting the Great Wall to the specific fortifications built by the Han Chinese to defend against the northern races. From this, one could infer that China's intention behind renaming '10,000-Li Long Wall,' the symbol and pride of the Chinese, 'All-Time Great Wall' was to make it the new symbol of the 'Chinese nation' encompassing ethnic minorities. In doing so, China could also achieve the secondary effect of confirming that the vast region through which the All-Time Great Wall extends was Chinese territory in the first place. Therefore, it can be said that the SACH announcement of the result of the All-Time Great Wall Protection Project intended to serve both the cause of cultural heritage protection and secondary political agenda.