‘Another Example of Propaganda’: Chinese War Blockbuster Fuels Anger in South Korea

News Snapshot:

Across China, war epic The Battle at Lake Changjin is filling cinemas and shattering box office records. The film, set on the Korean Peninsula during the bloody 1950-53 Korean War, is on course to be the world’s highest grossing movie of 2021. But the movie has been met with fierce criticism in South Korea, raising the possibility that it may not even find a local distributor. To many South Koreans, the film is another propaganda piece filled with historical inaccuracies and bankrolled by the Chinese government to incite deeper patriotic feelings among the country’s younger generation. Some critics point out...