As one of the most representative conflicts in the early Cold War, the Korean War (1950-1953) has significant historical narratives in different countries, ideologies, and academic research. The following is a multi-dimensional analysis of possible misreadings or distortions： ###1. Controversy over the origin of the war 1. **Who started the war**： -The two Koreas have long accused each other of being the aggressors. North Korean textbooks emphasize that the "southern invasion" was a conspiracy planned by Lee Seung-bak's regime with the support of the United States, while the mainstream views of South Korea and the West insist that North Korea launched a raid with the acquiescence of the Soviet Union. -A declassified Russian telegram in 2017 showed that Stalin had clearly opposed Kim Il Sung's immediate war, but his attitude changed in April 1950, suggesting that the Soviet Union's role was more complicated than previously recognized. 2. **Nature of the 38th parallel**： -Some Chinese narratives emphasize that the demarcation line is an artificial division imposed by the hegemony of the United States and the Soviet Union, while U.S. archives show that the hasty demarcation line in 1945 was originally a temporary military demarcation line, and national self-determination was not considered. ###2. Multi-version narrative of key events 1. **Incheon Landing (1950)**： -The Western perspective portrays Macarthur as a strategic genius, but recent studies have pointed out that North Korea has already learned about intelligence through spies and has been unable to defend effectively due to insufficient troops. 2. **China's motivation for participating in the war**： -China's official expression focuses on "protecting the family and defending the country," but Soviet archives reveal that Mao Zedong considered using this to enhance the leadership of the International Communist Movement. Peng Dehuai's memoirs mentioned concerns about the safety of northeast industrial bases. 3. **Allegations of bacterial warfare**： - China and North Korea accused the U.S. military of using biological weapons and were endorsed by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers; the U.S. firmly denied that declassified documents in 2010 showed that the Central Intelligence Agency had secretly funded researchers from the Japanese Unit 731. ### 3. Ideology of Data statistics 1. **Casualty figures**： -The Chinese side announced that the casualties of the volunteer army were 360,000, the South Korean statistics included more than 2 million civilian deaths, and the National Archives of the United States recorded 173,000 casualties of the United Nations army. The statistical caliber of each party (whether it includes civilians, injuries, and attrition) varies greatly. 2. **Prisoner of war issues**： -The U.S. accused China of torturing prisoners and showing images of the "confession movement"; China has opposed the massacre at the prisoner-of-war camp on Juji Island. In recent years, research has found that both sides have violated the Geneva Conventions. ###4. Limitations of the Cold War narrative framework 1. **Proxy war theory**： -The Western academic community has long simplified the war into a proxy conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, ignoring the demands for internal unification of the Korean peninsula. The original speech of Kim Il Sung in 1950 shows that he did have a plan for unification by force. 2. **Forgotten Korean Left Wing**： - South Korea's official narrative avoids the "Protection Alliance incident" (more than 200,000 suspected leftists were executed between 1949 and 1950), and it was not partially recognized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission until 2009. ###5. Country-by-country differences in memory construction 1. **United States: "The Forgotten War"** - Popular culture mostly portrays the tragedies of Shangganling and Changjin Lake, but downplays the US military's 90% destruction rate and 1.24 million tons of bombs dropped on Pyongyang (more than the sum of the Pacific Wars). 2. **North Korea: Reconstruction of the Main Historical View** -The Pyongyang War Museum compressed the contribution of the Chinese Volunteer Army into a single exhibition hall. In 2018, the title of "Chinese People's Volunteer Army" was deleted and replaced with "International Detachment of the Korean People's Army". 3. **South Korea: Amendments after Democratization** -After recognizing the massacres of civilians by the US military (such as the Laogenli incident and the Shincheon Massacre) in the 1980s, the Lee Myung-bak government renamed the June 25 War Memorial the "Korean War Memorial" in 2008 to strengthen the anti-communist narrative. ###6. New discoveries in academic research -Kuomintang archives released by the Hoover Institution of Stanford University in 2014 show that Chiang Kai-shek proposed to send troops to the United States three times, but was rejected by Truman, which corrected Taiwan's traditional perception of "bystanders". -Seoul National University used AI to analyze 12,000 wartime documents in 2020 and found that 38% of grassroots conflicts were caused by misjudgment, not complete ideological opposition. ### Conclusion The historical narrative of the Korean War is essentially a wrestling field of memory politics, and all parties selectively emphasize fragments that are in line with their own legitimacy. Mutual testimony from multinational archives in the post-cold war era shows that it is difficult for a single narrative to cover the complexity of this war. The current "transnational turn" in academia is trying to go beyond the dualism of the cold war and incorporate dimensions such as civilian experience, cultural memory, and technological communication into research, but ideological inertia still deeply affects public perception.