Licensed tourist guides have been telling foreign visitors that the Joseon Dynasty was a vassal state of China, a lawmaker said at a parliamentary audit, in cases of historical distortion that drew sharp criticism. The Korea Tourism Organization has no plans to survey Chinese-speaking guides and does not systematically track the training records of licensed guides.
Rep. Jung Yeon-wook of the People Power Party, who represents Suyeong district in Busan and sits on the National Assembly's Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee, raised the issue at the organization's audit on the 14th, pointing to both the distortions and lax oversight by the state tourism agency.
Citing media reports, Jung presented cases in which guides told foreign tourists that "Joseon was for generations a vassal state of the Chinese nation." On the Japanese invasions of 1592, one guide reportedly explained that Joseon resisted because "it could not allow passage for an army marching against its own father's country."
Asked by Jung whether such remarks made any sense, Korea Tourism Organization President Park Sung-hyuk said they did not. Asked whether it was normal for guides holding a state license to offer such explanations, Park said it was not.
Problems were also confirmed in the field. According to data presented by Jung, 26 of 261 Chinese-language guided tours conducted at Gyeongbokgung Palace this year were classified as improper — about 10% of the total.
Seven complaints related to historical distortion have been filed over the past five years, but almost none led to administrative action. Jung said filed complaints alone make it difficult to grasp the true scale of the problem, and that unreported cases suggest distorted commentary may be far more widespread.
The agency's management system also has gaps. In a written response to Jung's office, the Korea Tourism Organization said it has no plans to survey Chinese-speaking guides and has drawn up no separate inspection plan.
Its personnel database for licensed guides contains only basic information such as names and language areas, with no record of completed training. With roughly 42,000 licensed guides in the country, the agency has failed to systematically track training histories after licenses are issued.
"It seems the agency only looks into this after media reports come out and it gets burned," Jung said. He noted that completion of the organization's guide academy requires only an attendance rate of 80% or higher, and cited Marseille, France, where licenses are withheld from applicants who lack adequate understanding of history and culture.
Jung warned that repeated distortions could spread mistaken perceptions of Korea at a time when the number of Chinese-speaking tourists is rising. "The number of Chinese-speaking tourists keeps growing," he said. "If these remarks are repeated, they will only be amplified once visitors return home."
"There is a theory that once a single window is broken, however trivial it seems, the whole thing collapses," he added. "If this keeps happening, questions about our country's standing will inevitably resurface."
Park said the issue of distorted historical commentary was "not a trivial matter but a very important one" and pledged to examine it seriously. He also acknowledged shortcomings in the management of training records.
"The reality is that with about 42,000 licensed guides at present, we have not been able to manage training records as well," Park said, adding that the agency would consider including such records in its management database. "The association also conducts separate training, and those completion records are not yet linked, so the system is split in two," he said. "You have raised a good point, and we will think about it and find a way."