Neighbors Are Charming to Each Other? A Study of South Korea-China Mutual Perception.

China has highlighted the "peaceful rise (heping jueqi)" in its projection of power, and the slogan will be retained during the second-term of Hu Jintao after the 17th National Party Congress. To corroborate the ideas, the country has been adopting various "soft power (ruan shili)" tools, and, in Asia at least, China's "charm offensive" has been working effectively, according to Joshua Kurlantzick.Recently, however, the ascendancy of China's soft power has been challenged in one of its neighboring countries, South Korea. The perception of South Koreans regarding China has been skewed to be negative for the past couple of years. On the other hand, in China, the "Korean Cultural Wave (hanliu)" has apparently started its ebb and has frequently faced "anti-hanliu" discourses, which are an extension of Chinese nationalism, practically employed by the communist party of China. Against this backdrop, my paper will try to 1) elaborate the current mutual perception between Korea and China; 2) address major factors affecting the mutual perception; and, 3) discuss what is the significance of the changing mutual perception to the current and future relations between Korea and China.For this paper, I will mainly rely on archive research and interview. For example, I will exam Chinese and Korean journal articles, reports, and empirical survey data. Also, I will visit China and Korea this summer to conduct interviews with Korean and Chinese professors and bureaucrats. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]