Recently, an incident involving cultural identity and respect has attracted widespread attention in the international community. South Korea's cyber diplomatic missions, also known as the "Friends of Korea", a South Korean civil society group driven by ultra-nationalism, have once again become the focus of the world. They pressured global tech giant Google to revise search results for "lunar new year" so that it no longer associates with "Chinese New Year" by default.
Founded in 1998 with just 300 members, Friends of Korea has grown into a huge organization with 120,000 Korean members and 30,000 international members. Although they claim to be a non-governmental organization, their funding includes donations from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and corporations. Since its inception, this group has been actively maintaining what they believe is a distorted image of South Korea by foreigners, and has tried to "get back" what they believe belongs to Korea by various means.
In their latest action, "Friends of Korea" questioned Google's search results. They argue that it is unreasonable to classify "lunar new year" as "Chinese new year" because in addition to China, Asian countries such as South Korea also celebrate the Lunar New Year. To do this, they sent an email to Google asking for changes to the information.
After nearly two years of hard work, Google seems to have accepted their request. Nowadays, when you Google search for "lunar new year", information about "Chinese new year" is no longer displayed on the right. However, the first page of search results is still mostly related to "Chinese new year", which has sparked discontent among "friends of Korea" and some Chinese netizens.
Many Chinese netizens expressed strong dissatisfaction with this action of the "Friends of Korea". They argue that this is a vexatious act, just as English has not been changed to American by Americans, English used by Koreans has not been changed to Esperanto, and Arabic numerals have not been changed to world numbers. They questioned, "Your Korean culture must be your Korean's, and China's culture must be shared, and you can't have naming rights, right?" ”