The funny thing is, if they wanted to see Koreans being more than the sum of our oppression they could have just looked to the history of the actual Nakrang. As I ranted at length to poor alexseanchai, the story of Nakrang is anything but one of passive Korean victimization--the place was run by Koreans, and it was other Koreans who destroyed it to drive out the Chinese. I hate how the jingoists ignore and dismiss the strength of Koreans in our actual history. These people don't really love Korea, they love their own fantasy version of it.

Pyeongyang may in fact have been the oldest capital city in Korea, and it's crucial for anyone ruling the northern half of the peninsula. That's why the Chinese chose it as the seat of the Nakrang prefecture, and why Goguryeoh (one of the ancient Korean kingdoms) moved its own capital to Pyeongyang a century after destroying Nakrang. And also why North Korea designated Pyeongyang as its own capital, of course. While Pyeongyang was never a capital of a unified Korean polity (and probably won't be in the future, either, with all the bad juju of recent history) it was always one of the major cities and certainly the foremost city in the North.

Good point about the "not in my backyard" aspect of it. XD If the Chinese had been at all interested in the southern Korean peninsula they would have had a presence here, too, but I guess we were too boring and far away.