Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok. [Yonhap]
Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok. [Yonhap]

Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok expressed frustration Sunday after his denial that his mother is Chinese drew accusations of anti-Chinese sentiment, asking whether he was supposed to "smile and agree" with what he called a false claim.

"One extreme attacks me with fake news, saying she's Chinese, and the other extreme calls it hatred when I push back — that's just nonsense," Lee wrote on social media Sunday.

The dispute traces back to a protest Lee attended June 6 at Olympic Park in Songpa-gu, Seoul, over a ballot shortage during the recent election. A demonstrator asked him, "Is your mother Chinese? I saw it online." Lee replied, "That's an insult. My mother is not Chinese. She is from Yangchon, Sangju."

Park Dong-chan, director of the Alert Institute for Migrant Rights Research and a scholar of migrant rights, criticized the remark in a media interview, saying Lee had effectively used "Chinese" as a slur and that his words "could be hurtful to young people with immigrant backgrounds who have Chinese-born parents."

Lee pushed back sharply. "We now live in a world where correcting a false claim that my mother — who is clearly not Chinese — is Chinese makes you a bigot," he said, adding: "Are you saying I should smile and go along with being called Chinese when she isn't?" He went on to say the criticism was typical of "the level of incitement that keeps trotting out words like hatred and divisiveness."


choigo@heraldcorp.com