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I think the question becomes why has the gender war not turned hot in Japan, which has similar economic factors?
That's a good question, but I don't know anything about Japan.
Also, I somewhat dispute that the gender war has "turned hot" in Korea. I think this "gender war" mostly journos trying to make a big issue about gender, for the reasons outlined in the second half of my grandparent comment. Surveys in 2021 showed that in every demographic surveyed, "inequality between men and women" was considered less of a problem in 2021 than in 2016. Also, if you are not terminally online you won't notice any gender war. (But Korean society does tend to be terminally online, so most people are aware of some feminist/anti-feminist drama. )
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I can't name sources in a hurry, and this might be a faulty explanation, but I think a partial reason of this is due to Korea turning super-neo-Confucian during the Joseon dynasty/period. This is most evident after the Qing conquest of the Ming, which the Koreans responded to by considering Qing China as not having political legitimacy*, and doubling down on their interpretations of neo-Confucianism; but strands of this are evident even earlier, when Korean scholars rejected Ming-dynasty innovations (e.g. the Lu-Wang school) in favour of elaborating on older models, most prominently from Zhu Xi. Even today you can see a much, much more obviously hierarchical system regarding personal relations present in Korea than in Japan or China, even counting pre-PRC China (edit: at least contemporaneously).
China, on the other hand, did have such reevaluations, and the Manchu conquest prompted significant soul-searching, resulting in things like the kaozheng school of thought. Japan's kangaku, likewise, did not hunker down in the same way Korea did.
I could easily see how a more hyper-Confucian society that's had a crash course in modern liberal democracy and capitalist markets would create sex-based resentment, especially if you introduce a dose of feminism into it.
*For further reading you could go look at how many Koreans at the time considered themselves to be sojonghwa and the real inheritors of Chinese political culture and civilisation, now that actual China was overrun by "barbarians". This was to the extent that, IIRC, Joseon Korea refused to use Qing dynasty regnal years as part of its calendar, and continued counting as if the last Ming emperor (?) was still in power. Also note that this was not entirely unique to Korea; there were politicians and thinkers in Japan and Vietnam who shared this opinion.
Some element of this after the "loss of China" in the 17th century likely contributes to Korean culture today. I've been told by native Koreans about how the older generations still sometimes say outright that "since the fall of the Ming there has been no worthy Chinese (persons)"; and there's always some loony Korean nationalist scholar, never taken very seriously, insisting on how this or that aspect of Sinosphere civilisation (from festivals to Chinese characters, so on and so forth) actually originates from Korea.
Oh, that's where this comes from! I've seen Chinese people complaining about this, but I never understood why it was a thing that the Koreans did, and it always struck me as bizarre.
I'll stress that that part is my own conjecture, and doubtless modern nationalism and fear/mistrust of the PRC plays into this phenomenon as well. But it seems unlikely to me that the historical background didn't contribute to this. And that the Chinese usually overhype whatever minor Korean nutter has to say for their own purposes as well, to the extent that the average Chinese is probably more misinformed about the actual state of understanding in Korea (where Koreans rightfully mostly relegate such hyper-nationalism as mostly batshit insane).
Then there are things that are just kinda...dumb, like the Chinese getting irate at the Korean dragon boat festival getting recognised internationally (honestly who gives a shit? It's like Italians getting upset about modern British celebrating a derivative of a Roman festival). That stupid thing about kimchi and paocai thing still confuses me to this day (not the background facts, but the sheer idiocy of it, as well as the initial irresponsibility of the Chinese press).
I'll file this away as an unconfirmable theory, then. :-)
If you mean that Koreans have nutters who claim Chinese things — and other things too, for that matter — are actually Korean, no, that's real. The Chinese do grossly exaggerate the extent of belief, of course.
The festivals thing I was thinking of was related to Lunar New Year. I'm going off this by memory, so couldn't find a source in time.
The Chinese character thing was something found originally here, where some Korean novelist and former(?)-professor expounds on the idea that actually proto-Koreans created Chinese civilisation before migrating to Korea (by equating proto-Koreans simultaneously with the Shang and the Dongyi). (Apparently the same person was also featured in a video here earlier this year where he more explicitly claims that Chinese characters are Korean. That video has been private'd, but some vengeful Chinese netizen has re-uploaded it)
(I also somehow found this looney tunes Korean guy claiming that English is descended from Korean?)
Again, these things aren't taken seriously by the (vast?) majority of Koreans, but they do exist (as do more mainstream but still silly nationalistic punchups). This is also not to elide that you see loony shit from the Chinese (and Japanese, and every ethnicity really) as well -- sometimes even from the state organs!
My conjecture is that some part of this historical revisionism has to do not only with modern nationalism and geopolitcal rivalry, but also a longer-rooted hostility that has fomented since the Qing conquest.
Don't worry, I know the nutters are real. It's just that I'm going to have to try hard to not get carried away with this cool new explanation that you provided. :-)
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