Contesting Koreanness: Migration as a challenge to the ethnic identity of the Korean Chinese by Amelia Schubert B.A., Arizona State University, 2007 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Geography 2011 i This thesis entitled Contesting Koreanness: Migration as a challenge to the ethnic identity of the Korean Chinese written by Amelia Schubert has been approved for the Department of Geography _____________________________________ Tim Oakes _____________________________________ Emily Yeh _____________________________________ Fernando Riosmena Date The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. IRB protocol # 0510.11 ii Schubert, Amelia (M.A., Geography) Contesting Koreanness: Migration as a challenge to the ethnic identity of the Korean Chinese Thesis directed by Tim Oakes ABSTRACT Since China and South Korea established diplomatic ties in 1992, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Korean Chinese have migrated to South Korea for work or marriage. Their ethnic return migration has not gone smoothly; despite their perception of a common Korean identity, the populations have adapted and evolved differently in over sixty years of separation. Contested definitions of Korean identity resulted. Employing a cultural political economy framework, this thesis explores the complex situation of the Korean Chinese within the Chinese state, their shifting position in South Korean immigration policy, and their eventual reorientation away from South Korea. The problems experienced by the migrant and host populations grew from a misconceived notion of ethnicity as simply shared racial and cultural background. In fact ethnicity is the complex, variable, and manipulable result of long histories experienced in specific places. Understanding ethnic identity requires consideration of territorially-defined group membership and state-sponsored attempts to claim space. Specifically addressing minority groups in China, but relevant to all multinational states, I argue for a contextualized approach to examining changes and conflicts in group identities. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis was enabled by the warm support of many people and organizations. The University of Colorado‟s Center for Asian Studies provided a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in 2010, allowing me to travel to Seoul for that summer. I am deeply grateful to B.I. Kim for his invaluable assistance and insight during that time. Jae Min Lim, Sahngjoon Lee and Hyu Gi Kim arranged interviews and answered endless questions. Huge thanks go to my advisor Tim Oakes for inspiration and guidance through this process, and much love to my family for their enduring enthusiasm. iv CONTENTS List of Figures………………………………...………………………………………………vii Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: A Theoretical Approach to Understanding Ethnic Return Migration 1.1 Ethnic Return Migration………………………………………………….……….12 1.2 The Role of Culture…………………………………………………………..…...17 1.3 Cultural Political Economy in Geography…………………………………..……22 1.4 A Case for Comparison: Ethnic Return Migration of the Japanese Brazilians..….30 Chapter Two: Chinese Minority Policy and Ethnic Nationalism 2.1 Background of the Korean Chinese in Northeast China………………………….39 2.2 Experience of Koreans in Soviet States…………………………………………..45 2.3 Chinese Minority Policy…………………………………………………….….…46 2.4 Korean Chinese as a minority minzu……………………………………………...55 Chapter Three: Korean Chinese Labor Migration into South Korea 3.1 Labor Migration in Northeast Asia……………………………………………….58 3.2 South Korean immigration policy development………………………………….60 3.3 Chinese state interventions………………………………………………………..62 3.4 Emboldening labor migrants in South Korea……………………………………..65 3.5 Impacts on Sending Areas………………………………………………………...68 3.6 The Future of Yanbian?...........................................................................................72 v Chapter Four: Korean Chinese Marriage Migration into South Korea 4.1 A South Korean Demography…………………………………………………….75 4.2 Marriage migration in theory and practice………………………………………..78 4.3 Korean Chinese marriage migration: Rise of an industry…………………….…..83 4.4 State regulation of the body politic…………………………………………….....86 Chapter 5: Conclusions………………………………………………………………………91 Reference List...……………………………………….………………………………………98 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Bus stop………………………………………………………………………….2 vii INTRODUCTION On January 7, 2008, a warehouse owned by the company Korea 2000 caught fire in the South Korean city of Icheon, killing 40 workers and sparking a nation-wide debate about the treatment of foreign labor in South Korean industry. Seventeen of the dead were foreign workers; fifteen were ethnically Korean Chinese, and two were Uzbeks. Public outcry centered on the fifteen Korean Chinese workers. These people were the ethnic brethren of the South Koreans, yet they were relegated to the least desirable jobs and the worst working conditions, left to perish in unsafe cold-storage warehouse explosions, denied even the basic ventilation system that could have expelled the combustible fumes. Newspapers were filled with testimonials by friends and family, mourning the victims and shaming the nation that had allowed the abuse of its own ethnic population. Was this South Korea‟s own Triangle Shirtwaist fire? Would it prompt drastic reform in labor safety standards, increasing oversight and finally putting workers‟ well-being before profit margins? The short answer is no. Within a week the clamor had faded, in two weeks it was gone. No legislation was proposed. Callous, I thought. But the repercussions of the fire did inspire me to question my own understanding of ethnic identity, eventually spurring me to this thesis. At the time of the fire I was teaching English at Chungnam Internet High School, a vo- tech school offering programming and graphic design classes to students in the greater Nonsan area of Chungcheongnam-do, South Korea. It was not glamorous. My bus stop is pictured below (see Figure 1). 1 Figure 1: Bus stop Nonsan is a rural town, agricultural with no industry to speak of. No Korean Chinese people lived there. Yet I was struck by the vehemence of the debate over the Korean Chinese, in the newspapers, with my students, and among teachers. The blood connection between the South Koreans and the Korean Chinese made those fifteen workers matter in a way that the two Uzbeks and even the twenty-three South Koreans did not. Uzbeks were foreigners, to whom the South Koreans had no obligation, and the South Koreans could have (should have?) looked after themselves. But the Korean Chinese were the unfortunate kin of the South Koreans. They were victims of geography and history and foreign meddling, cut off from the homeland by the redrawing of borders in the mid-twentieth century and left to the mercy of Chinese communists since then. South Korea had a duty to the Korean Chinese, and it apparently consisted of offering them low-wage jobs that didn‟t kill them. South Korea had failed. Americans steeped in an ongoing celebration of individuality tend to believe that descent should not matter. Phenotype and bloodlines are the stuff of racial discrimination. But in South Korea, descent overtly matters. South Koreans can trace their family trees back for hundreds of 2 years. Three surnames (Kim, Lee, and Park) account for roughly fifty percent of the population, mirroring a belief that there are only three original branches of the Korean nation. Within these three surnames though there are thousands of clans, and asking a South Korean about “which Lee clan” he or she belongs to can be a very long lesson in lineage. South Koreans know their bloodlines, and this colors their understanding of the Korean nation as a pure descent-based group. The relative isolation of the Korean peninsula has certainly encouraged this belief in Korean homogeneity. But the re-introduction of the Korean Chinese to the South Korean population has problematized this descent-based understanding of the Korean nation. The Korean Chinese do not live so far away from the South Koreans. Indeed, ignoring political boundaries, the Korean Chinese, North Korean, and South Korean people would still constitute one contiguous ethnic group. None of these groups have out-married in any significant numbers; all retain Korean as their primary language; in dress, food, naming, and family patterns they all follow Korean tradition. But we cannot ignore political boundaries. Political boundaries now order the world, assigning every person to a state and a particular citizen-group. Descent-based group identities of course still matter, but compete with place- based definitions of group membership. It is into this fraught battle that I wade. I began this thesis with two theoretical questions. First, how do people understand and enact personal identities with conflicting components? Ethnic and civic loyalties can make very different demands on people. The phenomenon of the hyphenated identity is by no means unique to the Korean Chinese, of course1. However, I believe this case is complicated by aggressive state intervention on behalf of both the ethnic Korean and the civic Chinese identities. 1 While I choose not to actually hyphenate Korean Chinese, it is functionally the same