I spent the last year in Korea doing (among other things) research on the situation faced by ethnic Chinese who grew up in Korea. The Korean term is hwagyo 화교, coming from the hanzi for huáqiáo 華僑, “overseas Chinese”. This is the first in a series of posts that is the result of this past year. This post will provide an introduction, while the following posts will be excerpts from interviews conducted over the past year.

The Korean peninsula is often believed by its inhabitants to be ethnically pure. This sense of identity has provided a foundation for group identity that is shared by ethnic Koreans around the world. It is a source of immediate trust and friendship between Koreans abroad meeting for the first time. Not surprisingly, the history of East Asia does not support the idea of ethnic purity going back for more than a few generations, for whatever that is worth. In truth, Korea, and the Republic of Korea in particular, has a fair degree of ethnic and cultural diversity. Despite historical precedents, changes in national law in the past 15 years have made it easier for foreign nationals to live and work in the country, though in the past year things might have begun taking a turn for the worse.

Recent arrivals from the West and from South Asia have taken jobs ranging from English teacher to manual labourer. However there is a long-standing community of ethnic Chinese who in many cases go back generations.

Sungkonghoe University’s Park Kyung-Tae 박경태, in his working paper titled Discriminating Invisible Minorities: The Experience of Ethnic Chinese in Korea, puts the arrival of the civilian huaqiao in Korea at 1882. While this date provides a solid point from which we might begin the story of modern Chinese in Korea, one can imagine there may have been earlier settlers coming from the ranks of the Qing military or perhaps sooner.

Despite the relative length of time that these communities have existed, and apparently without regard to the impact on society as a whole left by the huaqiao community, the Republics of Korea have had sometimes apathetic and sometimes saboteurial attitudes toward ethnic Chinese. As a possible indicator, it has been said many times that Seoul is the only major metropolis in Greater East Asia that lacks a Chinatown*. The closest thing to a Chinatown in the city would be either a now defunct cluster of shops in the Myeongdong neighbourhood or an intersection in Yeonnam-dong, both of which lack any sort of definition or internal consistency.

Throughout history there has been a great deal of exchange between the peoples of the Korean peninsula and the surrounding areas which now make up the Japanese archipelago and Greater China. Korean settlements existed throughout Manchuria and as far south as modern-day Shanghai. The Yalu River, now the border between the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, was until only very recently not much of a border at all. The geographical insignificance of the Yalu, as well as the Tumen River which finishes the eastern border between China and North Korea, can be seen by the large population of Korean speaking Chinese citizens in the region of China known as Dongbei (東北, the Northeast). This is especially apparent in places like Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture where the Korean language has an official status, as well as in Jilin Province and the city of Yantai in Shandong Province where a great many of the original hwagyo in Korea are said to have originated and where a large number of ethnic Koreans still reside.

Political barriers aside, the two rivers are easily crossed and are the route of choice for North Korean defectors. Despite the very real division between states that is enforced at these rivers, the modern-day border has not always been the border of Korea in its various forms. It has been variously drawn at the Liao River in what is now China’s Dongbei region, as well as extending well past the Liao as was the case during the height of the Goguryo Kingdom. As is usually the case with modern-day states, the political borders rarely follow much less clearly definiable human cultural boundaries, and a great many Chinese citizens in the Northeast consider themselves Korean. Many still speak Korean in their homes and Mandarin in their public lives, though not all.

The same attitude prevails among many of Koreas ethnic Chinese, making any border between the two cultures even more difficult to pin down. More so due to the fact that a number of them spend plenty of time both in Korea where many where born and Taiwan where their passports were issued. Some experiences of one such Korea-based Overseas Chinese will be shared in a coming post.

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* The two well known Chinatowns in Korea are in Incheon, a large city outside of Seoul, and Busan. The Busan Chinatown, for what it’s worth, is mostly Russian now. Establishments in the Chinatown in Incheon are mostly run by ethnic Koreans.