Asia Times Online :: China News - The gentle decline of the 'Third Korea'

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The gentle decline of the 'Third Korea'
By Andrei Lankov

(This article may be read in conjunction with

Two countries, two systems, one porous border, Asia Times Online, August 14.)

By Chinese standards, the city of Yanji is rather small, with a population of nearly 400,000. About a third of them are ethnic Koreans: Yanji is the capital of Yanbian autonomous prefecture in the northeastern province of Jilin.

From the first few minutes in Yanji it does not feel completely like

China. The streets and shops have signs both in Korean and Chinese, the people (well, many of them) speak Korean among themselves, and restaurants advertise dog meat, a traditional Korean delicacy. But it also feels different from South and North Korea. Yanji is much too poor if compared with the South and much too rich if measured against meager North Korean standards.

The Korean migration began as a trickle in the 1880s, and by the early 1920s it had developed into a large flow. Some of those settlers fled the persecution of the Japanese colonial occupiers at home, but many more were attracted by lands easily available to migrant farmers in what then was known as Manchuria.

An overwhelming majority, some 80%, came from the areas that after 1945 became parts of North Korea. During the Chinese Civil War, most local Koreans sided with the communists, and this helped boost their standing after 1949. The local Koreans were officially recognized as a "minority group", and in 1952 the entire area was made into an autonomous prefecture, with the Korean language co-official with Mandarin.

Yanbian is a large area, roughly half the size of South Korea, but its current population is merely 2.2 million. South Korea has 48 million people, so the density of population in Yanbian is remarkably low. Indeed, while traveling through the area one can drive for few kilometers without encountering any signs of human settlement - a picture that is unthinkable in most of South Korea or coastal China.

In 1945 about 1.7 million Koreans lived in China, overwhelmingly in its northeastern area. About 500,000 of those chose to move back to Korea in the late 1940s, but a million or so decided to stay. Nowadays, the Korean population has reached 2 million, of whom some 800,000 reside in Yanbian.

Economically, the area has not been very successful - perhaps because it is landlocked, so the import-oriented development strategy does not really work there. The breathtaking economic growth of the past two decades in the country as a whole has changed the looks of the local cities and towns, but Yanbian is still poor by contemporary Chinese standards. Sometimes in the villages around the city one can even see a derelict hut with a thatched roof - a sight that is almost impossible to see more prosperous areas of China. Still, changes are everywhere: the old gray buildings of the Mao Zedong era are being demolished and giving way to new, posh apartment complexes. Construction is everywhere, the number of hotels is astonishing, and good roads criss-cross the area, though motor traffic is still very thin.

Beijing's policy toward ethnic Koreans has always been somewhat contradictory. On one hand, the Chinese central government follows the Leninist principles it learned from the Soviet Union. According to these principles, the ethnic minorities should be given manifold privileges, often at the expense of the majority group.

Indeed, this is frequently the case with the ethnic Koreans. But there were periods of unease and even open persecution, especially in the crazy decade of Mao's Cultural Revolution beginning in 1966. A middle-aged ethnic-Korean businessman told me, "Back in the late 1960s, I seldom saw my parents. Because they were members of an ethnic minority, they had to go to ideological-struggle sessions every day and had to stay until very late."

However, that period was an exception. The same person, who said he is not a fan of the current Chinese system, still admitted when asked about discrimination: "Discrimination? Well, almost none, to be frank. They appoint some Han Chinese officials to supervise the administration, but basically I don't think Korean people here have problems with promotions or business because of their ethnicity. Sometimes being a minority even helps a bit - it's easier to get to a university if you come from a minority group."

It is clear that many Korean community cultural institutions rely on generous subsidies from the central government. The Chinese state sponsors a large network of the Korean-language schools, so until recently nearly all Korean children received secondary education in their ancestors' tongue. If they wish, they can attend Yanbian University, where ethnic Koreans are given preferential treatment for the entrance exams.

The local television network broadcasts in Korean and the newsstands in the area sell a number of Korean-language periodicals. Some of these publications hardly need sponsorship, since they deal with the ever popular topics of sex, crime and violence, but many others, such as high-brow literary magazines or rather boring local dailies, would go out of business without their state subsidies.

A local law requires every street sign in the prefecture to be written in both Korean and Chinese, and it explicitly stipulates that Korean letters should not be smaller or placed below the Chinese characters. This even applies to advertisements.

The Korean heritage (or rather those parts of the heritage that are deemed politically safe) is much flaunted in the area because it is one of factors that make Yanji attractive to potential tourists. So Korean restaurants are everywhere and local advertisements frequently use images of beautiful girls clad in the Korean national dress or hanbok.

However, it would be a mistake to depict the Chinese policy in the area as an ideal to be emulated. The potential threat of irredentism has never been completely forgotten, and it is an open secret that radical Korean nationalists have dreamed about annexing this area since at least the early 1900s. They often say Yanbian is actually a "third Korea" (the other two being North and South), so it should be included into a Greater Korea that they believe will emerge one day.

Until recently such threats were not much pronounced, since the impoverished and grotesquely dictatorial North Korean regime could not inspire much longing for the lost homeland among the Chinese Koreans. Perhaps most local Koreans share the feelings of a middle-aged Korean with whom I had a long talk in the town of Tumen on the North Korean border. While pointing to the barren hills of North Korea, easily seen from a restaurant window, he said, "I am so lucky that my grandparents chose to get out of that place. I think we all would be dead had our grandfather stayed there. It is such an awful place. I do not understand how they manage to survive in North Korea."

This seems to be the common feeling toward North Korea. There might be a lot of genuine sympathy, as demonstrated in the late 1990s at the height of North Korea's great famine, when there was widespread grassroots support for the illegal migrants from that country. However, in most cases the North Korean regime is seen by local Koreans as an object of contempt and ridicule, and its unwillingness to emulate the Chinese example is often mentioned as the major reason for the disastrous situation of the country.

However, in 1992 China established formal diplomatic relations with prosperous South Korea, and soon the Yanbian area was

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