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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