Author: Gowoon Noh
Publisher:
Published: 2011
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9781124666013
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This study focuses on how the Korean-Chinese population of Yanbian Korean-Chinese Ethnic Autonomous Prefecture (Yanbian) conducts transnational business and engages in labor migration between South Korea and the Yanbian Prefecture, China. Korean-Chinese are the descendants of migrants from the Korean peninsula who left to China between the mid-19th century and the end of the Second World War. After forty years of severance, Korean-Chinese were reconnected to South Korea ever more closely through transnational interactions, such as labor migration, transnational business corporations, scholarly exchange, and popular media distribution. This study seeks to understand the context in which the "official" national ideology of cultural homogeneity among the members of the Korean nation is suggested to be a major element in guaranteeing economic progress, while much of the Korean-Chinese public insists on limiting the interactions between the two countries to within the sphere of economic relations only and not facilitating cultural relations. This study looks at how Korean-Chinese are situated in a unique context of national belonging between China and South Korea as an ethnic minority of the postsocialist Chinese state and the largest Korean overseas population believed to share national ancestry and culture with capitalist South Korea. Rather than enhancing national sentiment with their mother country, South Korea, which provides more economic opportunities through the global flows of media, information, consumer products, capital, and labor, my study shows that Korean-Chinese build stronger attachments and patriotism to the Chinese state. As a way of resisting social inequality set by economic relations between Korean-Chinese and South Koreans in global capitalist markets, Korean-Chinese have constructed a sense of moral superiority to South Koreans. By demoralizing South Korean society as corrupted by devil spirits of capitalism, while also moralizing the Chinese postsocialist transformation as a remedy for the socialist past of poverty, Korean-Chinese seek to secure a legitimate and firm standing as a part of China's geopolitical and global economic power. My study shows that the contradictory positions toward capitalism are the local means by which Korean-Chinese negotiate their economic exploitation and political marginalization in the process of globalization between the two states. In discussing the meanings of nation and state in globalization, this study looks at the newly emerging notion of neoliberal citizenship in the context of China's postsocialist transformations. My study explores how Korean-Chinese exercise transnational mobility between China and South Korea in the process of postsocialist transformations, and how their transnational strategies are practices encouraged by China's neoliberal discourse of the private self. My study, however, aims to further elaborate the analysis of neoliberalism to the extent that the emphasis on neoliberal ethics of self-governance and self-responsibility in postsocialist China often engender political and economic insecurity for the ethnic population by challenging their national belonging and identity between the two states. I examine how Korean-Chinese, a marginalized ethnic minority of Northeast China, pursue social and political power by embracing as well as critiquing global capitalist processes and neoliberal ethics. This study also adds to the theoretical inquiry of the question of globalization by focusing on the question of gender. Although both Korean-Chinese men and women equally participate in the border crossing between China and South Korea, women's pursuits for economic gain through transnational practices tends to be more severely criticized by Korean-Chinese intellectuals and the general public, and women themselves as well, as a condition of immorality. Some feminist scholars examine how, as bearers and caretakers of a nation's following generations, women's activities in crossing a nation's boundaries bring out more controversial debates than men's. The Korean-Chinese interlocutors with whom I conducted fieldwork are mostly middle-aged women who experienced the Chinese Cultural Revolution in their teens and the postsocialist economic reform policies after they graduated high school. At present, they are considered to be better at adapting to the postsocialist transformations than their male counterparts. However, the morality question for women pursuing wealth oscillates between praise for their economic qualities as self-maximizing subjects, what China's neoliberal politics encourage, and discrimination of their sense of morals as money-driven greed influenced by South Korean capitalism. The official and public discourses about the Korean-Chinese women show how the process of postsocialist changes contains gendered connotations and evaluations.
