I turned on the TV after arriving in Korea this week and I was greeted by a TV program examining various stores and restaurants catering to foreigners in Korea, as well as the foreigners that frequent those places. The name of the program, or perhaps the tagline, was 외국인백만시대 (One Million Foreigner Era). The program gave it the air of it being something to celebrate, which was heartening, particularly because it focused on South and Southeast Asians in Korea, not a very highly-regarded group otherwise.
The statistic of 1 million foreigners is somewhat misleading because about half of the 1 million are ethnic Koreans who retain Chinese citizenship, but given that almost half of all rural children in Korea will be mixed-race, there will be no shortage diversity in the future. Parenthetically, I don't think diversity for its own sake is a good thing, because it means that you think a town full of nothing but ethnic Koreans is inferior to a town of a mixture of Koreans and half-Vietnamese. I often hear fellow Canadians deride a place as "the whitest place ever", and it really only makes sense if you're not being serious and really just complaining about the paucity of dining options.
At any rate, it's interesting to consider that Korea will have an admixture of races in the future. If this helps Korea avoid going the way of Japan, with a stalled economy and a population that will drop by about 40 million in the next 40 years, it's a good thing. It will certainly challenge the conception of Korea as a nation-state populated exclusively by ethnic Koreans, and finding a place in Korean society for the mixed-race children, one that's somewhere other than an obscure corner, will be a significant challenge.
What do you think are some of the unforeseeable changes of an increasingly multiracial South Korea?
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The statistic of 1 million foreigners is somewhat misleading because about half of the 1 million are ethnic Koreans who retain Chinese citizenship
I hear this in the K-blogosphere, but I'm not so sure it's true. Chinese citizens may now be half of the total and Chosŏnjok half of that, my guess, so about one fourth.
About half of the foreigners in Korea are Chinese, and most of them are ethnic Koreans to begin with, so about 40% according to this article.
I wonder, though, how accurate the 71% figure is for the PRC nationals being ethnic Koreans.
I don't think the numbers add up. I could be wrong, but I believe that there is an incentive for PRC nationals to claim Korean ethnicity but it is nearly impossible to verify because of different record keeping. By contrast, someone gets an F4 only if they can prove (through ROK records themselves) that they or one of their forebears is a former ROK national who gave up their ROK citizenship.
At any rate, China has for years claimed there were only 1 million or so ethnic Koreans in China, yet here we have 443,566 of them? So are we to believe that half of the entire ethnic Korean population of China has made an exodus to South Korea?
Not impossible but not terribly likely either. It gives me reason to question the numbers: Maybe the actual number of ethnic Koreans in China is far higher than the official number; in fact, I've heard that the actual number could be around 10 million, close to 1% of the PRC population.
Or maybe the percentage of ethnic Koreans in the PRC population of South Korea is distorted.
Or both.
I thought the same thing when I first saw the figures, remembering that the official number of Koreans was only a few million.
Considering how long most of those people have been in China, I wonder how they prove they're ethnic Koreans.
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