Since the late 1980s, the community of Korean minorities in Northeast China has experienced unprecedented “Korean Wind”: many Korean minority of China made efforts to realize their wealth accumulation and to raise their social status through transnational migration from China to South Korea. In the past thirty years, two generations of Chinese Korean migrants born between 1940 to 1980 have worked in South Korea as labors for the so-called “3D jobs”: the difficult, dirty and dangerous work. Many young Chinese Korean migrant workers left their elderly parents and children at home in Northeast China to seek for jobs and better future in a country that they were both familiar with and estranged at the same time....[ Read more ]

Since the late 1980s, the community of Korean minorities in Northeast China has experienced unprecedented “Korean Wind”: many Korean minority of China made efforts to realize their wealth accumulation and to raise their social status through transnational migration from China to South Korea. In the past thirty years, two generations of Chinese Korean migrants born between 1940 to 1980 have worked in South Korea as labors for the so-called “3D jobs”: the difficult, dirty and dangerous work. Many young Chinese Korean migrant workers left their elderly parents and children at home in Northeast China to seek for jobs and better future in a country that they were both familiar with and estranged at the same time.

Based on detailed ethnographic data on the social change and the Left-behind members of a Korean community in rural Northeast China as a result of long-term anthropological field work, this research aims to answer two questions: first, what impacts do the international migration have on home villages in rural China, considering the local socio-economic context and historical background of the Chinese Korean, who used to be a geographically and politically marginalized ethnic group in China since the 19^th century? Second, as a non-aboriginal ethnicity in the Northeast, how did the Chinese Korean practice social and cultural reconstruction through different strategic maneuvering on local rice cultivation before the 1980s, and the international labor market after the 1980s? Thus, this thesis investigates the social and cultural reconstruction of Chinese Korean communities from the following four perspectives: First, the nation-state plays a significant role in constructing a Korean identity as an official Chinese minority and they have been mobilized into nationalism from their immigration into Northeast China in large scale in 1910, to the contemporary global networks in Northeast Asia after the 1980s; Second, the Left-behind elderlies in rural China who face the crisis of loneliness, health problems, and the threat of death, are constantly negotiating with and struggling for their ethnic and national identities. Thus, they intend to search for a sense of belonging by the means of space imagination; Third, the middle-aged working parents who are undergoing international migration between China and South Korea, are also trying to maintain their family relations by networking, traveling, and remittance transferring. Their family tie therefore revolve around the older generation; Fourth, since the early 1990s farmlands of the Chinese Koreans have been contracted to local Han peasants from their home villages, inevitably the cultural capital and monopolistic rice-cultivating techniques of the local Koreans have been transferred to the local Han neighbors in large scale.

Accordingly, I propose: the Chinese Koreans are continuously reconstructing their family ties, communal and national relationships, as well as their imagination of the home space. This research therefore adds a new perspective of global network development in the context of dynamic local ethnic relations and the influences of consumerism on agricultural communities to the study of ethnicity in China.