1 JOSEONJOK MIGRANT WORKERS ’ IDENTITY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN KOREA

This paper explores the changing views of ethnic Koreans in China. Though Koreans have lived in what is now China for centuries, approximately 2 million emigrated or were forced by the Japanese to move to China, mostly in the 1880-1945 period. We show that though briefly, during Japanese occupation, Joseonjok were viewed by Koreans on the peninsula as truly Korean, since the 1980s the government has mostly treated them as foreign. Focusing primarily on the past 15 years, we show the changing policy regarding Joseonjok, which increasingly gives them rights above and beyond those enjoyed by other migrants, but continues to keep them marginal and outside of the Korean nation. We also examine Joseonjok workers attitudes, and the discrimination they face on the job and in Korean society. No nation-state is entirely isolated from its neighbors. Though the Westphalian state system created a world of contiguous, discrete nation-state entities, separated from each other by (usually) mutually recognized borders, the state system did not stop the tradition of human movement. Even the most proudly and self-consciously homogenous places, such as South Korea, have long traditions of both emigration and immigration. In the past two decades, South Korea has made a transition from being primarily a sending state to a receiving state. This is a momentous change and one of potentially great consequence for Korean national identity. In Korea, as in other countries that have made similar emigration/immigration transitions, such as Italy and Japan, there are groups of people who represent both the past and the future. These are the return migrants, who left their homelands because of poverty or political persecution or both, but who now, sometimes several generations later, come knocking at the now enticing golden doors of their fast-developing ancestral homelands. Sometimes the homeland governments and people welcome them back with open arms, as with Germany (Joppke forthcoming). And sometimes they offer suspicion and exploitation. In this paper, we examine the case of the Joseonjok, or ethnic Koreans who left their homeland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and settled in China. They have long sough