North Korean Migration, Communication, and Identity

Abstract

For a multitude of economic, social, and environmental factors, a large number of North Koreans explored various migratory routes into and outward from China. An increasing number of these migrants eventually choose to settle in South Korea. Consequently, this development has led to significant ramifications individually and across South Korean society with regard to identity transformation, coethnic dynamics, and contemporary conceptualizations of nationhood, which ultimately affect potential reunification scenarios between the Koreas. This article critically reviews how North Korean migrants have transformed their identities through various interactions and communication with the Korean-Chinese, South Koreans, and Korean-Americans during their journeys from North Korea through China and Southeast Asia to South Korea, as well as the South Korean and Western media portrayals of North Koreans. The study utilizes existing literature on the topic, official statistics of North Korean arrivals in South Korea, and public polls on unification as well as the author’s own interviews of approximately 500 North Korean migrants in China and South Korea since 1999. It argues that while North Koreans in South Korea have successfully transformed their legal identity from the socialist northern to the capitalist southern citizenship, their socioethnic identities are still in the making. Coethnic tensions among Koreans with different nationalities have formed a kind of hierarchical nationhood among them and placed them in a certain socioeconomic order. This hierarchy and othering among ethnic Koreans based on birthplace and residence has important policy implications for any future unification scenario. Younger South Koreans have ambivalent attitudes toward North Koreans, taking a pragmatic economic approach to reunification as peace, rather than an ethnocentric national unity and political union.