Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea 9780804799614

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Contested Embrace

Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center Andrew G. Walder, General Editor The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University sponsors interdisciplinary research on the politics, economies, and societies of contemporary Asia. This monograph series features academic and policy-oriented research by Stanford faculty and other scholars associated with the Center.

Contested Embrace tr ansborder membership politics in t wentieth-century kor ea

Jaeeun Kim

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (KSPS) Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-BAA-2102). Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kim, Jaeeun, author. Title: Contested embrace : transborder membership politics in twentieth-century Korea / Jaeeun Kim. Other titles: Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | Series: Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015047452 | ISBN 9780804797627 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Transnationalism—Political aspects—Korea—History—20th century. | Korean diaspora—Political aspects—History—20th century. | Korea—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. | Japan— Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. | China—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. | Koreans—Japan—History— 20th century. | Koreans—China—History—20th century. Classification: LCC JV8757 .K5454 2016 | DDC 323.6089/957009045—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047452 ISBN 9780804799614 (electronic) Typeset by Thompson Type in 11/14 Garamond

To Hun-Seok Kim

Contents

List of Illustrations

x

Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Transborder Ties

1

1 Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move: Colonial State, Migration, and Diasporic Nationhood

29

2 “Who Owns the Nation?” Cold War Competition over Zainichi Koreans in Japan

73

3 Beyond “Bamboo Curtain” and “Hermit Kingdom”: Korean Chinese between Two Socialist Fatherlands

126

4 Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion: Korean Chinese “Return” Migration to Post–Cold War South Korea

172

Conclusion: Ethnic Nationalism, Globalization, and the Future of Transborder Membership Politics

227

Appendix: Archival and Ethnographic Data

241

Notes 245 Bibliography 279 Index 325

List of Illustrations

Maps I.1. Northeast Asia in the late 1930s: Expansion of the Japanese Empire

2

I.2. Northeast Asia from the early 1950s to the present: Decolonization and the Cold War

3

Figures 2.1. Mindan’s placard hung in Ikaino (the Korean neighborhood in Osaka) in 1971

112

2.2. Ch’ongnyo˘n’s placard hung in Ikaino (the Korean neighborhood in Osaka) in 1971

113

2.3. Doorplate for Mindan members

114

2.4. Per capita GDP trends of South and North Korea between 1950 and 2008

260

Table Table B.1. Abbreviations of the materials cited extensively in Chapter Three

280

Acknowledgments

This book has been long in the making; it was born through multiple border crossings and a series of changes in my institutional affiliation. I have had the great fortune to benefit from the guidance, support, and generosity of numerous individuals and institutions along the way. Writing acknowledgments to a book like this may always feel like an awful understatement. My deepest gratitude goes to my mentor Rogers Brubaker, whose brilliance, integrity, dedication, and warmth left the most enduring imprint on my intellectual growth. Apart from enriching the book with his insightful critiques at the early stage of its development, Rogers should take credit for reining in the perfectionism (in a positive light) or insecurity (in a negative light) of his (now) junior colleague in the most gracious way and enabling the book to see the light of day, opening itself to constructive criticism. Numerous mentors and colleagues provided brilliant insights, sharp criticisms, and warm encouragements. I would like to thank Gail Kligman, Andreas Wimmer, Akhil Gupta, Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Fatma Müge Göçek, and the anonymous reviewers of Stanford University Press for reading the entire manuscript at different stages of its development and sharing their critical insights with me, especially Gail multiple times. For helpful comments on the earlier versions of individual chapters, I thank the late Nancy Abelmann, Barbara Anderson, Joshua Bloom, Miguel Centeno, Nicole Constable, David Cook-Martín, Mitchell Duneier, David Fitzgerald, Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Douglas Gildow, Julian Go, Young-Hae Han, Yossi Harpaz, Wesley Hiers, Angela Jamison, Robert Jansen, John Lie, Rajashree ­Mazumder, Dmitry Mironenko, Leslie Moch, Zeynep Ozgen, Hyung-Il xi

x ii  Acknowledgments

Pai, Saeyoung Park, Rocio Rosales, Donggen Rui, John Skrentny, Jae-Jung Suh, Kristin Surak, Iddo Tavory, Jun Yoo, Roger Waldinger, and Sharon Yoon. The participants in many seminars, workshops, conference sessions, and invited talks helped me crystalize the key ideas of the book and sharpen my arguments. Although I cannot possibly name all of them, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the participants in the following venues: 2006 Comparative Social Analysis seminar at UCLA, 2006 Society for Comparative Research Retreat at Yale, 2009 SSRC Korean Studies Workshop in Monterey, 2010 SSRC IDRF Recipients Workshop in Austin, 2011 “Comparative Perspective: The Politics of Public Space in Korea” Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania, 2012 Contemporary China Colloquium at Princeton, and 2013 SSRC Korean Studies Junior Faculty Workshop in Monterey. The earlier version of part of Chapter One appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History 56 (2014): 34–66, published by Cambridge University Press. The earlier version of part of Chapter Four appeared in Law & Social Inquiry 36 (2011): 760–786, published by the American Bar Foundation and Wiley Blackwell. The book certainly benefited from the anonymous reviewers of both journals. The extraordinary intellectual community in UCLA Sociology profoundly shaped how I think and write, the influence of which I realized only after leaving it and the pedigree of which I proudly embrace. In particular, the horizontal and vertical ties and camaraderie created through the Comparative Social Analysis seminar (the so-called 237) embedded me in the department both intellectually and socially, which was immensely helpful during the solitary writing process. Although the cross-continental move every summer for four years in a row was undeniably tough, I would not change any of these given the exceptional privilege that they gave me. I was able to interact with brilliant mentors and colleagues at Princeton, Stanford, George Mason, and the University of Michigan, whose friendship also made the bumpy and solitary transition to a faculty member much smoother than otherwise. Apart from those already mentioned above, I would like to thank Robert Wuthnow, Kate Choi, Gi-Wook Shin, Ajay Verghese, Tony R. Samara, Rashmi Sadana, Satsuki Takahashi, Alexandra Murphy, Ramaswami Mahalingam, and Youngju Ryu. A special shout-out to Robert Jansen one more time, thanking him for his over ten years of friendship, which has sustained me from UCLA to the University of Michigan.

Acknowledgments  x iii

The research for this book was undertaken with generous support from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. Summer language fellowships from the Center for Chinese Studies and the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA enabled me to improve my language skills before undertaking research in China and Japan. The writing of the book would have been significantly delayed without the financial support and the luxury of time given by the writing fellowships from UCLA, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton and the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. The Academy of Korean Studies has kindly underwritten the editorial expenses for romanization, cartography, and indexing for the entire book. I am sincerely grateful to Andrew Walder, Geoffrey Burn, James Holt, Jenny Erin Gavacs, Margaret Pinette, and other production staff at Stanford University Press for welcoming the manuscript and ushering the final manuscript through to production. I also thank Nojin Kwak, Adrienne Janney, and Jan Sun­ young Wisniewski at the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan for making the book a better read by securing financial support and editorial assistance. Jesse Lichtenstein deserves a separate mention for his tremendous contribution to tightening the writing of the book. The late Jihyon Cho generously gave me the permission to use his incredible photos in Chapter Two a few months before he passed away. I want to pay due respect to his life’s work through this book. This book would have been impossible without the openness, kindness, and generosity of numerous individuals who shared their stories with me at my fieldsites. I only regret that I cannot name most of them, as they appear in this book under pseudonyms. I would still like to give special thanks to those who facilitated my archival and ethnographic research in South Korea, Japan, and northeast China. For my research in South Korea, Yongp’il Kim and the staff members at the former Tongp’o T’aun Center (now Chungguk Tongp’o Hu˘imang Yo˘ndae) deserve the first mention. They let me “hang out” at the center seven days a week and always answered my silliest questions with enlightening insights. I also thank Kyu-gu˘n Ch’a and E˘n-ok Yi for enabling me to access the perspectives of streetlevel bureaucrats. In Japan, An Pae, Yo˘ng Kim, Chae-hwa Park, Ch’o˘l-su Kang, Mi-saeng Yun, and Kwang-hyo˘n O introduced me to important

x iv  Acknowledgments

o­ rganizations, invited me to various social gatherings, and shared their own ­experiences over the delicacies of Tokyo and Osaka. Sang-gi Kim, my beloved grandfather-­in-law in Osaka, addressed my endless inquiries with remarkable honesty and introduced me to friends and neighbors who would have been inaccessible through organizational channels. For my research in northeast China, my deepest gratitude goes to Donggen Rui (Tong-gu˘n Ye) and Guanglin Jin (Kwang-rim Kim). Although they were not even in China during my fieldwork, their family members, friends, and colleagues came through as the most invaluable resources for my research. I will also never forget the hospitality of my multiple host families, Cho˘ng-so˘n Kim, Si-rim Kim, Su-so˘n Ch’oe, Chae-jun Kim, and Sun-ja Song. I would like to express my special gratitude to two individuals who were irreplaceable during my research in northeast China but have passed away since I returned from the field. The late Kyo˘ng-rim Kim kindly accompanied me to numerous interviews with people who would not have opened up to an unknown South Korean researcher from the United States. Those who are familiar with the work of the departed Ranshan Liu (Yo˘n-san Ryu) will see how much I am indebted to his bootstrap ethnology and collection of oral histories. One of the greatest joys of carrying out international fieldwork is to have an opportunity to learn from, and form an enduring relationship with, the international group of scholars. In addition to those already mentioned above, I am grateful to Chulwoo Lee, Hye-Kyo˘ng Yi, Dong-Hoon Seol in South Korea, Hyang-suk Kwo˘n, Ryo˘ng-gyo˘ng Ri, Ae-sun Yang, and U-jong Cho˘ng in Japan; and to Tae-o˘n Yang, Chunri Sun (Ch’un-il Son), Zhongguo Jin (Chong-guk Kim), and Sen Jin (Sam Kim) in China. These scholars have graciously shared their expert knowledge, introduced me to a broad range of secondary literature, and facilitated my recruitment of study participants. I am looking forward to their feedback on this book and to continuing cross-border scholarly exchanges with them. It is a genuine privilege to thank my immediate and extended family for their unflagging support and warm encouragement. My parents Hwa-kon Kim and Mi-hye Kang taught me the importance of sincerity, persistence, resilience, and humor—the virtues required of those who embark on a long intellectual journey. My accomplishments and setbacks across the Pacific have been their pride and concern over the past decade. I also thank my only sister Jaelim for inspiring me with her professionalism and, above all, being a steadfast companion from the day she was born. I also thank my

Acknowledgments  x v

mother-in-law Se-yang Kim for providing a warm respite from the madness of academia. In the end, I owe my most heartfelt debt to my husband HunSeok Kim, to whom this book is dedicated. Nobody has put up with more or provided more moral support than him during the ups and downs of this long journey. Without his incredible generosity, warmth, humor, and compassion, I would never have made it here.

Contested Embrace

in troduc t ion

Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Transborder Ties

When I visited Chin-t’ae’s house in Japan in 2009, two framed photos hung on the living room wall.1 One was a group photo taken with the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung during Chin-t’ae’s 1988 visit to North Korea. Chin-t’ae pointed himself out—a slender, serious-looking man in a dark suit, among twenty-two similarly dressed “fatherland visitors” posing for a picture with the “Great Leader.” The other was a 2006 photo of Chin-t’ae and his wife, taken in their hometown in South Korea. In it, they faced the camera dressed in splendid traditional Korean wedding garments, which gleamed in stark contrast to the gray hair, wrinkled faces, and stooped backs of the two beaming octogenarians. Chin-t’ae was born in 1923 in Cheju, an island at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. He followed his father to Osaka at the age of fourteen and worked in various manufacturing jobs until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Although his family members joined the massive repatriation flow back to the Korean peninsula, Chin-t’ae postponed his return, in part because he had heard about the political turmoil sweeping across newly liberated Korea. At that time, he had no inkling that it would be almost seventy years before he could return to his hometown. Chin-t’ae became a supporter of a pro–North Korea organization in Japan, and the South Korean government banned his return, though he managed to send remittances and letters to his family secretly through friends and neighbors. When the South Korean consular office finally issued temporary travel permits to Chin-t’ae and his wife in 2006, they visited their parents’ graves in their hometown for the first time in more than seven decades. They also 1

2  Introduction Sakhalin

U.S . S. R .

MA NC HU KU O ( MA NZHO U GU O)

MON GOLIA MONGOLIA

Xinjing (Changchun) Kando/ Kantō (Jiandao) JE H OL

C HŌ HO S E N ( KO R E A)

Peking (Beijing)

Sea of Japan

N

Tokyo

Seoul

Osaka

Yellow Sea IN A CH INA

J A PA N

Nanjing Shanghai

PA C I F I C OCEAN

Japanese Empire in 1931 Japanese-dominated or conquered areas prior to Pearl Harbor

TA IWA N H ON G KON G Hainan

Unoccupied China 0 0

100 200 300 400 500 mi 200

400

600

800 km

M a p I.1. Northeast Asia in the late 1930s: Expansion of the Japanese Empire.

held a long overdue wedding ceremony, commemorated by the photo in the living room, with the blessings of their reunited families.2 After returning to Japan, the couple finally changed the nationality category in their foreigner’s registries from “North” to “South” Korea3 and subsequently applied for South Korean passports. These enabled them to complete the belated registration of their marriage and their children’s and grandchildren’s births in the South Korean family registries (the basic civil registration system in South Korea, implemented initially by the Japanese colonial state).4

SAKHALIN

Introduction 3

USSR/ Russia

Sea of Okhotsk

Khabarovsk

N

Qiqihar HEILONGJIANG Harbin Changchun JILIN

C H I N A

Yanji

Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture

Shenyang LIAONING

NORTH KOREA

Sea of Japan

Pyongyang

Dalian

HOKKAIDO

Vladivostok

Demarcation Line

Seoul

Yellow Sea

HONSHU

SOUTH KOREA

Tokyo

J A PA N

Pusan

a Ko r e

Osaka

ai t S tr

Cheju Do

SHIKOKU KYUSHU

East China Sea

PACI FI C OCEA N

0 0

100 200

200

300 400

400 600

500 mi 800 km

M a p I.2. Northeast Asia from the early 1950s to the present: Decolonization and the Cold War.

While showing me their new passports and family registration documents, Chin-t’ae glanced toward the bedroom, where his ailing wife lay in bed, and said with a quiet smile, “Now that we have these papers that document our marriage, my wife is not going to die a spinster.” He added that, although it was unlikely that his wife would have another chance to visit

4  Introduction

South Korea with her newly issued South Korean passport, the change in registration would still mean a lot to their sons and daughters: “Having South Korean passports and family registration documents will make it much easier for them to travel overseas and handle family property left in South Korea.” Kil-yong had a different story to tell about a photo of the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung when I met him in northeast China in 2009. A fourth-generation Korean migrant, he was born in 1942 in Dunhua, Manchuria (the disputed borderland in northeast China), which had been under Japan’s control since 1932. His family did not join the massive wave of repatriation after the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945. Instead, his father became actively involved in the Chinese civil war as a communist and later became a high-ranking official in the newly minted People’s Republic of China. The government dispatched his father on the official Chinese goodwill mission to North Korea in 1948 to celebrate the establishment of its socialist ally. His father returned from this trip with a photo of himself ­being greeted by Kim Il-sung, with no way of knowing how that photograph would affect his family in the years to come. In 1961, Kil-yong, a college dropout, managed to land a job as a teacher at a technical high school in Yanji (the capital city of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, home to the majority of ethnic Koreans in China), and this brought him the privileged city-dweller status.5 Several months later, however, a government directive ordered the closure of his school. This left him unemployed, jeopardized his hard-won city-dweller status, and darkened his future prospects overall. The deepening radicalization of the Communist Party leadership also concerned him; a mocking remark he made about the agricultural collectivization project had been publicly criticized during the Anti-Rightist Movement a few years prior. Encouraged by the rumor that North Korea provided coethnic “returnees” with jobs, higher education, and citizenship, Kil-yong crossed the China–North Korea border one night in January 1962. He and several friends knocked down the Chinese border guards, ran across the bridge between Tumen (China) and Namyang (North Korea), and were welcomed by North Korean border guards at the end of the bridge with a salute: “Welcome to the socialist fatherland!” Although many other Korean Chinese “repatriates” were assigned to factories or mines near the border area, Kil-yong secured a teaching job in a developed port city, Wonsan. He suspected that the photo

Introduction 5

of his father and Kim Il-sung he showed North Korean officials during the intake interview was helpful. The photo, however, became a liability after Kil-yong returned to China a few years later at his parents’ tearful request. As the Cultural Revolution threw China into turmoil, the Red Guards accused Kil-yong’s father of having secretly served the “revisionist agenda” of North Korea, and the photo was presented as critical evidence. Kil-yong’s unauthorized venture to North Korea was painted as part of his father’s espionage activities. Because both his father and Kil-yong were labeled “antirevolutionaries,” his family not only lost their city-dweller status but were discriminated against in every aspect of their lives: they were not rationed white rice; their home was not supplied electricity; even their pig, branded an “antirevolutionary pig,” was denied its share of rationed feed! Kil-yong’s younger brothers and sisters were not allowed to join the Communist Youth League—not even if they openly denounced and disowned their father and elder brother. It was ten years before Kil-yong could teach at a school again. Yo˘ng-il was born in Heilongjiang in northeast China in 1947, the second son of his first-generation immigrant parents. Unlike Kil-yong’s family, whose settlement in Manchuria dates back to the late nineteenth century, it was as late as 1938 that Yo˘ng-il’s father left his poverty-stricken hometown at the southwestern end of the Korean peninsula to find work in Japanoccupied Manchuria. He returned to his hometown briefly to marry Yo˘ngil’s mother and took her back to Manchuria right after the wedding. When the couple sent a letter to their families in Korea in the spring of 1945, delivering the news of the birth of their first son, they had no idea that the collapse of the Japanese Empire, the occupation of Manchuria by the Soviet army, and the ensuing civil wars in China and Korea would effectively prohibit their return before their deaths in the mid-1980s. Although Yo˘ng-il was not highly educated, he managed to join the army and then the Communist Party in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. This helped his career as a rural cadre. But when he first visited South Korea in 1989 in his early forties, Yo˘ng-il found that peddling Chinese medicines or working at construction sites in South Korea could bring him at least ten times the income he was earning as a low-level government official in China. His South Korean relatives were initially terrified by the unexpected visit of their long-forgotten relative from the “evil” communist country. But they eventually agreed to list him in the family genealogy

6  Introduction

book and wrote several letters of invitation so that he and his wife could obtain entry visas to South Korea to earn money. The restrictive immigration policies in the early 1990s, however, made it virtually impossible for coethnic migrants from China like Yo˘ng-il to enter South Korea via legal channels. His elder brother, whose 1944 birth registration remained in the village archive, was able to obtain South Korean citizenship. But Yo˘ng-il and his younger siblings, whose births remained unregistered in the colonial-­era family registries, were not. It was only through the invitation of his divorced daughter, who had remarried a South Korean man, albeit only on paper for the sake of citizenship, that Yo˘ng-il and his wife were able to return to South Korea in 1997. Knowing that other opportunities to return would be scarce, the couple overstayed the designated visa term and worked as unauthorized migrants in South Korea for nine years until policy changes finally enabled them to obtain South Korean citizenship in 2006. After recounting his migration history, Yo˘ng-il proudly showed me his recently obtained South Korean passport and family registration document without my prompting, as Chin-t’ae in Osaka did. Yo˘ng-il’s son obtained South Korean citizenship as well, I also learned, although he was not interested in settling permanently in South Korea. In fact, by the time I met Yo˘ng-il, his son was working at a Korean restaurant in Japan without papers to make as much money as possible so that he could start his own business after returning to China. Yo˘ng-il explained that his son’s newly obtained South Korean citizenship facilitated his migration venture: “Without the South Korean passport, he couldn’t possibly have been exempted from the visa screening process at the Japanese consular office.” The stories of Chin-t’ae, Kil-yong, and Yo˘ng-il reveal some of the common experiences of colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants and their descendants in Japan and northeast China. These experiences include a series of border crossings spanning multiple generations, forcible separation from—and neglect or persecution by—their state of origin, and a shifting sense of loyalty and belonging to the multiple states that have claimed these people or to which they’ve laid claim. Each story also describes painstaking efforts of Korean migrants and their descendants to maintain, rebuild, appropriate, or create cross-border family ties amid changing geopolitical and ethnopolitical circumstances. Other common features in their stories are the complex dealings with various official and unofficial documentation practices

Introduction 7

while attempting (for a range of reasons) to reclaim membership in their putative “homeland.” Contested Embrace is a comparative, historical, and ethnographic study of these complex relationships—as illustrated in the earlier stories—between the states in the Korean peninsula, colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants to Japan and northeast China and their descendants, and the states in which they have resided over the course of the long twentieth century. The incongruities among territory, citizenry, and nation have long preoccupied scholars in the fields of international migration, nationalism, and citizenship. The primary focus has been the challenges that various types of internal others, such as immigrants or ethnic minorities, pose to the presumed isomorphism among state, society, and culture—the regulatory ideal of the modern nation-state system. Yet over the last decade or so, scholars have shown growing interest in the membership politics engendered by a different configuration of these incongruities, focusing on the relationship between the state and “its” external members. The most attention has been paid to the rise of what is often called emigrant citizenship, expatriate citizenship, or transnational/transborder citizenship,6 which commonly refers to the increasingly strong ties between sending/emigrant states in the South and labor migrant populations and their descendants in the North. As the influence of emigrant populations on the national economy and domestic politics has grown (via remittances, skill transfer, long-distance political participation, or the ethnic lobby targeting the host state), an increasing number of states have sought to maintain and nurture the affiliation and loyalty of emigrant populations and their descendants (to name a few: Mexico, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Turkey, and the Philippines), in some cases simply by allowing or promoting dual nationality.7 Researchers have also studied a different type of transborder membership in postcommunist Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Russia, where newly nationalizing states have institutionalized membership statuses for their transborder ethnonational “kin,” who had been separated from their “mother countries” by changes in borders and polities rather than by emigration. For example, the privileged treatment of coethnics in immigration and citizenship policies—which had long been enjoyed by ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe before the policy change in reunited Germany in the early 1990s—is increasingly common throughout Europe, ranging from Hungary’s treatment of ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries to Russia’s treatment of Russian-speaking ­minorities

8  Introduction

in CIS countries.8 The relationship between states and those who were forcibly displaced and dispersed as a result of political turmoil, ethnoreligious conflicts, or outright civil wars has also gained renewed attention, expanding the hitherto limited usage of the term diaspora to a wide variety of ethnic and religious groups. The complexly evolving economic, political, cultural, and ideological relationships between “diasporas” and their fledgling homeland states have been studied in Armenia, Bosnia, Croatia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, and Haiti, among other cases.9 I suggest we consider this diverse range of phenomena as different manifestations of transborder membership politics. Transborder membership politics involves political claims, institutionalized practices, and discursive representations oriented to or generated by those who have durably resided outside the territory of the state, yet are perceived as belonging to that state or to the nation associated with that state. I use transborder instead of the more conventional term transnational. The claim that people located outside the territorial jurisdiction of the state nonetheless belong to the same nation—“outside the state but inside the people” (Shain and Barth 2003, 469)—is central to, even constitutive of, this politics.10 The proliferation of transborder forms of membership and belonging in this sense does not adumbrate the transcendence of nationalism or the nation-state system, as claimed by some early observers;11 rather, transborder membership politics in some cases is driven by transborder or long-distance nationalism.12 I also use the term membership rather than citizenship. The former is more useful in encompassing the variegated terms on which the state incorporates transborder populations; granting legal citizenship is only one of these multiple modes of incorporation.13 Finally, not only the movement of people over borders, but also the movement of borders over people can engender transborder configurations.14 Highlighting the historicity of what are now considered “international” borders is an important aspect of the book’s analytic approach. Contested Embrace analyzes transborder membership politics in and around the Korean peninsula in the colonial, Cold War, and post–Cold War periods. Japan’s occupation of Korea at the turn of the twentieth century set in motion a massive out-migration of the colonial population to the Japanese archipelago (the metropole of the Japanese Empire) and Manchuria (the disputed border region between the Japanese Empire and China).15 By the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945, ethnic Koreans in these two

Introduction 9

regions (over 2 million in each) comprised approximately 15 percent of the entire “Korean” population.16 Postwar repatriation left 0.6 million of these migrants in Japan and 1.2 million in (now communist) China. The literature on ethnic Koreans in Japan and China has tended to place them squarely within the territorial boundary of postwar Japan or the People’s Republic of China, the seemingly contrasting narratives characterizing the two groups notwithstanding. Studies of ethnic relations in Japan, for instance, have shown how Japan’s transformation from a multiethnic empire to a self-stylized homogeneous nation-state entailed the transformation of its Korean residents from colonial subjects to a hidden ethnic minority that was legally disenfranchised, socially excluded, and culturally assimilated and thus rendered invisible.17 The few existing accounts of Korean Chinese history, by contrast, have uniformly highlighted the progressive integration of this “model minority” into the People’s Republic of China in a teleological and triumphalist fashion.18 Inquiries about the genealogy of Korean ethnic nationalism19 or colonial and postcolonial state building,20 for their part, have limited their analytic focus largely to the Korean peninsula. The massive outward migration that coincided with the rise of Korean nationalism and the uneven incorporation of these transborder Koreans into the colonial and postcolonial state-building processes have been largely missing or mentioned only in passing in these studies. Contested Embrace breaks with the “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003) underlying these studies, that is, the prevalent tendency in social sciences to take the current nation-state as a seldomquestioned unit of analysis. I situate ethnic Koreans in Japan and China not simply at the margin of their respective state of settlement but also at the transborder margin of their states of origin, that is, the colonial and postcolonial states in the Korean peninsula.21 Despite a widespread, deeply entrenched and quasi-primordial belief in Korean ethnic nationhood, the embrace of these transborder coethnic populations by the colonial and the two postcolonial states, North and South Korea, has been selective, shifting, and recurrently contested. Contested Embrace explores under what circumstances and by what means the colonial and postcolonial states have sought to claim (or failed to claim) certain transborder populations as “their own,” and how transborder Koreans have themselves shaped the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties as they have sought long-distance membership on their own terms. Building on the emerging

10  Introduction

constructivist/modernist approach to East Asian nations and nationalisms22 and the culturalist/cognitive turn in recent theorizing on the modern state, Contested Embrace illuminates the political and bureaucratic construction of ethnonational kin populations beyond the territorial boundary of the state.

Who Constitutes the Transborder Nation? Classification, Identification, and Boundary Crossing in the Context of Macrohistorical Transformations While building on the growing scholarly interest in transborder forms of membership and belonging, Contested Embrace seeks to overcome limitations in the existing literature on transborder membership politics in three respects. The Korean situation provides a particularly rich and distinctive case for the advancement of these theoretical agendas. First, the existing literature on transborder membership politics has largely focused on the question of “who gets what”—in other words, disputes over what economic, political, and social rights, obligations, and influences transborder members should have vis-à-vis their putative homeland states. In contrast, the question of “who is what”—that is, disagreements over who should be defined as transborder members and how these members should be identified—has remained understudied from a theoretical and comparative perspective. By situating the hitherto neglected questions of classification, identification, and boundary crossing at the center of the analysis, I demonstrate that being a “homeland” state or a member of the “transborder nation” is not an ethnodemographic fact but rather a precarious, arduous, and revocable political achievement. The peculiar trajectories of state building in the Korean peninsula— involving an extended period of colonial rule and the emergence of two mutually delegitimizing postcolonial states, North and South Korea— offer an opportunity to highlight this fundamentally political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation building. As the stories of Chin-t’ae and Kil-yong suggest, at different times throughout the twentieth century ethnic Koreans in Japan and China (and their respective states of settlement) took an ambivalent, or even hostile, stance toward the transborder claims to their affiliation and loyalty made by their putative homeland states. By the same token, as indicated in Chin-t’ae and Yo˘ng-il’s experiences, the “homeland” states often warily guarded their territorial

Introduction 11

and membership boundaries against the claims to membership and belonging made by their ethnonational kin in Japan and China. This selective, shifting, and contested embrace of coethnic populations by the putative homeland state appears even more striking given the widely recognized ethnically centered understanding of Korean nationhood.23 The Korean case thus cautions us against attributing unwarranted explanatory power to ethnic nationalism without specifying its genesis, infrastructure, and varying manifestations in different sociopolitical domains and in different macrohistorical contexts.24 Second, Contested Embrace pays particular attention to the two-pronged nature of disputes over “who is what,” which involve struggles over both group definition and individual identification. Whereas the former struggles concern the creation and the transformation of a transborder membership category, the latter struggles concern an individual’s claim to membership in that category, however its boundary is drawn in the first place. And although the former struggles over group definition usually develop in the legal, political, and public spheres, the latter struggles over individual identification unfold through the reiterative encounters between front-line state agents (that is, the foot soldiers of the modern “taxonomic state,” to borrow the term from Ann Stoler [2002]) and transborder populations in various bureaucratic settings, largely hidden from the public view. The literature on transborder membership politics has seldom distinguished these two dimensions and has paid little attention to struggles over individual identification in bureaucratic settings. The distinction, however, is important for two reasons. First, the distinction enables scholars to examine not only how states define the boundaries of certain categories but also whether states have the infrastructural capacity to “correctly” and forcefully assign individuals to these categories.25 For instance, whether a person’s national membership is determined by the jus soli or the jus sanguinis principle—the often-cited criterion for determining ethnic or civic understanding of nationhood— means very little if there is no adequate bureaucratic infrastructure that can verify to whom the person is born and where. Second, the distinction between struggles over group definition and those over individual identification enables scholars to conceptualize the agency of transborder populations in a more comprehensive and dynamic way. Transborder populations can challenge the dominant categorical schemes imposed by the state, not only by proposing alternative views about how they should be classified

12  Introduction

as a group but also by deliberately misrepresenting their individual identities and thereby inducing “misclassification” or “misidentification” from the state’s perspective (for instance, by forging a birth certificate). Incorporating the micropolitics of identification in bureaucratic settings into our analysis therefore produces a much more agentic portrayal of transborder membership politics. The Korean case helps us duly recognize the importance of these struggles over individual identification in transborder membership politics. In the Korean case, the development of the legal, bureaucratic, and semantic infrastructures of state membership did not precede, but rather coincided with, an unprecedented level of out-migration among the colonial population. This belated modern state building left the state with an uneven, fragmentary, and sporadic grasp of both its sedentary and mobile populations, affecting its infrastructural capacity to impose its classification schemes on the ground. The competitive and hostile interstate relations that characterized northeast Asia in the better part of the twentieth century—the competitions between Japan and China during the colonial period and between North and South Korea during the Cold War—further undermined each state’s monopoly of the legitimate use of symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1991): the capacity to authoritatively define who was what and to naturalize these definitions with immense performative power. The resultant uncertainty and politicization of the identity of Koreans in Japan and China made their incorporation into the national body politic of their ancestral homeland more precarious, but it also allowed them more room for negotiation and maneuvering as they managed their individual paper identities vis-à-vis the states involved. These circumstances bring into sharp relief the importance of the micropolitics of identification in bureaucratic settings, which is often obscured in other cases of transborder membership politics. Finally, I argue that we take into serious account long-term macro­ regional processes that play a crucial role in the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties. These macroregional processes not only engender “ethnic mixing” and “unmixing” on a large scale (Brubaker 1998) but also transform the nature of borders and polities, destabilizing the membership status of certain mobile populations, altering the realpolitik considerations of relevant state elites, and thereby setting in motion contentious transborder membership politics. Moreover, interstate competition, mutual emulation, and norm diffusion on the international level contribute

Introduction 13

to the formation and the transformation of official classification schemes and identification regimes, which come to serve as a conceptual grid and a practical tool in the state’s transborder nation-building effort. In other words, the uneven and tumultuous development of the regional interstate system constitutes and reconstitutes the very analytic units that are later taken for granted—the state of origin, the state of settlement, and the transborder population. The existing literature on transborder membership politics, having focused largely on relatively recent developments, has often neglected the significance of these long-term macrohistorical processes and regional interstate dynamics, while prioritizing the factors pertinent to the current phase of global capitalism and exaggerating the novelty of state effort to reach out to “their” transborder populations. This book seeks to overcome the resulting analytic myopia as well as the presentist and economistic tendencies in the broad field of transnationalism studies. The stories of Chin-t’ae, Kil-yong, and Yo˘ng-il highlight how deeply transborder membership politics in Korea have been embedded in the dramatic and distinctive macrohistorical transformations of twentiethcentury northeast Asia. These transformations include the dissolution of the Sino-centric regional order and its belated incorporation into the Western interstate system; the rise and demise of the Japanese Empire, especially the massive cross-border migration it engendered, the geopolitical boundaries it reconfigured, and the peculiar institutional legacies it bestowed; the formative influence of the Cold War on decolonization and nation-state building in the region; and finally, the attenuation of Cold War tensions and the dramatic increase in cross-border migration within and beyond the region. The Korean case vividly illustrates how these macroregional processes contributed to the formation and the transformation of a distinctive institutional field of transborder nation building, comprising a set of organizations (including both state and nonstate agencies), bureaucratic techniques (for example, census taking, documentation of identities, and border policing), and idioms of identification (terminologies employed in various state categorization practices). This changing institutional field determined the bureaucratic and imagined scope of the “transborder nation” at a particular historical conjuncture. By tracing the shifting and diverging contours of transborder membership politics in northeast Asia over the course of the long twentieth century, I attempt to bring the literature on transborder membership politics into productive conversation with the studies

14  Introduction

of colonialism, postcolonial state building, Cold War, and globalization, while mitigating the existing scholarship’s oversampling of European and American cases.

The State’s Symbolic Power and the Bureaucratic Underpinning of Transborder Membership Politics The ethnographic vignettes presented at the beginning of the book highlight how Chin-t’ae, Kil-yong, and Yo˘ng-il had to deal with various official and unofficial documentation practices (family registries, foreigner’s registration, passports, family genealogy documents, and invitation letters) to claim long-distance membership and belonging in their ancestral homeland. The literature on transborder membership politics has largely focused on the economic, political, and cultural means of transborder nation building (for example, fund-raising, diaspora bonds, diaspora taxation, political campaigns, legal status provision, cultural festivals, and the like). The bureaucratic scaffolding underlying transborder nation building, in contrast, has remained undertheorized. Nationalist discourse and rituals that emphasize the primordial bond between the core nation and its external “kin” are readily observable; the seemingly mundane bureaucratic procedures that mediate actual encounters between the “homeland” state and its transborder populations are not. Yet, as John Torpey (2000, 6) briskly put it, “National communities must be codified in documents rather than merely ‘imagined’”—and transborder national communities are no exception. Building on a wide range of literature, Contested Embrace develops a set of general theoretical arguments—relevant well beyond the Korean case—about how the historically evolving and mutually interlinked bureaucratic practices shape the contours of transborder membership politics over time. Building largely on Pierre Bourdieu (1991, 1999) and Michel Foucault ([1979] 1991), the culturalist/cognitive turn in the theories of the modern state in the last two decades has shifted our analytic focus from the politico-­military dimension of the modern state to its ideological and symbolic power.26 Instead of repeating the structure-superstructure antinomy, however, the keen interest in the ideational aspect of the modern state has encouraged a search for its material foundation, shedding new light on the state’s bureaucratic practices. In this new formulation, bureaucratic practices are essential not only for the modern state’s extractive power—as thor-

Introduction 15

oughly examined by neo-Weberian historical sociologists27—but also for its “symbolic power” (Bourdieu 1991, 1999), that is, its capacity to form and impose “fundamental categories of perception” and thereby “actively constitute the subjects in whose name it claims to exist legitimately” ­(Loveman 2005, 1653). Those in the Foucaultian tradition have similarly argued how a myriad of bureaucratic techniques produce the population/society as a knowable and transformable object of rationalized governance, that is, the target of disciplinary and biopolitical power exercised by both state and nonstate actors.28 Of a variety of bureaucratic practices, most relevant to the topic under examination are the official registration and documentation of identities. These official registration and documentation practices establish a categorical grid through which the population is rendered “legible” to the state (Scott 1998). These practices also mediate the mundane and reiterative encounters between ordinary people and the state, through which people learn the “grammar” of the state (Anderson 1991). As the state extends its reach into every facet of social life, these official identities become indispensable currencies for various transactions in everyday life, shaping how individuals themselves conceive, represent, and perform their identities.29 As originally arbitrary boundaries and categories become taken for granted and constantly and consistently deployed by all actors involved, new “kinds” of people, places, or things are created (Hacking 1991). This way state categories can call into being what they allege to merely designate and thereby construct a “natural” and “commonsensical” world (Loveman 2005). Identification documents are a key locus of this symbolic power of the state. Presumably embodying such values as detachment, impersonality, and objectivity, these documents are often deemed as a privileged source of the “truth” about individuals’ identities. The systematic collection, classification, and circulation of information in the forms of “card and code” (Noiriel 1996) make this information divisible and combinable, storable and retrievable, and mutually comparable. By transcending the immediate spatial and temporal contexts in which the information was originally produced, these cross-referenced files constitute the core of the “memory of the state” (Matsuda 1996). In this context, the verification of identity often centers on ascertaining consistency across cross-referenced files. Conversely, anything that is not legible to the state, anything that is not translated into

16  Introduction

the lingua franca of the state (that is, documents; Ewick and Sibley 2003, 1360), cannot enjoy the full degree of the state’s symbolic power. What David Dery (1998) has called “papereality” may outlast or even override the reality it is supposed to document. However, we must also note that the “aura of irrefutability” (Tarlo 2003, 9) that official documents evoke does not always work to the advantage of the state. Individuals are neither perennially imprisoned in a Weberian “iron cage” nor always caught up in a Kafkaesque perversion of bureaucracy. The more states become dependent on paperwork to validate identity, the more vulnerable they become to false reporting, fabrication, and impersonation. Forgers create their own “papereality” by mimicking the writing of the state with all its attendant paraphernalia. Impostors prop up such “papereality” by refashioning their self-presentation in alignment with their fabricated paper identities. In places where the production, maintenance, and distribution of official documents are particularly incomplete and arbitrary (as in many developing countries), complicit state officials often authorize counterfeit documents, whereas bona fide claimants find themselves undocumented. It thus becomes increasingly difficult to defend official documents as a privileged source of the “truth” about individuals’ identities. In this setting, not only the absence but also the excess of documentation renders the population illegible to the state. I have discussed so far the dynamic interactions surrounding the state’s documentation and registration practices as if the population of interest is “encaged” (Mann 1986) within the territorial ambit of the state. This sedentary bias is prevalent in the theories of the modern state, including the culturalist/cognitive approach previously outlined. However, growing cross-border migration—accompanying the global expansion of capitalism and the entrenchment of the modern interstate system—was the critical driving force behind the “primitive accumulation of symbolic power” (Loveman 2005) across the globe, that is, the painstaking construction of relevant bureaucratic infrastructures and their global diffusion at varying paces. States’ efforts to define and identify the set of persons entitled to privileged access to their territory, the labor market, and citizenship led to what Gérard Noiriel (1996) called “révolution identificatoire” beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Such innovations in turn enabled modern states to control their borders and engage with mobile people more effectively than ever before.30 A similar development occurred in emigration states, which sought to monitor their growing emigrant populations,

Introduction 17

gain access to emigrants’ resources, and secure their loyalty.31 As a result of these long-term and uneven historical processes, by the mid-twentieth century the documentation of both native and nonnative populations and the ­control of borders became essential qualities, if not the universal reality, of modern statehood. As the regulation of cross-border migration came to rely heavily on official documents, establishing identity through documents presented to various state agents became an indispensable component of cross-border migration. I call attention to the remarkable effect that these seemingly mundane, reiterative transactions have on the “prosaic production of stateness” (Painter 2006). Encounters with state agents at the points of exit, transit, and entry require that migrants mobilize various official documents: most directly passports and visas but also other supporting documents necessary for the acquisition of these travel documents (for example, birth and marriage certificates and records of education, employment, financial status, and tax payments). These mutually interlinked documents properly place migrants within “the national order of things” (Malkki 1995) and thereby render them “knowable” in the contemporary interstate system. Through these ritualized transactions between migrants and state agents, the regulation of cross-border migration effectively transforms the relevant national categories from abstract concepts into experienced reality. These transactions therefore serve to naturalize the states’ authority to produce the “truth” about individuals’ identities, including their national identities. However, the privileged authority of official documents—produced and confirmed through border transactions—is not free from the types of challenges discussed in the preceding paragraphs. Some migrants may try to avoid designated checkpoints entirely and resort to undocumented passage. Others may find ways to reinvent their bureaucratic persona with counterfeit documents and present themselves as legitimate subjects entitled to exit or entry. This reinvention of paper identity becomes possible through “networks of complicity” (Sadiq 2008, 57–70), which often filter into state agencies in both sending and receiving contexts. In the face of migrants with nonexistent or suspicious documentary evidence of their identities, state agents may ease their heavy reliance on documentation and turn to alternative “identity tags” (Goffman 1959). For instance, state agents may collect biometric information from migrants such as fingerprints, blood or DNA samples, or iris scans. Or they may examine their performances of alleged identities in an attempt to evaluate the congruence between ­“paper

18  Introduction

and flesh, inscription and performance” (Chu 2010, 105)—or, if I may, “papereality” and (corpo)reality. Yet no identity tag is completely free from what is often called the Goffmanian paradox: the more inspectors rely on certain identity tags, the more they become susceptible to those intent on using the tags as props for passing.32 I argue that the preceding discussion can be fruitfully extended to how the historically evolving and mutually interlinked bureaucratic practices contribute to the making, unmaking, and remaking of the “homeland state” and the “transborder nation.” The documentation and registration practices constitute the conceptual grid through which a state identifies and enumerates what it considers members of “its” transborder population and mobilizes those identified as such for its own economic, political, and ideological agendas. These practices also mediate the reiterative encounters between the state and “its” transborder population in various bureaucratic settings, including, yet not limited to, consulates, border inspections, and immigration offices. Through these encounters the categorical practices of the distant “homeland” state come to shape, if to varying degrees, the vernacular idioms of self-identification of the transborder population. Furthermore, these bureaucratic practices leave durable documentary traces, which eventually form the “memory of the state” (Matsuda 1996). States often turn to such documentary traces when they need to validate the belated claims to national belonging by those whose long defunct ties to their “homeland” seem ambiguous or suspicious. Conversely, weak or fragmentary documentation creates pockets of illegibility in the state’s synoptic view of its population. This undermines the state’s capacity to embrace transborder populations exhaustively and consistently. Instead of underscoring the repressive dimension of the modern state’s capacity to render its population “legible” (Scott 1998), I argue that those with imperfect documentation may not necessarily experience their illegibility as a relief. To be sure, some indeed feel content shielding themselves from forcible incorporation into their state of origin, especially when the state is seen as a predatory variant. In this case, they may even try to maintain their illegibility by actively sabotaging the state’s demand for “proper” registration and documentation and thereby “blinding” the state (Loveman 2007). However, keeping the state at a distance is not the only posture transborder populations assume vis-à-vis their state of origin. Rather, some with nonexistent or imperfect documentation may instead feel frustrated and resentful at the denial of their ties to their long-lost

Introduction 19

“homeland” and at their exclusion from the material and symbolic benefits that transborder membership may confer. These benefits may include preferential treatment in immigration and citizenship, if “return” migration to the ancestral “homeland” emerges as an attractive option. In response to such gatekeeping practices of the putative homeland state, some may mobilize alternative genres of identification as a way of reasserting their belonging against the state’s monopolistic claim to truth; others may engage in so-called identity fraud by mimicking the state’s documentation practices, creating their own “file selves” (Goffman 1961), and thereby inducing misclassification and misidentification from the state’s point of view. Struggles over individual identification ensue. The symbolic efficacy of the state’s claim to a transborder population, however, does not depend solely on its own infrastructural and symbolic power or on the dyadic interactions between the state and the transborder population. I argue that the efficacy hinges significantly on the cooperation of other states—an aspect that has long been obscured by the “container model” of society (Giddens 1995) informing the theories of the modern state. The official classification and documentation practices define not only individuals’ vertical relationship with the given state but also their place in the horizontally segmented global interstate system. If the transborder jurisdictional claim of a state is not commensurate with the consensual practices of other states, the state fails to make other states treat “its” transborder populations unambiguously, consistently, and seamlessly as “its own.” Not only the willingness of other states to cooperate but also their capacity to do so matters. The infrastructural weakness of the state of settlement—manifest in, among other things, absent or deficient entry records, birth certificates, or other population registration systems—helps members of transborder populations escape the forcible embrace by their state of origin, which frequently relies, for the identification of its own members, on the documentary traces created and maintained by other states. The discussion so far shows that the standardization, adjustment, and coordination of relevant bureaucratic practices across states are crucial to establishing and ratifying the transborder reach and the group-making power of the “homeland” state. This last argument highlights the hitherto neglected international dimension of the symbolic power of the state.33 To summarize, by overcoming the prevalent territorial bias of the recent theorizing on the modern state and attending to the infrastructural conditions of transborder nation building, Contested Embrace highlights the

20  Introduction

bureaucratic underpinning of transborder membership politics. By constituting the conceptual grid of the state as well as the vernacular idioms of identification of the transborder population (if to varying degrees), official identification and documentation practices serve as a critical site for the politics of identification in transborder membership politics, contributing to the making, unmaking, and remaking of the “homeland” state and the “transborder nation.” This analytic shift thus offers a much more dynamic and agentic view of transborder membership politics by bringing into sharp relief the micropolitical dimension of transborder membership politics in bureaucratic settings. Furthermore, analyzing the formation and the transformation of the bureaucratic infrastructure of transborder nation building over the long span of time in the broader regional context helps us situate transborder membership politics in the broader macrohistorical transformations, counteracting the prevalent presentist and economistic bias in the literature.

The Politics of Belonging in the Fieldsite: Methodological and Terminological Issues In addition to secondary literature in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and En­ glish, I draw on archival and ethnographic data collected during eighteen months of multisited field research carried out in South Korea (during the summers of 2005 and 2007 and from September 2008 to January 2009), Japan (from February to April 2009), and northeast China (from May to October 2009). For archival sources, I examined transcripts of parliamentary debates, government documents (annual reports, diplomatic statements, administrative circulars, and internal memoranda), court rulings, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, biographies, memoirs, works of fiction, and a collection of oral histories (for a detailed discussion, see the Appendix). The translation of the cited archival materials is mine unless indicated otherwise. I also collected ethnographic data through interviews and participant observation. The ethnographic data were used to cross-check the archival data, capture intragroup differences and conflicts (due to differences in age, gender, class, education, migration history, ideological disposition, and other characteristics), link macropolitical events to individual life trajectories, and illuminate critical yet lesser-known dimensions of transborder membership politics. For instance, the ways in which people developed

Introduction 21

various strategies to circumvent state agendas or to maintain, appropriate, or create cross-border family ties could be explored only via ethnographic research. Ethnographic excerpts and oral histories cited extensively in the body of the book—with all identifying information removed—are derived from my multisited ethnographic research unless indicated otherwise. A detailed discussion on the ethnographic data utilized for each substantive chapter can be found in the Appendix. The language issue, however, is worthy of a separate discussion here. While I examined archival materials in Chinese and Japanese, the primary language I used for my ethnographic research was Korean.34 For reasons discussed in following chapters, most study participants were fluent in Korean. The distinctive minority policies in China helped the Korean Chinese preserve their ethnocultural characteristics, including language. In fact, many residents in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, my major fieldsite in northeast China, especially those in their forties and older, were more proficient in Korean than in Mandarin. This was one of the reasons many of them chose to migrate to South Korea rather than to other cities within China in the post–Cold War period. The increasing contact with South Korea in the past two decades further helped the language retention of young Korean Chinese. A great number of Korean Chinese households had satellite television, which broadcast South Korean programs in real time, although this was technically illegal. Exposed to a variety of South Korean media sources and pop cultural icons, some young Korean Chinese in this region were more fluent in both Chinese and South Korean–style Korean (often called Han’gungmal; see the following pages for a detailed discussion) than their elders. In contrast, Japanese is the first language for most Koreans in Japan, and many cannot speak Korean at all, partly due to severe discrimination against the Korean minority. However, my interviews in Japan focused on those who used to be or remained affiliated with the pro–North Korea organization Ch’ongnyo˘n, which has shown serious commitment to maintaining Korean language skills among its members (see Chapter Two for a full discussion of this practice and its implications). Thus, most Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans could communicate in Korean, although they were likely to use Japanese in their everyday lives. To be sure, this does not mean that the language choice did not affect the type of ethnographic data I was able to collect. Most important, the choice of language had the potential to steer me away from ethnic Koreans who could not speak Korean at all and who, for this reason, might be

22  Introduction

s­ignificantly less oriented toward Korea than toward their state of settlement. My interlocutors (as a matter of courtesy) also likely refrained from switching between Korean and Japanese or between Korean and Chinese as freely as they would have liked to had I been as proficient in speaking Japanese or Chinese as they were. I tried to keep this bias in mind while analyzing the data and sought to compensate for this limitation by reading secondary literature on culturally assimilated Korean minorities in Japan and China.35 A more interesting, and unanticipated, language-related issue that I encountered in my fieldsites was that the differences between the Korean I spoke (as a person born and raised in Seoul, the capital of South Korea) and the Korean my interlocutors spoke (which was influenced by Japanese, Chinese, or the dialect of the northern part of the Korean peninsula) frequently became the subject of small talk. Many people I met in Japan compared— apologetically, grudgingly, or matter-of-factly—my “standard,” “flawless,” and “colloquial” Korean to their “formal” and “stilted” Korean, which they learned at Ch’ongnyo˘n schools but found inadequate for everyday usage. Yet the growing popularity of South Korean TV shows in Japan was giving them a chance to learn “how to date and love in Korean,” in the words of one of my study participants. I would like to note additionally that former and current affiliates of Ch’ongnyo˘n made sure to call Korean “urimal” (literally, “our language”) whereas consciously avoiding the more conventional term “Han’gungmal.” As I will discuss in Chapter Two, whether to call Korea “Han’guk” (indicating South Korea) or “Choso˘n” (indicating North Korea) was long the focus of fierce struggles in Cold War Japan. Even now, calling Korean “Han’gungmal” can be interpreted politically as a blanket promotion of South Korea as the sole legitimate repository and custodian of the nation’s ethnocultural heritage. The politics of language transpired somewhat differently in the case of the Korean Chinese. They distinguished between “Han’gungmal” (which South Koreans use) and “Yo˘nbyo˘nmal” (which many Korean Chinese concentrated in the Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture use), but the experience of this distinction varied among Korean Chinese. As a demographic, political, and cultural center of Korean Chinese communities, Yanbian (and Yo˘nbyo˘nmal) long entertained a privileged status in northeast China. The increasing contact with South Korea that began in the late 1980s, however, undermined the prestige of Yo˘nbyo˘nmal, which is heavily influenced by Chinese and the dialect of the northern part of the Korean peninsula.

Introduction 23

Han’gungmal became the language many Korean Chinese migrants had to master to work effectively or mingle naturally in South Korea or to pass as South Koreans in unwanted chance encounters with police or immigration officers. Those whose ancestors were originally from the southern part of the Korean peninsula (like Yo˘ng-il) had a decisive advantage in terms of linguistic adaptation when compared with many Yanbian residents. When I conducted research, Han’gungmal was also gradually emerging as a new standard for Korean education, press, and broadcasting in Yanbian, albeit not without tension. The allure of Han’gungmal, however, was not limited to these various practical advantages that its mastery could bring. Fluency in Han’gungmal came to signal one’s long-term settlement in South Korea, which was often associated not only with remittance-generated economic prosperity but also with superior (more modern and globalized) cultural taste, as the culture of migration became deeply entrenched in Korean Chinese communities over the last two decades. The preceding discussion is related to a more general methodological issue concerning the ways in which I, as a South Korean native studying at an American university, was perceived, accepted, welcomed, suspected, or rejected by my (potential) study participants. I was generally welcomed without much hesitation by current or former Ch’ongnyo˘n affiliates in Japan (except for those who were high-ranking Ch’ongnyo˘n activists). The gradual dwindling of Cold War tensions and a series of other changes in the 2000s have attenuated the mutual suspicion and hostility between Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans and South Korea, enabling South Korean researchers to interact with Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans without fearing government sanctions, while also making the latter more open to the former. This was especially the case when research participants were recruited through personal rather than organizational channels, as was the case in this study. My reception among Korean Chinese, in contrast, varied, reflecting the complex relationship between Korean Chinese and South Korea in the post–Cold War period. As will be discussed in Chapter Four, the post– Cold War migration boom in northeast China has been largely predicated on the Korean Chinese incorporation into the secondary labor market in South Korea. This has exposed many Korean Chinese not only to the hostile immigration policies of their ancestral “homeland” but also to everyday discrimination and humiliation at the hands of South Korean citizens. Such disillusioning post–Cold War intraethnic encounters have had the effect of reinforcing their self-identification as citizens of multiethnic China, while

24  Introduction

undermining attachment to their ancestral homeland or “coethnic brethren.” Yet it is also undoubtedly true that their “return” migration to the affluent “homeland” has brought higher income, improvement in general living standard, familiarity with South Korean culture (especially its thriving pop culture), and, in some cases, pride in their ethnic identity vis-à-vis the majority Han Chinese. This complex situation generated ambivalent attitudes toward South Koreans in general and toward me in particular. To establish rapport and trust, I spent an extensive amount of time with my study participants. I also paid close attention to any differences between the ways my Korean Chinese interlocutors interacted with each other and the ways they interacted with me or other South Koreans. Interestingly, I was sometimes approached by Korean Chinese whose future vision (not only for themselves but also for their children) was no longer limited to northeast Asia after two decades of intensive migration experience. In efforts to find a way to migrate to the United States or send their children to study abroad, they asked me about how to get admitted to U.S. colleges or graduate schools, how to pass the visa screening, how to pay for tuition or send remittances back home, and how to obtain green cards. I told them that obtaining visas should not be difficult for students already admitted to a university, that student visa-holders were not allowed to work, and that students should first find employment after graduation to obtain a green card. However, my responses—largely limited to a description of how to work within the official system or how the official system should operate—were often interpreted as a product of my privileged naiveté (that is, as a person holding a “better” passport) or, worse, as an unwillingness to share my knowledge about how to circumvent official policies that discriminated against people like them. These episodes highlighted the profound discrepancy between my own experience of global mobility and that of my research participants. This enabled me to understand more keenly how the hierarchically organized global mobility regimes have shaped the ways in which the Korean Chinese have charted their migration ventures, not only to South Korea but also to other parts of the world. How this factor is shaping evolving transborder membership politics at the turn of the twenty-first century will be discussed in the concluding chapter. Lastly, I would like to clarify one terminological issue. Although the use of “Korean Chinese” to describe ethnic Koreans in China is well established, calling ethnic Koreans in Japan “Korean Japanese” is generally considered problematic. Japan’s postimperial transition was built on a radical

Introduction 25

exclusion of its former colonial subjects from its reconstituted citizenry and nation; obtaining Japanese citizenship has long entailed forcible cultural assimilation, which harked back to the bitter colonial memory. “Korean” and “Japanese” have thus long been perceived as mutually exclusive identities by both parties involved. To avoid obscuring this complex historical and political context, many scholars use “Korean residents in Japan” (a translation of the Japanese terms Zainichi Chōsenjin or Zainichi Kankokujin) or simply “Zainichi” (see Lie [2008, x–xi] for an explanation of the term). This book uses “Koreans in Japan” or “Zainichi Koreans” interchangeably to designate ethnic Koreans of peninsular origin who permanently settled in Japan after the collapse of the empire, regardless of their citizenship status, ideological stance, or degree of cultural assimilation.

What Lies Ahead The theoretical arguments laid out in this introductory chapter will be fleshed out through the comparative analysis of the contentious transborder membership politics during the colonial (Chapter One), Cold War (Chapters Two and Three), and post–Cold War (Chapter Four) periods. These chapters differ not just in chronological setting but also in the theoretical and methodological stabs they make at the larger problematique of the study. These variations reflect differences in the features and legacies of each episode of transborder membership politics, in the theoretical debates to which each chapter speaks, in the data and methods best suited to address the theoretical and empirical questions each chapter asks, and in the types of data actually available. Further, I situate each episode of transborder membership politics in a comparative context, not only in relation to the contentious membership politics examined in other chapters but also in relation to several comparable cases from other regions. In this way I highlight the Korean case’s distinctive contributions to the development of the core analytic theme of each chapter: colonial migration (Chapter One), postcolonial state building (Chapter Two), homeland politics under socialism (Chapter Three), and ethnic “return” migration (Chapter Four). Korea was a colony of Japan throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Contested Embrace begins its journey from this period not simply because Korean communities in Japan and northeast China have their origin in colonial-era migration. Equally important, during the colonial period the legal, bureaucratic, and semantic infrastructures of Korean

26  Introduction

t­ ransborder nation building emerged amid the dramatic transformation of the regional interstate system and an unprecedented level of intraregional migration. Drawing primarily on an extensive range of secondary literature, I show how the colonial state’s efforts to enumerate, identify, and penetrate the colonial population moving beyond its territorial reach provided an impetus for the growth of its infrastructural power. The ensuing development of various legal, organizational, and bureaucratic infrastructures, in turn, further helped the colonial state to claim migrants of peninsular origin uniformly as “its own,” despite differences among these migrants, their resistance to the compulsory incorporation into the colonial state, and the competing jurisdictional claims made by other states. This process provided a critical institutional scaffolding for the diasporic imagination of Korean nationhood and laid the groundwork for transborder membership politics for decades to come. Chapters Two and Three begin with the macropolitical reconfiguration that followed on the heels of worldwide decolonization, which newly problematized the question of who should belong to which state. In northeast Asia, the Cold War global order further complicated questions of national belonging by superimposing geopolitical frontiers onto emerging national borderlines, channeling repatriation processes, and, most important, yielding two ideologically polarized and mutually antagonistic postcolonial states on the Korean peninsula. The two chapters explore the protracted, contested, and diverging trajectories through which colonial-era migrants who remained in Japan and Manchuria came to be folded into the vortex of this dramatically reconfiguring interstate system in Cold War northeast Asia. These migrants’ selective and uneven incorporation into the two competing postcolonial states was integral to both the anticommunist developmental state-building project in the South and to the anti-imperialist socialist state-building project in the North. Chapter Two focuses on the prolonged and vehement competition between North and South Korea over the allegiance of colonial-era Korean migrants who remained in Japan. I identify the divergent transborder nation-building strategies that the two nascent postcolonial states employed to make their own docile citizens out of this opaque and recalcitrant population, who were situated beyond the territorial reach of state organs and ambivalent toward the initiatives of the two putative homeland states. North Korea launched a successful repatriation campaign and heavily invested in Korean enclaves in Japan. In so doing, North Korea pre-

Introduction 27

sented itself as a safe haven in which Koreans could find an escape, not only from the hostile Japanese world but also from the predatory South Korean state. By contrast, South Korea capitalized on its advantage at the interface between the transborder ethnic community and its surroundings. South ­Korea fashioned itself as a broker that could facilitate the integration of the Korean minority into the Japanese mainstream, and a gatekeeper that could control Zainichi Koreans’ engagement with families and home communities in South Korea. I argue that the control of the bureaucratic persona of Koreans in Japan, buttressed by the consensual practices of other states (most important, Japan), was critical for South Korea’s eventual ascendancy in this competition. Chapter Three examines the contrasting Cold War trajectory of colonial-­ era Korean migrants who remained in Manchuria. The successful incorporation of the Korean Chinese into communist China in the postwar period led to their disownment by South Korea. Yet this incorporation was not necessarily seen as incompatible with the strong tie between the Korean Chinese and North Korea. The chapter examines how China, North Korea, and the Korean Chinese promoted, dismissed, or repressed varying interpretations of this transborder tie. Beyond the much-studied realm of ethnic minority policies, I focus on the changing management of several cross-border migration flows (both authorized and unauthorized) from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s to explore the turbulent unfolding of the triadic relationship among China, North Korea, and the Korean Chinese. By drawing on the hitherto unexplored archival and oral history data, the chapter shows how various forms of cross-border transactions profoundly shaped the war-making, state-making, and nation-making (or unmaking) processes in both countries, as well as the life trajectories of individual Korean Chinese who straddled their “two fatherlands” to navigate the tumultuous socialist transition in both countries. Post–Cold War transborder membership politics (the subject of Chapter Four) gained major momentum from the large-scale influx into South Korea of the Korean Chinese, who activated their long-dormant tie to the rediscovered homeland as a means of weathering China’s lurching transition to a market economy.36 I show how the South Korean state drew on the organizational practices, bureaucratic techniques, and idioms of identification inherited from the colonial and Cold War periods in order to classify the long-forgotten ethnonational kin, substantiate their belated claim to membership, and regulate their access to the affluent “homeland.” The absence

28  Introduction

of or defects in the family registration documents, reflecting the state’s uneven, sporadic, and belated embrace of the colonial-era Korean migrants to Manchuria and their descendants, led to Korean Chinese exclusion from various benefits of transborder membership. However, the chapter also reveals the porosity of these paper walls with which South Korea enclosed itself. I explore, on the one hand, how Korean Chinese migrants struggled to redefine their collective identity in the legal, political, and public spheres by presenting themselves as an integral part of the Korean nation and as such entitled to special treatment by their “motherland.” But equally important, I closely trace less conspicuous, yet no less significant, struggles in bureaucratic settings wherein Korean migrants challenged the state’s monopolistic truth claim about their individual identities by either mobilizing alternative genres of identification or creating false paper identities for themselves. In the concluding chapter, I first recapitulate the book’s five main theoretical arguments and related contributions. I show how each chapter highlights the fundamentally political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation building; examines the bureaucratic underpinning of transborder membership politics from multiple perspectives; reveals the historical nature of transborder membership politics by focusing on the formation and the transformation of relevant institutions over a long span of time; demonstrates the importance of the broader regional interstate system in determining the efficacy of the state’s transborder claims making and offers a deeply agentic portrayal of transborder membership politics by paying attention not only to the macropolitics but also to the micropolitics of identity. I conclude by briefly discussing the value and limitations of “ethnic nationalism” as an analytic category and the future of transborder membership politics in the current phase of globalization.

one

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

Colonial State, Migration, and Diasporic Nationhood

From the mid-nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century, northeast Asia experienced the dissolution of the historic Sinocentric regional order, the rapid rise and expansion of the Japanese Empire, and an unprecedented level of intraregional population movement and ethnic mixing. Over 3 million people migrated from the Japanese archipelago to Korea and Manchuria as colonial settlers (Watt 2009, 19–39), whereas at least 30 million moved from the Chinese mainland (south of the Great Wall) to Manchuria, sinicizing this historic frontier (Gottschang and Lary 2000). The competing state- and nation-building processes in the region profoundly shaped the regulation of these migration flows. These processes were further complicated by the migration of more than 4 million colonial subjects from the Korean peninsula to the Japanese archipelago and Manchuria (the disputed borderland between China and the Japanese Empire).1 By the end of the Pacific War, the more than 2 million “Koreans” in each of these two destinations together comprised approximately 15 percent of the entire “Korean” population. Although the importance of colonial occupation for the rise of Korean nationalism has been well documented, the existing literature has long failed to grapple with the fact that the emergence of national categories and nationalism was coeval with the unprecedented level of population movement within the ambit of the expanding empire. A few recent pioneering studies have begun to recognize the critical importance of migration, diaspora networks, and the experience of exile to the construction of nationhood in Korea.2 Dispersal, collective suffering, homeland orientation, 29

30  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

troubled relations with the host society, and identification with coethnic communities elsewhere—the five criteria for diaspora identified by Robin Cohen (1997)—have all been central to the imagination of the Korean nation. However, these recent studies have not paid systematic, sustained attention to the concrete practices of the colonial state, which enabled, channeled, and challenged emerging cross-border networks, national categories, and diasporic imaginations. In this chapter I examine the role played by the colonial state in the formation of Korean “diasporic nationhood,” defined broadly as the institutionalization and the imagination of the Korean nation as a community of common descent, history, and destiny, whose primordial identity is ruptured neither by the extinction of “its own” state nor by its separation from an ancestral homeland.3 Instead of analyzing Korean diasporic nationhood as an oppositional formation to colonial occupation, I begin by noting the striking “isomorphism” (Anderson 1991, 114) between the Japanese colonial state and Korean anticolonial nationalism in terms of their definitions of national collectivity. Studies of European overseas empires have employed a fruitful line of inquiry focusing on this isomorphism and analyzing the dialectic role that colonial states played in the formation of the national “geo-body” (Winichakul 1994) and anticolonial territorial nationalism (Breuilly 1993). The Korean case is different, however, in that both the colonial state and anticolonial nationalism defined the Korean nation in transterritorial terms. From various possible sources of this distinctive phenomenon, I focus on the development of the Japanese colonial state’s official classification practices concerning its Korean subjects who were on the move. The population classification practices of colonial states have attracted much attention in studies of European colonialism. Scholars have examined how these states, as “taxonomic states” par excellence (Stoler 2002), contributed to the making, unmaking, and remaking of various “peoplehood” identities (Lie 2004)4 of their heterogeneous populations.5 The institutionalization of customary courts run by indigenous power holders, for instance, involved transforming multiple, overlapping, and fluid local identities into mutually exclusive, exhaustive, and hereditary legal identities.6 The institutionalization of settler privileges constructed a sharp boundary between European settlers and native populations7 and obliged colonial states to deal with various categorical “abnormalities,” such as the offspring of the sexual unions between settlers and natives, which blurred this

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 31

boundary.8 The development of and debates over these classification practices were therefore deeply intertwined with the vicissitudes of the plural legal orders that characterized European colonial rule. These practices also left a deep and lasting imprint on postcolonial nation-building processes.9 The central question that informed these studies was how heterogeneous colonial populations, once “encaged” (Mann 1986) within a single imperial administrative unit, could gradually be molded into a nation in some contexts, yet not in others. The literature has limited its analytic scope mostly to the encounters and ethnic mixings that took place within the territorial boundaries of the colonies. Such an analytic framework cannot adequately explain the legacy of colonialism in Korea, the largest and most important colony of Japan from 1910 until 1945. Unlike most European colonizers who encountered a patch of overlapping rules and a dizzying array of diverse human groupings in their conquered territories, the annexation of Korea brought Japan a relatively well-bounded territory that had been governed by a centralized monarchy (if one with limited bureaucratic power [Palais 1996]). The population was relatively homogeneous in terms of phenotype, language, religion, and cultural practices, despite the rigid status system in place.10 Further, the question of “mixed-blood” people posed few legal, administrative, or political quandaries comparable to those that arose in European empires for several reasons: the relatively short duration of imperial expansion limited the number of interethnic unions; the phenotypical similarity between colonizers and colonized and the dominant (albeit contested) racial ideology that underscored their affinity11 made the presence of these unions and their offspring relatively invisible and less disturbing; the broadly shared belief in patrilineality helped minimize ambiguity in sorting out the offspring of such unions. Therefore, the sites for population classification struggles that were so crucial in European overseas colonies were relatively unimportant in Korea. But another vexing question did arise: how to deal with those who left the colony. As already mentioned, more than 4 million colonial subjects migrated from the Korean peninsula to the Japanese archipelago and Manchuria throughout the first half of the twentieth century. They became the focus of disagreements over who should be allowed to cross the internal and external borders of the empire, how they should be identified, with what rights and obligations they should be invested, and how such decisions should affect their ethnonational membership. These conflicts helped

32  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

to construct, police, solidify, naturalize, and challenge the meaning and the boundary of “Korea” and the “Korean” people. Therefore, to understand population classification struggles in the Japanese Empire, as well as the long-term consequences of these for ethnic and national boundary making, we must look beyond the territorial unit of the colony. I focus on the membership politics of migrants of peninsular origin in the first half of the twentieth century in three contexts: (1) Korean migrants to the Japanese archipelago; (2) Korean migrants in Manchuria before the Japanese occupation of the region in 1931; and (3) Korean migrants in Manchuria after the establishment of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state, in 1932. Although the well-established tripartite periodization of Japanese colonial policies in Korea (that is, military rule, cultural rule, and imperialization)12 informs my empirical analysis, my choice of these three cases is guided largely by my analytic and comparative interest. These three cases serve to highlight several important comparative axes that explain how and why the classification struggles over Korean migrants unfolded differently in these three cases and what the long-term consequences of these struggles were for ethnic and national boundary making. The differences in the place of settlement (the metropolitan mainland, the contested borderland, or the Japanese puppet state) and in the main ethnonational group with whom Korean migrants competed for scarce resources (Japanese or Chinese) determined, among other things, which ethnonational boundary (the internal or external boundary of Japanese nationals) became the focus of contestation; what types of challenges the colonial state faced from colonial subjects, indigenous populations, and other states involved; and to what extent and on what grounds migrants could negotiate their identity vis-à-vis the states involved. The different trajectories of transborder membership politics in these three cases highlight the primacy of geopolitics and the profoundly relational nature of the colonial state’s engagement with its migrant populations. But identifying the common patterns cutting across these three cases is as important as explaining their divergence. I argue that the state’s efforts to control colonized populations moving beyond its territorial reach—often against the preference of migrants or the claims of rival states—provided an impetus for the growth of its infrastructural power. The ensuing development of various legal, bureaucratic, and semantic infrastructures, in turn, further helped the colonial state to enumerate, identify, and penetrate its increasingly mobile population, if with varying degrees of success. More-

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 33

over, such state efforts contributed to the construction, solidification, and naturalization of the category of “Koreans” by contributing to the development and circulation of various idioms of identification to designate people of peninsular origin. As migrants engaged with various state practices that regularly sorted, re-sorted, and treated them as “Koreans,” they also came to experience their Korean identity as tangible and consequential. Their chances for migration, education, or employment; their rights to property, subsidies, or protection; and their subjection to the state’s extraction or violence all came increasingly to depend on how state agencies defined and identified them, not only inside but also outside the colony. I argue, in summary, that the colonial state’s engagement with migrants outside the peninsula provided, albeit unwittingly, a critical institutional scaffolding for the imagined community of the Korean nation, eventually conceived as transcending the colony’s geographical boundary. Without considering this transborder dimension of Japanese colonial state building that occurred in the context of imperial expansion, massive migration, and competing nationalist projects, we cannot explain the genesis of Korean diasporic nationhood, not only as a core of the subjective self-understanding of exiled intellectuals but as an objectified legal and administrative identity imposed categorically on migrants from all walks of life.

The Emergence of the Legal, Bureaucratic, and Semantic Infrastructures of Nation Building the quest for the korean nation

Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, northeast Asia was rapidly and forcibly incorporated into the expanding Western interstate system. Japan arose as a new regional hegemon after defeating China and Russia in two wars. It launched its own imperial project vis-à-vis its neighbors, effectively transforming itself into one of the few non-Western empires. This dramatic macropolitical transformation in the region was accompanied by an equally dramatic epistemological shift. To survive in a world in which only “civilized nations” were allowed self-rule, state elites had to quickly learn and skillfully command the grammar of the modern nation-state system. Japan took the lead in translating a myriad of new concepts imported from the West (state, sovereignty, nation, race, society, population, and statistics, to name a few) and claimed to be the possessor of the new lingua franca of the region, legitimizing its imperial expansion with the lexicon of international

34  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

law (Dudden 1998; L. Liu 1999). Nation was one of these new terms and indeed one of the most important terms. Japanese intellectuals coined two new words to translate nation, which were later imported to China and Korea. 国民, read as kokumin in Japanese, contained two characters meaning state and people. 民族, read as minzoku in Japanese, consisted of two characters meaning people and clan. The former emphasized state membership, whereas the latter an ethnic understanding of the nation (Doak 2007). Each term gained popularity at different times in Japan, China, and Korea, depending on the success of modern state building and the specific conditions of nationalist mobilization in each country. The radical yet successful modern state building in Meiji Japan made the concept of kokumin tangible and resonant by the 1870s and 1880s: the Constitution, nationality law, military service law, national education, and civil registration system, among other state institutions, came to embody this new term (Doak 2007; Kyu H. Kim 2007). Minzoku, on the other hand, became a widely used and resonant term only after Japan began to build its multiethnic empire in the twentieth century (Weiner 1997; Oguma 2002). By contrast, Chinese revolutionary nationalists initially rallied around the concept of minzu (a term equivalent to minzoku) to rise against the Qing court, which came to be newly defined as an alien regime that had doomed the fate of the Han nation (minzu) (Chow 2001). However, once these revolutionaries overthrew the Qing court in 1911, the republican government tried to portray China not as a state of the Han minzu but as a state comprising five minzu, with the intention of discouraging the nationalist ambitions of other non-Han groups and molding them into loyal “state subjects,” that is, guomin (a term equivalent to kokumin) of new multinational China. The subsequent Nationalist regime abandoned even this multinational vision and began to claim that, Han or non-Han, all residents belonged to the one unified Chinese nation, called Zhonghua minzu (中華民族) (Dikötter 1992; Mullaney 2011, 21–25). In Korea, neither kungmin (the Korean version of kokumin) nor minjok (the Korean version of minzoku) was widely used until 1905. Although political discussions about the future of the historic Korean polity proliferated in the emerging public sphere (Schmid 2002), participants primarily used old terms, such as people (inmin), commoners (paekso˘ng), or brethren (tongp’o),13 to make sense of or performatively call into being a collectivity in which the ultimate sovereignty was to reside (P. Kwo˘n 2007, 198). This lag in the epistemological shift reflects the tortuous modern state-building

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 35

process in Korea. In the absence of the legal and administrative apparatuses of the modern state, the novelty of the new concept, nation, could be easily obscured. The limitations of the New Household Registration System (Sinsik Hojo˘k), enacted in 1896 by Royal Decree No. 61, illustrate this point well. The new registration system replaced the centuries-old triennial survey, conducted by the precolonial Choso˘n court since the late fifteenth century (or possibly even earlier) (Hwang 2004). This triennial survey differed from a modern census in three key respects. First, the primary interest of the central state did not lie in acquiring precise knowledge about its populace but rather in securing revenues and personnel for military and corvée service. Actual taxation was thus managed through a quota system divided across counties, which left much room for negotiation, maneuvering, and abuse at the local level (Kyo˘ng-n. Kim 2003; Ku˘n-t’. Kim 2004). Second, the notion of equality among individuals vis-à-vis the state—a fundamental epistemological principle underlying the modern census—did not yet exist. Rather, the survey served to reinforce social distinctions, which were manifested, among other ways, in the (intentional) lack of a standard format. For instance, the most basic marker of identity, the name, was documented in varying forms according to the person’s social status and gender.14 Finally, the horizontal boundary of state subjects remained unspecified. The territorial scope of this triennial survey implied that those living in the Korean peninsula, which was administered by centrally dispatched officials and mapped relatively thoroughly (Ledyard 1987; Schmid 2002, 200–204), were the subjects of the Choso˘n court. However, the conditions under which an individual became or stopped being a Choso˘n subject had not been specified in legal and administrative terms. The absence of substantial cross-border movement of commoners helped the state maintain this vague understanding of membership for centuries.15 The New Household Registration System enacted in 1896 intended to embody a modern understanding of nation, national space, and state–­ society relations. Invoking the abolition of the caste system in 1894, the government pronounced that this new system would enable “the people [inmin]” to “equally partake [kyunjo˘m] in the benefits of the state’s protection” (Hwang 2004, 360; the translation has been altered slightly for clarity). The central government no longer collected information about the social status of its population but focused on identifying the number of households and gauging the economic standing of each household accurately for taxation

36  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

purpose. Further, this modern survey, as a status marker of “civilized nations,” was expected to move Korea’s standing in the international community (So˘ 2006, 47–52). Yet the registration system fell well short of its goals. The central state did not have the capacity to effectively sweep away deeply entrenched local practices. Women’s proper names remained unrecorded; former slaves were still listed only as numbers in their former master’s registries; the records of other persons of lowly birth, such as butchers and Buddhist monks, were incomplete and organized into a separate compilation (Hwang 2004, 382). These holdover practices undermined the reformers’ proclaimed commitment to the equality of people vis-à-vis the state, a core principle of modern nationhood. The confusion, sabotage, and resistance of both local officials and the general population severely undermined the ambitious reform imposed from above. Instead of, as expected, accounting for a hitherto unregistered population, in the first year of its implementation the new survey showed a sharp decrease in the registered population.16 In sum, it failed to transform the established pattern of vertical transactions between the state and the population. Moreover, this reform left the horizontal boundary of the nation undefined, and this became more problematic at the dawn of the twentieth century than before. The taken-for-granted congruence between territory and population was about to erode in the Korean peninsula. A series of unequal treaties brought Korea an increasing number of foreigners, who enjoyed various extraterritorial rights. A small number of Koreans, in their efforts to avoid persecution based on their political or religious faith, sought to obtain foreign citizenship and claimed extraterritorial rights (So˘ 2006, 131–137). Moreover, a growing number of Koreans left the Korean peninsula. A small stream (approximately 8,000) migrated to Hawaìi and Mexico as coolie laborers at the turn of the twentieth century (Patterson 1988). Koreans also began to settle in eastern Manchuria and maritime Russia (A. Park 2009), directly north of the peninsula, in the middle of the nineteenth century. For decades, neither the Choso˘n court nor its short-lived successor the Taehan Empire (1896–1905) had clarified in legal terms how its subjects’ migration and settlement outside the Korean peninsula, or acquisition of membership in another state, would influence their relation to the Korean state (Hwang 2007). The state had no nationality law; neither the old nor the new household registration system had resolved the issue. Although there were signs of change in local administrations at the turn of

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 37

the twentieth century (which I discuss later), the duration of the Taehan Empire was too brief and crisis riven for this inchoate change to grow into a well-defined and consistent principle. Ironically, the scope of the imagined and institutionalized Korean nation began to emerge more clearly only after Korea became Japan’s protectorate in 1905, effectively losing its standing in the “family of nations.” The two neologisms, kungmin and minjok, finally replaced the old terminologies in political discourses, which, at the twilight of the Korean polity, displayed renewed vigor, acumen, and urgency. A pamphlet entitled Kungmin suji (國民受持, “What all kungmin should know”) was one of the most widely circulated publications in 1905 (quoted in Hwang 2004, 375). Between 1905 and 1910, the terms kungmin and minjok frequently appeared in influential newspapers such as Taehan Ilbo or Hwangso˘ng Sinmun (P. Kwo˘n 2007, 198). These newspapers also published a series of editorials that explained the meaning of kungmin in comparison with minjok, discussed the proper relationship between the state and its kungmin, or encouraged voluntary participation in the household registry as one of the most important obligations of kungmin (T. Kang 2006). The popularity of kungmin in nationalist discourses, however, did not last long. As hope for an independent Korean state eroded, minjok acquired new significance as an alternative to kungmin. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, kungmin came to be understood as a specifically political term, a clearly bounded human group of equal individuals whose fate was inextricably tied to the state. In contrast, minjok came to denote a community of common descent, history, and destiny that might transcend and survive the rise and demise of particular dynasties or even the extinction of its own independent state. The imagined community of minjok would provide a solid grounding for Korean nationalism in the following years, as Korea finally became Japan’s colony and Koreans became the kokumin (or kungmin) of Japan. However, not without irony, it was the archenemy of Korean nationalists, that is, the Japanese colonial state, that eventually constructed and solidified the institutional scaffolding of this imagined community of the Korean minjok. the family registration system in the plural legal order of the empire

In 1910, Korea was finally annexed by the Japanese Empire. Like many of its Western counterparts, the Japanese Empire did not constitute a single,

38  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

unified national space. Before the empire’s expansion in the late 1930s, it consisted of six different “regions” (chiiki, 地域), one of which was Korea, named Chōsen (a Japanese transliteration of Choso˘n).17 In the Japanese legal lexicon, region signified not simply a geographically circumscribed space but also a legal and administrative unit governed by a separate set of laws. Korea, like Japan’s other formal colonies, was governed by the Government General, which enjoyed broad legislative power and was fairly independent of the Imperial Diet or the metropolitan government. Corresponding to these plural legal spaces, Japanese nationality came to be made up of different “regional” categories, including Japanese (narrowly defined), Taiwanese, Korean, and others. This plural legal system engendered a series of questions. On what basis should an individual’s “regional” membership be determined—by birthplace, residence, descent, culture, or some other characteristic? How should the state identify which individuals were Japanese, Taiwanese, or Korean? Should these regional memberships be alterable and, if so, under what conditions? These questions of classification, identification, and boundary crossing all converged on the empire’s basic civil registration scheme—the family registration system, koseki (戶籍).18 The distinctive and intricate ways in which this system came to buttress the empire’s nested membership structure help explain why migrants became the primary locus for classification struggles. The family registration system was first enacted in 1871 in the Japanese archipelago and contributed in two ways to Japanese nation-building processes in the Meiji era (1868–1912) and beyond. First, by obliging every “Japanese national” to officially register his or her identity (for example, name, birth, marriage, divorce, death, and so on) in the same format and by sanctioning “anomalous” naming and kinship practices, the family registration system contributed to cultural homogenization across the Japanese archipelago.19 The concept of ie (家, family), the boundary and internal components of which were all regulated by the civil code (Pelzel 1970), was critical. Although this ie institution was celebrated as unique to Japan and constitutive of the Japanese national essence (Lo and Bettinger 2001), it is a classic example of an “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).20 The Meiji government had to struggle for years to force commoners to create and register their surnames in a “proper” form and to stop practicing “anomalous” forms of marriage, kin reckoning, and household formation (Smith 1996, 168). It was precisely through such meticulous state sanctions that naming and kinship practices became standardized in accordance

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 39

with the norm of the ie institution (Pelzel 1970; Smith 1996). Considered the most fundamental building block of the Japanese nation, ie came to define the boundary of ko (戶, household), the unit of family registration. The head of a household, who was in charge of the registration of his family members, was considered to occupy the lowest rank of “a chain of authority and responsibility that continued through village heads to the prefectural governors and ultimately to the emperor” (Winther 2008, 29), the divine head of the nation (Gluck 1985). Second, the family registration system practically delineated the boundary of the “Japanese” (Nihonjin), which had not been clarified by either the Constitution (1889) or the nationality law (1899) (Chapman 2011). Every Japanese subject belonged to an ie, the unit of registration, and each ie had its own honseki (本籍), roughly translated as “the place of origin.” Honseki indicated the address at which a certain family was originally registered. It linked each ie to a concrete point in the newly nationalized space, which was being reconceived through cadastral survey, the reorganization of administrative units, and postal systems. Under government policy, unless a person’s entire family relocated its registry, or a family member was adopted or married into a different family, their official “place of origin” (inherited patrilineally and patrilocally) was supposed to remain the same regardless of any change of actual residence.21 Having one’s “place of origin” within Japanese territory validated a person’s Japanese nationality regardless of where he or she actually lived. Japan’s imperial venture raised a question of whether this rule should be equally applied to colonial subjects residing in the newly annexed Japanese territory. One of the first actions the Japanese government took in its colonies was to institute family registration systems. These family registration systems in the colonies emulated their counterpart in the metropole, yet were also distinct from it. In this way, they attested that both colonizers and the colonized shared membership in the Japanese Empire, while marking and maintaining distinctions between them. In Korea, the family registration system was introduced in 1909, a year before the annexation.22 The system helped the colonial state impose unified practices of naming and kinship onto the entire “Korean” population regardless of status, class, or gender differences.23 Those registered in the Korean family registry were all subjected to the single “Customary Law of Korea,” which had been documented, studied, and formalized by Japanese legal scholars and judges (H. Yang 1998; Marie S. Kim 2007). The system

40  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

thus to some degree homogenized and equalized Koreans. This was quite different from many European colonies in Asia and Africa, where the colonial state established multiple customary courts that helped institutionalize, consolidate, or even create tribal, ethnic, or religious identities and fissures. Furthermore, the family registration system in Korea institutionalized and thereby consolidated differences between Koreans and Japanese proper (Sakamoto 2000). Given the negligible phenotypical difference between the two groups and the deepening, if slow, cultural and linguistic assimilation taking place under colonial rule, Korean-style names served as the clearest diacritical marker for distinguishing Koreans from Japanese. Different kinship practices, regulated by the “Customary Law of Korea” and the Japanese Civil Code respectively, made it difficult for Koreans and Japanese to form families together through marriage or adoption (Cho˘ng-s. Yi 2008), contributing to the maintenance of ethnic boundaries. These “different customs” the state sometimes ignored, at other times carefully maintained, and at still others actively created, though it claimed all the while to be merely recognizing extralegal realities (Marie S. Kim 2007).24 As postcolonial studies have documented, these shifting stances highlight a contradiction inherent in imperial rule between the demand for assimilation and the insistence on difference.25 A 1911 ordinance that forbade Koreans from taking Japanese-style names (Mizuno 2008) and a 1939 one that forced them to adopt such names (along with Japanese kinship practices) (Miyata, Kim, and Yang 1992; Mizuno 2008) reveal this glaring tension. The Japanese who argued against the assimilation of naming and kinship practices— which their opponents claimed to be part and parcel of the empire’s civilizing mission—expressed a deep anxiety that doing so would enable Koreans to “pass” as Japanese and to claim various material and ideal goods hitherto monopolized by the Japanese.26 Even in 1939, the colonial state—its assimilationist thrust notwithstanding—had to appease this concern by policing the boundary in several ways: for instance, the colonial state encouraged Koreans to adopt Japanese-style surnames that were rare among the Japanese or to at least keep their Korean-style proper names (Mizuno 2008). Yet naming and kinship practices were not the most authoritative grounds for distinguishing “Japanese” from “Koreans”; what ultimately determined whether a person was Japanese (narrowly defined), Korean, or Taiwanese was his or her “place of origin” in the family registry (Endō 2010; Chapman 2011). As mentioned already, within the empire’s nested

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 41

membership structure, to be recognized as a Japanese national one had to belong to a certain “family,” which in turn belonged to a certain “region” depending on the location of the family’s “place of origin.” No one, except royal family members, could become a Japanese national without the mediation of this nested membership structure. The family registry, therefore, came to serve as the ultimate documentary foundation that defined an individual’s regional membership. It also made that identity visible to anyone engaged in transactions involving official papers, which facilitated the regulation of the external and internal boundaries of the Japanese imperial membership. The family registration document, in other words, was the final barrier against “passing.” There were conditions under which Japanese imperial subjects were allowed to change their place of origin and, by extension, their regional membership. After reviewing several alternatives, by the late 1910s the government established (most importantly through the Coordination Law [Title 39] issued on April 17, 1918) that Japanese nationals could change their regional membership only by changing the “family” (ie) to which they belonged by means of interregional marriage, divorce,27 or adoption. Otherwise, neither long-term residence and birth in other regions of the empire nor cultural assimilation was considered legitimate grounds for changing one’s “place of origin” and, by extension, regional membership. Through such legislation, regional membership effectively became ethnonational membership, determined and inherited based on patrilineal and patrilocal principles. Yet the establishment of these legal principles did not guarantee their implementation on the ground. To document the entire population in a uniform registry would require tremendous infrastructural power on the part of the state. That is, to effectively maintain the horizontal boundaries of state membership, the state would have to transform the vertical transactions between itself and the population. This was easier planned than accomplished. The protectorate government, for instance, had only limited success in inaugurating the first family registration system in 1909. The first survey, conducted by the police, did manage to count some 3 million hitherto undocumented Koreans, showing that the protectorate government’s administrative capacity was superior to the previous Korean government’s (Hwang 2004, 367–368). The omission rate, however, still remained high in the early 1910s, at an estimated 20 to 25 percent of the Korean population (O and Ryu 2009). Updates of the family registry ultimately

42  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

depended on voluntary reports by civilians, who seldom saw reasons to cooperate. To many Koreans, traveling to a remote police office to register 28 seemed not just bothersome but terrifying, and the reward for doing so remained obscure. The intense colonial state–building process in the following decades did improve this situation. Increasing interactions with lower-level bureaucrats, who swelled both in numbers and types (for example, primary school teachers, police officers, public health agents, judges in lower courts, and the like),29 made the family registration document and the official identity it established necessary for conducting many important transactions, such as marriage, divorce, adoption, inheritance, or admission into schools.30 But as historian Takashi Fujitani observes, even as late as the early 1940s, “The colonial government still found itself scrambling to put Korean [family] registers in order” (Fujitani 2011, 38). In 1942, it was estimated that over 1.1 million Koreans, some 4 percent of the Korean population throughout the empire, remained unregistered. The accuracy of the existing registry was in serious doubt. This “large, fluid segment of the population [that] remained invisible to the state” (Fujitani 2011, 69) was partly a product of Koreans’ high home birth and infant mortality rates, as well as low education levels, meaning incompetence in the empire’s lingua franca, Japanese. But another significant obstacle was a dramatic rise in migration, especially to Japan and Manchuria. It is much more difficult for a state to track a mobile population beyond its territorial governance when that group’s ties to its ancestral homeland, and its political allegiance to the state, are weak. Moreover, the state in which migrants settle may challenge the jurisdictional claim of their state of origin, claiming these migrants as its own. In this way, Korean migrants were not only a source of ambiguity in the conception of the empire’s regionally demarcated, plural legal system; they also posed a tremendous practical challenge to that system’s implementation.

The Control of Borders and the Making of Koreans: Migration to Japan The port of Shimonoseki and Pusan are different. In Shimonoseki, one can feel that people interact with each other naturally and comfortably. By contrast, the pier of Pusan always leaves a sense of congestion. One

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 43 reason was that passengers of peninsular origin, with a few exceptions, all had to go through the immigration office located in an out-of-theway place on the pier. . . . Hundreds of people hurriedly burst into this cramped office. To get the stamps and passage tickets, they rushed to a handful of windows and squeezed in their [travel] certificates all the while yelling at each other. Without these passage tickets, ferryboats or train tickets were no good. Rumor had it that some were arrested for using counterfeit documents. This was a place where the slogan, naisen ittai (Japan and Korea are one body), never ever held. Kwanbu yo˘llakso˘n [The Shimonoseki–Pusan ferryboat] (P. Yi [1968] 2006)

Until the late nineteenth century, both Japan and Korea had sealed their borders, allowing only officially sanctioned cultural and commercial exchanges in designated ports of entry.31 Although the 1876 unequal treaty between Korea and Japan led to a steady increase in the number of Japanese officials and merchants in Korea—up to 170,000 by 1910 (Uchida 2011, 10)—Imperial Ordinance 352 of 1899, which prohibited foreigners from taking up employment outside the foreign concession areas, hindered the influx not only of Chinese (the major target of this ordinance) but also of Koreans into Japan. After annexation in 1910, however, cross-strait migration was no longer regarded as “international” migration, and Korean migration to Japan could no longer be regulated by the existing immigration and emigration controls.32 In the following decades, the push from the devastated agrarian regions of southern Korea and the pull of galloping industrialization and wartime mobilization in Japan combined to dramatically increase the number of Koreans in Japan, from just 250 in 1910, to over 800,000 in 1938, to more than 2 million in 1945 (Weiner 1994, 53, 121). This spectacular growth, however, does not mean that Korean migration to Japan remained unrestricted throughout the colonial period. On the contrary, whether the primary goal was restriction or promotion, both the metropolitan and colonial governments (mainly, the Home Ministry of Japan and the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Government General of Korea [GGK henceforward]) were constantly involved in regulating the flow of migration. The shifting policies can be largely explained by economic and political factors (Weiner 1994; Nishinarita 1997; Cho˘ng and Kil 1998). The liberal policy implemented between 1910 and the mid-1920s catered to the rapid economic growth in Japan. The shift toward greater restriction

44  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

between the mid-1920s and 1939, on the other hand, was a response to the severe interwar recession in Japan. The imperial government reversed the immigration policy again after 1938, as growing war industries demanded a huge number of cheap and docile workers. Short-term political turmoil, such as the popular nationalist uprising in Korea in 1919 (Eugine C. I. Kim and Mortimore 1977) and the massacre of Koreans in Japan in a postearthquake riot in 1923 (Weiner 1983), left its imprint by triggering a brief span of heightened control or a short-term ban on travel for security reasons. In seeking to regulate Korean migration to Japan, state authorities on both the sending and the receiving sides developed a plethora of legal, organizational, and bureaucratic practices and forged cross-strait networks of policy makers and front-line bureaucrats. The travel certificate system (ryokō shōmeisho, 旅行證明書) (or the voyage certificate system [tokō shōmeisho, 渡航證明書], as it came to be called later) was introduced in the wake of the March First Uprising in 1919 and became the linchpin of migration control. A copy of the family registration document, endorsed by the local police, served at once as an identification document and a travel certificate—the dual functions usually performed by a passport in international travel. The police assumed the role of both passport issuers and immigration officers: the local police in the migrants’ native towns (where their family registries were located) were in charge of issuing travel certificates, whereas the police in the ports of departure (in Korea) and entry (in Japan) inspected these documents and granted or denied boarding or admission (Kwang-y. Kim 2006). Although initially announced as a temporary measure effective only during the March First Uprising, the travel certificate system remained largely intact even after the immediate security concerns dissipated. Facing the interwar recession and the soaring unemployment rate in the metropole, the Japanese government leaned toward restrictionist policies throughout the 1920s and 1930s and introduced additional requirements for those seeking entry. For instance, in 1929, Korean factory workers and miners living in Japan who wished to travel to Korea needed to obtain a temporary return permit from the Japanese police before departing, which they were then required to produce before boarding in Korea for the return trip.33 Those who failed to obtain the permit were not guaranteed reentry, however long they had lived in Japan. Moreover, after 1932, the local police office in Korea had to consult with the police office at a migrant’s point of destination in Japan prior to the issuance of travel certificates. To ensure that

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 45

migrants would not become “public burdens” in Japan, typical inquiries included whether the applicants had already secured jobs, had family members to support them, or had arrest or deportation records (Weiner 1994; Kwang-y. Kim 2006). This practice resembled what Zolberg (2003) dubbed the “remote control” of immigrants—that is, various measures (including the visa system) to stop unwanted immigrants at their point of departure. The multiplication of gatekeepers and their thickening cross-border cooperation were matched by a similar development in the use of identification documents. After 1932, the police officer’s description of the traveler’s appearance was added in the margin of the travel certificate. Other public and private institutions were increasingly required to issue their students or employees standardized identification cards (preferably with photos), which served as complementary means of identification (Kwang-y. Kim 2006). The radical change in migration policies that occurred after 1938—from restriction to aggressive mobilization—did not undo these bureaucratic techniques developed during the era of restriction. The 1938 agreement between the GGK and the Home Ministry of Japan shows that, in seeking to eliminate cumbersome restrictions on Korean migration to Japan, the two agencies sought to improve the rationality, efficiency, and legitimacy of the existing means of migration control, rather than to abolish them: the temporary return permit became available to individuals in more occupational categories, and its expiration date was extended; the migration of a woman to join her spouse in Japan was made easier if documentary evidence of marriage was provided; and the overhaul of student identification cards was discussed to prevent irregular formatting or unauthorized issuance (Kwang-y. Kim 2006). Transstrait cooperation through interlinked bureaucratic practices increased even further in the 1940s. For example, when the GGK enacted the residential registration system in 1942, the metropolitan government sent records of its Korean residents to their native towns in Korea. This enabled the local administrations in these towns to identify migrants’ current addresses and update their family registries without relying on voluntary reports (M. Yi 2007). This greatly improved the colonial state’s control of mobile Koreans, who were subsequently recruited as laborers, soldiers, and so-called comfort women (women working in military brothels) during the Pacific War (Fujitani 2011, 35–77). The discussion so far shows how the increasingly sophisticated bureaucratic techniques facilitated the colonial state’s control of Korean migration to Japan. This regulation in turn constituted an important component of

46  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

state building in the Korean peninsula. Obtaining proper registration was necessary, if not sufficient, for Koreans to pass through multiple screenings on their way to Japan, and this provided incentives for voluntary registration. Further, establishing identity through papers presented to state agents had become part of the life experience of many Koreans, including even those who had never attended elementary school34 or had never left their secluded hometowns before (Chun-s. Yi 2002, 19–20). In this sense, securing the state’s “monopoly of the legitimate means of movement” (Torpey 2000) was part and parcel of modern state building, not only in connection with immigration but also in connection with emigration (Torpey 2007). These cross-strait migration control policies did not go unchallenged. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, editorials in influential Korean-language newspapers and magazines criticized them as harsh to poverty-stricken migrants, discriminatory in terms of their selective application to Koreans, and thus inconsistent with the empire’s pronounced assimilationist principle. For instance, an editorial that appeared on January 19, 1933, in Tonga Ilbo, a well-known forum for moderate to right-wing nationalists, highlights the contrast between the “Japanese” (Ilbonin) who could “freely go back and forth between Shimonoseki and Pusan” and the “Koreans” (Choso˘nin) encumbered by the government’s migration policies that “illegitimately infringed on their natural right” (Tonga Ilbo 1933). Throughout September 1935, Minjung Sibo, a Korean-language newspaper created by the leftist labor activists in Osaka, published a series of articles criticizing the metropolitan government’s deportation policy (Minjung Sibo 1935). Beginning in the late 1930s, challenges to restrictive migration policies even came from Koreans who would otherwise be considered pro-Japanese “collaborators.” They petitioned to the GGK for more lenient migration policies or even outright abolition of the travel certificate system (Mizuno 2008, 153–160; Caprio 2009, 189–190; K. Ryu 2007, 103),35 appropriating the radical assimilation policy of the time to demand equal imperial subjectship more forcefully than ever before (Fujitani 2011; Uchida 2011, 378–389). Notably, concerns about the economic and political security of the colony sometimes pushed the GGK to take a more conciliatory and accommodating stance toward Korean demands than did the metropolitan government. The unfolding of the protest of thousands of aspiring migrants in the port of Pusan on May 17, 1924, is a good example. Several days of protest,

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 47

called the Pusan Citizens’ Rally (simin taehoe), and petitions from powerful peasant, worker, and student organizations successfully pressured the GGK into temporarily abolishing the travel certificate system in June, overriding the opposition of the Home Ministry of Japan (Kwang-y. Kim 1997, 83). The conflict between the colonial and metropolitan governments over the issue of Korean migration to Japan continued well into the 1930s. The critical response of some policy makers in the metropole reveals what was at stake in this conflict: a renowned professor and policy maker Fukuda Tokuzō argued in 1929 that Korean migrants were aggravating the unemployment problem in the metropole and that the burden “should be placed onto the shoulders of the Government General in Seoul, and specifically on the police in Pusan Harbor” (quoted in Kawashima 2009, 172–173). Given the authoritarian nature of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, challenges to state policies usually took a more furtive form, that is, the mobilization of an assortment of “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985). Korean migrants turned to human smuggling networks, bribed police officers, or purchased counterfeit family registration documents to circumvent a plethora of discriminatory practices they experienced at the border (Kwang-y. Kim 2006, 219–224) and in the metropole (in such domains as employment, wages, housing, or unemployment benefits) (Kawashima 2009, 94–129). It is notable that the Korean-language newspaper articles reporting on these phenomena did not reproduce the detached or criminalizing tone of the police reports or the court records. They portrayed the wandering masses seeking to arrange unauthorized entry or those arrested for violating various laws less as criminals than as victims—victims of unendurable poverty, “harsh and unnatural” migration control, and rampant discrimination against Koreans (Maeil Sinbo 1928; Tonga Ilbo 1934). These hitherto unheard-of phenomena—the authorities’ effort to control unauthorized migration and the contestations over the legitimacy of such actions—reveal the novelty of the colonial-era migration in Korea. What was new was not simply that people began to leave the Korean peninsula in droves. The evolving bureaucratic techniques targeting colonial subjects on the move rendered the Korea–Japan border a de facto international border, and Koreans quasi-international migrants. These bureaucratic techniques engendered new political subjectivities and “repertoires of contention” (Tilly 2003) that characterized international migration in the modern sense of the term. Furthermore, the contentious and dialectic interplay among

48  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

Korean migrants and the colonial and metropolitan governments had the effect of constructing the colonial state as the manager, representative, and custodian of the colonial society as a whole, the scope of which included “Koreans” (as defined by their family registries) in the metropole. Despite being officially defined as Japanese nationals, Koreans were never granted unlimited access to the metropole even when the assimilationist thrust reached its peak in the 1940s.36 By the end of the colonial period, the predeparture screening in the southern port of Pusan had become a glaring symbol of the gap between the propaganda and the reality of the empire. The assimilationist ideology—manifest in such slogans as “Same race and same civilization” (dōshu dōbun, 同種同文) or “The Inland (naichi) and Chōsen are one body” (naisen ittai, 內鮮一體)—was easily belied by the lived experience of Korean migrants at the border. The Korea– Japan border obtained an iconic status in numerous contemporary fictional accounts; they often described how the protagonist, mostly a male Korean intellectual, came to identify with coethnic peasants and laborers despite their class differences, after his humiliating encounter with a Japanese immigration officer at the border. For example, in Sang-so˘p Yo˘m’s ([1924] 2005) Mansejo˘n (Before the March First Uprising), the protagonist, who is studying literature at a Japanese university and whose proficient Japanese often makes people mistake him for Japanese, confesses that he finds it particularly stressful and frustrating to take the Shimonoseki–Pusan ferryboat on his way home: “On my way from Tokyo to Shimonoseki, I can take it easy; I need not reveal that I am Korean (although I do not make conscious efforts to pretend as if I were Japanese). But as soon as I take the ferryboat, I usually feel that the air gets intimidating and something grabs me by the back of my neck.”37 With every such encounter with a gatekeeper at the border, the identity of “Korean” and its distinction from “Japanese” became increasingly naturalized. To be sure, not all Koreans were purely victims of this migration control policy. Many Koreans turned the state’s migration control policy into a profitable enterprise. These included lower-level police officers who took bribes, smugglers who sold counterfeit documents, and the members of Sōaikai, a pro-Japanese Korean organization in Japan,38 who sold travel certificates to line their own pockets. But this by no means invalidates the fact that the categorical distinction between the “Koreans” and the “Japanese” was at once the basis and the product of this cross-strait migration control

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policy. In a nutshell, by perennially and compulsorily defining, identifying, and treating migrants of peninsular origin “as Koreans”—regardless of the differences among them in class or cultural assimilation and irrespective of their birth or the duration of their settlement in the Japanese archipelago— the control of Korean migration to Japan made migrants’ membership in the Korean minjok more consequential, tangible, and resonant than their membership in the Japanese Empire in toto, that is, their status as Japanese kokumin. To summarize, I’ve highlighted in this section the four defining characteristics of transborder membership politics surrounding Korean migration to Japan. First, the boundary at stake in this case was the internal one distinguishing the categories of Japanese imperial subjects, that is, the boundary between Japanese in a narrow sense and Koreans. Second, the extensive and intensive exit and entry control made the Korea–Japan border a de facto international border for the Koreans, if not for the Japanese. Third, the cooperation of the strong metropolitan government on the other side of the border, which had comprehensively and thoroughly identified and documented its residents (including the colonial subjects on its soil), was of pivotal importance in enhancing the colonial government’s capacity to claim, identify, and mobilize “its” members both inside and outside its territorial orbit. And finally, partly as a result of this effective cooperation, the extent to which migrants could negotiate their identities vis-à-vis the states involved was relatively limited. However, transborder membership politics concerning Korean migration to Manchuria, to which I now turn, unfolded quite differently in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Making Loyal Colonial Subjects in the Contested Borderland: Migration to Manchuria before 1931 If we take no action in response to the incomparable treatment and contempt to which [Koreans] are subjected in adjacent Manchuria, what else would it mean other than the annihilation of the Korean nation [Choso˘n minjok]? . . . The Government General of Korea is simply looking the other way, and the Chinese, while looking askance at this bystander, are whipping us on our heads and committing heinous atrocities against our brethren [tongp’o] . . . We are 20 million [ich’o˘nman] in number, our own rivers and mountains reach 3,000 li [a traditional unit

50  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move of distance] [samch’o˘lli], and we boast 5,000 years [och’o˘nnyo˘n] of history. . . . My coethnic brothers! We must take an action! “Saengjonkwo˘n e kwanhan chawich’aek” [A measure of self-defense for survival] (Tonga Ilbo 1927b)

What is often called Manchuria had historically been inhabited by various nomadic peoples and constituted the northeastern frontier of imperial China. The Qing court (originating from one of these groups, the Manchu) carefully maintained the separation of its homeland-cum-hinterland from China proper by, among other things, banning Han Chinese settlement in Manchuria (Elliott 2000). Ethnic Koreans occasionally crossed the border for hunting, herb collecting, or seasonal farming and actively engaged in cross-border trade, yet they did not set up concentrated, enduring settlements there until the mid-nineteenth century. State control of irregular border-crossers and private merchants remained selective and sporadic (S. Kim 2006). These patterns began to change after the mid-nineteenth century. Deepening economic and political crises in Korea gave the first boost to Korean settlement in eastern Manchuria, beginning in the 1860s. The Qing court, increasingly wary of Russian expansion, sought to nationalize this sparsely populated frontier by transplanting “its own” people: the centuries-old immigration ban was lifted during the 1870s and 1880s to promote Han Chinese settlement. Korean settlement, by contrast, was tolerated rather than encouraged. Koreans were granted ownership of the newly opened lands only if they changed their hairstyles and outfits to Manchu styles and paid a land tax to the provincial government. In the absence of the modern nationality law, the Qing state considered these actions markers of their naturalization (P. Yu 2002, 33–52). The Korean state initially refrained from confronting the Qing government’s new policies. Yet this began to change after the historic tributary relationship was dissolved in 1895 and Korea was urged to act according to the “international” norms of sovereignty. The Korean government installed a police station near the northern border, dispatched officials to carry out a census of settler communities, discouraged Korean settlers from naturalizing as Qing subjects, and insisted on revoking completed naturalizations (P. Yu 2002, 58–64). The government also revived a long-dormant territorial dispute, claiming that eastern Manchuria, historically called Kando

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 51

by Koreans (H. Park 2005, 241–243n5), belonged to Korea. This new assertiveness was informed by the thriving nationalist imagination of the day, which rediscovered Manchuria as the birthplace of the Korean nation (minjok) and demanded its “recovery” as a way to redeem the nation’s vigor, autonomy, and self-confidence (Schmid 2002, 199–236). This inchoate dispute did not end after Korea became Japan’s protectorate. Japan had its own interest in bringing Koreans in Manchuria under its control: apart from its concern with the growing anti-Japanese nationalist militias in Manchuria, Japan considered Korean settlers a bridgehead for its advance into the area, whose rich resources and strategic value seemed indispensable to the empire’s survival (Brooks 2000; Yamamuro 2006). The protectorate government (1905–1910) began to claim eastern Manchuria and Korean settlers as “its own” just as the Korean state had, only more aggressively and systematically. In addition to opening a police office in Kando,39 conducting a census, banning Korean naturalization, and posing a territorial claim to Kando, Japan took a further step in clarifying the nationality status of Korean settlers in the language of the modern interstate system; for the first time, the horizontal boundary of “Koreans” was demarcated legally and administratively. The protectorate government announced an ordinance in 1908 that forbade Koreans from adopting a foreign nationality under any circumstances (P. Yu 2002, 134–135; So˘ 2006, 182–187). This was an exceptional move, for the Japanese nationality law allowed voluntary renunciation of Japanese nationality. The 1909 treaty between the Qing and Japan resolved the dispute over territory but not that over personal jurisdiction. Japan withdrew its territorial claim but obtained the right to establish consular offices in eastern Manchuria, which were put under the joint control of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan and the GGK.40 By this time there were almost 200,000 Korean settlers in eastern Manchuria (P. Yu 2002); although the Qing court tried to place them under its own jurisdiction, the treaty neither clarified their nationality status nor made any clear distinction between naturalized and nonnaturalized Koreans. Japan continued to claim that ethnic Korean migrants were all Japanese nationals—regardless of when they migrated or whether they had naturalized as Chinese—and expanded its zone of influence by asserting its right to protect “its own” nationals. China’s policies concerning Korean migrants came to be guided by its wish to neutralize such claims. Disputes therefore focused not on the boundary between Koreans and Japanese proper (that is, the internal boundary

52  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

within the category of Japanese nationals) but instead on the boundary between Japanese nationals and nonnationals (the external boundary of Japanese imperial subjects). This Japan–China competition shaped the basic contours of the membership politics concerning Korean migrants in Manchuria throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Instead of presenting the complex unfolding of this politics (for this, see H. Park 2005), I highlight its four characteristics for comparison with the membership politics that emerged in connection with Korean migration to Japan. First, the involved state authorities competed, rather than cooperated, to make Korean migrants their own loyal nationals. For this purpose, both Japan and China increasingly predicated on migrants’ national affiliation their access to valued goods and services: land ownership, land leases, tenancies, residencies, poverty relief, tax reduction, financial aid, higher education, and consular protection. As a corollary, both governments punished those whose loyalty they presumed lay with the other side with measures such as heavier taxation, police harassment, closing of schools, cancellations of tenancy, confiscations of land, and deportations (T’ae-g. Kim 2002; Sin 2002). The shifting Chinese policies toward Korean migrants reveal a dilemma the Chinese government faced. It could not drive Koreans out of Manchuria because their communities were already well established and their rice production brought considerable economic benefits. Nor could it embrace Korean migrants unconditionally because they tended to bring Japanese influence in the form of aggressive consular jurisdictional claims. This double bind shaped Chinese naturalization policies vis-à-vis Koreans. Despite local variations (H. Park 2005, 64–123), China moved generally from encouraging41 to restricting the naturalization of Koreans. Although nonnaturalized Koreans became subject to severe discrimination,42 naturalization also became more difficult. This was due to the suspicion on the part of the Chinese authorities that the Japanese government or Japanese capital was behind naturalized Koreans, surreptitiously using them to take possession of land through various backstage agreements. This shift toward greater restriction betrays China’s frustration that its naturalization of Korean migrants had done little to block Japan’s encroachment into Manchuria.43 Increased exclusion, in turn, made Korean settlers ever more reliant on whatever protection and benefits that Japanese consular offices could offer. The 1919 mass uprising of Koreans (the March First Uprising) initially jolted Japan into taking a more conciliatory approach toward its colonial

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population in the name of the “Cultural Rule.” This policy change also applied to Koreans in Manchuria, where Korean nationalist militias were seeking coethnic support and international alliance with Chinese or Soviet communists. The GGK made “protection and control” the double goals of its new policies vis-à-vis Koreans in Manchuria (Kihoon Kim 1992). On one hand, strict control continued: the GGK and the consular police jointly carried out a series of brutal crackdown campaigns that targeted Korean nationalist guerillas and (presumably) complicit civilians. They also, through the 1925 Mitsuya Agreement, provoked and allowed the Chinese authorities to harass Korean communities and arrest “subversive Koreans” (futei senjin, 不逞鮮人, the term broadly designating Korean dissidents)—an attempt by the Chinese to deny the GGK an excuse to send “counterbandit” troops to Manchuria (Brooks 2000; Esselstrom 2009). However, the Japanese authorities also tried to appease the hostility of Koreans t­oward the colonial power by providing them with low-interest loans, poverty relief, disaster relief, primary education, subsidies to private schools, vaccines, advanced farming techniques, irrigation facilities, and other forms of support (T’ae-g. Kim 2002). The Japanese consular offices also began to intervene more directly and resolutely in favor of Koreans in a variety of disputes with the Chinese, especially those concerning land contracts. This exacerbated Chinese resentment and hostility toward both Japanese and Koreans. A second important difference between Korean migration to Manchuria and Korean migration to Japan was that the entry of Korean peasants into Manchuria was virtually unrestricted. The primary site of the struggle was not the control of the entry of Koreans into Manchuria but rather the control of the terms of their settlement. The Chinese warlord regime that had emerged in Manchuria by the late 1910s wanted to populate the resource-­rich and sparsely inhabited borderland for development and state building (McCormack 1977), whereas in Japan proper emigration, not immigration, was promoted to ease high population pressure (Lynn 2005). Nonetheless, even after the number of Han Chinese settling in Manchuria had soared and tensions between China and Japan increased, the infrastructurally weak Chinese state could not seal the Korea–China border as effectively as it wanted to. In addition, the GGK did not cooperate with the warlord regime to stop Korean migrants from leaving in the first place, as it did with the Japanese metropolitan government; it showed interest in policing the Korea–China border only when acute security concerns made this imperative. In the previous section, I showed that a plethora of legal,

54  Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move

organizational, and bureaucratic arrangements rendered the Korea–Japan border a quasi-international border and made Koreans heading to Japan quasi-international migrants. By contrast, the Korea–China border was an international border in the formal sense of the term but long remained porous to Koreans seeking entry into Manchuria. The limited involvement of the GGK in Korean migration to Manchuria did not always work to the benefit of the Japanese colonial state. It hampered the GGK’s effort to define, identify, and thereby produce “its own” subjects out of migrants in this disputed borderland, and this is the third distinctive characteristic that I want to highlight. We have seen that the Japanese colonial state defined the boundary of “Koreans” for the first time and made this identity an almost immutable one that neither settlement nor birth outside the empire could dissolve. The success of a consular jurisdictional claim like this is predicated on a state’s capacity to render legible “its own” members among the opaque masses beyond its territorial reach. This was a particularly daunting task in Manchuria for several reasons. Many migrants had left their native hometowns before the 1909 introduction or the mid-1920s consolidation of the family registration system in Korea. A significant number did not migrate there directly from Korea but rather came from Russia/the Soviet Union where they had initially settled. And few Koreans took the trouble to register their second- or third-­generation children in their native hometowns. Given all these complexities, Korean migrants in Manchuria, unlike their counterparts in Japan, had rarely left solid documentary traces that could substantiate their peninsular origin and nationality status (T. Kwo˘n 1933; Tonga Ilbo 1937). The vast and unwieldy geography of the region, the unorganized nature of migration to Manchuria, the indifference or resistance of many Koreans to the colonial power, and the opposition of the Chinese authorities combined to cripple the colonial state’s capacity to follow, penetrate, and account for Korean populations in Manchuria. The colonial state tried to overcome these adverse circumstances through various registration and documentation practices of a quasi-governmental organization called the Korean Association (Chōsenjin Minkai, 朝鮮人民會). Beginning in the mid-1910s, the GGK and the Japanese consular office increasingly delegated to this organization a variety of administrative tasks, including registering Korean migrants’ civil status, residence, and property and issuing travel certificates or—for those who had been arrested and released during the Japanese “counterbandit” operations—certificates of­

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defection/absolution (myo˘njoechu˘ng, 免罪證) (T’ae-g. Kim 2002, 59–62; Sin 2002, 86–112). Japan was able to use these administrative tools to smother Korean nationalist resistance and subject Korean residents to every­day surveillance and control (Esselstrom 2009, 65–91). The same practices, however, also provided migrants with a degree of stability and security in their everyday lives and validated their entitlement to whatever meager protection and benefits the Japanese authorities could offer (Sin 2002, 43–59). These benefits encouraged migrants to register with the Korean Association. In the late 1920s, some 46,000 Korean households in eastern Manchuria—about 60 percent of the estimated total—were reportedly affiliated with it (T’ae-g. Kim 2002, 61–64).44 The preceding discussion on the challenges faced by the colonial state brings us to the last point of comparison: the degree of migrants’ agency vis-à-vis the state’s effort to nationalize both territory and identity. Compared to Korean migrants in Japan, Korean migrants in Manchuria initially had considerable room to negotiate their categorical identity vis-à-vis the claims of the competing states. The sparse and uneven state presence in this historic frontier region allowed them to keep the state (and its classification practices) at a distance, to a degree unimaginable in the Japanese archipelago. A peculiar landownership arrangement prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century is a case in point. Although the Qing court formally banned nonnaturalized Koreans from owning land, many jointly purchased land and shared its de facto ownership by including one naturalized Korean, appropriately called “the owner on paper,” who served as the nominal owner on occasions when local Qing officials had to be dealt with (C. Son 2001, 98–102). Also important was that China vigorously asserted a competing jurisdictional claim. For instance, when confronting Japan’s ban on Korean naturalization, Chinese local governments argued that Korean migrants, especially those who had migrated before 1910, had become stateless as of the annexation and thus did not need Japan’s permission for their naturalization (C. Son 2001, 150–181). This enabled Korean migrants to resist the jurisdictional claim of the colonial state, which followed them all the way to Manchuria, by offering an “exit” option (Hirschman 1970).45 Immediately after the annexation of Korea, for instance, thousands of Korean settlers jointly submitted to the provincial Qing government an application for naturalization. The establishment of the Republican regime in China in 1912 motivated some Korean intellectuals in Manchuria to launch a

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naturalization campaign in 1913 (C. Son 2001, 111). Cho˘ngu˘ibu (正義部), one of the anti-Japanese military organizations established in Manchuria in 1924, encouraged Koreans to naturalize as a way of avoiding Japanese surveillance and persecution of nationalist activities (T’ae-g. Kim 2002, 150). When migrants made decisions about naturalization, consideration of practical benefits or sanctions were as important as ideological concerns. To illustrate, when a Chinese soldier murdered an innocent young Korean man in a crowded Longjing marketplace, this incident became a lightening rod for early-1923 Korean protests against insufficient protection provided by the Japanese consular office and its ban on Korean naturalization. It even provoked the otherwise pro-Japanese Korean Association to organize mass protests, several days of business closures, and regionwide assemblies. It produced a resolution encouraging the renunciation of Japanese nationality and promoting the petition for self-rule to be submitted to the Imperial Diet in the metropole.46 Toward the end of the 1920s, however, intensification of competitive nation and state building in Manchuria gradually narrowed the migrants’ room to maneuver. As mentioned previously, the Chinese government took an increasingly prohibitive and punitive approach to Korean migrants, who were now seen primarily as the vanguard of Japanese imperialism, and excluded them from its nation-in-the-making on its northeastern frontier. Korean migrants, for their part, turned to the Japanese consular office to file grievances and solicit protection. A series of editorials in Tonga Ilbo (whose tone was predominantly nationalistic in this period) and petitions submitted by the pro-Japanese Korean Association in the late 1920s struck a surprisingly similar chord, despite differences in tone (solemnly critical versus ruefully pleading) and in the remedies they proposed (selfempowerment versus a tighter integration into the empire). They attributed the Japanese authorities’ lukewarm response to Korean sufferings to their subordinate status in the empire (“an adopted son of the Emperor”; Saitō Makoto Bunsho [1930] 1971)47 and lamented that “if Japanese suffered . . . the persecution to which Koreans are subjected in Manchuria, the troops would have already been dispatched” (Tonga Ilbo 1927a). The unfolding of what came to be known as “the Wanbaoshan Affair” in 1931 dramatically shows how political alliances and patronage structures in northeast Asia were being reconfigured on the eve of Japan’s occupation of Manchuria. A conflict between Korean and Chinese peasants over an

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irrigation canal led to several days of bloody clashes and interventions by both the Chinese and Japanese authorities. The repercussions were not limited to Manchuria. Koreans in Korea expressed their solidarity with their “brethren” (tongp’o) by organizing fund-raising groups, dispatching civilian investigation teams, boycotting Chinese merchandise, and rioting against Chinese residents in Korea (H. Lee 2009; S. Son 2009). As this section’s epigraph conveys, the transnationalization of this particular episode of ethnopolitical conflict made clear that coethnics in Manchuria had come to be considered an integral part of the imagined community of the Korean nation (Choso˘n minjok), primordially connected to the Korean peninsula and sharing the same phylogeny. This imagination was often expressed with the rhymed set phrase, “ich’o˘nman tongp’o [20 million brethren], samch’o˘lli kangsan [the territory that reaches about 733 miles], and och’o˘nnyo˘n yo˘ksa [5,000 years of history].” The contentious membership politics in Manchuria examined so far highlights how “tongp’o” (同胞, dōhō in Japanese) emerged as the most important, and exceptionally versatile, category in the semantics of Korean diasporic nationhood. By the turn of the century, this old term had come to signify the horizontal ties and affective attachment among those who belonged to the same “nation.” However, the dual meanings of the nation, which could be translated into either minjok or kungmin, made the boundary of tongp’o and its political implications ambiguous. On the one hand, tongp’o was used to invoke the primordial unity, affective attachment, and political solidarity among those who belonged to the Korean minjok. In this usage, “naiji tongp’o” (內地同胞, the brethren in the metropolitan inland) or “chaeman tongp’o” (在滿同胞, the brethren in Manchuria) referred to Koreans in Japan or Manchuria. The geographical qualifiers like naiji or chaeman at once mapped Korean presence beyond their ancestral homeland and underscored the unity and solidarity among Koreans regardless of their dispersion. Understandably, “tongp’o” became an important semantic resource for Korean nationalists; nationalist exiles frequently invoked the term to stress the unity of all Koreans (both inside and outside the peninsula) and mobilize their resistance against Japan. However, the term could also be employed by the colonial state to nurture a sense of intimacy and solidarity among the Japanese kokumin, especially between the colonizers (Japanese) and the colonized (Koreans). This usage would become increasingly common with the assimilationist shift in colonial policies in

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the 1940s: for example, official publications began to refer to Koreans as “Chōsen dōhō” (朝鮮同胞, the Korean brethren) or “hantō dōhō” (半島同 胞, the brethren of peninsular origin) (I. Hong 1999, 58). Interestingly, these two seemingly contradictory usages of tongp’o were blended together in the discourses surrounding the victimization of Koreans in Manchuria. An editorial that appeared on July 15, 1926, in Tonga Ilbo, for instance, not only “urge[d] the ordinary brethren [tongp’o] to pay attention to” the persecution of Koreans in Manchuria, but also “demand[ed] the Government General of Korea to explain what course of actions it [would] take vis-à-vis the violent actions of the Chinese authorities” (Tonga Ilbo 1926). The “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) of the nation envisioned by this editorial—as well as by many other contemporary print media sources closely following the news—was the transborder community of Koreans, for whose suffering every Korean must show brotherly empathy and solidarity. Yet we should not miss that, by the early 1930s, a common consensus emerged among Koreans of different ideological stripes—with the exception of the communist wing consistently committed to armed struggles against Japanese imperialism—that the colonial state must assume responsibility, if a paternalistic one, for the victimization of the “Korean brethren in Manchuria.” Contemporary popular culture in colonial Korea, for instance, frequently portrayed Korean migrants as quintessential victims of barbarian Chinese, while attributing the role of a civilized guardian to the Japanese consular police (Chong-h. Cho˘ng 2007; Fujitani 2011, 299–334). The colonial state played along with this characterization, portraying itself as the custodian of Koreans both inside and outside the colony—even though its actual performance hardly stood up to this claim.

Manchukuoans, Japanese, or Koreans? Korean Migration to Manchuria after 1931 Since he naturalized [as Chinese], old man Pak had carried his [Chinese] registration document on his person at all times. But after ­ anchukuo was established, he stashed the paper away in a chest at M home. . . . Although he himself could barely speak a few Japanese words, with his son Myo˘ng-hwan’s help, old man Pak [proficient in ­Chinese] was able to earn some money by brokering land transactions

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 59 between Manchurians [Manin, 滿人] and Japanese. There was no point in carrying the evidence that he had in fact naturalized as Chinese ­before. “Ijung kukcho˘k” [Dual nationality] (Man-s. Kim 1948a)

The previous section highlights how the vast dissimilarities between the macropolitical context of Manchuria and that of Japan in the 1910s and 1920s meant that membership politics unfolded quite differently in each place. However, as implied by old man Pak’s change of attitude in the short story cited above, Japan’s 1931 occupation of Manchuria transformed the political context within which disputes over the membership status of Korean migrants played out. For complex geopolitical reasons, instead of making Manchuria its fourth formal colony, Japan established “Manchukuo” (滿洲国, Manzhouguo in Chinese, meaning the Manchurian state) and stylized it as an independent, multiethnic state—a product of self-­ determination of “the people of Manchuria,” who had a distinctive history and culture and finally rose against the incompetent and despotic warlord regime (Duara 2003). Manchukuo’s relationship to the Japanese Empire remained ambiguous. In its substance, it was arguably Japan’s “informal colony,” yet its form was carefully modeled on the modern independent nation-state (S. Han 1995),48 and its ideology was rooted in Pan-Asianism (Duara 2003; Yamamuro 2006). The Japanese government defended Manchukuo in the language of nationalism (in the face of censure by the League of Nations, from which Japan withdrew) and splendidly adorned it with the paraphernalia of a nation-state. But it was no offspring of national self-determination. The historical, social, and cultural unity of its population could not have been weaker. Only slightly over 10 percent of the population could have been considered natives of Manchuria. Most of the Han Chinese, who made up more than 80 percent of the population,49 had migrated from neighboring provinces within the previous decade or so, during which time (as described in the previous section) they repeatedly clashed with the Japanese authorities. Even after the establishment of Manchukuo, these Han Chinese migrants frequently moved back and forth between Manchuria and their communities of origin, and immigration from neighboring Chinese provinces continued well into the 1940s in the context of intensifying China–Japan conflict (Gottschang and Lary 2000). The Manchukuo ­government would

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thus continue to wrestle with the questions of how to regulate the immigration and citizenship status of its Han Chinese population, how to make them see their Japanese neighbors more as conationals than as colonizers, and, more generally, how to instill in them a sense of belonging to the new state, until Manchukuo’s collapse (Endō 2010, 231–236). Just as tricky was how to incorporate growing numbers of Japanese settlers into the Manchukuo national citizenry. Their membership status could not be resolved in the same way as it had been in Japan’s other formal colonies, where plural legal systems persisted to mark and sustain the hierarchical distinction between the colonizers and the colonized. To maintain the façade that Manchukuo was an independent nation-state, Manchukuo state builders had to mold Japanese migrants into Manchukuo nationals, yet without jeopardizing their de facto colonizer status. This thorny question was further complicated by the presence of so many Koreans in Manchuria—in 1932 they outnumbered Japanese by three to one (S. Han 1995)—whom Japanese authorities had fiercely claimed as Japanese nationals and strictly forbidden from taking Chinese citizenship. This raised the question as to whether Koreans should be allowed to become Manchukuo nationals on the same terms as Japanese proper. And how should their previous relationships to Chinese and Japanese proper be readjusted? What required retuning was not just the external boundary of imperial membership, which separated Japanese (broadly defined) from non-Japanese; also open for reconsideration was the internal boundary that separated Japanese from Koreans. No definitive answers to these questions were offered before this shortlived state collapsed. The Manchukuo government, unable to reconcile multiple contradictions that beset Manchukuo from its inception, failed to enact a consistent body of nationality and citizenship laws (Endō 2010, 197–329), which would have provided the “ethnotaxonomic orthodoxy”50 of Manchukuo. Manchukuo thus remained saddled with multiple classification schemes that were ambiguous and mutually contradictory (Tamanoi 2000). Nevertheless, a broad shift in imperial policy in the late 1930s from a focus on the independent nation-state building to an emphasis on the unity of the Japanese Empire—Manchukuo included—affected which population classification scheme gained primacy. The founding spirit of Manchukuo as articulated in 1932—“the cooperation and harmony of five ethnic groups (gozoku kyōwa, 五族協和)”—represents the zeitgeist of the early years. In this classification scheme, Koreans

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were officially named as one of these five groups, along with Han, Manchu, Mongol, and Japanese. Koreans were considered separate from Japanese, and both Koreans and Japanese were declared to be integral members of Manchukuo on equal terms (at least in principle) with the other three groups (S. Han 1995). Similar classification schemes were institutionalized in agrarian cooperatives, settlement colonies, various state-controlled associations (including the Concordia Associations [Kyōwakai, 協和會] in the early years of Manchukuo), special military units, and the official census. Many of these were organized along ethnic lines, with Japanese and Koreans in separate groups (Sin 2002, 86–153; H. Park 2005, 124–161). The 1936 forfeiture of extraterritorial rights previously accorded to Japanese nationals (Koreans included) exemplifies the major trend of the early to mid-1930s: the gradual, if sometimes controversial, progression toward the integration of Japanese and Koreans into Manchukuo in the name of independent nation-state building (DuBois 2010). Koreans responded to this early trend in varying ways. Some settlers expressed hope that their new affiliation with this ostensibly independent multiethnic state would enable them finally to sever their legal ties to the Japanese Empire, in which they were perennially relegated to the status of colonial subjects. They hoped it would secure equal rights to land, tenancy, education, and high-ranking government positions and even allow them to realize a form of self-rule, a decades-old demand that had been suppressed by both the Chinese and the Japanese authorities (Y. Cho 1933). Other Koreans, however, were less pleased; they were in fact distressed by the prospect of this possible separation and their incorporation into Manchukuo. To them, the establishment of Manchukuo had meant liberation from the harassment and persecution by the Chinese authorities and an opportunity to obtain recognition as full-fledged Japanese imperial subjects who would become the dominant ethnonational group in Manchuria (U ˘ i-y. Kim 1935). The forfeiture of extraterritorial rights, the dissolution of the Korean Association into the Concordia Association, and the educational reform that put Korean schools under the supervision of Manchukuo (instead of the GGK) (Tanaka 2004, 93) all provoked profound anxiety that Koreans, as a minority without political power and now even without Japanese patronage, would be inevitably marginalized in Manchukuo and, worse, defenseless in the face of Chinese hostility (C. Son 2001, 281–288). The GGK also expressed concerns about its weakening control over Koreans in Manchuria (Tanaka 2004).51

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Whether welcomed or feared, the complete absorption of Koreans into Manchukuo, and the dissolution of their extant membership in the Japanese Empire, turned out to be a short-lived illusion. On one hand, Koreans were a small minority at 3 percent of the 1940 population, with lower status and weaker power; it soon became clear that their integration into nation building was not the priority of the Manchukuo state builders. The Korean Association was dissolved, Japanese and Chinese were adopted as the lingua franca, and the majority Chinese soon dominated the lower-level bureaucracy (H. Yun 2012, 242–243). These changes inevitably resulted in the marginalization of Koreans (many of whom were illiterate peasants living in remote villages) in Manchukuo’s administration, educational system, and cultural life (H. Yun 2001).52 On the other hand, as Japan sank into the mire of the ever-expanding war from the late 1930s onward, the Japanese authorities ceased to worry about maintaining the façade that Manchukuo was an independent multiethnic nation-state. They instead began to stress the leadership of the “Japanese” in building the Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere, of which Manchukuo was an integral part. In contrast to the earlier years when the dissolution of the category of “Japanese” into Manchukuo nationals was seriously considered, it was asserted that becoming a good Japanese subject was not incompatible with, but rather essential to, becoming a good Manchukuo national (Sin 2002). Unlike other members of Manchukuo, Japanese were recognized as having dual nationalities, Japanese and Manchukuoan (Endō 2010, 201–239). How did Koreans fit into this category of “Japanese”? Various dichotomous classification schemes, which proliferated in many institutional arenas, did frequently group Koreans with Japanese, juxtaposed to other ethnic groups combined. These included: “Manchurians [滿人] versus Japanese [日本人],” “natives [土着人] versus Japanese [日本人],” or “persons of Manchurian origin [滿系] versus persons of Japanese origin [日系]” (Tamanoi 2000).53 What tied Koreans to Japanese in these binary schemes was neither their ethnocultural commonality, nor comparable economic or political standings, but rather their common legal status as Japanese nationals, broadly defined.54 This sharp dichotomy between “Japanese” and “nonJapanese” was the product of the membership politics in the earlier years through which all Korean migrants were made Japanese nationals despite the persistent hierarchy between Koreans and Japanese and the differences among Koreans. That is, Korean settlers born in Manchuria in the second or third generations who were culturally sinified, or who acquired Chinese

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citizenship (like old man Pak cited at the opening of this section), were still classified as Japanese (immigrants); on the other hand, Han Chinese settlers who migrated from neighboring provinces in the 1920s were classified as “natives” or “persons of Manchurian origin.” This well illustrates the constitutive and performative power of state categorization practices, which render only certain ethnic boundaries relevant and define (and thereby produce) who are “immigrants” and who are “indigenous people.” But one should not deduce from the prevalence of these dichotomous classification schemes that the internal distinction within the category of “Japanese” (broadly defined) lost its political import or institutional grounding. After all, given the nested membership structure of the Japanese Empire, maintaining this internal distinction between Japanese proper and Koreans was consistent with the claim that Koreans were Japanese nationals via their first-order belonging to the colony, Korea. The establishment of Manchukuo did not lead to a discarding of this principle or its related legal and bureaucratic edifices. In fact, if one looks at the implementation of this principle, the establishment of Manchukuo had quite the opposite effect, reinforcing rather than weakening the compulsory nature of Koreans’ belonging to the colonial state. The establishment of Manchukuo removed many restraining factors that had in previous decades crippled the colonial state’s transborder reach. This enabled the colonial state not only to nominally claim Koreans in Manchuria as its own but to keep track of them on the ground. I examine this process from two different angles. First, the establishment of Manchukuo radically transformed historic Korean migration to Manchuria, not only in terms of its numbers, composition, and geographic distribution but also in the degree and means of the state’s control over it. With the removal of the antagonistic Chinese authorities, Manchuria seemed to provide a vast, unencumbered space into which Japan could discharge the surplus population of the archipelago and the peninsula (Lynn 2005). Furthermore, it was considered necessary to encourage Japanese and Korean immigration, while controlling Han Chinese immigration, to reinforce Japan’s practical grip on Manchukuo. Through the ensuing “Manchurian boom” promoted by the state, the number of Koreans in Manchuria increased dramatically from 0.6 million in 1930 to over 1.5 million in 1943. The regional origin and the destination of Korean migrants also changed. Recruitment was concentrated in the agrarian region in southern rather than northern Korea, and these newcomers were channeled primarily to

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northern rather than eastern Manchuria, also known as Kando. Before 1932, approximately 80 percent of Korean settlers in eastern Manchuria were originally from the northern part of the peninsula (H. Park 2005, 46). In contrast, southerners made up 70 to 90 percent of newcomers (Kihoon Kim 1992). The explosive growth and diversification of the Korean migration flow to Manchuria, however, decreased rather than increased the opportunities for unregulated migration. Beginning in 1937, two Colonization Companies, one sponsored by the GGK and the other by the Manchukuo government, carried out the recruitment, predeparture training, and settlement of Korean migrants. Migrants without immigration certificates and valid family registration documents could be blocked or deported at any time on their way to Manchuria. Newspapers began to report on the wandering mass of migrants who, devoid of the required documentation, were still seeking to clandestinely enter Manchuria (Maeil Sinbo 1938b; Tonga Ilbo 1938, 1939b, 1939c)—a phenomenon that had long been associated with Korean migration to Japan. Because Korean migration to Manchuria became a highly organized state affair, newcomers were more likely to be properly documented than were their predecessors. In addition, as part of the effort to uproot anti-Japanese guerillas, many early migrants were forcibly removed from their historic villages, which had served as the headquarters, hideouts, and support bases for these guerillas. They were relocated to state-controlled agrarian cooperatives and issued residential certificates bearing their name, age, “place of origin,” and current address (C. Son 2001, 415). In this way, the colonial state was able to incorporate, if belatedly, these early migrants into its documentary circuit. Second, the quickening and deepening state building in Manchukuo was important for strengthening the colonial state’s control over hitherto undocumented Koreans. By the mid-1930s, about 0.5 million Korean migrants (an estimated 40 to 50 percent of Manchukuo’s Korean population) possessed no proper family registration documents (C. Son 2001, 267–268), reflecting the considerable difficulty faced by the colonial state in previous years in tracking down “its” mobile subjects. This began to change when the Manchukuo state required Koreans to provide valid family registration documents to, among other things, establish their rights to land (C. Son 2001, 249–293) or gain admissions to public schools (Sin 2002, 181). This pushed many undocumented Koreans to complete their belated registrations through a simplified procedure, guided by the Korean Association

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(before its dissolution) and the government officials dispatched from Korea (Tokyo Asahi Shinbun 1934; Maeil Sinbo 1935; Michael Kim 2014, 121–122). The establishment of the family registration (in 1940) and residential registration systems (in 1943) in Manchukuo also further increased documentation of Koreans.55 The Manchukuo government provided the resulting new information on its Korean population to the GGK and allowed it to carry out the registration of Koreans directly in Manchuria. With such assistance, between 1941 and 1944 the colonial government was able to newly register 115,721 Koreans in Manchuria and to update the family registries of 108,180 (Sin 2002, 186)—a task considered more urgent than ever in the context of total war. In summary, the increased involvement of the colonial state in the migration process, the intensive state building in Manchukuo, and the cooperation between Manchukuo and the GGK together rendered Koreans in the borderland more visible and legible than had previously been possible. Migrants of peninsular origin in Manchuria came to be sorted and re-sorted as Koreans more effectively than ever before. To be sure, some Koreans tried to capitalize on the state’s ever-moreintensive efforts to “embrace” (Torpey 2000) Korean migrants to challenge the hierarchical distinction between “Japanese” and “Koreans.” To them, rallying under the banner of naisen ittai and embracing radical assimilationist policies seemed to be the most effective strategy for enhancing Koreans’ standing in Manchukuo, where the “harmony and equality among different ethnic groups” increasingly looked like a pipe dream. For instance, many Korean leaders in Manchukuo petitioned that the Korean Educational Ordinance of 1938, enacted in the colony of Korea, be extended to the Korean community in Manchukuo. They embraced the GGK’s claim that the assimilationist spirit of the ordinance—which manifested not only in the infamous ban on the use of the Korean language in school but also in the removal of several discriminatory measures against schools segregated for Korean students—was an expression of the emperor’s benevolent will to finally grant Koreans an equal standing as Japanese proper (K. Pak 2005, 272). By restoring the supervisory role and the patronage of the GGK (called the “motherland” in these petitions), these Korean leaders hoped to improve the quality of the education of Koreans in Manchukuo, which had been marginalized and underfunded in the state’s educational system. Other assimilation policies, such as the voluntary enlistment, name changes, and drafting, were welcomed by these Korean elites for similar reasons (H. Yun 2001).

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However, a rigid ethnic hierarchy permeated everyday life in Manchukuo. In a society like this, elevating the status of Koreans to that of Japanese might well have offended and alienated the much more numerous Han Chinese, who used to pejoratively call Koreans erguizi (二鬼子), “the running dog of devilish Japanese” (Chungguk Choso˘njok Ch’o˘ngnyo˘n Hakhoe 1992). Sensitive to the volatility of this issue, the Manchukuo government, in cooperation with other relevant governing bodies of the empire,56 ensured the maintenance of the hierarchical distinction between Koreans and Japanese proper in a range of institutional domains such as wage, taxation, education, jurisdiction, and the food rationing that began in the early 1940s (H. Yun 2001). Discrimination in food rationing—a blue card for Japanese, yellow for Koreans, and red for others—was the source of the most visceral frustration and resentment. This left a vivid imprint on both the retrospective accounts and fictional portrayals of the period. Another short story of novelist Man-so˘n Kim (1948b), “Kwigukcha” (Repatriates), for example, describes a Korean woman, Yo˘ng-ae, who liked being called her “Japanized” name Mrs. Kimura and used to give an impassioned speech on Korean women’s duty to support the empire’s war effort, including drafting; the character nevertheless comes to feel humiliated and betrayed by the discriminatory treatment she experiences as a “Korean” (Senjin/­X ianren) at a ration station. However, what concerned the authorities was not so much the disappointment and disillusionment of pro-Japanese Koreans like Yo˘ng-ae. They were concerned more about the resentment of Chinese, who reportedly insisted that Koreans use their old Korean-style names on their food ration cards to prevent them from enjoying the same privileges as Japanese (Sin 2002, 184). In the short story “Ijung kukcho˘k” (Dual nationality) quoted at the beginning of this section, old man Pak decides to stay put even after Japan’s defeat, scoffing at other Koreans who, fearing Chinese riots, hurriedly leave for Korea. He is fluent in Chinese, always wears Chinese-style clothes, has a Chinese concubine, and maintains a friendly relationship with his Chinese neighbors. More than anything else, Pak believes that his certificate of naturalization will keep him safe by proving his full-fledged Chinese (Chunggugin) identity. But the document does not prevent a Chinese soldier who has defected from the Manchukuo army from summarily killing Pak amid the chaos in the wake of Japan’s defeat; the certificate actually confirms the soldier’s initial suspicion that Pak is not a real Chinese but a Korean who had to naturalize to obtain Chinese nationality. In this short

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story, old man Pak’s hybrid identity as a long-time migrant in Manchuria is demonstrated by his occupation as a broker, his transethnic social networks, and his linguistic and cultural practices. But it is his categorization as Korean—confirmed, ironically, by his certificate of naturalization as Chinese—that proves fatal at this critical moment. This was the moment when, with the collapse of the empire, the question of membership and belonging once more became problematic in Northeast Asia.

“Colonial Pilgrims” Writ Large The relationship between the colonial state and the formation of the postcolonial nation has been one of the most important questions in the social scientific study of colonialism. This chapter has addressed this question by examining a hitherto understudied phenomenon: the colonial state’s transborder engagement with its subjects who left the territorial unit of the colony and its impact on the formation of diasporic nationhood. In comparatively analyzing differing membership politics that unfolded in the context of Korean migration to Japan and to pre- and post-1931 Manchuria, I have focused on identifying the tumultuous and uneven development of specific legal, bureaucratic, and semantic infrastructures that helped the colonial state extend its transborder reach, if with varying degrees of success in different geopolitical and ethnopolitical contexts. These included the implementation of the family registration system, the development of border policing and consular practices, the creation of cross-border networks of policy coordination, the formation of quasi-governmental ethnic organizations, and the circulation of mutually overlapping, yet distinct, idioms of national identification. These various legal, bureaucratic, and semantic infrastructures enabled the state to follow colonial subjects on the move and to forcibly define and identify these migrants as “its own,” often in the face of suspicion, sabotage, and resistance on the part of other states, indigenous populations, or migrants themselves. Building on the modernist (as opposed to primordialist) approach to Korean nationhood, I argue that the extensive and intensive engagement of the colonial state with migrants heading to and settling in Japan and Manchuria contributed to the formation of Korean diasporic nationhood in two ways. First, it made the Korean nation a transterritorial community that was legally codified, pervasively institutionalized, and enduringly documented. The modern notion of “nation” (which was translated into

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­kungmin or minjok) gained traction among Korean elites prior to the annexation (Schmid 2002). Yet after annexation kokumin/kungmin could no longer be an amenable concept for Korean nationalists. Although some continued defining Koreans as the kungmin of the independent Korean state, this claim often rang hollow. After all, there was no concrete institutional ground for such a claim except in the extinct, and nationalistically recast, past or in the longed-for, yet unrealized, future. The notion of minjok, by contrast, captured nationalist imagination by keeping Koreans from being subsumed and dissolved under the category of the Japanese kokumin (kungmin). Yet I would like to emphasize that the concept of minjok was not purely antagonistic to colonial discourses. It was in fact the colonial state that institutionally grounded the imagined community of “Choso˘n minjok” in a distinctively transterritorial form. The colonial state defined the boundary of “Koreans” (Chōsenjin) for the first time in the language of the modern interstate system. It further restricted the crossing of this categorical boundary even at the height of cross-border movement by making a person’s Korean identity almost immutable: neither settlement nor birth even outside the empire could dissolve it. Finally, the colonial state succeeded to varying degrees in forcibly incorporating people on the move into this documented community of Koreans. In so doing, the colonial state contributed to naturalizing the distinction among different minzoku comprising Japanese kokumin (such as Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese) rather than undermining it.57 Through dynamic and contentious interactions with Korean migrants and authorities of other states involved, the Japanese colonial state emerged as a public and autonomous agent that assumed a degree of accountability for the “colonial society”—one of the critical conditions for the dialectic emergence of anticolonial nationalism (Breuilly 1993, ­218–229)—the boundary of which transcended the territorial borders of the colony on both the institutional and the imaginary levels. Moreover, this infrastructural scaffolding of the Korean nation, constructed by the colonial state, left an enduring imprint on the complex tapestries of transborder membership politics in the region during the Cold War and post–Cold War periods, as the following chapters of this book will show. A second way in which the colonial state shaped Korean diasporic nationhood was that its engagement with migrants of peninsular origin transformed abstract official categories—including its ethnonational tax-

Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move 69

onomies and various idioms of identification—into tangible, consequential, and resonant experiences for a broad range of migrants. This included even those migrants who had left the peninsula before the onset of colonial rule, were born outside the peninsula, or were culturally assimilated as Japanese or Chinese. The legal and administrative category of Chōsenjin dovetailed nicely with the vernacular category of Choso˘n minjok. This congruence between the legal and vernacular categories partly explains why Choso˘n emerged as the unchallengeable ethnonym for Koreans during the colonial period, dwarfing another candidate, “Han” (as in the Taehan [meaning “the great Han”] Empire); despite being preferred by exiled nationalists (Im 1993), the latter term had no foundation in the legal and administrative discourses of the colonial state. To be clear, I am not arguing that migrants of peninsular origin all came to deeply identify themselves primarily as “Koreans” or reached consensus about the desirable future of the Korean nation; categories, after all, do not automatically produce identities (Brubaker 2004). Any in-depth study of subjective identities of Korean migrants would require a more systematic examination of the cultural world they inhabited than has been possible in this chapter. My contention is that migrants of peninsular origin were constantly made aware of and forced to negotiate with their objective identification as “Koreans” by state authorities in novel ways. This was so regardless of their subjective identification with this particular national category, let alone any commitment to one of the many (and mutually competing) forms of anticolonial, nationalist movements. Establishing identity by presenting official documents to state agents became part of the life experience of those who participated in these migration flows. The identification document, the sine qua non of the grammar of the modern state, became a primary, and often the most authoritative, medium through which they conceived, represented, and performed their identities and belonging, including their national identities. These migrants represented a broader social base than did the bilingual colonial elite or exiled nationalist intellectuals—the groups on which the literature on the formation of diasporic nationalism has often focused. And these migrants circulated within the field of the empire as a whole rather than being limited to the territorial unit of the colony, as did “creole nationalists” in Latin America and their varied sequels in Southeast Asia (Anderson 1991, 47–65, 113–140). To reprise and extend Benedict Anderson’s celebrated metaphor (113–116), we can therefore call these

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migrants colonial pilgrims writ large, a massive number of colonial subjects who became nationals through complex interactions with state apparatuses of the empire outside the territorial boundary of the colony. This chapter brings the colonial state back into the explanation of nation formation in colonial Korea by focusing on its quintessentially modern effort to monopolize the legitimate movement of people and render its population legible (Torpey 2000). This aspect has been given little attention in the literature on Korean nationalism or that on colonial nationalism more broadly. The temporal and spatial parameters of the works of Andre Schmid (2002) (focusing on the period prior to Korea’s annexation) and Richard S. Kim (2011) (studying Koreans in the United States) partly explain why the Japanese colonial state receded to the background in their work. John Lie (2008, 172), in his sophisticated discussion of diasporic nationalism, does note how colonial migrants “encountered a world of passports and identity papers” that “reinforced the sense of national borders and belongings.” But he quickly stresses that the complex reality of diasporic Koreans cannot be reduced to these national categories. True as the argument might be, his assertion still leaves unspecified the prolonged and contested processes through which the Japanese colonial state created fundamental legal, bureaucratic, and semantic infrastructures that shaped the imagined scope of the transborder Korean nation. To construct a theory of the coeval “spread of peoplehood identification” and “the consciousness of diasporic identity” (172), it is essential to examine comparatively and historically how and why colonial states developed varying classification and documentation practices vis-à-vis their mobile subjects in different contexts. We must understand how successful these practices were in mediating the reiterative encounters between migrants and the lower echelon of the colonial bureaucracy. And we must grasp the long-lasting legacies these practices left for nation-state building and ethnonational boundary making at a regional level. This leads to the last point of this concluding section—the generalizability of my empirical findings and theoretical arguments beyond the Korean case. The existing studies of migration within the realm of the empire have focused on the migration of colonizers, first from the metropole to the colony and then in the opposite direction. They have explored how this migration contributed to empire building, decolonization, and nation building in both the metropole and the colony (Elkins and Pedersen 2005). Analyses of the Japanese Empire have developed a similar line of inquiry. They have examined how the migration of Japanese contributed to the mutual

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constitution of metropole and colony (or the colonizers and the colonized) and how it shaped the shifting meaning and the boundary of the Japanese nation in the era of imperialism and decolonization.58 By contrast, the migration of colonial subjects and its ramifications have remained marginal in the literature. The Japanese Empire may stand out in terms of the prevalence of the cross-border migration of colonial subjects, the intensity of the colonial state’s involvement in their migration, and the political salience of the jurisdictional struggles over their membership status.59 The geographical vicinity between the metropole and the colonies helped overcome the socalled tyranny of distance (Harper and Constantine 2010, 180–190), which effectively suppressed the migration of colonial subjects to metropoles in European overseas empires (with Algerian migration to France as a notable exception). In addition, as was the case in other late empires, Japan’s imperial expansion was a highly organized state affair carried out in the context of intensifying international competition, a revolutionary progress in human mobility, and an equally revolutionary progress in states’ capability to control this mobility. The colonial state’s extensive and intensive transborder engagement with its subjects abroad—analogous to the actions of the inchoate Italian nation-state (Choate 2008)—sheds new light on the claim that the Japanese Empire should be theorized as a nationalizing empire, with all its contradictions and tensions.60 Nevertheless, the circulation of colonial subjects within and beyond empires was more common than our conventional analytic framework would lead us to believe. The incorporation of the colony into the global economy, or the influx of colonizers from the metropole, led elsewhere to large-scale displacements of colonial populations, which subsequently migrated to the metropole, to other parts of the empire, or outside the empire. The migration from the Indian subcontinent to Britain and to other British colonies is only the best-known example.61 The entrenched Eurocentrism in the study of the first wave of global migration and the rise of nationalism62 may be partly responsible for the lack of attention to this type of migration. I suggest that we comparatively examine the political dynamics created not only by metropolitan settlers in the colony but also by colonial migrants from the colony to the metropole, to other parts of the empire, or beyond the empire. We need to ask how plural legal orders of the empire were challenged and transformed as the colonial population crossed its internal and external borders. How did colonial states differ in the degree

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and modes of their involvement in migrations of their colonial populations? How did such states define and identify the membership status of migrant populations? Which category of membership—racial, ethnoreligious, national, or imperial—was given primacy over the others in particular official classification schemes, and how effectively could migrants challenge or undermine these official practices? And lastly, how did these different trajectories of colonial-era membership politics shape the formation of diasporic nationhood, or lack thereof, in the colonial and postcolonial periods?63 The comparative study of the migration of colonial subjects and its ramifications will contribute to reconstituting the study of empire, migration, and nationhood formation in a way that is more sensitive to the wider, global relations in which the present nation-state is embedded (Go 2009).

t wo

“Who Owns the Nation?”

Cold War Competition over Zainichi Koreans in Japan

The worldwide decolonization after the Second World War newly problematized the question of who should belong to which state. The dissolution of empires entailed not only the collapse of repressive colonial structures but also the eclipse of the modicum of protection and membership rights that had been provided to imperial subjects. Many of those who found themselves in newly nationalizing territories in which they no longer belonged “returned” to their putative homeland. Yet others could not or did not “return.” The existing literature has explored the ways postimperial states ­responded to the massive influx of colonizers from their settler colonies.1 Researchers have also studied the ways these states have coped with the former colonial subjects who remained in the former metropoles.2 Few studies, however, have examined how newly created postcolonial states dealt with their ethnonational, ethnoreligious kin populations situated outside their newly demarcated territories, including those who had migrated to other parts of the empire. Studies of postcolonial states have instead focused on the development of institutions of territorial governance. They have asked why only a few rulers succeeded in building a strong state and consolidating their heterogeneous populations into a unified nation.3 Scholars have, with too few exceptions, analyzed the legacy of colonial rule by focusing on the arbitrary demarcation of the territorial boundary of colonies and the exacerbation of existing ethnoreligious fissures.4 The territorial bias in the literature on postcolonial states becomes particularly problematic when we consider the Korean case. By the time of the collapse of the Japanese Empire, approximately 15 percent of the 73

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e­ ntire Korean population was living outside the Korean peninsula (D. Kim 1998). Even after the massive ethnic unmixing in the immediate postwar era, 600,000 Koreans remained in Japan and 1.2 million in Manchuria. Meanwhile, the emerging Cold War order complicated questions of national belonging by superimposing geopolitical frontiers onto fledgling national borderlines, shaping repatriation processes in the region, and, most important, yielding two ideologically polarized and mutually antagonistic Korean states. In this chapter and the one that follows, I explore the protracted, contested, and diverging trajectories through which colonial-era migrants situated outside the Korean peninsula came to be folded into the vortex of this dramatically reconfiguring interstate system in Cold War northeast Asia. Their selective and uneven incorporation into the two competing postcolonial states was integral to both the anticommunist, developmental state-building project in the South and the anti-imperialist, socialist state-building project in the North. In this chapter, I focus on the shifting relationships between the two postcolonial Korean states and colonial-era migrants who remained in Japan from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s. The contrasting Cold War trajectory of colonial-era migrants who remained in what became communist China will be the subject of Chapter Three. Unlike other postcolonial settings where the question “Who owns the state?” has frequently triggered ethnic conflicts (Wimmer 2002), in the Korean case, it was the question “Who owns the nation?” that generated violent confrontation between the two postcolonial states, both of which claimed the same territory and the same nation as their own. This struggle to monopolize the right to embody and represent a single nation—which culminated in the Korean War and continued throughout the Cold War period—was not limited to those in the Korean peninsula; the struggle extended to approximately 600,000 colonial-era Korean migrants in Japan. Despite the headline-grabbing reports on the volatility of “homeland nationalism” or “diaspora politics,” states do not always actively engage with their transborder populations, let alone aggressively seek their loyalty. Neither China and Taiwan nor East and West Germany, for instance, competed over their coethnics abroad as ferociously as the two Koreas did for the Koreans in Japan.5 The particular antagonism between North and South Korea does not alone explain this competition; the two states did not go to equivalent lengths to claim colonial-era migrants who remained in northeast China or in the Soviet Union, as will be discussed in Chapter

“Who Owns the Nation?” 75

Three. What, then, brought about this decades-long contest for the allegiance of Koreans in Japan? Unlike the Chinese and the Soviet governments, the postwar Japanese government sought to rid its shrunken national territory of as many of its ex-colonized people as possible. Further, it was reluctant to grant Japanese citizenship to those who, despite these efforts, chose to remain. This radical departure from the imperial past created a political vacuum for a large number of people who suddenly found themselves essentially adrift in a rapidly reconfiguring regional interstate system. Interestingly, neither Korean state objected to this extreme disenfranchisement of their coethnics stranded in the former metropole. Both rejected any suggestion that these “liberated” Koreans be considered Japanese nationals as a neocolonial affront to their independence. Further, neither Korean state could afford to leave these Koreans under the control of its ideological nemesis. Having just come out of the violent civil war (1950–1953), both states considered securing the allegiance of their coethnics in the former metropole as imperative for their security and legitimacy. To add even more uncertainty to the already volatile situation, Japan did not consistently align with either of the Korean states, as China and the Soviet Union did. Unable to simply take over this transborder population by diplomatic fiat, the two mutually delegitimizing homeland states were forced to solicit Korean allegiance far more aggressively than otherwise. This distinctive political configuration enables us to recognize the daunting challenge faced by the two inchoate postcolonial states. Situated beyond the territorial reach of the coercive and ideological apparatuses of the two states, Koreans in Japan were shielded to a degree from their nation-making violence, to which those “encaged” (Mann 1986) in the Korean peninsula were defenselessly exposed. The shifting international alignment between Japan and the two Koreas further enabled Koreans in Japan to “choose,” or postpone choosing, which Korean regime to affiliate with—if under varying constraints that I will explore in this chapter. This was an option unavailable to their counterparts in China or in the Soviet Union. The ensuing vehement competition between North and South Korea that spanned more than two decades helps us problematize the facile assumption that the new national order of northeast Asia came into being straightly through the collapse of the empire (1945), the establishment of North and South Korea (1948), the effectuation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1952), or the

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cease-fire agreement of the Korean War (1953). We must also examine how this steady chronology is complicated by the long, drawn-out processes on the ground through which the two inchoate postcolonial states produced their own citizens out of the opaque and recalcitrant transborder population, who had long remained ambivalent at best toward the initiatives of the “homeland” states. I argue that North and South Korea relied on two very different means of transborder nation building vis-à-vis Koreans in Japan. North Korea, through its powerful transborder intermediary organization, constructed a parallel institutional world for the excluded Korean minority, that is, a safe haven in which Koreans could find an escape from the hostile Japanese world. This strategy had the effect of making the nascent homeland state forcibly present and indispensable in the everyday experiences of the transborder population. South Korea instead fashioned itself as a broker that could facilitate the integration of the Korean minority into the Japanese mainstream and as a gatekeeper that could control their transborder engagement with their families and home communities in South Korea. These disparate strategies had different strengths and weaknesses, and their efficacy depended on various external factors, such as the duration of Korean settlement in Japan and changing domestic and international political contexts. By bringing the making, unmaking, and remaking of the “homeland” state and the “transborder nation” into analytical focus, this chapter demonstrates that being a “homeland” state for a transborder population is not a taken-for-granted ethnodemographic fact but is rather an arduous, precarious, and revocable political achievement. Furthermore, this chapter shows how the complex interactions between the three states involved in the fate of Zainichi Koreans (Japan and North and South Korea), and Zainichi Koreans’ responses to these interactions reconfigured the institutionalized and imagined scope of the Korean nation.6 I chart, for example, how the term Choso˘n, which arose as an uncontroversial ethnonym during the colonial period, became a politicized marker closely associated with North Korea (whether the association was cherished or stigmatized). I also document how the three states employed new bureaucratic techniques (for example, the foreigners’ registration system, the grant of permanent resident status, or the issuance of passports) and created new official categories during this period. In addition to marking the complete expulsion of “Koreans” from the redefined boundary of the “Japanese,” these novel bureaucratic and semantic practices show that

“Who Owns the Nation?” 77

Choso˘nin/Chōsenjin (朝鮮人) as a comprehensive ethnonational (minjok) category had come to lose much of its institutional grounding over time. Instead, colonial-era migrants were increasingly forced to adopt one of the two mutually exclusive legal identities as North or South Korean nationals (kungmin). Notably, South Korea pursued this shift more aggressively than North Korea, recognizing only those who explicitly opted for South Korean citizenship as its transborder members, toward whom it was obliged (by international norms) to act as a custodian and for whom it was obliged to provide proper administrative assistance. However mundane and prosaic they seem, these administrative ­services—indispensable for Zainichi Koreans’ transactions with Japanese bureaucrats, with family members who remained in Korea, or with other foreign agents in the case of international travel—served as a powerful lure of South Korean identity, which could not be matched by North Korea. North Korea increasingly fell behind South Korea in acquiring favorable recognition from other states or international and supranational bodies. It thus could not provide its transborder members with a reliable or desirable bureaucratic persona, one that could facilitate their unencumbered navigation of a world in which individuals are pervasively sorted and re-sorted by their state membership. This made many of those who subjectively identified themselves as the overseas citizens of North Korea turn to South Korea for passports or certificates of citizenship. In sum, what crippled North Korea’s transborder nation-building project in the long run was not so much a deficit in “empirical statehood” as a deficit in “juridical statehood.”7 This point aligns with a broader theoretical argument of the book, namely, that the symbolic efficacy of a state’s claim to a certain transborder population relies significantly on the willingness and the capacity of other states to cooperate.

North Korea: The Homeland State as Safe Haven from colonial subjects to foreigners

How was it that, in the first two decades of the competition for the allegiance of Zainichi Koreans, North Korea decisively held the upper hand over South Korea? A longing for home wasn’t the explanation—over 90 percent of Koreans in Japan were originally from the southern regions of the peninsula. Nor was North Korea able to expect Japan’s consistent support given the postwar and the Cold War political landscape of northeast

78  “Who Owns the Nation?”

Asia. To solve this puzzle we must examine the macroregional processes in the immediate postwar period that shaped both the distinctive profile of the majority of Zainichi Koreans and the basic framework through which they understood the nature of the two Korean regimes. With a push from the occupying Allies, approximately 70 percent of the 2 million colonial-era migrants had repatriated to the Korean peninsula in the first two years of Japan’s defeat. Yet as early as the beginning of 1946, the border control policies of occupying Allies were focused on prohibiting Koreans from moving in the reverse direction (Caprio and Jia 2009). Repatriation was becoming an increasingly unattractive option for many Koreans. Faced with economic hardship, cultural alienation (in the case of long-term settlers or the second generation; see Lie 2008, 11), political turmoil (including a series of civilian massacres), and the ensuing civil war on the Korean peninsula, many repatriates sought to return to Japan where they had once established their livelihood and might have remaining kinship or village networks on which they could rely. Especially to many Cheju Islanders, who had long maintained a distinctive regional identity and had a long history of circular migration and cross-border family dispersion, Korean enclaves in Osaka offered a better alternative than anywhere on the Korean peninsula, which they simply called yukchi, meaning “mainland” (Kyo˘ng-h. Cho 2015).8 The “return from the return” of compatriots and their reports on the depressing situation in South Korea led Koreans who had remained in Japan to postpone their homecoming indefinitely. Koreans, however, were not welcome in the postimperial state. The Japanese government was adamant about excluding the remaining former colonial subjects, not to mention the repatriates who sought to return to Japan, from its reconstituted citizenry. Former colonial subjects (the Taiwanese, Koreans, and, interestingly, Okinawans; see Oguma [1998] 2014) were initially classified as “third country nationals” (daisangokujin), distinguished not only from the “Japanese” (hojin or nihonjin), but also from “foreigners” (gaigokujin), the term exclusively designating citizens of Allied countries (Watt 2009, 94). “Third country nationals” were not eligible for various privileges enjoyed by other “foreigners,” such as greater food rations and extraterritoriality; further, the term had a derogative connotation. Korean activists therefore struggled to acquire the status of full-fledged “foreigners” (Kashiwazaki 2009). In 1947, the Foreigners’ Registration Act indeed began to legally classify Koreans and Taiwanese as “foreigners,” even before their nationality

“Who Owns the Nation?” 79

statuses were clarified. This law had the effect of denying these former colonial subjects any special treatment in terms of immigration proceedings and citizenship privileges. Having possessed the right of access, if limited, to the metropole during the colonial period, Koreans were now obliged to establish lawful residence status via proper registration records, renew their records every two to three years, carry registration cards, and produce these cards at any moment at the authorities’ request. The slightest violation of these laws could jeopardize residence status and lead to deportation. In 1952, the San Francisco Peace Treaty finally formalized the expulsion of Koreans from the category of Japanese nationals, collectively stripping them of Japanese nationality regardless of the duration of their stay, their degree of cultural assimilation, or birth in Japan. The colonial-era family registration system continued to serve as the documentary basis for determining which individuals were Koreans and which were Japanese. Meanwhile, U.S. occupying authorities in both defeated Japan and the southern half of liberated Korea began to prioritize the cause of anticommunism, while sacrificing the principle of national self-determination, the liquidation of imperial legacies, and the promise of democratic reforms (Caprio and Jia 2009). Consequently, the General Headquarters (GHQ) in Japan became hostile to the representative ethnic Korean organization (the League of Resident Koreans in Japan, known as Chōren), which had been established in 1945 and increasingly leaned toward communism. The Japanese and U.S. authorities considered this organization, and, by extension, the remaining Koreans in general, a grave threat to the economic and political stability of Japan and to the geopolitical interests of the United States—in the same way that the occupying U.S. military came to consider numerous leftist nationalist organizations, proliferating in the southern part of the Korean peninsula boiling with revolutionary fervor, a grave security concern (Cumings 1981, 1990). The GHQ, in cooperation with the interim Japanese government, closed the semiprivate Korean-language schools under Chōren’s control in 1948 and banned the organization itself in 1949. The Korean War (1950–1953) further soured the relationship between the GHQ and Chōren, as the United States intervened, Japan became a rear base, and Korean activists in underground left-wing organizations waged an antiwar campaign against the GHQ (Caprio and Jia 2009; Choi 2013). Many Koreans experienced the authorities’ assault on the core institutions and organizations of Korean communities in Japan as a continuation of colonial domination (Inokuchi 2000).

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North Korea captured such Korean grievances in its vitriolic denunciation of the reactionary neoimperialist coalition forged by the United States, Japan, and the “puppet regime” in the south, which had welcomed the crackdown as a successful anticommunist campaign. Yet the positive reputations of North Korea and its legendary leader General Kim Il-Sung9 were not sufficient to transform colonial-era migrants into self-identifying overseas citizens of North Korea. The 1955 establishment of the Association of Korean Residents in Japan, known as Ch’ongnyo˘n in Korean and Sōren in Japanese, provided an essential organizational infrastructure that enabled the North Korean state to exercise its power from afar. constructing a national society on foreign soil: ch’ongnyo˘n and the absentee homeland state From Hokkaido to Kyūshū, wherever we Koreans live We have built schools from the primary schools to the university Learning our national culture and revolutionary tradition Students are growing, entrusted with the future of our fatherland We heartily follow the lofty guidance of our Great Leader Our pride is inexhaustible “Uri charang iman cho˘man anirao” (Our pride is inexhaustible) (T. Han 1973)10

Ch’ongnyo˘n declared itself an overseas organization of North Korea. It claimed to respect the principle of noninterference with regard to Japan’s “internal” affairs and accordingly distanced itself from the Japanese Communist Party. The organization was thereby able to carve out a structural niche in which it could nurture the loyalty of Koreans to North Korea without triggering direct sanctions from the Japanese government (S. ­Ryang 1992). With the financial support and ideological guidance of North Korea, Ch’ongnyo˘n was able to rapidly saturate ethnic enclaves with organizations and institutions under its control. Envisioning itself as an extension of the North Korean state, Ch’ongnyo˘n organized the Women’s Union, the Youth League, the Young Pioneers, and the Entrepreneurs’ Union, stretching from central headquarters in Tokyo to local branches in neighborhoods. Several firms were associated with Ch’ongnyo˘n, including a credit union, an insurance company, and an import-export firm. In addi-

“Who Owns the Nation?” 81

tion, Ch’ongnyo˘n ran various types of adult schools and many publishing houses, which issued textbooks, more than thirty journals of various types, and several newspapers, including Choso˘n Sinbo, the Korean-language daily (S. Ryang 1998, 583). Most important, Ch’ongnyo˘n established a national school system spread across the major Korean ethnic enclaves; at its peak, the system included more than eighty elementary schools, fifty-six junior high schools, twelve senior high schools, and the Choso˘n University in ­Tokyo and accommodated 46,000 students (S. Ryang 1998). This national school system was North Korea’s most powerful means of transborder nation building in three respects. First, these schools refused official accreditation and financial subsidies from the Japanese government and, free from its supervision, constructed their own curriculum following the guidance of North Korea. Students received indoctrination in nonalignment third-world socialism, which offered an interpretive framework for attributing the past trauma and present ordeals of Koreans in Japan to colonial domination and continuing neoimperialism. Many study participants recalled their first exposure to this alternative historiography as a moment of enlightenment, redemption, and liberation. Chin-t’ae, for example, told me how the school changed him, a Japanese wannabe with inferiority complex who always wore kimono and geta, almost overnight: “My wife still says that I left home that morning, saying ‘Ittekimasu’ [a Japanese expression, meaning “I am leaving”], and then came home in the afternoon, saying ‘Tanyo˘ watsu˘mnida’ [a Korean expression, meaning “I am back”] instead of ‘Tadaima.’” Kwi-suk, who was smuggled into Japan as a girl after she survived the government-led civilian massacre in Cheju Island in 1948, told me how enlightening and empowering it was to learn through her son, a student of a Ch’ongnyo˘n-line school, about the responsibility of Japanese and American imperialism for the killing of her father and brothers and for her daily struggle as a poor unauthorized migrant. The significance of these schools for North Korea’s transborder nation building was not limited to direct ideological education. A second contribution of the schools was their accommodation of various aspirations from below, which increased the legitimacy of the North Korean regime. These schools provided higher education, moderately respectable careers, support networks, and self-esteem for young Koreans, who were excluded, marginalized, and humiliated in the Japanese educational system. My ethnographic research shows that the lure of these rewards was so strong that

82  “Who Owns the Nation?”

even some Koreans affiliated with the pro–South Korea organization sent their children to these schools; these parents expected that their secondgeneration children could learn the Korean language and cultural norms, rid themselves of self-loathing inflicted by the severe discrimination against Koreans, or, more mundanely, find Korean marriage partners. Families lacking proper residence permits benefited from these schools, which, unlike other Japanese public schools, did not require strict documentation. Popular songs such as the one with which I began this section illustrate the significance of these schools in solidifying North Korea’s hegemony within the Ch’ongnyo˘n communities. The lyrics of the school songs also nicely illustrate how these schools were considered the greatest gift from the virtuous leader in North Korea and served as a source of pride. Here is the school song of Kanagawa Korean School, for example: “In the sunny Sawadari of Yokohama, Kanagawa / We built our schools from the primary to the senior high school / Stunned, all the world looks at our schools / Impressed by the Choso˘n people’s great sprit / Envious of us living under the care of the Great Leader.”11 Third, these schools facilitated North Korea’s transborder nation building by consolidating the boundary of the Ch’ongnyo˘n communities. Brubaker and his coauthors (2006, 269–277) convincingly demonstrate that Hungarian schools in Transylvania, Romania, played a critical role in reproducing Hungarian ethnicity not so much by providing explicitly nationalist education as by nurturing students’ competence in the Hungarian language and providing a matrix for the formation of ethnically bounded friendships and romantic involvement. Likewise, Ch’ongnyo˘n schools served as the center of an ethnically bounded social network that lasted long after graduation and provided common reference points (for example, a standardized knowledge of and perspective on Korean history, culture, geography, and politics) among Koreans under Ch’ongnyo˘n’s influence. They created symbolic capital that was recognized and rewarded within the Ch’ongnyo˘n world, most directly in the form of employment in its various organs. The symbolic capital produced in Ch’ongnyo˘n schools, however, was not useful in the Japanese mainstream: they were not recognized as accredited institutions and were treated as nonacademic organizations. This disadvantage hampered the recruitment of upwardly mobile, ambitious young Koreans to Ch’ongnyo˘n schools, yet it contributed to the maintenance of the boundary of those who built their educational credentials solely through this educational system.

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Rituals and symbols featured prominently in North Korea’s transborder nation-building strategies. The North Korean national flag and the pictures of North Korean leaders were displayed in all the organizations and schools under Ch’ongnyo˘n’s control and even in private homes of some ardent supporters. The playing of the North Korean anthem and the reading of a congratulatory message from the “fatherland” always accompanied important ceremonies, including school commencement. The Ch’ongnyo˘n community collectively celebrated the major national holidays of North Korea, including the birthday of the “Great Leader.” More subtly, Ch’ongnyo˘n insisted on using the Western calendar in its official publications instead of Japan’s unique calendar based on the emperor system. The unification and standardization of the sense of time is a crucial element of modern nationstate building (Anderson 1991). In this sense, Ch’ongnyo˘n’s refusal to adopt the Japanese calendar system signaled its measured distancing from Japanese society. The Ch’ongnyo˘n schools also sought to reorient their students’ sense of national space with regard to the Korean peninsula, a map of which hung in the classroom and appeared in the textbook with the title “Our Country”; the map of the Japanese archipelago, on the other hand, was simply titled “Map of Japan.”12 Moreover, Ch’ongnyo˘n promoted the use of the Pyongyang standard of the Korean language instead of the Seoul standard, while discouraging the use of not only the Japanese language but also Korean regional dialects—mostly southern dialects, given the composition of Koreans in Japan—if with limited success. An article published in Choso˘n Sinbo on December 14, 1970, for instance, reports on a family who successfully replaced “cho˘ngji” (meaning kitchen in the dialect of Cho˘lla Province) with “puo˘kkan,” and “chil” (meaning road in the same dialect) with “kil,” and was therefore able to enjoy the radio program broadcasted from the “fatherland” (Choso˘n Sinbo 1970c).13 In summary, the power and legitimacy of Ch’ongnyo˘n consisted primarily in its capacity to build a sustainable alternative community for Koreans in Japan. The organization aimed to create a parallel world characterized by a high degree of “institutional completeness” (Breton 1964); in its prime, it succeeded in doing so. The Ch’ongnyo˘n world provided Korean-language education, ethnically segregated niche job markets, banking institutions, intraethnic social networks, mutual aid, and assistance in dealing with the Japanese government. Furthermore, it served as a venue in which Koreans felt comfortable in their own skins, developed a Korean national “habitus,”

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and nurtured collective pride in their national origin. Ch’ongnyo˘n acted on behalf of the absentee socialist fatherland at the neighborhood level so successfully that it made this distant and nascent homeland state forcibly present, prosaic, and indispensable in the everyday experiences of the transborder population. The organization was consequently able to transform colonial-era migrants into self-identifying “North Koreans,” despite a flimsy legal foundation and weak international support. Nevertheless, guarding the boundary of this territorially unbounded national society was not an easy task. Ch’ongnyo˘n’s indispensability depended on the strict exclusion of Koreans from Japanese mainstream society. For instance, Ch’ongnyo˘n’s effort to discourage the transfer of its best and brightest to Japanese schools was made easier by the Japanese government, which required the students in Ch’ongnyo˘n schools to take a separate exam to be eligible for such a transfer. A few Ch’ongnyo˘n school graduates did make it to Japanese universities, but in these cases Ch’ongnyo˘n required them to affiliate with the League for Choso˘n International Students in Japan (Chae Ilbon Choso˘n Ryuhaksaeng Tongmaeng). The word international—which was added in 1955, the year of Ch’ongnyo˘n’s establishment—epitomizes Ch’ongnyo˘n’s efforts to define these students as “international” in origin, studying in “foreign” institutions, even if they were actually born and raised in Japan. The story of Chin-su, another study participant, whose father was a high-ranking Ch’ongnyo˘n official and whose mother was Japanese, shows that Ch’ongnyo˘n also relied on a type of boundary-maintenance mechanism based on informal sanctions and cultural taboos, in this case against interethnic marriage. When his mother showed up on a school field day dressed in her traditional Korean costume, she instantly became a subject of gossip among his classmates and their parents. Such a public display of the Korean identity in the face of severe discrimination was generally considered a courageous and admirable act, but his classmates and their parents did not like a Japanese “acting” as if she were a “genuine” Korean. One might rightly suspect that this type of transborder nation-building project, predicated on the radical disengagement from the host society, would become increasingly difficult to sustain over time. It is therefore not surprising that the ideology of “eventual return” (Lie 2008, 32–65) emerged as an almost logical corollary to this particular transborder nation-building strategy. The repatriation campaign that swept the Korean community in the late 1950s was the materialization of this ideology. To adequately grasp

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the uproar engendered by this campaign, we need first to examine why cross-strait migration became such a politicized issue throughout the 1950s. illegal migrants, defectors, or refugees? disputes over japan’s deportation policy Yi Pyo˘ng-nam, a Korean detainee in the Ōmura detention center, applied for repatriation to North Korea . . . but Yi was instead severely assaulted by anticommunist inmates who received orders from the South Korean CIA.14 . . . Twenty more detainees became the victims of similar assaults, and they subsequently withdrew their applications for repatriation to the North. . . . Deporting such detainees to South Korea resulted in grave consequences. According to our investigation, about half of the 251 detainees who were deported to South Korea in 1956 were turned over to the South Korean CIA as soon as they arrived in South Korea. Zainichi Chōsenjin no Jinken o Mamoru kai (1964, B22–B35)15

The relationships among Japan, North Korea, and South Korea did not normalize for decades after the dissolution of the empire. As a result, the parameters that would determine the legality and the legitimacy of border crossings were not settled for an extended period, generating chronic and protracted controversies. How to represent and treat certain migration flows between the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago—as forced migration, human smuggling, refugee movement, repatriation, deportation, or something else—became a highly politicized topic. The outcome of these disputes was crucial not only to the legitimacy of the states involved but also to the destiny of those crossing the borders. Japan reluctantly agreed to grant a more stable residence status to Koreans who continued to remain in Japan from the colonial period. Yet the government consistently denied the right of residence to those who had repatriated to the Korean peninsula and then returned to Japan clandestinely. These “illegal” migrants were former Japanese nationals who most likely had family ties in Japan. Indeed, to some, Japan was the only home that they had known their entire lives. The application of such a strict cutoff point was thus considered exceptionally arbitrary and cruel by many moderate to progressive Japanese politicians and intellectuals; other European countries, in comparison, generally made an exception in dealing

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with the immigration and citizenship status of former colonial subjects. Moreover, this radical exclusionary policy was difficult to enforce. Many Koreans successfully skirted the postwar border control system, assisted by well-entrenched human smuggling networks. Once they had safely arrived at the shores of the Japanese archipelago, they were able to rely on thick kin and hometown networks for employment and security. To legalize their status, some took advantage of several loopholes in the registration system, especially in the early years of its implementation; others appealed to sympathetic or corrupt low-level Japanese bureaucrats and managed to obtain registrations; and still others purchased the registrations of repatriated or deceased Koreans on the black market. One of my research participants, Han-ik, for instance, was able to obtain the foreigner’s registration document of his old friend even before he was smuggled into Japan at the dawn of the Korean War. His friend had lived in Fukuoka from 1937 on and obtained his foreigner’s registration document in 1947. But he subsequently returned to Korea without reporting his departure to the Japanese authorities, which enabled Han-ik to reuse his document. Unlike others in a similar situation, Han-ik was even able to change the name on the document to his real name by taking advantage of a special ordinance that allowed document holders to change the registered name if Japanized names had been used for initial registration. Han-ik’s experience is especially interesting for its irony: the fact that many Koreans possessed both their original Korean name and a Japanized name—in large part as a result of colonial assimilation policies and postcolonial discrimination against Koreans—undermined the state’s capacity to pin down their identity while enabling them to avoid state surveillance. Despite these success stories, the deportation and removal records of the Japanese government attest to the existence of a large number of Koreans who failed to establish lawful residence in Japan one way or the other. These were the people who filled the Ōmura and Hamamatsu detention centers throughout the 1950s. The Japanese government classified these detainees into two groups: first, colonial-era migrants who had not repatriated to Korea in the immediate postwar era, yet had lost lawful residence status in Japan due to their serious violations of the Foreigners’ Registration Act; and second, post-1945 “illegal” migrants from South Korea who were arrested during or after their clandestine entry. Throughout the 1950s, the deportation of these two groups of detainees did not proceed smoothly. Af-

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ter all, the nationality status of these detainees was still in dispute, leaving the question of where to deport them unresolved. South Korea claimed that both groups of detainees were South Korean citizens, but it adamantly refused to admit the first group, who were seen as indigent and ideologically suspect. South Korea argued that the precise residence status of these former colonial subjects should be determined not by the unilateral imposition of the draconian Foreigners’ Registration Act but by the upcoming bilateral treaty between Japan and South Korea. As former Japanese nationals, South Korea argued, these Koreans deserved more protection from deportation than did other foreigners. Ch’ongnyo˘n and its allies denounced Japan’s deportation policy for a different reason. By planning to deport all Korean detainees to South Korea without exception, they argued, the Japanese government stripped the detainees of the right to be “repatriated” to North Korea. They developed two lines of critiques applicable respectively to each group of detainees. First, they criticized the Japanese government for ignoring that most colonialera migrants in Japan had already chosen socialist North Korea as their homeland, as evidenced by their maintenance of the Chōsen designation in their foreigner’s registry (the meaning of which will be discussed in detail later in this chapter) or by a stated preference during their detention, as was the case for Yi Pyo˘ng-nam, cited at the beginning of this section. If these detainees needed to be deported, they ought to be sent to North rather than to South Korea. Second, those who entered Japan after 1945 could not be simply classified as “illegal migrants.” They were “refugees” who escaped starvation, compulsory military service, anticommunist persecution, and political massacres in South Korea—not an unfounded claim given the extreme poverty and state terror rampant in South Korea in the 1950s. Sending them back to South Korea, therefore, would not be a legitimate exercise of state sovereignty but a grave violation of the emerging international norms on refugee protection. In a similar vein, Ch’ongnyo˘n and its allies in Japan accused South Korea of various human rights abuses in the latter half of the 1950s, including masterminding the frequent assaults on detainees who had expressed their wishes to be deported to North Korea. The report cited at the beginning of this section provides one such example. As if to corroborate this denunciation, ninety-four detainees in the Ōmura detention center went on a hunger strike in 1958 to protest their scheduled deportation to South Korea (Morris-Suzuki 2007). As was the case in the

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POW camp in South Korea during the Korean War (Monica Kim 2011), the Ōmura detention center became a battleground on which leftist and rightist inmates, the latter often instigated and supported by the Japanese and South Korean authorities, violently collided over the question of where they should be repatriated. The alarmed South Korean government warned Japan that, if it sent these detainees to North Korea, South Korea would, in retaliation, refuse to repatriate the roughly 900 Japanese fishermen who had been detained for their alleged intrusion into South Korea’s territorial waters. The South Korean state vilified the detainees who pled for deportation to the North as “criminals, drug smugglers, draft dodgers, and communist sympathizers” who did not deserve the protection of the Japanese government or international law (Oemubu 1956). The trials of arrested stowaways highlight how the climate of the day instantly politicized the flow of cross-strait migration, much of which was driven by motives more personal than political. One of my research participants, Su-yo˘ng, for instance, explained that “the desire to eat enough boiled white rice and send [his] poor mother fancy clothes made in Japan” was behind his decision to be smuggled into Japan. Yet during his trial in the port of Pusan, the South Korean prosecutor accused him of being “a traitor to the fatherland,” whereas the court-appointed attorney asked for forgiveness, defending Su-yo˘ng’s unauthorized departure as an effort “to earn foreign currency for the development of the fatherland.” Given the heated political rhetoric to which Su-yo˘ng’s seemingly innocuous migration decision was immediately subjected, it would not be difficult to imagine the outcry engendered by North Korea’s petition for the massive repatriation of Koreans in Japan in the following years. return, banishment, or exodus? disputes over north korea’s repatriation campaign

Han-ik fled to Japan at the eve of the Korean War to escape the draft. With the help of his old friend and uncle who had lived in Japan since the colonial period, he managed to legalize his status, graduate from the Korean senior high school, marry a second-generation Korean, and become a high-ranking Ch’ongnyo˘n activist. His father in Korea, however, was very disappointed to learn that Han-ik, his first son, would not come back to his hometown. In 1960, determined to bring back Han-ik, his father paid to smuggle himself into Japan, only to be arrested and sent to the Ōmura

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detention center. While visiting his father, Han-ik persuaded him to apply for repatriation to North Korea; he was afraid that, if his father were to be deported to South Korea, the South Korean intelligence agency would charge his father with spying due to Han-ik’s involvement in Ch’ongnyo˘n. Although his mother and other siblings were still in South Korea, reunification seemed imminent: after twelve years of dictatorship, the Rhee administration in South Korea had just been overthrown in April 1960 by protesters shouting the slogan, “Let’s march up to the North! Please come down to the South!” Han-ik had no inkling that his father would never be able to reunite with his family in South Korea before his death in North Korea thirty years later.

In the mid-1950s, North Korea and Ch’ongnyo˘n began to petition for the massive repatriation of Koreans in Japan, not just a small number of detainees. Securing the support of the Japanese government, the International Red Cross, and many Koreans in Japan, the Repatriation Campaign moved more than 80,000 Koreans from Japan to North Korea, including some who applied for “repatriation” to North Korea while awaiting deportation at the detention center, as was the case for Han-ik’s father. The stunning success and the quick decline of this campaign demonstrate both the appeal and the limits of North Korea’s transborder nation-building project. The success of this campaign was an outcome of the confluence of heterogeneous and mutually contradictory interests (Morris-Suzuki 2007). Japan’s conservative ruling party had long sought to rid Japan of its economically destitute and politically recalcitrant Korean minority. It was also trying to minimize opposition to the controversial Japan–U.S. security treaty in the offing; cooperating with North Korea’s repatriation campaign was one way of wooing leftist politicians and intellectuals, who had long criticized the administration for favoring South over North Korea. In addition, throughout the 1950s, the Japanese government had sought to repatriate Japanese who had been trapped in communist countries (China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea) after the collapse of the empire; its cooperation with North Korea therefore could be justified as a shrewd diplomatic move to bring back its own nationals.16 The nationalist leadership of North Korea and the newly formed Ch’ongnyo˘n (both solidifying their hegemony through the purge of an internationalist faction), for their part, became increasingly convinced that the “repatriation” of Koreans would serve their interests, the potential

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economic burden of subsidized repatriation and settlement notwithstanding. The repatriates were expected to help relieve the post–civil war labor ­shortage in North Korea.17 Moreover, repatriation could be the first step toward normalizing diplomatic relations with Japan, which was considered an increasingly desirable goal given the weakening communist alliance among North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union (Morris-Suzuki 2007). Repatriation was also expected to strengthen the hegemony of Ch’ongnyo˘n—and by extension, North Korea—by offering an exit option to many impoverished Koreans, especially the younger generation who were coming of age faced with grim prospects in Japan—even more so if they could not legalize their undocumented status. Most important, the spectacle of Koreans in Japan voluntarily repatriating to North Korea would stand in stark contrast to their forcible deportation to South Korea; it would be an exercise in national self-determination by ordinary Koreans, who had managed to overcome the obstruction imposed by the neoimperialist coalition. The Japanese government and the International Red Cross, which aided the repatriation process, distanced themselves from this triumphalist rhetoric. Facing fierce protests from South Korea, which condemned their cooperation as a “grave infringement on the sovereignty of South Korea,” both the Japanese government and the Red Cross asserted that their decision was not based on any legal judgment about the nationality of the repatriates but on the humanitarian principle that obliged the international community to facilitate the resettlement of “displaced persons” in the country of their choosing, so long as that country admitted them (Oemubu 1956). Nevertheless, this seemingly innocuous representation was anything but apolitical: as the use of the term displaced persons implies, this representation reinforced and naturalized the notion that Korean residents did not belong in Japan. The repatriation procedure itself was a rite of passage that produced the truth of the “displacement” of Koreans. For instance, the foreigner’s registration cards of the repatriates were stamped with “Re-Exit” (Saishukkoku, 再出國), even if many of them had been born in Japan and had never left the country (Morris-Suzuki 2007, 226). This particular representation effectively invalidated South Korea’s claim that the “repatriation” involved neither voting with one’s feet nor an innocuous resettlement of displaced persons but rather the banishment of South Korean citizens whose permanent resident status should have been guaranteed by Japan. The term used by each party reveals the ongoing competition over how

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to define the disputed population movement. While North Korea used the term kwiguk (歸國), meaning “returning to the home country,” South Korea consistently used the term puksong (北送), meaning “sending/­ deportation to the North.” Japan used kikoku (歸國, returning to the home country) or hikiage (引揚), roughly translated as repatriation, the same term used for the postwar repatriation of Japanese (Watt 2009). The International Red Cross interchangeably used repatriation, resettlement, and, in correspondences addressed to the South Korean government, emigration (Oemubu 1956). In terms of sheer numbers, the Korean community responded with a resounding welcome to North Korea’s initiative.18 Between 1959 and 1967, more than 80,000 Koreans (approximately 15 percent of the total Korean population in Japan), most of whom were from the southern region and had lived in Japan for decades, chose to take a one-way trip to a destination where they had no preexisting ties. It is extremely difficult to obtain a firstperson account from the returnees, who have been locked in North Korea ever since—except for a very few who later defected from North Korea. Nonetheless, data on their socioeconomic status at the point of repatriation and interviews with their families and friends who remained in Japan suggest that this startling record was the result of three factors: Japan’s exclusionary stance toward its former colonial population, the incompetence and tyranny of the South Korean regime, and the Ch’ongnyo˘n version of transborder nationalism focusing on homeland politics rather than the reform of Japan’s minority policies. Fifteen years after the collapse of the empire, Zainichi Koreans were deeply impoverished and could expect little help from the Japanese government. Sonia Ryang (1997, 13), for instance, cites a 1963 report on the socioeconomic status of the “repatriates” showing that 4,200 of 6,000 who had jobs were day laborers, while 7,800 were unemployed. Most of the recorded jobs were peddling, waste paper collecting, factory work, and dealing in secondhand goods. Morris-Suzuki (2007, 119–121) draws our attention to the contemporaneous change in Japan’s welfare system. In February 1956, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, in cooperation with the police department, launched an aggressive large-scale investigation of the Livelihood Protection Payment program, the only welfare benefit for which Koreans, as foreign residents, were eligible. The campaign reportedly discovered massive abuse of the system by unqualified Koreans; the government­

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consequently cut the number of Korean beneficiaries from 130,000 to around 50,000 in just two years. As foreigners, they were excluded from the national pension system enacted in 1959. My interview data additionally reveal the ways in which these structural factors were intertwined with cultural expectations and intrafamily dynamics, which ended up dispersing family members in unexpected ways. Hyo˘n-dong, for instance, planned to go to North Korea with his younger brother, hoping to contribute to the building of “the socialist fatherland.” Hyo˘n-dong’s parents did not oppose his brother’s repatriation plan: given the pervasive discrimination against Koreans, his brother, a high school dropout, would likely wind up in the Korean-dominated pachinko business at best, if he stayed in Japan.19 But they pressed Hyo˘n-dong to postpone his departure: they at least wanted to marry off their first son before he left. As a college graduate, Hyo˘n-dong’s career prospects in Japan also seemed much brighter than his brother’s. Hyo˘n-dong acceded, but several years later, after his marriage, the vehement opposition of his wife’s family prevented him from following through on his original plan to join his brother. In Suk-cha’s case, the family pressure worked the other way. Her motherin-law wished to spend the rest of her life in the “bosom of the socialist fatherland.” Although her four sons were not particularly enthusiastic, they saw it as a grave breach of their filial duty to let her leave alone. Although Suk-cha, a widow, was the first daughter-in-law, who was supposed to take care of her parents-in-law according to the traditional cultural norm, she resisted the pressure of her in-laws to join their repatriation. She feared that repatriation to North Korea might make it permanently impossible for her to reunite with her natal family in South Korea. The South Korean regime, for its part, was an accomplice to its own humiliation. Apart from a disappointing economic performance that lagged behind its competitor to the north, the Rhee administration, stubbornly bent on its anticommunist agenda, even helped increase the number of “repatriates” by pushing some unauthorized migrants awaiting deportation to choose “repatriation” to the North for fear of being persecuted as communists back in South Korea. Han-ik’s father’s predicament, introduced at the beginning of this section, is a case in point. Su-yo˘ng, another postwar illegal migrant, described to me the impasse at which detainees like H ­ an-ik’s father found themselves: Once you were deported back to South Korea, the police would harass you, asking whether or not you’d met Ch’ongnyo˘n relatives, whether or not you’d

“Who Owns the Nation?” 93 seen the photos of Kim Il-sung, whether or not you’d read communist pamphlets. And guess what? Seventy percent of my neighbors were Ch’ongnyo˘n [affiliates] back then, and the photos and pamphlets were all over. They hung right on the wall of my cousin’s house! How would it even be possible not to see these photos and pamphlets unless you were blind? Still, if you say yes [to the police interrogator], you’re busted. If you say no, they beat you like hell, yelling that you’re lying. Anticipating all this, anybody with brain would naturally think, “No, I won’t go through that. I’ll just take the chance. I’ll go to North Korea.” As many as twenty people from my own village, who came to Japan in the 1950s just to make money, because they were so poor, eventually chose to go to North Korea for these reasons. How would they have known that they would never be able to come back, that South and North Korea would remain divided for more than sixty years, and that they’d end up starving in the country advertised as “the heaven on earth” [chisang nagwo˘n]?20

Regardless of the long-term cost that these returnees had to pay, in the short term, the success of the repatriation campaign strengthened Ch’ongnyo˘n’s power just as its organizational strength had contributed to the campaign’s success. During the repatriation campaign, Ch’ongnyo˘n worked as a de facto consular office of North Korea as well as a mouthpiece for Koreans in Japan. The number of students in Ch’ongnyo˘n-run schools increased sharply in the early 1960s as many students who were culturally Japanese transferred from the Japanese schools to prepare themselves for repatriation (S. Kwo˘n 1960). Some repatriates entrusted their assets to Ch’ongnyo˘n before departure, which substantially increased the organization’s financial resources (Morris-Suzuki 2007, 159). Yet this exodus-cum-homecoming remained a viable prospect for Zainichi Koreans for only a brief period. Although the repatriation program officially ended in 1989, the number of participants peaked in 1960 (49,036) and 1961 (22,801) and then dropped sharply to several thousand per year through the rest of the 1960s, several hundred per year in the 1970s, and single digits per year in the mid-1980s (S. Yu 1993, 95). By the mid-1960s, the news of disappointing realities in North Korea had already spread. The 1961 military coup in South Korea overturned the short-lived reform government established after the April Revolution a year prior, stifling Zainichi Koreans’ hopes for imminent reunification and undermining the dream of eventual return to their hometown in the southern region of reunited Korea. Furthermore, what had been envisioned as a temporary sojourn in Japan was becoming long-term settlement as the number

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of ­second- and third-generation Koreans continued to grow. Meanwhile, urban gentrification was destroying the historic Korean ghetto, which had been the Ch’ongnyo˘n stronghold. The momentum now swung back to South Korea.

South Korea: The Homeland State as Broker and Gatekeeper controlling the interface: mindan and the bureaucratic persona of zainichi koreans

Although North Korea rapidly saturated ethnic Korean enclaves with organizations and institutions under its guidance, the battleground preferred by South Korea was the “nationality” designation in Japan’s Foreigners’ Registry. In other words, South Korea targeted not subjective but objective identification, not the soul of the people but their bureaucratic persona. When the Japanese government enacted the Foreigners’ Registration Act in 1947, neither of the two Korean states had been established. The nationality of Koreans was recorded in the registry uniformly as Chōsen, the name of the long-time dynasty and the former colony. Referring to the now expired colonial classificatory system discussed in the previous chapter, the designation signified, and indeed produced, the radical exclusion of the former colonial subjects from Japan’s redrawn national citizenry, yet not their inclusion into the citizenry of the newly emerging independent postcolonial Korean state. The Japanese authorities explained that Chōsen was merely a provisional designation, indicating individuals’ colonial origins but not their official nationality, and that the designation would be used only temporarily until the question of nationality of Koreans in Japan was clarified. Once the two Korean states were established in 1948, South Korea found Chōsen problematic in a dual sense: it was associated not only with a humiliating colonial memory but also with North Korea, because North Korea had retained Choso˘n/Chōsen for its official name whereas South Korea had not.21 Hence, beginning in 1949, the South Korean government urged Koreans in Japan to register explicitly as “nationals abroad” (chaeoe kungmin, 在外國民) of the Republic of Korea and requested that the Japanese government collectively change their nationality designation in the Foreigners’ Registry from 朝鮮 (Chōsen) to 韓国 (Kankoku), a Japanese transliteration of the new name for South Korea.

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North Korea, on the other hand, sought to take advantage of the ambiguity of the Chōsen designation, claiming that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (which translates Korea into Choso˘n) was the sole legitimate custodian of the historic Choso˘n minjok. From the perspective of the North Korean state, Kankoku was a coarse fabrication of the puppet South Korean regime. The term revealed South Korea’s negation of the long history of the unified state and its hidden desire to perpetuate the “unnatural” division of the nation (minjok). This interpretation had a broad appeal for Koreans in Japan. Chōsen had become an unchallengeable ethnonym and an uncontroversial designator of the ancestral homeland during the colonial period, its pejorative usage in the colonial context notwithstanding. North Korea also benefited from the default status of the Chōsen designation: many ordinary Koreans, especially those illiterate in the Japanese language and unfamiliar with the language of registration practices, could not afford to care about a designation whose consequences remained obscure. As a result, although more than 94 percent of Koreans originally came from the southern regions of the Korean peninsula, about 92 percent of those identified in the Foreigners Registry of 1950 remained identified as Chōsen (S. Ryang 1997). This enabled North Korea to allege that the maintenance of this designation showed the individual’s conscious choice of North Korea as his or her fatherland. To change this status quo, South Korea sought to capitalize on its geopolitical advantage. The bilateral negotiations between South Korea and Japan that began in the winter of 1951 were expected to secure the recognition of South Korea as the sole legitimate nation-state in the peninsula entitled to represent the Korean population in Japan. Although negotiations remained unresolved throughout the 1950s, postponing the normalization of diplomatic relations for another decade, the [South] Korean Liaison Mission (an interim body that served the role of a consular office before 1965) managed to secure the cooperation, if not the staunch support, of the conservative Japanese government. Beginning in 1950, the Japanese government allowed Koreans individually, though not collectively, to change their designations from Chōsen to Kankoku or to the Republic of Korea. The change in the reverse direction, that is, from Kankoku to Chōsen or to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, was not allowed in principle. The rationale was that Kankoku was more or less a nationality, whereas Chōsen was only a provisional placeholder.22 Moreover, some staff in immigration and municipal

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offices ­persuaded, or sometimes coerced, Koreans to change their designations from Chōsen to Kankoku when they visited the offices to deal with ordinary administrative affairs; in some reported cases, the staff members changed the designation at their own discretion without even informing those concerned, who were often illiterate in the Japanese language. The Japanese government aided South Korea in indirect ways as well.23 In processing various administrative transactions, such as a transfer of inherited assets, release for parole, or a provision of insurance for bereaved families, the Japanese government required Koreans to submit official documents issued by the Korean Liaison Mission or the pro–South Korea organization Mindan (short for the Korean Residents Union in Japan, acting on behalf of the Korean Liaison Mission), while refusing to accept equivalent documentation issued by Ch’ongnyo˘n. In 1954, the Ministry of Justice instructed local administrations to apply South Korean civil laws to all Koreans in Japan regardless of the nationality designations in their foreigners’ registrations.24 This policy would make Koreans in Japan more dependent on the South Korean government in administrative matters and thereby more vulnerable to its pressure. The rationale for this policy, offered by the Japanese government, merits a separate discussion: (1) Japanese bureaucrats are not able to distinguish between “Chōsenjin” (people of Chōsen) and “Kankokujin” (people of Kankoku); (2) the majority of Koreans in Japan came from the southern Korean peninsula; and (3) a bilateral treaty with South Korea is in the offing.25 The first point reveals that the legal basis for determining the nationality of Koreans was not yet established at the time; neither the designation in the foreigner’s registry nor self-report was considered a credible basis on which to make legally binding decisions. The second point is more interesting than it may initially appear; the idea that regional origin as documented in the family registry determined the legal domicile of an individual was a colonial legacy rooted in the distinctive nested membership structure of the Japanese Empire (Chapter One). Finally, the third point plainly shows South Korea’s advantage over North Korea in the realm of diplomacy. The discussion so far reveals that, although South Korea did not have the upper hand in the competition for the hearts and minds of its transborder “kin,” it did have a decisive advantage in the contact zones between the Korean community in Japan and the outside world. South Korea could perform more effectively in this interface not only because Japan lent its

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support but also because the ancestral hometowns and kinship ties of more than 90 percent of Zainichi Koreans were located in the southern regions of the peninsula. As mentioned in Chapter One, during the colonial period, Korean migrants in Japan had to obtain a reentry permit from the Japanese police office to travel to their hometowns and then return to Japan; after the end of colonial rule, these migrants had to obtain not only reentry permits from the Japanese government but also passports from the South Korean state, which required the change of the nationality designation as a prerequisite for the issuance of such documents. In addition, family registration documents necessary for various bureaucratic transactions in Japan were preserved in the local administrative offices of their ancestral hometowns in the South and processed through the Korean Liaison Mission. Because the South Korean government delegated this administrative work to Mindan (T’ae-g. Kim 2000), those who applied for family registration documents, certificates of South Korean citizenship, or South Korean passports had to seek Mindan’s assistance. Nevertheless, until the mid-1960s, the South Korean government’s influence within the Korean communities of Japan had been limited to sporadic instances, although activists and various organizations under North Korean control occupied the everyday landscape of the ethnic enclaves. The benefit of changing one’s nationality designation from Chōsen to Kankoku was not yet clear. My ethnographic data suggest that the aforementioned policies of the Japanese government were not applied consistently and rigorously on the ground, which gave a great deal of leeway to local bureaucrats and Ch’ongnyo˘n supporters. The absence of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan and the absolute poverty of most Koreans made it extremely difficult for Koreans to visit their hometowns in any event, limiting Mindan’s influence to those who were exceptionally successful and resourceful.26 Most important, as shown by the disputes over Japan’s deportation policies and North Korea’s Repatriation Campaign, the violent anticommunist nation-building process in the South—crystallized in a series of civilian massacres and the civil war—made identification with the South Korean state and subjection to its jurisdictional claim an unattractive prospect for many Koreans. In short, South Korea and Mindan established only fragmentary domination over Koreans in Japan—a “weak state” perched over a “strong society,” to evoke Joel Migdal’s characterization of many postcolonial states in the developing world (Migdal 1988). With the

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ratification of the Japan–South Korea treaty in the mid-1960s, however, the situation began to change. predator or protector? disputes over south korea’s application campaign for permanent residence by treaty

The 1965 Japan–South Korea bilateral treaty granted “South Korean nationals” who had continued to reside in Japan since their colonial-era migration (as well as their children) the right to apply for a special permanent residence status, called Permanent Residence by Treaty. The South Korean government initially expected that this new legal arrangement would provide Koreans in Japan with a clear incentive to identify themselves as South Koreans. Before 1965, the resident status of Koreans, whether identified as Chōsen or Kankoku, had been almost identical, although identically insecure; now only those who belonged to the Kankoku category became eligible for a permanent resident status of any sort, which entailed various subsidiary benefits (B. Kim 2006). Nevertheless, to the dismay of the South Korean state, only 20,000 of over 600,000 Koreans applied for permanent resident status in 1965, the first year of the five-year application period. Many remained hesitant, suspecting a hidden agenda on the part of the Japanese and South Korean states. On the one hand, the application process required the applicant to expose his or her life, past and present, to a thorough examination by the Japanese authorities. For example, the applicant had to submit documentation in the Foreigners’ Registry to establish his or her uninterrupted residence. This was not always easy, given the chaotic situation in the immediate aftermath of the war when back-and-forth movement across the strait was common. Some Koreans were afraid that the investigation might reveal their previous or current violations of immigration laws, such as the purchase of other people’s registries. Even those who met the eligibility criteria were likely to lack proper registration records: many did not register in the Foreigners’ Registry, especially in 1947, for fear of deportation or simply because they were unaware of the new registration requirement; in addition, records were not always consistent across time due to mistakes made by those registering or by Japanese bureaucrats. The illiteracy of many Koreans in Japanese and their use of multiple names (Korean and Japanized names) contributed to inconsistent records in the early years of registration (Mindan 1976). These deficiencies in documentation could be remedied by other means—for example, by submitting affidavits of reliable sponsors. Yet

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this type of screening left much room for discretion among frontline immigration officers, whom Koreans had long distrusted as unsympathetic and hostile. The South Korean state had not enjoyed a high level of trust among Koreans, either, as detailed in the previous section. Traumatic encounters with the violence of the colonial and postcolonial states had taught ordinary Koreans that they had better remain at a safe distance from both the Japanese and South Korean bureaucracies. Ch’ongnyo˘n’s opposition campaign further kindled this existing mistrust and anxiety. Ch’ongnyo˘n argued that the promise of so-called permanent resident status was a shrewd gimmick of the Japanese government to invent an excuse to deport Koreans for whatever trivial violations might be found during the screening process. The treaty included several clauses that specified the conditions, processes, and the destination of lawful deportation to South Korea, which further fueled Ch’ongnyo˘n propaganda. The consequence of the treaty, Ch’ongnyo˘n argued, was not to guarantee Koreans a permanent resident status but to infringe on their previous resident status, which was already precarious. Ch’ongnyo˘n further argued that the hidden agenda of the South Korean “puppet regime” was to expropriate the property and financial resources of Koreans in Japan. This predatory regime, it claimed, was interested only in squeezing the most out of its people; having starved 30 million brethren on the peninsula, South Korea had now turned its sights on Koreans in Japan. Not only money but the lives of their children were at stake, Ch’ongnyo˘n warned. This warmonger regime, which had enforced a repressive universal conscription system and wasted its people in Vietnam as the “bullet bait” of American imperialism, was now targeting Koreans in Japan, who would be dragged to battlefields as soon as their nationality status was clarified. According to Ch’ongnyo˘n’s propaganda, application for permanent resident status (“yo˘ngjugwo˘n sinch’o˘ng”) equaled application for permanent death (“yo˘ng chugu˘l sinch’o˘ng”) (Choso˘n Sinbo 1970b). These disparaging claims were not entirely groundless. The Park administration, which had seized power after a military coup in 1961, hurried to establish the bilateral treaty precisely because it considered the influx of Japanese capital, including that of Zainichi Koreans, to be essential for the growth of the South Korean economy. Furthermore, the South Korean state had been interested in drafting Koreans in Japan since 1953 (Chaeoe Kyominkwa 1953).27 Some of the post-1945 illegal migrants to Japan (like Han-ik and Su-yo˘ng, introduced in previous sections) were indeed draft

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dodgers who would have been punished severely if they had been deported back to South Korea.28 The revised military service law in 1962 permitted South Korean citizens residing abroad to postpone or to be exempted from conscription, a revision made in anticipation of the bilateral treaty with Japan. Nevertheless, the photos of a few draft notices mistakenly sent to those who had applied for permanent resident status were broadly circulated in the Ch’ongnyo˘n daily newspaper Choso˘n Sinbo, in an attempt to reveal the danger awaiting the clueless converts. In response to the disappointingly low application rate, South Korea launched a systematic and aggressive campaign. The government negotiated with the Japanese government to minimize procedural obstacles and increase the number of individuals who passed the required screening.29 South Korea mobilized all the Mindan activists as well as consular and other government officials for household visitations, lecturing tours, public speeches, and assistant services to help with documentation (Mindan 1976). The South Korean government accused Ch’ongnyo˘n of harboring a hidden agenda of its own, namely hindering Koreans from establishing a more stable resident status in Japan so as to make them more susceptible to its propaganda, specifically its repatriation scheme. Precisely because Koreans in Japan were unconvinced by the South Korean claims, and because Ch’ongnyo˘n’s countercampaign was powerful, Mindan was able to effectively lobby for the South Korean government to augment the benefit package: the government accorded those who registered as “South Korean Nationals Abroad” in the consular office the right to invite family members in Korea to Japan, granted them tax privileges on investments in Korea, ensured their exemption from mandatory military service, and offered other benefits as well.30 It might still have been much more difficult for the South Korean state to overcome Ch’ongnyo˘n’s opposition if the Japanese conservative government had not backed South Korea. Soon after the treaty was signed, the Japanese Ministry of Justice announced that Kankoku was a nationality, while Chōsen became an obsolete category. This announcement formalized the unequal status of the Chōsen and Kankoku designations, which had only implicitly guided bureaucratic transactions before 1965. This now formalized asymmetry dealt a heavy blow to Ch’ongnyo˘n’s countercampaign urging Koreans to change their identification from Kankoku to Chōsen: the Ministry of Justice issued an official instruction to limit the change in this direction to very exceptional cases,31 and the ministry also prohibited

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local municipal offices from enacting the change of designation at their discretion, an arrangement that sought to incapacitate reformist mayors sympathetic to Ch’ongnyo˘n and North Korea. Although Ch’ongnyo˘n was able to mobilize more than 20,000 Koreans to demand the change from Kankoku to Chōsen between 1965 and 1970, only 415 people succeeded in obtaining local government approval; of these, 230 approval decisions were retroactively overturned by the central government.32 By January 1971 (the application deadline), more than 350,000 Koreans had applied for permanent resident status by identifying their nationality as South Korean. The southbound movement of Koreans on paper continued in the following years. channeling “transnationalism from below”: the homeland state as gatekeeper

Suk-cha had been unable to meet her natal family since they had repatriated to Korea just before the end of the Pacific War. She had remained in Japan with her family-in-law, who later became ardent Ch’ongnyo˘n supporters. This effectively made it virtually impossible for her to visit her hometown in South Korea for decades. On her sixtieth birthday, Suk-cha decided to finally participate in Mindan’s Homecoming Group Tour: I thought that it would be okay now. I had fulfilled my obligations to my mother-in-law and my husband. I had raised my children and married off all of them. I heard that my own mother in her eighties was still alive in South Korea. Then, shouldn’t I go see her before she passes away? Although my children were working for Ch’ongnyo˘n, they understood. Still, I didn’t tell any of my neighbors. I didn’t want to strain my relationship with them or embarrass my children.

Despite her excitement, Suk-cha was hurt when she finally reunited with her sister after forty years. With tears in her eyes and distress in her voice, her sister told Suk-cha not to come again; she was afraid that her connection with a “Ch’ongnyo˘n person” (that is, Suk-cha) might jeopardize her husband’s career as a professor. Yet two years after the first visit, Suk-cha changed her identification to Kankoku to take another trip to South Korea: “I just thought that there was not much time left for me.”

The transborder nation-building projects of North and South Korea presented contrasting visions for the future of colonial-era migrants stranded

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in Japan: repatriation to the homeland versus permanent settlement in the former metropole. According to mainstream Ch’ongnyo˘n discourse, permanent resident status and the ban on discrimination in admission to Japanese schools, both of which were guaranteed by the Japan–South Korea treaty, were not improvements in the lives of Koreans; rather, they were pathways to assimilation. Ch’ongnyo˘n’s ambitious effort to build an autonomous national society on foreign soil, however, risked isolation and exclusion from the state of residence. The majority of Koreans came to find this vision increasingly unviable and unattractive. It was not simply the desire to take root in Japan that nudged Koreans in Japan toward embracing South Korea’s contrasting vision. The desire to reconnect with their home communities was another important motivation. The South Korean state seeking to control Koreans in Japan by regulating their access to their home communities was not a new phenomenon. Nonetheless, the normalization of diplomatic relations and the general improvement of economic conditions from the mid-1960s onward made various exchanges with their home communities possible and affordable to an increasing number of Koreans. Some wanted to send remittances to their impoverished families; others wanted to invite their families to Japan for family reunions; still others wanted to visit their ancestral hometowns to meet their long-separated families, attend important family events such as funerals, or visit the graves of their deceased parents. Unlike its predecessor regime in the 1950s, which had sealed off its borders in fear of communist infiltration from abroad, the developmental state in the 1960s and 1970s sought to actively discipline, utilize, and nurture this “transnationalism from below” (M. Smith and Guarnizo 1998).33 The state facilitated, hindered, or channeled cross-border flows of goods and people to serve its own economic and political agendas. The new regime actively urged Korean entrepreneurs and hometown associations to invest in or donate to national developmental projects and the improvement of their hometowns. This practice was vilified by Ch’ongnyo˘n as the same old mercenary and predatory behavior. Some Koreans in Japan indeed accused not only the South Korean government but also their own families and villagers of being demanding, manipulative, and ungrateful. They resentfully lamented that they were seen not as “tongp’o” (coethnics) but as “tonp’o” (“ton” meaning “money” in Korean).34 Many nonetheless found it empowering and rewarding to actively respond to these new government initiatives. They took pride in and gained recognition for aiding their fam-

“Who Owns the Nation?” 103

ily members, their community of origin, and, by extension, their “homeland” in need. Those from Cheju Island, for instance, still like to boast that tangerines, the major cash crop of the island, were first introduced to Cheju in the mid-1950s, when some Zainichi Koreans smuggled in the seedlings for their indigent families. Regardless of the validity and verifiability of this broadly shared belief, it is true that Koreans in Japan brought water pipes, electricity, and cement bridges, if not tangerines, to the island that had long been one of the poorest regions of South Korea.35 Mindan served as a conduit for channeling this “transnationalism from below” into the developmental projects of the homeland state. In contrast to these thickening cross-border exchanges, those who kept the Chōsen designation could hardly maintain even basic contact with their families in South Korea. Labeled as communist sympathizers, they were not allowed to enter South Korea unless they changed their identification to Kankoku. Moreover, South Korean citizens known to be related to “Ch’ongnyo˘n people” faced constant surveillance by local police, promotion restrictions in public sector careers (for example, civil or military service), ostracism from local communities, and, in extreme cases, prosecution for espionage activity. Distressed family members in South Korea often pressed their Ch’ongnyo˘n relatives to change their affiliation or disowned them out of desperation. It was not uncommon for South Korean family members to remove the name of the relatives who “repatriated” to North Korea from their family registry by falsely reporting to the authorities that they were dead or missing.36 Some families, assisted by other relatives or villagers affiliated with Mindan, managed to circumvent the punitive South Korean state and maintain cross-border family ties. For instance, South Korean relations of Chin-t’ae (introduced at the beginning of the book) told me how thankful they were for Chin-t’ae’s remittances, although, they confessed, they always burned his letters immediately. In general, however, tensions, estrangement, guilt, and resentment damaged many cross-border family relations throughout the Cold War period. The annual homecoming event for those who had not obtained South Korean citizenship provides the most glaring example of how the South Korean state actively capitalized on cross-border family ties to press conversion. Reflecting the increasing confidence of the South Korean state vis-à-vis its competitor,37 Mindan began to organize a homecoming tour for Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans during the mid-1970s. Participants were issued one-time travel permits, visited their ancestral hometowns, and met their

104  “Who Owns the Nation?”

f­amilies under the surveillance of South Korean security agents. Mindan organized a group tour around the developing cities, thriving industrial zones, and refurbished historical sites to impress the participants with South Korea’s rapid economic growth and propagate the ruling military regime’s nationalist credentials (S. Park 2010). These tours were exhaustively covered by the South Korean media and Mindan’s official gazette. The participants reportedly denounced Ch’ongnyo˘n for disseminating false propaganda and leading them to betray not only their immediate families but also their fatherland and brethren in the national family writ large. This official representation by no means accurately captured the conflicted experiences of those on the homecoming trip, as illustrated by ­Suk-cha’s fraught reunion with her long-separated sister. Ch’ongnyo˘n, for its part, developed a counternarrative, representing Koreans in Japan as individuals whose “ancestral hometown” (kohyang) had been lost in the South, yet whose “fatherland” (choguk) was undisputedly the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North. Only the eventual reunification of the fatherland, not individual family reunions, could remedy the suffering stemming from this divergence of kohyang and choguk, Ch’ongnyo˘n asserted. However, the success of Mindan’s Homecoming Campaign reveals that Ch’ongnyo˘n failed to resolve the tension inherent in these dual belongings. The South Korean state effectively appealed to Zainichi Koreans’ attachment and sense of obligation to their hometown and family in the South in order to urge them to abandon their “ideological” allegiance to the North. The majority of participants in the tour, including Suk-cha, indeed switched their identification: some understandably felt that they had long been cheated by Ch’ongnyo˘n, whereas others simply could not give up the chance of another family reunion in the future. In any event, under such highly politicized circumstances, the participants’ reputations in the Ch’ongnyo˘n community could be irrevocably smeared; many had no choice but to quit the organization. This explains Suk-cha’s constant concern that her trip might compromise her children’s status in Ch’ongnyo˘n. Pok-sun, an eighty-four-year-old woman I got to know in Osaka, indeed suffered such repercussions. When her mother-inlaw in South Korea passed away in the early 1980s, Pok-sun was torn between two conflicting obligations, one to Ch’ongnyo˘n as a long-time activist, the other to her extended family as the first daughter-in-law. Although she ultimately attended the funeral with a newly issued South Korean passport in hand, her in-laws still griped about the belated fulfillment of her

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filial duty. When she returned to Japan, she was hurt again by some of her long-time friends and neighbors, who denounced her as a traitor. Pok-sun eventually had to resign from her position in Ch’ongnyo˘n. The family registration practice provided the South Korean regime with another means of converting Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans into South Korean citizens. Although the South Korean state had used this registration practice to press Zainichi Koreans to change their nationality designations from Chōsen to Kankoku before 1965, normalized diplomatic relations and increasing cross-border exchanges made proper and timely registration not only much easier but also more imperative. The South Korean civil laws recognized only the kinship relations documented in this historic family registry as genuine and effective. Various bureaucratic transactions or court proceedings in Japan often required the submission of one’s family registry as the most authoritative supporting document. Therefore, it was important for Koreans in Japan to have an accurate registration with respect to birth, death, marriage, divorce, and adoption, in case cross-border intrafamily disputes arose over such matters as inheritance. Such disputes were common in the Korean community in part because the cross-border dispersion of family members and their long-term separation made their family relations unusually complex. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that the South Korean government, intent on every chance to convert Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans, banned those who maintained the Chōsen designation from registering in the family registry. This ban considerably compromised the practical interests of those who maintained the Chōsen designation. A brochure published by a Ch’ongnyo˘n-run legal counseling organization includes descriptions of a variety of real-life cases in which the lack of proper registration in the family registry became problematic. For example, to a person asking how he could prevent his uncle in South Korea from selling off his deceased father’s land without his consent, the counselor answered that it would be difficult for the unregistered son like the questioner to override his uncle’s claim to his father’s property without documentary proof showing his relation to his deceased father.38 Although, in the early years, a few Ch’ongnyo˘n people managed to register by taking advantage of loopholes in the complex registration procedures, these loopholes were quickly closed by the South Korean state. The government simplified registration procedures, reinforced the gatekeeper role of the consular office and Mindan, and required the local administrative offices in South Korea to check the

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nationality designation as a prerequisite for registration in the family registry (Oemubu 1978). Many first-generation Zainichi Koreans found it not only practically necessary but also emotionally reassuring to complete the family registration. The distinctive organizational principle of the family registry, homologous to a certain degree with that of the traditional family genealogy book (chokpo), resonated with the long-held cultural belief of Koreans in their primordial belonging to the patrilineage and the home community, or to the husband’s patrilineage and home community in the case of a married woman. Despite the patriarchal, patrilocal, and patrilineal nature of the family registry, which embodied the nature of the Korean kinship system (Janelli and Yim 1982), many female interviewees showed as much emotional attachment to their registry as their male counterparts: if nothing else, proper registration in their husbands’ family registries could grant their marriages proper legal status and themselves a degree of status, voice, and respect among their kin, especially if their husbands were involved in bigamous relationships. In other words, the family registry was not only an instrument of the state, but also a cultural artifact through which some transborder Koreans envisioned, confirmed, and asserted their legitimate belonging to the ancestral lineage and “homeland” on multiple levels. Although they were conveniently branded as communists, Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans were no exception to this cultural value system. In fact, given the strong nationalist credentials of North Korea and the powerful role of Ch’ongnyo˘n in preventing the assimilation of Koreans into the Japanese mainstream, Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans had ample reason to take pride in the belief that they, not “the puppet South Korean regime,” were the guardians of authentic Korean identity. They had strictly observed the principle of exogamy structured by the peculiar surname institution of Korea and carefully preserved traditional ancestor worship practices, a linchpin of the Korean patrilineal kinship system (Janelli and Yim 1982).39 This ritual additionally offered an opportunity for first-generation Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans to deliver to younger generations their family history—a story that was often inextricably intertwined with the atrocities perpetrated by the violent South Korean regime and expunged from the official history of South Korea (H. Kwon 2010). The ancestor worship practice contributed to solidifying ethnic boundaries by adding one more reason to avoid marriage with Japanese, especially Japanese women, who were seen as inappropriate

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and incompetent at performing these rituals for their husbands’ ancestors (A. Yang 2001). The critical role of the Ch’ongnyo˘n-run schools in teaching their students this “national culture” (minjok munhwa) is unmistakable. These schools, for example, had effectively instilled in the minds of the second- and thirdgeneration Zainichi Koreans that their fathers’ or grandfathers’ “places of origin” in the family registry (honseki in Japanese and ponjo˘k in Korean; see Chapter One) were their “ancestral hometowns” (kohyang), which became all the more romanticized for their inaccessibility. For instance, the lower-level elementary school students were often asked to match their own names and photos with their grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s places of origin and then to identify these places on the pictorial map of the Korean peninsula.40 Apparently, this particular way of imagining one’s belonging to the national “geo-body” (Winichakul 1994) was not unrelated to the organizational principle of the family registry (see Chapter One). South Korea’s ban on family registration not only compromised the practical interests of those who maintained the Chōsen designation but also deepened their sense of loss and uprootedness. Serving as a de facto consular office and the primary gatekeeper, Mindan reaped both handsome profits and political power from the increasing cross-border exchanges. Initially, the delegation of the consular work to Mindan reflected a lack of administrative resources of the inchoate South Korean state. This originally provisional arrangement lasted until 1994, when protests against the exorbitant fees Mindan charged for the issuance of various documents finally pressured the South Korean government into halting this decades-old outsourcing. Such complaints were nothing new, though. An editorial in a Korean newspaper published on July 31, 1968, was already criticizing Mindan for charging as much as ¥10,000 to ¥30,000 to issue a passport, comparing this with the practices of other governments: Japan was charging merely ¥1,000, the United States ¥3,600, and Taiwan ¥900. The editorial expressed concerns that many Koreans in Japan considered Mindan no more than a passport seller.41 A passing statement in the Handbook for Consuls published in 1978 by the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is equally informative (Oemubu 1978). The handbook emphasized that it was illegal to impose extra demands on South Korean citizens who applied for official certificates of various types. This warning seems to confirm the assertion of many interviewees that some

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consular officers or Mindan activists used the issuance of these official certificates to increase their own influence or to line their own pockets. Regardless of its increasing power, Mindan never achieved the same level of legitimacy as Ch’ongnyo˘n. Rather, Mindan was often compared to the colonial-era government-sponsored Korean organization in Japan called Sōaikai, whose leaders were often accused of enriching themselves by exercising their influence on the issuance of reentry permits (Kawashima 2009, 130–168). The discourse of anticommunist nationalism Mindan endorsed was sometimes seen, even by those who consciously distanced themselves from Ch’ongnyo˘n, merely as a façade masking the organization’s pursuit of worldly goods, that is, its rent-seeking behavior.

Belated Imposition of National Division and the Changing Meaning of Choso˘n “the 38th parallel on the dinner table”

Hwa-ji was a teacher in a Ch’ongnyo˘n-run senior high school in Osaka when South Korea’s Application Campaign for Permanent Residence by Treaty swept across the Korean community. If a classmate was absent from class, other students anxiously speculated about whether the absent student had gone to the local administrative office to change his or her identification from Chōsen to Kankoku. One day, Hwa-ji’s students were so agitated that they flocked to the district office to picket it. A student who had been absent that day walked in with her family. She was astonished to find her classmates imploring her not to change the designation, yet she had no other choice but conform to her family’s decision. Feeling ashamed and distressed, the student quit school the next day.

Before the mid-1960s, Chōsen/Choso˘n remained for the most part an undifferentiated default category in Japan, as it had been in the colonial period. The term was a reminder of the entire Korean peninsula in which transborder Koreans had their “roots” and was an ethnonym denoting a community of descent, history, and destiny that had survived colonial occupation and national division. Neither Chōsen nor Kankoku was a reliable sign of a person’s alignment with North or South Korea. Some maintained the default Chōsen category simply because they had no compelling reason to change the status quo. Others changed their designations from Chōsen to Kankoku by coercion or because of misinformation. Those who

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had obtained other people’s registries to legalize their undocumented status could not always align their objective identification with their subjective allegiance. This type of incongruity was common among those from Cheju Island who fled the bloody left–right clash and the subsequent civilian massacre by the emerging anticommunist South Korean regime in 1948. Many of those who fled understandably became ardent supporters of Ch’ongnyo˘n and yet had to obtain other people’s registries to avoid deportation, whether these registries were identified as Chōsen or Kankoku. The nationality designation therefore remained more or less irrelevant to the organization of the everyday lives of Koreans in Japan. Those who were technically identified as Kankoku were still able to participate in various Ch’ongnyo˘n-run organizations or the repatriation campaign. After all, nationality on paper, albeit a potentially sensitive subject, could not provide a visible diacritical marker in everyday interactions as, say, phenotype, skin color, or cultural practices often did. To illustrate, in an oral history documented by journalist Jackie Kim, So˘ Meng-Sun joyfully recalled how puzzled she was when she first heard her neighbors talking about “Ch’ongnyo˘n people” and “Mindan people.” Having recently moved from the countryside in Saitama to a large ethnic enclave in Kawasaki, she had no idea what those terms meant. She made her neighbors laugh by asking what “Ch’ongnyo˘n people” and “Mindan people” looked like (J. Kim 2005, 129). As far as everyday interactions and passing were concerned, the boundary between Japanese and Koreans could be a more sensitive one than that between “Ch’ongnyo˘n people” and “Mindan people.” Because of the severe discrimination against Koreans and their degree of cultural assimilation, passing as “Japanese” was the default state of being for many Zainichi Koreans in everyday interactions that did not involve “papers” (Lie 2008, 20). Reflecting the term Kakure Kirishitan (Christians in the closet), which derived from the history of the persecution of Christians in early modern Japan, the term Kakure Chōsenjin came to designate some Koreans who took pains to pass as Japanese even among their compatriots (Song 2008). These circumstances changed after the mid-1960s. The intensified competition over the nationality designation transformed what it meant to be identified as Chōsen or Kankoku. As South Korea began an all-out effort to encourage conversion, disciplinary efforts to defend group boundaries intensified on the other side, too. The story of Kim Su-gi, r­ eported in

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Choso˘n Sinbo on October 5, 1970, shows how, among those affiliated with Ch’ongnyo˘n, being registered as Kankoku became a source of embarrassment and humiliation regardless of the rationale behind such registration (Choso˘n Sinbo 1970a). According to the article, when Kim Su-gi visited the local administrative office to register his son’s birth in 1950, he was told that he could not register his son under the Chōsen designation and could be deported if he maintained his own. Frightened, Kim Su-gi changed the identification of his entire family to Kankoku—a decision he later re­ gretted, as he became one of the born-again Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans who experienced a profound sense of empowerment through their identification with the organization’s political discourses and activism. Although he had hidden this embarrassing fact from his neighbors and friends, he could not but feel ashamed whenever his distressed son, a Ch’ongnyo˘n activist, asked him why Kim changed the identification to Kankoku in the first place. The anonymous author of the article closed the report with a redemptive ending: Kim Su-gi was finally liberated from this shame by joining Ch’ongnyo˘n’s countercampaign encouraging Koreans in Japan to change their identification from Kankoku to Chōsen. Many stories like this one were published in Choso˘n Sinbo in 1970, at the peak of the North–South competition over the nationality designation. The unabashedly propagandizing tone of these articles notwithstanding, the intensifying politicization of the nationality designations, Chōsen and Kankoku, was not simply a product of the political machinations of the upper echelon of Ch’ongnyo˘n or Mindan. A range of spontaneous actions from below equally contributed to this changing political landscape, as demonstrated by Hwa-ji’s account of the picketing students at the district office. Whether to belong to the category of Chōsen or Kankoku increasingly influenced the organization of the everyday lives of Zainichi Koreans, hardening the “groupness” (Brubaker 2004) of these two categories. The sharpened opposition often strained family and neighborhood relations, although the degree of vehemence of this conflict varied across families, neighbors, and time. Cha-gyo˘ng, a lifetime Ch’ongnyo˘n supporter, recalled how this conflict unfolded in a compact ethnic enclave where she had been running a Korean traditional dress shop for years. In 1974 when the South Korean government and Mindan made a disputed accusation that Ch’ongnyo˘n tried to assassinate President Park of South Korea, young Mindan activists—some of whom Cha-gyo˘ng had known for a long

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time—swarmed into her store and spray-painted “Murderer’s House” all over. A butcher in her neighborhood, a Mindan supporter, began to ask his customers, “Are you Mindan or Ch’ongnyo˘n?” proclaiming that he would not sell his meat to “despicable Ch’ongnyo˘n murderers” (see Figure 2.1 and Figure 2.2 for the street scenes of the Korean ethnic enclave in Ikaino, Osaka, in the early 1970s, covered with campaign placards of the two opposing parties). One particular object, a doorplate still found in the neighborhoods where Koreans have long been concentrated, embodied the effort to make the otherwise invisible nationality designation visible and tangible; it reads “Daikan Minkoku Kyoryū Mindan dan’in no shō” (the sign of a member of Mindan of the Republic of Korea) (see Figure 2.3). Mindan demanded that those who changed their designations from Chōsen to Kankoku hang this doorplate, as if trying to impress people with its expanding turf in the neighborhood—although many Zainichi Koreans admittedly preferred to make their “defection” as inconspicuous as possible. The broadly circulated phrase, “the 38th parallel42 on the dinner table” (Rim 2008), also conveys the extent to which the competition between Ch’ongnyo˘n and Mindan became territorialized. National division was finally imposed on the Korean communities in Japan, including their most intimate domain of family life, more than two decades after the division of the peninsula. However, we must note that the belated imposition of national division did not bring about the closure of the competitive transborder nation-­making process all at once. Unlike in the Korean peninsula, in the case of Zainichi Koreans, North and South Korea were unable to rely on territorial closure, sustained by a heavily militarized border, to prevent “infiltration” or “defection.” “Mindan people” and “Ch’ongnyo˘n people” continued to live at each other’s elbows, sometimes within the same family, as the very phrase “the 38th parallel on the dinner table” implies. Some kept paying dues to both Mindan and Ch’ongnyo˘n out of everyday pragmatism. In this context, the paranoid regimes in both Koreas treated even those formally identified as their own citizens with perennial suspicion and the threat of violence. The Chōsen or Kankoku designation in itself did not guarantee a North Korean or South Korean passport for decades; the case-by-case discretion of Ch’ongnyo˘n or Mindan authorities, or South Korean immigration or consular officials, was more important. One of the first tasks undertaken by the Korean Immigration

F igu r e 2.1. Mindan’s placard hung in Ikaino (the Korean neighborhood in Osaka) in 1971. It reads, “Don’t let the lies fool you! Don’t regret after the deadline and apply for permanent residency as quickly as possible.” s ou rc e : Cho and Kin (2003, 50). Reprinted with permission.

F igu r e 2.2. Ch’ongnyo˘n’s placard hung in Ikaino (the Korean neighborhood in Osaka) in 1971. It reads, “The application for death, let’s cancel the application for permanent residency, and change the puppet nationality Han’guk into Choso˘n!” s ou rc e : Cho and Kin (2003, 51). Reprinted with permission.

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F igu r e 2.3. Doorplate for Mindan members. s ou rc e : Author photo.

Service created in 1961, for e­ xample, was to screen the applications of Zainichi Koreans hoping to visit South Korea (Po˘mmubu 2003). Mindan frequently refused to issue South Korean passports to those whose family members were involved in dissident groups regardless of their registration under the Kankoku designation. This perennial suspicion brought about much grimmer consequences as well. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Zainichi Korean repatriates in North Korea found themselves increasingly vulnerable to persecution by the despotic regime (S. Ryang 2004). In the same period, Zainichi Koreans with South Korean citizenship became ready-made scapegoats of the authoritarian regime in the South, which mobilized the Red Scare whenever its democratic credentials were questioned from below: as many as 109 Zainichi Koreans were arrested, tortured, and convicted for their alleged crime against national security between 1971 and 1990 (H. Kwo˘n 2007). The two competing “homeland” states’ efforts to discipline the arduously constructed, yet territorially unbounded, boundary of their own citizens continued relentlessly throughout the Cold War era.

“Who Owns the Nation?” 115 anomaly of the interstate system: ordeals of “zainichi chōsenjin”

In the late 1990s when Yo˘ng-ch’o˘l’s elder brother applied for a master’s degree program in the United States, his family, who had been Ch’ongnyo˘n supporters for three generations, decided to change their identification to Kankoku to avoid complications. Yo˘ng-ch’o˘l, at that time a student in a Ch’ongnyo˘n-run senior high school, refused to follow suit. However, it took him only two years to regret his decision. When he himself went to Dalian, China, to study Chinese as an exchange student, the immigration officer at the airport singled him out and transferred him to the second-tier inspection department, where he was interrogated for several hours. He was released only after a Japanese staff member from his school submitted an affidavit for him. This was not the end of his ordeal, though. Yo˘ng-ch’o˘l had to appear at the local police office for further questioning, during which he had to explain his complex legal status in broken Chinese. It took him one month to resolve this predicament. Frustrated, Yo˘ng-ch’o˘l changed his designation to Kankoku when he returned to Japan during the summer break.

The discussion so far shows that, beginning in the mid-1960s, Chōsen became an elective category, requiring conscious effort to maintain and implying alignment with North Korea. But Chōsen did not become a legal identity with a valence symmetrical to that of Kankoku. Those who consciously kept the Chōsen designation increasingly found themselves in a profoundly paradoxical impasse. On some occasions, they were treated as stateless people, with all the complications that accompany being an anomaly in the contemporary interstate system. On other occasions, they were treated as quasi–South Koreans, which made them susceptible to aggressive courtship by the South Korean state. On still other occasions, they were treated as North Koreans, with all the negative consequences of affiliation with that pariah state. In the absence of mutual recognition between Japan and North Korea, the Japanese government tended to treat “Zainichi Chōsenjin” (Chōsen residents in Japan)—an administrative category that, beginning in the mid-1960s, came to refer only to those identified with the Chōsen designation—either as stateless or as quasi–South Koreans. Because the Chōsen designation was seen as signifying not nationality but the stateless status of the person, South Korean or Japanese citizens who married Zainichi Chōsenjin were not permitted to change their nationality to Chōsen, whereas a change in the opposite direction was approved or encouraged.43

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In a similar vein, it was through the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, not through a bilateral treaty between North Korea and Japan, that in 1982 Zainichi Chōsenjin finally came to secure permanent resident status in Japan and the right of reentry in the event of international travel. However, in various legal and bureaucratic transactions involving the determination of legal domicile, the Japanese government often categorized Zainichi Chōsenjin simply as Zainichi Kankokujin (South Korean residents in Japan).44 This situation increased Zainichi Chōsenjin’s dependence on the South Korean state, which pressured them into changing affiliation in exchange for the administrative assistance it provided. Many Japanese bureaucrats refused to grant the same authority to documents issued by Ch’ongnyo˘n as to those issued by Mindan or South Korean consular offices. The South Korean government was torn between its deep-seated hostility toward these “North Korea sympathizers” and the imperative to claim these hundreds of thousands of transborder Koreans as “its own.” On the one hand, the government continued to demonize and stigmatize those who retained the Chōsen category by severely punishing South Korean citizens for their alleged connection with these “untouchables.” On the other hand, it continued to include these “untouchables” in its annual official report on “South Korean citizens abroad” (chaeoe kungmin) and press their conversion by all means. At the same time, as members of an “antistate organization” under South Korea’s National Security Law, those who retained the Chōsen designation could enjoy neither the rights of South Korean citizens nor the rights of other foreign nationals (including those who naturalized as Japanese), who in general did not have much difficulty visiting South Korea.45 Curiously, in some respects, North Korea itself has treated Zainichi Chōsenjin at best as ethereal members of the state. Despite North Korean citizenship law, which defines all ethnic Koreans who have not obtained foreign citizenship (including South Korean citizens) as its own citizens, this proclamation, lacking the necessary legal and bureaucratic support, remains more rhetorical than substantive. Enumeration and identification form the fundamental basis of modern national membership, which establishes an unmediated relationship between state and individual; the passport is the ultimate embodiment of this relationship. But North Korea has not specified the rights and obligations of its “overseas citizens” (haeoe kongmin), nor has it counted them in any registration and docu-

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mentation system. As already mentioned, neither the Chōsen designation nor Ch’ongnyo˘n membership guarantees a North Korean passport or the accompanying right to enter North Korea. Ch’ongnyo˘n has never made public the number of its dues-paying members. Its local branches have operated on the basis of de facto membership, rather than official registration (S. Ryang 1998, 583).46 Such a loose and flexible definition of membership has enabled those who have obtained South Korean citizenship to remain Ch’ongnyo˘n affiliates and enjoy accompanying benefits. But it is also true that this loose and flexible definition leaves the nature of the relationship between Zainichi Chōsenjin and North Korea vague and contingent on changing political contexts. Notably, those who retain the Chōsen designation sometimes are treated as North Koreans by other state authorities. When this happens, they have to bear the brunt of the increasing international isolation and stigmatization of North Korea. Its consequence becomes clearer when the focus of analysis moves beyond the temporal frame of this chapter. For instance, in the 2000s, when the relationship between Japan and North Korea was strained, Zainichi Koreans who retained their identification as Chōsen were singled out for various sanctions by the Japanese government (S. ­Ryang 2009). There are more mundane but nonetheless significant forms of disadvantage. Those who retain the Chōsen designation are subject to stringent visa regulations, prolonged interrogation by immigration officers, and restrictions on their opportunities to expand businesses overseas or to study abroad. The disadvantages that my interviewees reported range from the relatively benign (for example, having to change their honeymoon destination from Italy to Malaysia due to visa complications) to the serious (such as the cancellation of important international business contracts or the interruption of graduate study at a U.S. institution). According to a handbook published by a Ch’ongnyo˘n-aligned organization in 2004, of the forty-nine most popular tourist destinations among Japanese travelers, Zainichi Koreans holding South Korean passports were able to enter all the Schengen signatory countries in European Union and some additional twenty-five countries without a visa, whereas those identified as Chōsen could enter only three countries (Malaysia, Maldives, and Singapore) without a visa.47 As a result, when they travel abroad, many Chōsen Koreans choose to bring only travel documents issued by the Japanese government to its resident refugee status holders, leaving their North Korean passports, even if they have one, at home. Yet this does not necessarily exempt them from possible

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complications, nor does it resolve a nagging question of which government would provide consular protection for them if necessary. These various disadvantages are experienced as a critical liability in the highly mobile, yet increasingly paranoid post–Cold War, post-9/11 world, accelerating the movement of ethnic Koreans out of the category of Zainichi Chōsenjin. Yo˘ng-ch’o˘l’s experience presented at the beginning of this section gives a clear illustration of this dynamic.

Schools versus Documents: Competing Means of Transborder Nation Building The literature on postcolonial state building has tended to analyze the legacy of colonial rule exclusively in relation to the development of territorial nationalism. This chapter has taken a different approach, paying attention to how the colonial legacy shaped and was reshaped by the shifting relationship between postcolonial states and their ethnonational, ethnoreligious kin populations situated outside their newly demarcated territories. The colonial legacy for transborder membership politics in Korea is not limited to the fact that the orphans of the empire in the former metropole became the focus of transborder membership politics during the Cold War period. Postimperial Japan and North and South Korea all inherited from the colonial state its definitions of “where Korea was” (although North and South Korea each could rule only half of it) and “who Koreans were” (although many fell outside the respective reach of the two postcolonial states). The three states commonly inherited the concrete bureaucratic techniques to establish this legal identity (most important, the family registry), as well as the mutually overlapping and competing terminologies that designated “Korea” and “Koreans” as a distinctive national community (Choso˘nin/ Chōsenjin, for instance). This common legacy explains in part why there was hardly any disagreement over the boundary separating the Koreans from the Japanese when the three states executed repatriation plans or created their respective constitutions and nationality laws in the immediate postwar period—a rarity in the prolonged decolonization processes of European overseas empires. However, the question of who were the members of the two fledgling postcolonial states, North and South Korea, could not be resolved in the same way. Without the reifying power of established institutions, the question of who were North or South Koreans immediately became the ques-

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tion of how to produce North or South Koreans. Whereas these questions were resolved on the Korean peninsula by domestic “pacification,” civil war, and (somewhat precarious) territorial closure, and in China and the Soviet Union by diplomatic fiat, none of these resolutions came to pass in the case of Koreans who remained in Japan. This chapter has explored the distinct—and more protracted and contested—path by which the two inchoate postcolonial states competitively created their own citizens (kungmin) out of the colonial-era migrants stranded in the former metropole. North Korea represented itself as a safe haven in which its transborder coethnics could find an escape from the hostility and discrimination experienced in their state of residence. It accomplished this in two ways. First, North Korea adhered to the ideology that Korean settlement in the former metropole was a temporary and abnormal state of affairs, caused by the tragic national division imposed and sustained by the neoimperial alliance of the United States, Japan, and the puppet regime in the South. It promoted the eventual return to the reunified homeland as the most desirable future for Koreans in Japan. North Korea was committed to realizing this vision in practice as well, as illustrated by the large-scale, subsidized repatriation of Zainichi Koreans to North Korea at the turn of the 1960s. Yet North Korea did not pursue the congruence of territory and nation simply by bringing “its own” people in. More distinctively and perhaps more ambitiously, North Korea brought “the bosom of the socialist fatherland” out to “its” people overseas. That is, it constructed a parallel institutional world for the excluded Korean minority in Japan and promoted their radical disengagement from mainstream Japanese society. The role of the transborder intermediary organization was crucial. In a manner that invokes the Foucaultian concept of “state effect,”48 Ch’ongnyo˘n constantly conjured the effect of the absentee homeland state through its statelike performances that saturated the lifeworld of the transborder population while nurturing a sense of distance and alienation from their Japanese surroundings. In this way, Ch’ongnyo˘n could help the “homeland” state overcome the structural difficulties entailed in penetrating, embracing, and mobilizing a population beyond its territorial reach. Ch’ongnyo˘n schools exemplified this most ambitious type of transborder nation-building strategy, which aimed at the creation of new national subjects in the most comprehensive and substantive way. South Korea found both strategies infeasible. Ever vigilant of communist infiltration and burdened with the problems of overpopulation and

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poverty, the South Korean regime hardly considered the repatriation of indigent and subversive Zainichi Koreans an economically and politically viable plan. The pro–South Korea organization Mindan, beset by a lack of resources and legitimacy, was never able to construct its own community in Japan comparable to the Ch’ongnyo˘n world, either. Instead of pursuing the congruence of territory and nation, South Korea pursued a more deterritorialized transborder nation-building strategy, capitalizing on its advantage at the interface between the transborder ethnic community and its outside world. It, too, accomplished this in two ways. First, by wielding its geopolitical leverage vis-à-vis Japan, South Korea fashioned itself as a broker that could facilitate the integration of transborder coethnics into their state of settlement. When Koreans in Japan began to question the long-term sustainability and viability of North Korea’s transborder nation-building strategy, the South’s alternative vision finally had a chance to win them over. The South Korean state urged the Japanese state to grant permanent resident status to, and mitigate institutionalized discrimination against, Koreans in Japan if they identified themselves as South Korean citizens. South Korea’s support for legal and institutional integration into the state of settlement, therefore, went hand-in-hand with the demand for the unswerving loyalty and commitment of its transborder coethnics. Second, South Korea and its delegate Mindan actively assumed the role of a gatekeeper, allowing only its loyal affiliates to engage with families and home communities under its territorial governance in a variety of transactions such as sending remittances, paying visits, inviting families to Japan, and making investments. This strategy was open to North Korea and Ch’ongnyo˘n as well, especially during and after the Repatriation Campaign. For instance, some Ch’ongnyo˘n affiliates, despite their disillusionment with North Korea, kept the Chōsen designation in order to occasionally visit and financially support their families now in the North—a poignant mirror image of the earlier configuration in which many were forced to change their identification to Kankoku to reconnect with or protect their families in the South.49 Still, the South Korean state and Mindan reaped considerably more benefits from these gatekeeping practices. The reasons were both ethnogeographical and geopolitical: over 90 percent of Zainichi Koreans originally migrated from the southern regions of the peninsula; the absence of diplomatic relations between North Korea and Japan

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stymied the free flow of goods and people between the two countries in the first place. While the Repatriation Campaign and the Ch’ongnyo˘n schools exemplify North Korea’s transborder nation-building strategy, various identification documents—such as family registration documents, “nationals abroad” certificates, and passports—embody South Korea’s contrasting strategy. The South Korean state utilized these official documents to identify opaque populations at its transborder margin, define their state membership according to its own preferences, distinguish the docile from the subversive, and mobilize the transborder population for its developmental and ideological agendas. It is important to note that these interconnected bureaucratic practices served not merely to document an already existing status but to performatively create South Korean citizens de novo out of colonial-era migrants: a group of people who registered as South Korean nationals abroad (chaeoe kungmin) in the consular office; whose nationality in the Foreigners’ Registry appeared as Kankoku rather than Chōsen; who were properly registered in the family registry in South Korea; and who obtained Permanent Residence by Treaty, a key symbol of the bearer’s alignment with South Korea. In a nutshell, South Korea sought to move its transborder coethnics across the border on paper, yet not on the map as repatriation policies would have done. And instead of targeting the soul of the people, South Korea targeted their bureaucratic persona, their paper identity. In comparison with North Korea’s ambitious vision, South Korea’s strategy of focusing on the paper identity may strike some as too minimalist and formalistic an approach to the question of who were South Koreans or how to produce South Koreans. Such an approach indeed reflects the lack of commitment, legitimacy, and political will of the South Korean regime in its engagement with Koreans in Japan. The approach also explains the irony that the greater success of South Korea’s transborder nation-building strategy during and after the 1970s was built on and contributed to the unmaking of Korean communities distinct from mainstream Japanese society. The Ch’ongnyo˘n world, and most importantly its schools, had provided Koreans with a buffer against assimilation—for better or worse. South Korea focused on undermining the Ch’ongnyo˘n world without making a serious commitment to building alternative venues in which a distinct (South) Korean identity could be nurtured. Taboos against interethnic marriage

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or naturalization cut across the Ch’ongnyo˘n-Mindan opposition, at least among the first generation. Still, lacking the institutional support necessary to guard the ethnic boundary and reproduce a distinctive Korean identity, those whose lives were less embedded in the Ch’ongnyo˘n world were more prone to disregard these taboos as time passed.50 But precisely the fact that South Korea was able to effectively press for conversion and prevent defection—even without successfully cultivating a distinct South Korean identity—should prompt further discussion. Instead of dismissing the paper identity as superficial, we need to carefully reexamine the source of its power. I argue that the registration and documentation practices of South Korea were able to serve as its primary means of transborder nation building because they were interlinked with and buttressed by the consensual practices of other states. This observation draws our attention to the hitherto neglected international dimension of transborder membership politics, that is, the question of the recognition of a state’s transborder jurisdictional claim by other states or international and supranational organizations. This is the last point I want to develop in this chapter. In transborder membership politics, international recognition can override recognition from below when the two are not congruent. The Japanese state and other international bodies ultimately determined the meaning of a particular nationality designation in Japan’s Foreigners’ Registry and what this designation would entail for deportation, repatriation, civil registration, or domestic court proceedings involving Koreans in Japan. The support for North Korea’s Repatriation Campaign offered by the Japanese government and the International Red Cross, which aligned with the broader support that North Korea won from below at the time, dealt a heavy blow to South Korea. This episode, however, was an exception to the overall trend. The increasing asymmetry in international recognition that favored the South as well as the increasing isolation of the North undermined or completely overrode the self-identification of some Koreans as overseas citizens of North Korea. Regardless of their own preference, they were often treated as stateless people or as quasi–South Koreans. Ch’ongnyo˘n nonetheless continued to claim that its affiliates were neither stateless people nor quasi–South Koreans but rather the overseas citizens of North Korea. It tried to strengthen this fragile claim through numerous ritualized practices—the realm of North Korea’s expertise as a “theater state” par excellence (Kwon and Chung 2012). The “school excur-

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sion to the fatherland” was one such rite of passage. Through this excursion, which became available first to students of Choso˘n University and then to all students in Ch’ongnyo˘n-run senior high schools in the early 1980s, many third- and fourth-generation Zainichi Korean students gained an experiential understanding of the notion of “homeland” through the warm welcome they received in North Korea during the trip. The regularly organized fatherland trip for Ch’ongnyo˘n activists, from which Chint’ae’s photo with Kim Il-sung came (see the Introduction), played a similar role. Nevertheless, no matter how dramatically these rites of passage were performed and how authentically they were experienced, these practices could not exercise the same level of “symbolic power” (Bourdieu 1991) or “state effect” (T. Mitchell 1999) as far more mundane and dreary bureaucratic rituals of the other states such as registration and documentation practices. A deficit in international recognition had a profoundly negative impact on the symbolic power of the North Korean state, despite its surprising success in producing self-identifying overseas citizens of North Korea in the hostile international environment. A few other scholars have reported on similar findings. Anthropologist Navaro-Yashin (2003) explains how the lack of international recognition threatens the jurisdictional claim of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), a disputably independent state separated from the Republic of Cyprus in 1973. No document or title produced by TRNC institutions—such as “birth, school, marriage, and death certificates, salary slips, utilities bills, land registry documents, property points, and certificates of military service” (Navaro-Yashin 2003, 78)—is considered valid by the Republic of Cyprus, by other states (except for Turkey), or by international bodies, which have refused to recognize the TRNC as a legitimate state. This has forced Turkish Cypriots who want to travel or reside outside northern Cyprus to try to attain valid papers issued by other recognized states, such as Turkey or the Republic of Cyprus. Recently, the accession of the Republic of Cyprus to the European Union has made its passport even more attractive to Turkish Cypriots, who are usually subject to stringent visa regulations if they travel with TRNC passports (Navaro-Yashin 2003, 83). Sociologist Horng-Luen Wang (2004a) also shows that the “citizens” of the Republic of China (Taiwan) traveling or residing abroad experience similar, if less extreme, troubles because of Taiwan’s deficit in international recognition.

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To be clear, pursuing favorable paper identities does not bring about the deep, subjective identification with the sought-after bureaucratic persona. Without Japanese bureaucrats’ persistent demands for the family registration document in a variety of contexts—a demand informed by the bureaucratic logic of identification as much as by their political leanings— and without the practical benefits a South Korean passport could provide for international travel, many of my study participants, who still identified themselves as loyal Ch’ongnyo˘n affiliates and remained sympathetic toward North Korea, would not have obtained South Korean nationality. This seeming pragmatism, this disjuncture between the subjective and objective identification, may be interpreted as the limited power of the South Korean transborder nation-building strategy focused on the “superficial” paper identity. Or, more broadly, one might read it as a sign that the nation-­ state in general has become increasingly incapable of shaping loyalties and subjective identities in an increasingly globalizing world, an assessment captured by terms like “passport citizenship” (Harpaz 2013), “postnational citizenship” (Soysal 1994), or the “lightening of citizenship” (Joppke 2010). Indeed, one of the study participants, quoting Bertolt Brecht, compared his acquisition of South Korean nationality to “changing shoes,” that is, something irrelevant to who he really was. And yet, however much he might deny the importance of the change, under the current interstate system, individuals had better wear shoes—and a change of shoes in the opposite direction, that is, from Kankoku to Chōsen, is not allowed. Instead of pointing out the limit of national citizenship, I would rather underscore that the increasing transborder flows of goods and people over the past decades have multiplied the occasions on which the state-granted official identity becomes the only acceptable currency for various transactions. Hence, regardless of one’s subjective identification with a certain state, adopting the bureaucratic persona validated by that state and ensuring that this particular identity is documented correctly and consistently within and beyond borders—in other words, becoming a legible subject in the interstate system—have become more critical for one’s mobility than ever before. By failing to ensure that those identified as Chōsen were treated unambiguously, consistently, and seamlessly as its overseas citizens, North Korea could not provide its transborder members with a reliable or desirable official identity, one that could facilitate their unencumbered navigation of a world in which people are pervasively sorted and re-sorted by their state membership. Those identified as Chōsen in Japan’s Foreign-

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ers’ Registry became illegible subjects, “orphan[s] of infrastructure” (Star 2006), in the contemporary interstate system. As illustrated by Yo˘ng-ch’o˘l’s trouble with Chinese immigration officials, increasing global mobility has aggravated, rather than attenuated, the inconvenience, humiliation, and anxiety experienced by these “orphans”—those who cannot be neatly pigeonholed into the existing categorical system, or, to tweak the metaphor of my interviewee, those who are forced to travel with bare feet. Instead of making the nation-state, or even the “homeland” state, less significant, globalization has broadened their relevance. I will return to this point in the concluding chapter.

t hr ee

Beyond “Bamboo Curtain” and “Hermit Kingdom” Korean Chinese between Two Socialist Fatherlands

Since the early twentieth century, dynamic interactions among the nationalizing states, ethnonational minorities within those states, and these minorities’ external homelands (or “kin states,” as they are often called) have repeatedly kindled ethnopolitical conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe (Brubaker 1996). During the Cold War period, however, socialist regimes generally prioritized the communist unity over the historic national question, refraining from claiming ownership of their ethnonational kin populations residing in allied countries. In the experience of Europeans, the Cold War thus represented a “long peace” (Gaddis 1987) in a dual sense: the avoidance of military confrontations between the West and the East and the suppression of nationalist politics in the East. The fall of socialism marked the end of this long peace, with the bloody civil war in former ­Yugoslavia as the tragic denouement. The radically different experience in Cold War–era East Asia, however, exposes the Eurocentric bias of this macrohistorical narrative. The entanglements of emerging global ideological bifurcation and nationalist struggles for decolonization (Lundestand 1991; Westad 2003) meant that the onset of the Cold War brought to China, Korea, and Vietnam not an epoch of a long peace, but “an epoch . . . characterized by vicious civil wars and other exceptional forms of political violence” (H. Kwon 2010, 6). Further, the communist regimes in China, North Korea, and North Vietnam had stronger nationalist credentials than their anticommunist counterparts. The reputations of Taiwan, South Korea, and South Vietnam were marred by their close alliance with the United States and Japan, which invited the 126

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charge of neoimperialism from their critics. This distinctive macropolitical configuration of the region explains in part why North Korea’s aggressive effort to win over Zainichi Koreans—its heavy reliance on nationalist rhetoric and sentiment and its promotion of subsidized repatriation as a major policy platform—bears a striking resemblance to the policies of West Germany, not East Germany, toward ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Brubaker and Kim 2011). Yet did this pattern—aggressive nationalist courtship by the socialist state—hold true for the two Korean states’ approaches to the coethnic population that remained in what became communist China? In this chapter, I examine transborder membership politics as it relates to the 1.2 million Koreans who remained in Manchuria, as well as their descendants (Korean Chinese henceforth), from the mid-1940s to the mid1960s. Unlike the postwar Japanese government, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP henceforth) actively incorporated Koreans into its multinational state-building project. The CCP also made it impossible for South Korea to engage with the Korean Chinese in any meaningful way. Instead of protesting such policies, South Korea almost willfully ignored the Korean Chinese for nearly three decades, without making even a rhetorical claim to “own” this transborder population. North Korea also did not contest Korean Chinese acquisition of Chinese citizenship. However, the incorporation of Koreans into communist China was not necessarily seen by any of the parties involved as incompatible with the recognition of their special tie to North Korea. This chapter explores how the Chinese state, the North Korean state, and the Korean Chinese embraced, tolerated, or repressed varying interpretations of this transborder tie, and, in so doing, how they redefined and acted on the meanings and the boundaries of “Korean” (Chaoxianren, 朝鮮人), “Chinese” (Zhongguoren, 中国人), “nation” (minzu, 民族), and “fatherland” (zuguo, 祖国). In so doing, I bring into sharp relief the importance of the complex cross-border relationship for war making, state making, and nation making (or unmaking) in China and North Korea, as well as Korean Chinese agency in straddling the two countries, especially through cross-border migration. The orthodox Korean Chinese historiography highlights the progressive integration of this “model minority” into the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in a teleological and triumphalist fashion.1 In this account, the official grant of Chinese citizenship to Koreans in 1949 marks at once the grand

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finale of Korean peasants’ anti-imperial and antifeudal struggles (under the guidance of the CCP) and the glorious beginning of their new history, now “properly” contained within the Chinese national historiography once and for all, with no spillovers to the Korean peninsula. Departing from this teleological historiography—and its underlying “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003)—requires us to move beyond the realm of ethnic minority policies. Ethnic minority policies—minzu zhengce (民族政策) in the Chinese official lexicon—have long been considered a privileged site to observe the shifting dyadic relationship between non-Han minorities and the Chinese state.2 This unifocal analysis, however, often unwarrantedly renders invisible these minorities’ trans­border relationship with their external homelands or kin states. To explore the complex and dynamic unfolding of the triadic relationship among the Chinese state, the Korean Chinese, and their putative “homeland” state, North Korea, I shift the analytic focus to a hitherto unexplored phenomenon, namely the changing ways in which China and North Korea managed several cross-border migration flows (both authorized and unauthorized). These flows include the transfer of ethnic Korean soldiers from China to North Korea at the dawn of the Korean War; the return of some of these soldiers to China in the mid-1950s; the state-­ sanctioned resettlement of Korean Chinese in North Korea in the mid- to late 1950s; the unauthorized massive resettlement of Korean Chinese in North Korea in the early 1960s; and, finally, the repatriation of many of these “returnees” back to China a few years later. This focus on migration flows addresses various politically sensitive issues, including China’s involvement in the Korean War and the suffering of the Korean Chinese during the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution. Hence, many relevant official documents (for example, bilateral agreements, ordinances, memoranda, investigative reports, and official statistics) remain classified. The virtual impossibility of conducting research in North Korea aggravates the problem. Moreover, even though some data are available, Chinese scholars, fearing possible repercussions, have generally shunned the subject or refrained from publishing their studies. A few recent studies by historians, including Korean Chinese scholars who obtained South Korean citizenship, have offered a more detailed picture of Korean Chinese involvement in the Korean War.3 Yet the rest of the Cold War history remains largely unexamined. Above all, little has been revealed about cross-border migration flows between North

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Korea and China. In particular, the unauthorized exodus of Korean Chinese to North Korea in the early 1960s remains shrouded in official silence, despite the living memory of many Korean Chinese in their sixties or older (such as Kil-yong, with whom we opened the Introduction). To the best of my knowledge, the first—and up to the present, the only—study dealing with this exodus was published in a South Korean scholarly journal in 2012 (S. Yi and Song 2012). Yet the article limits itself to the presentation of recently declassified documents from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This chapter is arguably subject to the limitations in the state of the current literature and is thus more exploratory than explanatory. Nevertheless, by drawing on hitherto unexamined archival and original oral history data,4 I hope to bring to light some of the undocumented (or only fragmentarily documented) facets of Cold War history and make important contributions to several clusters of literature. First, I provide a more comprehensive explication of North Korean policies toward transborder Koreans than has been hitherto available. Unlike its better-known policies toward ethnic Koreans in Japan (discussed in Chapter Two), North Korea generally avoided taking an openly confrontational stance vis-à-vis its powerful ally, China; nor did it try to create institutions and organizations within China directly under North Korean control, targeting the Korean Chinese beyond its territorial boundary. However, North Korea did not completely disengage from the Korean Chinese as South Korea or other socialist states in Central and Eastern Europe did from their coethnics abroad. On the contrary, North Korea constantly turned to the Korean Chinese for its war making, postwar reconstruction, and industrial development, incorporating them closely into its anti-­ imperial socialist state building. Its territorial and membership boundaries remained malleable with regard to the Korean Chinese until the change in regional geopolitical relations put an abrupt end to this open-door policy in the mid-1960s. This chapter helps situate North Korea’s shifting policies toward the Korean Chinese in a broader comparative context, showing how and why North Korea differed from other socialist regimes. Second, I show how North Korea’s policies expanded the social space in which Korean Chinese charted out their mobility strategies beyond the territorial boundary of China, regardless of the stiffening migration control at the time. The most striking example is the unauthorized exit and resettlement of Korean Chinese in North Korea in the early 1960s and their return to China a few years later. I situate these lesser-known c­ ross-border

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migration flows within the turbulent socialist transformations of China and North Korea, experienced through the increasing rigidity of the social stratification system, the intensifying labor discipline, and a series of political crises. Korean Chinese responses to these economic, political, and social changes share many common features identified by existing studies drawing mainly on Han Chinese experiences.5 But North Korea’s repatriation policies gave an interesting twist to these general phenomena by enabling the Korean Chinese to factor in North Korea as they worked out their mobility strategies. In this chapter I specify how transborder membership politics were closely intertwined with the state-led socialist transformation in China and North Korea. I also highlight the agency of individual Korean Chinese who managed to straddle their two “socialist fatherlands,” despite the increasing rigidity of the social system in both countries. Finally, this chapter questions several simplistic characterizations of the nature of the party-state in Mao-era China, particularly the state’s migration and ethnic minority policies. As historian Diana Lary (1999) points out, to characterize prereform China simply as the “static decades” is to ignore the substantial level of migration that took place in this period, whether it was a product of the government’s planning or loss of control. Lary still concedes that international migration dropped to almost nil except the refugee flow to Hong Kong and Macao. But studies focusing on the experiences of non-Han minorities in China’s vast borderlands might reach a different conclusion. I also show that the PRC state flexibly approached the membership status of its Korean minority in the first two decades of its establishment, alternately nurturing, tolerating, or repressing the development of transborder ties between the Korean Chinese and its ally across the border. This finding undermines the state-induced amnesia that assiduously erases this complex history. It also questions the conventional wisdom that China has asserted its exclusive ownership over ethnic minorities in a consistently uncompromising fashion. And lastly, my oral history data refute the “totalitarian” view of the nature of the party-state by suggesting that the Chinese state offered varied, improvised, and fragmentary responses to Korean Chinese unauthorized exit and return.6 The complex web of interactions among the central state, the local government, street-level party cadres, and border crossers produced highly diverse consequences for individuals who participated in these unauthorized migration flows.

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Two Civil Wars, Two Fatherlands Azaleas on every mountain, tombstones of martyrs in every village [san mada chindallae, ch’on mada yo˘lsabi] From a poem dedicated by a famous Chinese poet, He Jingzhi, to the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture (W. Kang 2012)

For Koreans who remained in Japan, the postwar period was characterized by their progressive exclusion from postimperial Japan. Repatriation to the Korean peninsula was considered desirable (1945–1946), while the reentry of those who had once left Japan was strictly banned (beginning in 1946). The Japanese government began to register those who remained in Japan as foreigners even before their citizenship status was clarified (1947). In the following years, Korean-language schools were closed (1948) and the representative ethnic organization (Chōren) was disbanded (1949). The San Francisco Peace Treaty finally formalized the expulsion of Koreans from the category of Japanese (1952), collectively stripping them of Japanese nationality regardless of their duration of stay, degree of cultural assimilation, or birth in Japan. The colonial-era family registration system continued to serve as the documentary basis for determining which individuals were Koreans or Japanese. For Koreans who remained in Manchuria, by contrast, the same period was characterized by their progressive inclusion in communist China. The Chinese Communist Party encouraged Koreans to remain in China,7 and the Sino–Korea border remained porous for Koreans reentering Manchuria after their initial repatriation to the Korean peninsula (1946–1948). Those who stayed were registered in the new household registries (hukou) and were granted redistributed lands even before their citizenship status was clarified (1946–1947). The establishment of the People’s Republic of China (1949) formalized the incorporation of Koreans into the newly defined category of Chinese (Zhongguoren), collectively granting them Chinese citizenship and an official national minority status. Moreover, Korean-language schools were built, including the first minority university (Yanbian University) in China (1950), to encourage young Koreans to remain in China rather than repatriating to North Korea to pursue higher education. The establishment of a Korean Autonomous Region in Yanbian (1952)8 opened more positions in government and party organizations to upwardly mobile young Koreans.

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The CCP’s amicable stance toward Koreans had deep historical and ideological roots. The official CCP documents mentioned Koreans in Manchuria as one of the minority nationalities of China as early as 1928. They were considered an “oppressed nation” in Stalin’s terms and composed the majority of poor peasants in eastern Manchuria. Along with other wellknown non-Han groups such as Mongols, Hui, and Zhang, Koreans were promised equal treatment and the right to self-determination throughout the 1930s and were urged to fight against Japanese imperialism in solidarity with the Han Chinese.9 Yet the quick development of the CCP–­Korean alliance between 1945 and 1949 was as much a product of contingent political circumstances in postwar Manchuria as a product of the party’s proclaimed principles. After the collapse of Manchukuo, Manchuria came under the control of, first, the Soviet occupying army and then the CCP in the winter of 1945. Although the CCP quickly lost southern Manchuria and major cities in northern Manchuria to the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, hereafter GMD) in the following year, it managed to retain control of the Yanbian region (eastern Manchuria), in which Koreans made up almost 70 percent of the residents, until the end of the civil war. Keenly aware of the strategic importance of Korean support for its victory, the CCP ordered the transfer of the Korean Volunteer Army (which had been under its control since the early 1940s) from Yunnan (in southwestern China) to Manchuria (Chong-s. Yi 2000, 35–79). These troops protected their coethnics from the violence of Han Chinese militias, who kindled the long-held Han Chinese resentment against Koreans, appealed to nativist agendas, and were often funded by the GMD (H. Cho˘ng et al. 2006, 168–169).10 The granting of legal resident status and the distribution of lands to registered Korean peasants (1946–1947), pending the clarification of their citizenship statuses, further reinforced the CCP’s legitimacy among Koreans. Many Koreans came to consider the communist victory critical for their future lives in China. Notably, many of those Koreans who would have resisted the rising communist hegemony (such as landlords, officials in Manchukuo, Christians, and the like) had repatriated to the southern part of the Korean peninsula if they had been able to (Cumings 1981, 276–278; I. Kang 1998).11 This “voting with the feet” meant that the remaining Koreans more uniformly supported the CCP’s socialist reforms, not to mention its minority policies, than did the Han Chinese who had limited “exit” options. Approximately 120,000 Koreans, amounting to 10 percent of the entire Korean population

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in Manchuria, fought in the civil war on the CCP’s side, demonstrating a level of participation and sacrifice that greatly surpassed (percentage-wise) that of the Han Chinese (P. Kim 1999; Chung-s. Kim 2000). At the time of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, the government officially announced that Koreans were an integral part of the “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu, 中华民族). They were praised for their “outstanding revolutionary heritage” and for their “major role in . . . struggles against rebels, infiltrators, and feudal forces” and, above all, against the GMD (Yanbian Diwei [1948] 1992). As Koreans’ relationship with their state of settlement was transformed, their relationship with their state of origin—in this case, North Korea (because the CCP did not recognize South Korea)—had to be reformulated in turn. The Chinese state distinguished between ethnic Koreans who were Chinese citizens and North Korean citizens who simply resided in China. This distinction was based on whether the individual was registered in the Chinese household registry (hukou), introduced in northeast China in 1946 (P. Kim 1999, 162–163). Official documents used “Chaoxian people [朝鲜人民] who reside in the territory of China” to designate the registered (hence, Chinese citizens), and “Chaoxian people abroad” (朝鲜侨民) the unregistered (hence, North Korean citizens). Although both expressions included Chaoxian (Choso˘n in Korean), the term in the former referred to the colonial-era classificatory system, implying the ethnonational origin of the Korean minority, whereas in the latter it designated North Korea as a postcolonial political entity, which retained Choso˘n for its official name.12 The distinction between the two categories was flexible enough to accommodate the reality of frequent border crossings and prevalent cross-­ border family ties. According to a March 1950 government report on the conditions of the Sino–Korea border area (quoted in I. Yo˘m 2004, ­313–314), Koreans comprised 90 percent of those who lived within fifteen kilometers (9.3 miles) of the border. Hye-so˘n Ri’s (1998, 42) novel Ppalgan ku˘rimja (Red shadow) describes the everyday life of these Korean villagers as follows: “Young people dated across the Tumen River. Many people also arranged marriages across the border. The border security was so lax that people living near the river went to North Korea more often than Yo˘n’gil [Yanji, the capital city of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture] to go shopping or see relatives.” Residents on both sides also actively engaged in cross-border bartering. The civil wars in China (1946–1949) and Korea (1950–1953), which will be discussed shortly, further increased the porosity

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of the border. Those displaced from their homes by relentless air raids or intense battles often crossed the border without authorization (Y. Ryu 2008, 101). Under these circumstances, the Chinese local government tended to allow those considered North Korean citizens to reside legally in China despite the protest this flexible approach generated among Han Chinese officials outside Yanbian (Cathcart 2010, 39–41). A few North Korean border crossers were even allowed to belatedly reregister as Chinese citizens (Yanbian Diwei [1948] 1992), sometimes through informal negotiations with local bureaucrats (Y. Ryu 2008, 101).13 Furthermore, even those Koreans who were recognized as Chinese citizens were not defined exclusively as Chinese citizens. In an official document issued in December 1948, the secretary of the Yanbian District Chapter of the CCP acknowledged that “Chaoxian people [朝鲜人民] who reside in the territory of China” had another “fatherland” (zuguo, 祖国) apart from the PRC (Yanbian Diwei [1948] 1992). This statement was in part a resigned recognition of the spontaneous nationalist sentiment of many Koreans: many identified themselves more as “Koreans” (Choso˘nin) than as “Chinese” (Chunggugin), called North Korea rather than China their “fatherland” (choguk), expressed admiration for General Kim Il-sung rather than Chairman Mao, and commemorated Korea-related anniversaries with greater enthusiasm than China-related anniversaries (I. Yo˘m 2008, 128–137; Cathcart 2010, 44–45). This sentiment was shared by many leading Korean communist cadres, some of whom openly proposed to annex the Yanbian region into North Korea or to make it an independent republic of the Chinese federation (similar to the Soviet Union system) instead of an autonomous region (Chin-y. Yi 2000; I. Yo˘m 2008, 142–147). Its wariness of this apparent dual loyalty among Koreans notwithstanding, the CCP tolerated or even harnessed Koreans’ prevailing nationalist sentiment at the beginning of the 1950s. The CCP’s aggressive mobilization of Koreans for the Korean War is a case in point. At the beginning of war, at North Korea’s request (and in reciprocation for North Korea’s assistance during the Chinese civil war), the CCP secretly transferred its own Korean troops—who had been mostly recruited in northeast China and had fought in the Chinese civil war in previous years—to North Korea.14 On arrival, the soldiers were quickly and unconditionally granted North Korean citizenship and formed three divisions of the Korean People’s Army, constituting some 55,000 to 60,000 troops. Having accumulated years of war experience in China, the soldiers became the core of North Korea’s military

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force, constituting 47 percent of those who first crossed the 38th parallel (Chong-s. Yi 2000, 120–172; I. Yo˘m 2004, 325). In addition to soldiers, the CCP Central Committee ordered the transfer of Korean “doctors, nurses, drivers, mining engineers, and ordnance personnel” to North Korea, at one point even with the Northeast People’s Government’s promise—albeit eventually reneged—that it would provide “household allowances” for the families of these “repatriates” (Cathcart and Kraus 2011, 32). The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC issued a statement on September 20, 1950, that “it is a legitimate right as well as a sacrosanct responsibility” of “Chaoxian people [朝鲜人民] who reside in the territory of China” to “return to and defend their fatherland ” (italics mine) from the American imperialist threat (quoted in I. Yo˘m 2002, 293). As China subsequently joined the war beginning in the fall of 1950, this discourse came to apply not only to the transferred soldiers but also to the broader Korean community. In general, China’s decision to enter the Korean War was justified as a defense against American imperialism whose ultimate target was allegedly China, not North Korea (Gao 2001). This discourse is well captured by the most famous war propaganda, kang mei yuan chao bao jia wei guo, meaning “resist America, aid Korea, protect our homes, and defend our country.” Yet the propaganda tailored to Koreans simultaneously appealed to their special relationship with North Korea, if not without tension: it was, after all, North Korea—their other “fatherland”—that was in immediate danger (I. Yo˘m 2002, 2004; Cathcart 2010, 42–43). To be sure, not all Koreans were willing to risk life and limb for the nascent North Korean regime. A 1950 CCP intelligence report documents that many Koreans responded to the call for mobilization, the material compensation for which remained uncertain (Cathcart and Kraus 2011, 34), with anxiety, resentment, and cynicism.15 Nevertheless, it is also true that Koreans in northeast China suffered the consequences of the war more acutely than other Chinese: the relentless U.S. air raids killed their families in the northern Korean peninsula, rampaged the border areas in which they were concentrated, generated massive refugee influx that destabilized the border region (Cathcart and Kraus 2011, 37), and, ultimately, seemed to threaten the communist rule that guaranteed them citizenship and land ownership. Over 20,000 Koreans joined the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army as combat troops and even more served as nurses and translators (I. Yo˘m 2004).

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Voluntarily or not, the Korean communities’ active participation in the Korean War clearly reinforced Koreans’ identification with both the North Korean and the Chinese states. They made great sacrifices not only for the fledgling independent nation-state for which they had long yearned but also for the emerging multinational state that recognized them as its legitimate members. “Azaleas [the flower that has long stood for anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles among Korean leftists] on every mountain, tombstones of martyrs in every village,” one of the most popularly cited slogans, originally from a poem dedicated to the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, nicely captures the Koreans’ sense of entitlement to membership in the People’s Republic of China. Inclusion, as it were, was not granted as a gift but won by the commitment and sacrifice of Koreans themselves, one of the few minority populations who were actively involved in the communist struggles at the founding moment of the nation. And this identity as a model minority of China was considered compatible with the Koreans’ special tie to North Korea. Their participation in the two civil wars led the Koreans to champion the cause of anti-imperialism and the memory of war against the American superpower—the central tenet of both the Chinese and the North Korean regimes, which became “blood allies” (xuemeng) through these wars. The quasi-dual membership of the Korean Chinese in China and North Korea, however, came at the expense of their ties to South Korea. The wartime “Three-Anti and Five-Anti” movement (sanfan wufan) in Yanbian raised not only the old specter of Manchukuo collaborators but also the new anxiety over South Korean spies, criminalizing their ties to South Korea. The anticommunist regime in the southern peninsula for its part responded to the successful incorporation of Korean Chinese into the communist bloc with purposeful amnesia. For example, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to take the census of Koreans abroad immediately after the Korean War in 1954, only 390 Koreans in China were counted; this number actually reflected Koreans in Taiwan (Oemubu, n.d.). As almost 1.6 million Koreans in mainland China and the Soviet Union completely disappeared from this annual official census, the 565,685 Koreans in Japan came to constitute, on paper, 99 percent of Koreans abroad.16 Although increasing emigration to elsewhere, especially to the United States, in the following decades gradually diversified the composition of “overseas Koreans” (haeoe kyop’o, 海外僑胞), the absence of Koreans in communist countries from the official South Korean census continued until 1990.17

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The Korean Chinese also disappeared from the family registry. As discussed in Chapter Two, the South Korean government took various measures to enable or force transborder Koreans to complete nationals abroad registration (chaeoe kungmin tu˘ngnok) as well as family registration on the premise that they were all South Korean citizens regardless of their own preference (see also Kap-t. Kim 2001a, 2001b). But the question of the nationality or the family registration of the Korean Chinese had never been brought up in the course of creating and implementing these policies. Only the so-called dead family registries (those not updated for over thirty years), retained in the backs of the local administrative offices, silently attested to the sudden disappearance of the Korean Chinese from the documented community of the nation. Neither could transborder family ties be sustained from below, for efforts to cultivate family ties that crossed this charged ideological faultline could be dangerous not only in authoritarian South Korea but also in Maoist China. I showed in Chapter Two that South Korea’s transborder nation-building project during the Cold War constantly projected the regime’s paranoia onto the figures of Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans as objects of both intense hostility and zealous proselytism. On the other hand, the Korean Chinese were simply consigned to decades of oblivion, erased from the rhetorical practices, bureaucratic routines, and organizational structures of the state.

Navigating Postwar Reconstruction and Socialist Transformation across the Borders postwar reconstruction and north korea’s pursuit of coethnic labor

In terms of ethnic minority policies (minzu zhengce), the second quarter of the 1950s was a period of institution building in the PRC. The Ethnic Classification Project (minzu shibie, 民族识别) was one of such foundational enterprises launched in this period. The CCP carried out an ambitious ethnological project in the spring of 1954 to map the ethnonational composition of the new republic and to institutionalize this knowledge in its various legislative and administrative structures. The Ethnic Classification Project was a profoundly constitutive and pedagogical enterprise as much as an investigative one, especially along the southwestern frontier of China. It created, rather than simply recognized, the names and boundaries of non-Han groups while educating these minorities about the meaning of the term minzu and which minzu they belonged to. The project gave birth to

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the “ethnotaxonomic orthodoxy” of the PRC, which would in turn shape the self-understandings of those categorized for decades to come (Mullaney 2011). In northeast China, however, the impact of the Ethnic Classification Project was more of coordination than of creation. As shown in Chapter One, the competitive nation- and state-building processes in the earlier period had already made minzu/minjok an easily understandable category of identity, Chaoxian/Choso˘n an unchallengeable ethnonym for people of peninsular origin, and Chaoxian minzu/Choso˘n minjok a well-bounded and pervasively institutionalized ethnonational group. Still, it was not until 1954 that the Korean minority in China was given its official name, Chaoxianzu/Choso˘njok (朝鲜族), which replaced the cumbersome (and somewhat confusing) term “Chaoxian people [朝鲜人民] who reside in the territory of China.” The newly coined term Chaoxianzu placed the Korean Chinese in a mosaic of the more than fifty ethnonational groups of the PRC, who were now considered to constitute the singular Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu) and whose official names were constructed in an identical format: composed of their ethnonym followed by the character zu (族). The creation of the term Chaoxianzu thus marked “the creation of equivalence” (Desrosières 1991), the official entry of colonial-era Korean migrants into the Chinese nation-state on the same terms as other minority groups who were similarly baptized by the state. Beginning in 1954, it was in the name of Chaoxianzu that Koreans became entitled to seats in the National People’s Congress, autonomous local governments of various scales, Korean-­language schools at various levels, and ration packages that met their culturally specific needs (for example, white rice, red peppers, traditional costumes, and Korean-style plows; Chong-g. Kim 1999, 273–274).18 A contemporaneous change in the curricula of Korean schools also demonstrates the heightened integration of Koreans into the Chinese nation. From 1953 onward, Korean history and geography, which had previously been taught as independent classes, were taught as part of world history and geography, while the history of the Chaoxianzu and the geography of northeast China (Dongbei) were taught as part of Chinese history and geography (Chungguk Choso˘njok Kyoyuksa P’yo˘nch’anwi 1991). However, if we shift our analytic focus from the realm of ethnic minority policies to the management of cross-border movement, we find that the closer integration of the Korean Chinese into their state of residence did not always translate into a dissociation from their state of origin. The North

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Korean regime tried to induce Korean Chinese resettlement in North Korea, considering Koreans in China as a potential source of labor vital for its postwar reconstruction and state-led industrialization. This policy stance was driven largely by the enormous and extensive wartime destruction—a nearly 40 percent reduction in industrial output (compared to 1949 levels), with a steep decrease in every sector of the economy, ranging from agriculture and the consumer goods industry to electrical, chemical, and metallurgical production. American saturation bombing wrought havoc on homes, farmlands, and transportation infrastructure, 70 percent to 80 percent of which had been reportedly destroyed (Armstrong 2005). Understandably, the rebuilding of industry became the first priority of the North Korean leadership after the cease-fire, but such a daunting task could not be carried out by a severely hemorrhaged population. The wartime deaths and the refugee flow to South Korea resulted in a population decrease of 1.2 million (which amounted to 12.5 percent of the population of 1949); 1.8 million of the remaining population, having been severely injured during the war, were unfit for the task of reconstruction (W. Yu and Kim 1975, 137–138). The loss of skilled workers was even more acute: in August 1953, those who had ten or more years of work experience constituted only 4 percent of the workforce in heavy industry; more than half had less than one year of work experience (Il-s. Kim [1979] 1997, 61). North Korea’s heavy-­industry–centered development project, as in the Soviet Union and in China, required maximal mobilization of labor to compensate for the lack of capital investment. North Korea also had the extra burden of maintaining a sizeable military force in the context of continuing conflicts with South Korea. Simply relying on natural population increase—predicted to take at least two decades to restore the population to the prewar level (ibid.)—was an unviable option to meet these simultaneous needs. The North Korean regime thus turned to China—or more precisely, to its coethnics in China—in several ways.19 First, it requested that China postpone the repatriation of the People’s Volunteer Army to help with postwar reconstruction (Chong-s. Yi 2000). Second, when China began to gradually repatriate these war veterans in the mid- to late 1950s, North Korea tried to persuade Korean Chinese soldiers to permanently settle in North Korea instead of returning to China (H. Cho˘ng et al. 2006). Third, it lobbied the Chinese government to sponsor the recruitment of Korean Chinese for resettlement in North Korea, which, not by chance, coincided

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with its bid for the repatriation of Koreans in Japan (see Chapter Two). Finally, North Korea resisted following through on the 1955 bilateral agreement with China regarding the treatment of unauthorized border crossers. Instead of forcibly repatriating Korean Chinese border crossers as had been agreed, North Korea insisted on granting them North Korean citizenship or allowing them to reside in North Korea with passports issued by the Chinese consulate (S. Yi and Song 2012, 367–368). China usually tolerated or cooperated with North Korea’s initiatives. It delayed the repatriation of the People’s Volunteer Army, as well as tens of thousands of railway and construction workers, for a few more years.20 Instead of protesting North Korea’s effort to retain Korean Chinese veterans, China assisted with the renunciation of their Chinese citizenship if requested (S. Yi and Song 2012, 364–365). The recently declassified documents of the Foreign Ministry of Affairs of the PRC, examined by S. Yi and Song (2012, 365), also show that in 1959 the provincial governments of Jilin, Liaoning, and Heilongjiang successfully recruited 10,297 Korean Chinese households (or 52,014 Korean Chinese) for resettlement in the agricultural collectives and factory villages in North Korea.21 Given the sparse and sketchy nature of these documents, the actual scale of this governmentsponsored resettlement may have been greater. Lastly, the same documents show that China repatriated unauthorized North Korean border crossers back to North Korea but did not insist on the repatriation of Korean Chinese border crossers; it even cooperated with the renunciation of their Chinese citizenship if requested (365–368). Tellingly, in 1957 North Korea repatriated only twenty-seven Korean Chinese back to China, while China repatriated 313 North Koreans (368). Scholars infer that the spirit of fraternal socialism (Armstrong 2005) and North Korea’s strategic importance in the emerging Sino–Soviet rivalry (Lüthi 2008) explain China’s accommodating stance toward North Korea’s requests. In regulating these several types of cross-border population movement, both North Korea and China refrained from exerting coercion and flexibly dealt with the citizenship status of these border crossers. This is well illustrated by the ways in which both governments treated Korean Chinese veterans who fought in the Korean War as members of the Korean People’s Army, instead of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. As mentioned in the previous section, these soldiers had acquired North Korean citizenship on their secret transfer from China to North Korea. Nevertheless, prior to early 1958 they had the freedom to return to China at the time of discharge,

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along with their North Korean spouses if applicable. The Chinese government accepted these veterans as its own citizens and granted their North Korean spouses legal resident status.22 Estimates indicate that approximately 10,000 to 12,000 (40 percent of these soldiers who still remained in North Korea alive) chose to return to China between 1953 and 1957.23 In 1956, at the request of the head of the Yanbian prefectural government, the central government decided to restore the Chinese citizenship of those who had obtained North Korean citizenship yet subsequently returned to China without authorization (Y. Ryu 2008, 101; S. Yi and Song 2012, 366). These examples suggest that both North Korea and China tacitly recognized the (quasi-) dual membership of the Korean Chinese. Korean Chinese could not be both Chinese and North Korean citizens at the same time, but it seems that they were able to activate one membership while making the other dormant, provided that certain conditions were met. The boundary that separated the categories of Chaoxianzu (朝鲜族, Korean Chinese) and Chaoxian gongmin (朝鲜公民, North Korean citizens) remained flexible and malleable during this period. If state coercions were rare or mild, what factors influenced the resettlement decisions of individual Korean Chinese veterans? Making inferences about individual motivations is extremely difficult, especially because those who ended up in North Korea are currently inaccessible. Nevertheless, the oral history data collected by other scholars as well as myself strongly suggest that the location of family ties and the (perceived) prospects for upward mobility in each country were of paramount importance. The interviews of former Korean Chinese veterans, conducted by H. Cho˘ng and his colleagues (2006), include various examples of such speculations and negotiations. For instance, when Yo˘m Kwan-il was discharged in 1956 after serving six years as a medic, he decided to return to China because his request to go to Pyongyang Medical School was rejected. North Korean officials could not but accept his excuse that his aging parents in China desperately wanted him to return and marry before they died (H. Cho˘ng et al. 2006, 105). Another interviewee, Chang Han-ch’o˘l, attributed his decision to return to China to the residence of his brother and sister in South Korea, which he assumed would negatively influence his prospects in North Korea (248). These oral history data, despite their anecdotal nature, indicate that Korean Chinese veterans considered the chances of accumulating the educational and political capital necessary to get ahead in either of the newly emerging socialist societies to be important in making their resettlement

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decisions. North Korea therefore tried to retain Korean Chinese veterans by arranging marriages with North Korean citizens for them or promising attractive jobs after discharge, in addition to underscoring the importance of their service to “their fatherland.”24 incorporating veterans into the transitional economy In 1950, I joined the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army at age thirteen to “resist America, aid Korea, protect our homes, and defend our country.” On my return from [North] Korea in May 25, 1955, I was assigned a menial job as a prison guard. . . . I can’t help feeling pessimistic about my present circumstances. Many of my primary school classmates continued to pursue higher degrees after senior high schools; some of them are even studying in the Soviet Union to acquire postgraduate degrees. . . . I regret my decision to volunteer for the war. . . . I discontinued my education and risked my life in the war, but how come I am falling miserably behind now? “O ˘ tto˘ke haegyo˘lhaetssu˘myo˘n chou˘lkka?” (What would be the best way to solve this problem?) (Yo˘nbyo˘n Ch’o˘ngnyo˘n 1957)

The foregoing discussion leads us to the question of how well China fared in accommodating the widely shared aspirations for upward mobility of returning veterans. China embarked on its turbulent transition to a planned economy in the years between 1953 and 1957. In its efforts to facilitate rapid economic growth, the CCP increasingly subordinated the agrarian economy (based on small peasant landholdings) to the needs of industrial production and pushed for agricultural collectivization to effectively control the production, purchase, and distribution of grains (Shue 1980; Walker 1966, 1984). Despite the sacrifice of the agricultural sector, however, the heavy-industry–centered first five-year economic plan (1953–1957) did not generate the level of industrial growth anticipated by the Chinese leadership. It instead resulted in the overgrowth of the urban population, as peasants headed to nearby cities en masse, instead of working on collective farms (Lary 1999). Seeing the resulting urban unemployment problem and the delay in the collectivization of agriculture as detrimental to both the economic and political stability of China, the CCP began to strictly control peasant migration to cities. The household registration system (hukou

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zhidu) became the linchpin of this migration control beginning in the mid-1950s. The system divided the entire population into two categories: “city dwellers” who had the urban hukou and “peasants” who had the rural hukou. The latter were prohibited from accessing food rations, houses, jobs, medical insurance, pensions, educational opportunities, and many other benefits to which the former were entitled. By rendering these categorical identities hereditary and making their change extremely difficult, the household registration system restricted not simply the physical, but also the social, mobility of those categorized as peasants (Cheng and Selden 1994; Solinger 1999). In this context, obtaining higher education became vital. The acquisition of a senior high school degree or above generally led to a placement in the urban sector and hence entry into the privileged group of “city dwellers.” The limited number of senior high schools and universities, however, made this path to upward mobility extremely narrow. Initially, the heavyindustry–centered economic plan entailed the expansion of higher education, especially engineering education, between 1950 and 1955 (Shirk 1982, 26). In this earlier period, the CCP even sent more than 20,000 students to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries to import advanced technical skills (Cho˘n 2004, 32). Yet, alarmed by the swelling number of graduates whose placement in the limited urban sector could be no longer guaranteed by the party, the CCP abruptly changed its hitherto expansive education policies beginning in 1955. The party stopped building new schools, and existing schools were closed or ceased to admit new students in 1957 (Shirk 1982, 27).25 According to official statistics from 1958, the rate of enrollment in elementary schools reached 67 percent nationwide, whereas the college admission rate remained as low as 1.6 percent (25). The Korean Chinese felt the bottleneck even more acutely: their elementary school enrollment exceeded 90 percent in 1957 (C. Ryang 1957), yet their limited proficiency in Mandarin made it even more difficult for them to gain admission to most universities. Graduates of peasant origin were doubly disadvantaged by this policy shift: they were more likely to be forcibly sent back to their hometowns in the countryside unless they were admitted to higher-level schools or secured jobs shortly after graduation (Cho˘n 2004; Shirk 1982, 29). Hak-ch’o˘l Kim’s (1957) novelette Po˘nyo˘ng (Prosperity), like many other contemporary fictional accounts, describes the despair and the sense of relative depravation felt by those who failed the senior high school entrance exam:

144  Beyond “Bamboo Curtain” and “Hermit Kingdom” Going to college and becoming a doctor had been Yo˘ng-guk’s dream since he was a sixth grader. He dreamed about himself working in a magnificent hospital, dressed up in a stiffly starched white gown. . . . But the senior high school entrance exam smashed his dream completely. . . . He consulted with his friends and looked up the essays of other junior high school graduates who settled comfortably in the countryside. But nothing was helpful. Nothing could alleviate the pain in his heart . . . “Others become doctors, and I become just a farmer?”

In this novelette, Yo˘ng-guk also expresses his regret about not having followed other Korean Chinese who decided to resettle in North Korea. Resettlement in North Korea became an alternative that young Korean Chinese kept in the back of their minds—a topic that will be discussed in the next section. Not surprisingly, reintegrating Korean War veterans into this stressed transitional economy was not easy. Although official statistics on this population are difficult to access (see note 23), currently available archival and oral history data suggest that only a few veterans were placed in government organizations or state enterprises and acquired the desired urban hukou as a result. This privileged minority included those who were already highly educated, became communist party members prior to the war, acquired valuable skill sets (for example, driving or engineering) while on duty, were of higher rank at the time of discharge, or benefited from the expansive economic and educational policies of the early 1950s due to their early returns.26 The majority of veterans, however, had to be content with a modest cash payment and/or in-kind compensation, which was paid at the time of return or in the form of an annual subsidy. Most critically, many veterans continued to live as peasants—an identity that was becoming less an occupation than a hereditary caste.27 Despite the increasingly repressive political climate, considerable evidence suggests that some disgruntled veterans managed to make their voices heard and that the CCP was keenly aware of the potential volatility of this issue. For instance, an article in Chibu saenghwal (Local chapter life), a semimonthly party periodical, discussed how to deal with veterans who requested CCP membership based on their previous membership in the Korean Labor Party (KLP). As is well known, in Mao-era China CCP membership was one of the most desired political credentials, which could elevate one’s social status and increase entitlement (from the amount and the quality of food rations to the access to durable goods, housing,

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health care, and information). The article urged local party organizations to meticulously follow instructions from Beijing, noting that haphazard treatment in past years had caused some of these former KLP members, resentful about the downward mobility they experienced after their return to China, to send petition letters to the central government or even demand retransfer to North Korea. The central government recommended granting CCP membership immediately to those who showed good performance, had no record of wrongdoings, and possessed a certificate of membership in the KLP (Chunggong Yo˘nbyo˘n Choso˘njok Chach’ijuwi Chojikpu Tangwo˘n Kwalligwa 1958). Examples of more common types of complaints can be found in one of the state-sponsored monthly magazines, Yo˘nbyo˘n ch’o˘ngnyo˘n (Yanbian youth). One such example is the letter cited at the beginning of this section, written presumably by a former People’s Volunteer Army soldier. Now working as a prison guard, he regretted his decision to volunteer for the war at a tender age and resented his missed opportunities for higher education. After publishing this letter, the magazine subsequently published a spate of letters from other readers, who in unison underscored their sympathy as veterans themselves but quickly moved to admonishing the original letter writer for seeking reward in individual worldly success, rather than in his noble dedication to the party and the people.28 The reverberations created by the melodramatic play Kwihwanbyo˘ng (归还兵, A returned soldier) are also notable. The play is about a Korean War veteran who, on returning to China, finds that his wife has married her boss because she presumed that her long-missing husband has died. The play became an instant hit and garnered critical acclaim in early 1957, but this led to the persecution of its author, Ch’oe Cho˘ng-yo˘n, during the Anti-Rightist Movement only several months later. The political scandal reveals the CCP’s extreme vigilance on this issue.29 The evolving contradictions and tensions that I have discussed so far were commonly observed across the communist bloc, where nascent communist regimes tried to complete a radical transformation of the nation’s political economy (that is, a transition from a largely agrarian country to an industrial powerhouse) within a decade or so, while promising to deliver their citizens not only prosperity but also equality and justice. These contradictions and tensions would eventually throw China into turmoil for the following two decades, marked by the Anti-Rightist Movement ­(1957–1958), the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), the Great Famine

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(1960–1962), and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The experience of the Korean Chinese of this turbulent transition, however, was distinctive in one key respect: the existence of a state directly across the border, which claimed to be another socialist fatherland for “its coethnics abroad” (tongp’o). This factor would lead the economic and political crises of the following decades to unfold somewhat differently in northeast China.

Choso˘n Param (Korean Wind): Exodus exodus in context: changing agrarian, educational, and minority policies

In-jung, a second son of a peasant family, thought that the only way to improve his future prospects was to go to college and obtain the urban hukou like his elder brother. He was especially anxious because a fortuneteller told his parents that he would live his entire life “doing no better than tapping on the buttocks of cows” (so kungdungi na tudu˘rigo sal p’alcha), a common pejorative expression for the fate of peasants. He wanted to become an engineer like his elder brother, working on machines, not in the field. But the timing was unfavorable to him. The Chinese government was trying to maintain the college admission rate at a little more than 1 percent; the technical college from which his brother had graduated dramatically reduced the annual entrance quota by the time In-jung applied. Despite his desperate efforts, In-jung failed the highly competitive college entrance exam twice, the second time allegedly because of a sudden policy change that gave preference to those who had worked in the communes or factories for more than two years before taking the exam.30 After working in his production team for a couple of years in despair, In-jung decided to head to North Korea, hoping to continue his studies.

As was the case in other borderland regions of China (Evans, Hutton, and Eng 2000; Mullaney 2011), crossing the border without authorization to visit family, see a doctor, or smuggle petty goods had long been part of local life on both sides of the China–North Korea border (I. Yo˘m 2004, 313–314). The border guards (often individuals from local villages) generally tolerated such innocuous comings and goings or were even personally involved in profit-seeking transborder transactions (Y. Ryu 2002). Unauthorized border crossings for long-term settlement, however, remained rare until the late 1950s. The Hungarian consulate in North Korea, for instance, reported that prior to September 1957 the number of Korean Chinese who

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entered North Korea without authorization was merely 269. The same document, however, shows a dramatic increase at the turn of the 1960s, reporting that approximately 30,000 Korean Chinese entered North Korea without authorization and resettled there between January 1960 and September 1961 (quoted in S. Yi and Song 2012, 365). The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC provides an even larger estimate, reporting on unauthorized departure of 55,000 Korean Chinese (about 5 percent of the entire Korean Chinese population) between January 1961 and May 1962 (quoted in S. Yi and Song 2012, 366). Given the nature of unauthorized border crossings and the credibility of official documents produced in this period, 55,000 is still likely to be an underestimate. A Korean Chinese scholar, Yo˘n-san Ryu (2007), offers a vastly larger estimate of 165,000 drawn from the testimony of a North Korean official; the reliability of this report is, of course, difficult to verify. As will be discussed shortly, we do know that the North Korean government systematically registered these border crossers. The statistics that must have been produced in the process, however, are currently inaccessible. Although we lack even a basic sense of the scale of this massive crossborder flow, this hidden chapter of Korean Chinese history merits a close examination and a careful interpretation to the degree currently possible. I situate this exodus amid widespread anxiety and frustration about blocked mobility, aggravated by the changing agrarian, educational, and minority policies in the late 1950s. In the early years of the PRC, the distribution of land, the expansion of mass education, and progressive minority policies greatly enhanced the legitimacy of communist rule among the Korean Chinese—an ethnic minority whose members were mostly landless peasants with few opportunities for education. None of these policies, however, remained intact a decade later. The collectivization of agriculture throughout the 1950s culminated in the formation of the People’s Commune in 1958, the amalgamation of farm collectives comprising up to 20,000 households. The People’s Commune system not only abolished individual ownership of any kind but also militarized agricultural production and the everyday lives of peasants, including the provision of meals, medicine, child care, and education (MacFarquhar 1983). Regimented into a production team (the smallest unit in charge of production and distribution in the countryside), peasants were placed under the direct control of local cadres, subjected to a ruthless work regime and mobilized for a variety of state-led projects, all while being reduced

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to starvation at the peak of the Great Leap Forward (Dikötter 2010).31 Although the Great Famine in the following years did not spare city dwellers, many peasants resented that they were left to fend for themselves, while city dwellers were entitled to state-provided food rations procured from the countryside, however insufficient the rations had become. To make matters worse, escaping the grueling life of a peasant via higher education became even more difficult. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the CCP’s policy goal was to suppress the demand for higher education, instead of increasing its supply, and to channel young people to the countryside.32 This was increasingly done not through the provision of incentives but through the full-scale mobilization of the party’s propaganda machine. From the mid-1950s to mid-1960s, magazines, newspapers, and party periodicals regularly published articles written by high-level cadres highlighting the party’s accomplishments in expanding basic educational opportunities to the children of poor peasants and workers. These articles often noted young people’s complaints about recent restrictive educational policies, criticized their tendency to value elite education and disdain productive labor, and urged them to dedicate their talent to building “new socialist villages” in the countryside.33 These articles denounced aspirations for higher education and employment in the urban sector as a product of an individualistic, elitist, and bourgeois mind-set (see also Pepper 1996). In a derogatory manner, party propaganda frequently associated excellent academic performance with “white expertise” (baizhuan, 白专), meaning bourgeois expertise (Y. Wu 2007, 169). Other articles shared the experiences of local party chapters, which allegedly transformed disgruntled junior high school graduates into exemplary workers in communes: these chapters recommended offering proper ideological guidance, teaching advanced farming techniques, and granting various leadership roles to these young people, such as commune accountant, production team leader, or secretary of the local chapter of the Communist Youth League.34 Those who settled in their home villages after graduation sent their own letters and essays: they asserted that, after overcoming their initial disappointment, they had become born-again “new socialist farmers” “equipped at once with the right ideology and excellent expertise” (you hong you zhuan, 又红又专); they made sure to mention that their transformation was in due course rewarded by membership in the Communist Youth League and then in the Communist Party.35 Numerous novels, plays, poems, and reports tried to convey a similar message.36

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Nevertheless, precisely the fact that the party had to propagandize so intensively for a decade reveals how challenging it was to placate widespread resentment; overcome foot dragging, opportunism, and cynicism; and induce voluntary compliance. No amount of propaganda could persuade In-jung to feel proud of his destiny as a peasant in the fields, “tapping on the buttocks of cows.” The frustration, however, was not limited to those stuck in the countryside. The Anti-Rightist Movement that began in the winter of 1957 quickly focused on the so-called local nationalism of the Korean Chinese, as was the case in other minority regions (Connor 1984). Those involved in the campaign criticized the attachment of the Chaoxianzu to Korean culture, especially the language, as an expression of Korean arrogance and their refusal to emulate the “advanced Han Chinese,” “the big brother of all minzu constituting the family of the Chinese nation.”37 The enduring sense among Korean Chinese of belonging to both China and North Korea also drew scathing attacks. Emphasizing common descent or emotional attachment to North Korea was vilified as a vestige of bourgeois nationalism. The sole legitimate fatherland of the Korean Chinese was the People’s Republic of China, it was asserted, and Chaoxianzu were an integral part of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu), not the Korean nation (Chaoxian minzu).38 In the heat of this political campaign, many Korean Chinese, including peasants, were forced to improve their proficiency in Chinese. Yanbian University, for instance, launched a campaign called the “Chinese Language Great Leap Forward,” pressuring all students, professors, and staff members to improve their Chinese proficiency and increasing the proportion of classes taught exclusively in Chinese to 86.4 percent (Y. Ryu 2009). Korean Chinese peasants were also urged to learn the customs and farming techniques of Han Chinese peasants. In fact, the party asserted that one of the superiorities of the People’s Commune System was to give peasants more opportunities for interethnic interactions than were customary in small-scale villages, which had long been divided along ethnic lines.39 Moreover, the Korean Chinese were harassed for their “improper” linguistic habits, such as calling North Korea the “fatherland” (zuguo/choguk) or the Han Chinese (Hanzu) “Chinese” (Zhongguoren/Chunggugin).40 The Korean Chinese intelligentsia, especially the cultural elites,41 were victimized most by this new assimilationist push. Those who chose to pursue expertise in science and engineering were less vulnerable to such attacks, yet they often faced discrimination in employment. Just like members of

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the “black class” (politicians, officials, managers, bankers, and landlords of the old regime and their descendants; see Watson [1984]), Korean Chinese were categorically prevented from pursuing “confidential specialties” (for example, nuclear science, geography, airmanship) and excluded from several job categories in the government and military (for example, state scientists, fighter pilots, diplomats) due to suspicions about their dual loyalty. “welcome to the socialist fatherland!”: north korea’s low-profile repatriation campaign

Aggravating circumstances notwithstanding, it was not until the Great Famine struck northeast China in 1960 that Korean Chinese acted on their widely shared anxiety and frustration by flocking to North Korea without authorization. A few existing studies on the social history of the Great Famine commonly note a dramatic nationwide increase in unauthorized population movement defying migration control policies in place. Peasants in severely affected areas fled their villages, inundating other less affected areas or nearby cities seeking work (Dikötter 2010, 232); urban residents in the areas where the food rations dried up, for their part, fled to the countryside, hoping to rely on subsistence farming (Lary 1999). Local cadres condoned or even actively facilitated such unauthorized departures: some hoped that these departures would ease population pressure in their own villages or bring remittances from cities, whereas others were simply interested in lining their own pockets by selling letters of reference or travel permits; still others simply could not enforce the rules in the face of the horrors of famine. Personal connections—not only family ties but also the ties established through state-organized rural–urban migration during the Great Leap Forward—were critical in channeling these people on the move (Lary 1999; Dikötter 2010). Given this broader context, it is understandable that many Korean Chinese crossed the loosely patrolled Sino–North Korea border to seek relief from famine. The geographic proximity, ethnolinguistic affinity, crossborder family ties, and other social networks (created through a series of state-organized cross-border movements in earlier years) made North Korea a more feasible destination than other cities within China. This was also the case for other ethnic minority populations residing along the extended borders of China. Citing recently declassified documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Frank Dikötter (2010, 239) shows that such massive unauthorized cross-border movement in the border regions took place as early

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as 1958, including 115,000 people who left Yunnan for Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. The unauthorized exodus, however, increased exponentially at the turn of the 1960s as a result of famine, especially during a lull in policy enforcement in 1962: tens of thousands of people crossed the border, from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan, from Inner Mongolia to the Mongolian People’s Republic, and from southern China to Hong Kong (Bulag 1998, 184–185; Dikötter 2010, 239–241). But North Korea was different in one critical respect from other destinations to which starving Chinese peasants were heading. Inside China, municipal governments were ready to expel peasants without urban hukou (Dikötter 2010, 238–239); outside China, adjacent countries ruthlessly deported unauthorized border crossers, or only reluctantly, temporarily, and conditionally admitted them as refugees (Bulag 1998, 184–185; Dikötter 2010, 239–241). North Korea, on the other hand, welcomed these coethnics indiscriminately as repatriates—that is, those entitled to membership and access to its territory and the accompanying benefits of food rations, housing, and jobs. This open-door policy was not limited to the Korean Chinese. As discussed in Chapter Two, North Korea launched an aggressive repatriation campaign vis-à-vis Koreans in Japan at approximately the same time. Scattered evidence also suggests that North Korea encouraged the repatriation of Sakhalin Koreans who had not previously obtained Soviet Union citizenship (C. Cho 2002) and the Korean War orphans who had been initially sent to socialist allies in Central and Eastern Europe.42 This repatriation policy derived from the same labor shortage issue discussed in the previous section. In the late 1950s, the North Korean regime, after bloody factional struggles, adopted self-reliance as a primary goal of its economic planning. It radically reduced reliance on foreign aid (33.4 percent of the state revenue in 1954 to a paltry of 2.6 percent in 1960) and focused on developing heavy industry and constructing an independent military complex, while refusing to be integrated into the Soviet-led international division of labor as a primary goods producer (Armstrong 2005; Szalontai 2005). This development strategy led to the dramatic expansion of schools and factories (O 2007; Cheehyung Kim 2010, 172). It also generated a constant demand for docile labor and for native scientists and engineers to replace their foreign counterparts, who were scheduled to return, most notably, to the Soviet Union and East Germany (Armstrong 2005). In this context, the massive influx of Korean Chinese, who were fluent Korean speakers (unlike many of the second-generation Zainichi Koreans) and had

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grown up in a neighboring socialist country, was more than North Korea could have hoped for. North Korea built official reception centers in major cities near the border and assisted in the resettlement of Korean Chinese “returnees.” The rumor of a warm welcome spread quickly through Korean Chinese communities. As a result, the Korean Chinese exodus from China was not limited to peasants living in the border area, having direct cross-border family ties, and seeking immediate relief from famine. A Chinese official source, quoted in S. Yi and Song (2012, 366), shows that 55,000 unauthorized border crossers between 1961 and 1962 came not only from the Jilin province (47 percent)—where the Korean Autonomous Prefecture was located right across the China–North Korea border—but also from the provinces of Liaoning (40 percent) and Heilongjiang (13 percent), which are located further north and populated mostly by those from the southern part of the Korean peninsula.43 S. Yi and Song (2012, 366) quote another source that offers a glimpse of the occupational composition of these border-crossers: among the 25,435 people who fled the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture without authorization between March 1961 and the same month in 1962, peasants constituted only 43.6 percent, while factory workers (10.4 percent), students (13.36 percent), and other urban residents (32.64 percent) made up the rest. A few existing studies (Y. Ryu 2002), memoirs (P. Cho˘ng 1997), fictional accounts (H. Ri 1998), and my oral history data suggest that an unidentifiable number of Korean Chinese intellectuals victimized by a series of political campaigns fled to North Korea, while scientists and engineers who were facing glass ceilings were lured by the aggressive recruitment by the North Korean government. Less conspicuously, yet no less importantly, the exodus also included a large-scale outflow of young people like In-jung (cited at the beginning of this section) and Kil-yong (cited in the introductory chapter), who were neither starving nor persecuted in the strict sense of the terms. North Korea’s open-door policy offered a viable exit option to these young Korean Chinese who felt stuck (both physically and socially) or falling behind precisely when the new socialist stratification system—inextricably linked to the “stratification of places” in sociologist John Logan’s phrase (1978)—became rigid.44 Going to the Korean peninsula to fulfill aspirations of higher education had a long history in the region, dating back to the colonial period. Even after the collapse of the empire, the universities of North Korea continued to draw Korean Chinese students. In a CCP-sponsored symposium held

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in early 1948, for instance, participants discussed the “Return to Korea Epidemic” (hui Chaoxian bing, 回朝鲜病) among young Koreans. Many young Koreans feared that their lack of Mandarin fluency and minority status might disadvantage their prospects in the higher education system in the new China. Some of them were clandestinely crossing the border to North Korea on their own, hoping to gain admission to universities or vocational schools in North Korea. To dampen this fervor and prevent brain drain, the symposium participants agreed that it was necessary to build a minority university in Yanbian (I. Yo˘m 2010). Given this historical context, the contraction of educational opportunities beginning in the mid-1950s may have nudged many young people— especially enterprising males of peasant origin in their late teens to early twenties who had lost hope of finding jobs in urban sectors—into reconsidering the long-dormant option of “returning” to North Korea. They had less to lose by fleeing—in comparison with those who had already secured urban jobs or obtained the cadre status—and in general, had more adventurous dispositions. Contemporary publications, subjected to censorship, rarely brought up this phenomenon. But when they did, however obliquely, this “fervor” was always situated in the context of young people’s frustration about blocked mobility. For instance, in documenting the accomplishments of a local chapter of the Communist Youth League, an article in Yo˘nbyo˘n ch’o˘ngnyo˘n (Yanbian youth) mentioned a junior high school graduate who had long harbored a plan to run away to North Korea to study but eventually transformed himself into an exemplary worker in his production team.45 Also recall the character of Yo˘ng-guk, cited in the previous section, the son of a peasant in Hak-ch’o˘l Kim’s (1957) novelette Po˘nyo˘ng (Prosperity); after failing his senior high school entrance exam, he regretted not having gone to North Korea. Many of my interviewees fit this profile. A sense of blocked mobility was also important in the migration decisions of those highly educated and in relatively privileged positions. A bad “class label”46 or a statement critical of the party’s policies (like Kilyong’s sarcastic remark on agricultural collectivization; see the opening vignette in the Introduction) could negatively influence the prospects of otherwise promising individuals (Shirk 1982; Walder and Hu 2009). These flaws understandably hindered the accumulation of political capital, most important being the acquisition of CCP membership. However, they also increasingly hindered the accumulation of educational capital (for e­ xample,

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admission to prestigious universities) beginning in the late 1950s. The CCP began to prioritize “virtuocracy” (evaluating students based on their ideological virtues) and “feodocracy” (evaluating students based on their ascribed status, most importantly their class labels) over meritocracy in admission to higher education (Shirk 1982, 4).47 An ethnic minority status, as already mentioned, could also exclude a person from certain prestigious positions dealing with critical state interests. Those who were ambitious and upwardly mobile were likely to become resentful of their permanent disadvantage due to reasons unrelated to their own capabilities; some of them decided to seek their fortune in North Korea instead. The father of one of my interviewees, for instance, who had long been content with his job at a hydraulic power plant, decided to go back to his ancestral hometown in North Korea, Shinu˘iju, in 1961 after learning that his “wealthy farmer” class label—which had been assigned to him twelve years earlier following his eldest brother’s status—doomed his application for CCP membership. Another interviewee who was an English major at a prestigious foreignlanguage university decided to leave for North Korea after learning that he was the only student in his department excluded from a special job training in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs due to his ethnic minority status. Interestingly, the Chinese authorities seem to have largely tolerated the massive unauthorized exodus of its ethnic minority population. I could find no evidence that border patrols were significantly increased. Rather, there are ample testimonies that border guards frequently looked the other way rather than doing their best to arrest illegal border crossers. One of my interviewees, for instance, testified that, when the border patrol caught him and his friends trying to cross the Tumen River in April 1962, the soldiers simply told them not to and then left. He and his friends dismissed this warning and crossed the river the next day without interruption by the border patrol. The audacity of Kil-yong and his friends, who knocked down the border guards and simply ran across the bridge between Tumen (China) and Namyang (North Korea) (see the Introduction), was not exceptional. A Chinese official source reveals that at least in a few instances some of these unauthorized border crossers even made off with the border guards’ guns and boats (S. Yi and Song 2012, 366). Recall that only a few years earlier the CCP had launched a ferocious political campaign to crack down on the “local nationalism” of the Korean Chinese and their “wrong view on the fatherland.” In this context, the le-

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nient attitude toward these “fugitives” heading en masse to their “other fatherland” seems puzzling. A recently declassified official document offers a hint, suggesting that there was a secret bilateral agreement on the highest level of the respective leadership in China and North Korea: at a summit meeting in July 1961, Zhou Enlai reportedly mentioned the Korean Chinese exodus to Kim Il-Sung and promised to send Korean Chinese workers to help alleviate North Korea’s labor shortage (S. Yi and Song 2012, 369). Zhou Enlai’s statement is in line with Chinese policies in the earlier years; the CCP had been cooperative with its ally’s various efforts to induce Korean Chinese resettlement. The Soviet–China friction that became further aggravated in the early 1960s may also have affected China’s accommodating stance toward North Korea. However, the CCP’s exceptional leniency toward several tens of thousands of unauthorized border crossers should not be understood solely as a product of the deliberate policy decisions imposed from above by the central government. Rather, these lenient responses reflect the contradictory characteristics of the party-state during the Mao era. It brutally repressed dissidents but was often surprisingly incompetent in imposing the center’s professed agendas on its peripheries, creating much room for wheeling and dealing at all levels of society (Shue 1988; Lieberthal and Lampton 1992). More specifically, we must take into account the context of the Great Famine during which the fragmentary nature of the party-state was even more pronounced and the moral economy that had sustained party rule was severely undermined. As I discussed earlier, it was fairly common for local authorities to condone or even facilitate unauthorized population movement for various reasons. Only a thorough historical ethnography would be able to provide in the future a more comprehensive understanding of how the deliberate policy decisions of the central government and the improvised reactions of local governments together shaped the Chinese authorities’ varying responses to the massive unauthorized exit of the Korean Chinese. In sum, the “Korean wind” (Choso˘n Param, as Korean Chinese still call it) that swept through the Korean Chinese community at the turn of the 1960s was not an idiosyncratic and aberrant chapter of the Korean Chinese history, caused simply by an exceptional natural disaster. It was rather an integral part of the Korean Chinese responses to the turbulent socialist transformation, informed deeply by their collective memory of cross-border mobility and (quasi-) dual membership in earlier years.

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Coethnic Repatriates in the “Bosom of the Socialist Fatherland”: Disillusionment In North Korea, Kil-yong (see the Introduction for more on his biography) became a Chinese teacher in a senior high school in a developed port city, Wonsan. His new life in North Korea was not bad. He obtained citizenship in six months and was soon allowed to join the Korean Labor Party. He was in his mid-twenties, and, as white-collar workers with relatively high salaries and prestige, teachers were popular as marriage partners—“second only to military officers,” Kil-yong added with a mischievous smile—in postwar North Korea where the male-to-female sex ratio was already too low. He soon fell in love with a university student, who became pregnant with his child. But his parents in China vigorously opposed his plan to marry the woman, fearing that the marriage would decisively anchor their first son in North Korea. They saw Kil-yong’s departure as a temporary youthful adventure and wanted him to return to China, as some of his friends had already done. Kil-yong explained to me that many of his friends, accustomed to China’s egalitarian culture in which most people called each other simply “comrade,” had a hard time adjusting to the allegedly more hierarchical culture in North Korea. He recalled having been harassed by the police on the streets for improper attire: however hot and humid the summer days might be, teachers had to wear perfect suits “for the honor of the Great Leader,” he was told. Torn between filial duty and love for his fiancée, he decided to return to China temporarily, thinking that he would persuade his parents first and then come back again in four months to marry his pregnant fiancée.

The oral history data collected by others as well as myself provide a contour of the Korean Chinese returnees’ reception and resettlement in North Korea. The government built official reception centers in major cities near the border, in which the incoming border crossers were put through basic sanitary inspections, shown propaganda films, and served white rice and pollack soup—a feast in those days. Individual interviews followed, during which the border crossers were asked about basic personal information, education and employment history, family relations in North Korea, and reasons for their “return to the bosom of the socialist fatherland.” The main goal of these interviews was not so much to evaluate their eligibility for entry as to register these new members in the state’s administrative system

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and create data to be used for resettlement. Tellingly, none of my study participants was asked to provide standard identification papers as supporting documents. In-jung, for instance, confessed that he falsely reported that his family in China belonged to the “poor peasant” class, although they actually belonged to the “middle peasant” class. In-jung commented, “What kind of moron would say that he is a son of a landlord even if he is? They are not going to travel all the way to China and look into your hukou!” Some border crossers brought papers documenting their educational or employment history or letters and photos showing their connection to powerful cadres in North Korea (as Kil-yong brought his father’s photo with Kim Il-sung), in the hope that these documents would result in favorable placements. Days or weeks after the interview, these “repatriates” received official notifications about their job placement and resettlement. These notifications served as a temporary endorsement of the returnees’ identities, which enabled them to ride a train or receive food for free on their way to their new homes. Despite the unavailability of relevant official statistics, my data indicate that the demands of the regime were given primacy over the individual wishes of border crossers in job placement and resettlement decisions. Most of the border crossers, including In-jung, were assigned to collective farms, factories, and mines close to the border, where labor shortages were most severe.48 Those with high levels of education (plus valuable political connections) like Kil-yong were often resettled further south and assigned more privileged positions. A small minority were allowed to attend vocational schools or universities immediately after arrival, and some earned the chance after working for several years in the agricultural collectives, factories, or mines. Appeals to reconsider initial decisions were rarely accepted. Korean Chinese integration into North Korean society seemed relatively smooth on both the institutional and cultural levels. Initially granted residence permits, most “repatriates” obtained North Korean citizenship within a few months to a couple of years, and some even gained party membership. Korean Chinese “repatriates” were fluent Korean speakers (and, in many cases, spoke the same northern dialect) who had grown up in socialist China and were likely to have family or other social networks in North Korea. They thus navigated the North Korean social system skillfully and mingled with native North Korean citizens relatively easily. This is in contrast with the experience of Zainichi Korean repatriates: they were

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either not fluent in Korean or used the southern dialect, had no experience dealing with the socialist system prior to repatriation, and seldom had personal ties to native North Korean citizens (S. Ryang 2004). Nevertheless, many Korean Chinese returned to China within a few years. Although it is impossible to know how many returned and how many stayed until the official statistics of North Korea are made public, my interviewees unanimously suspected that the number of the former would be greater than the number of the latter. Improved food conditions and remaining family ties in China clearly played a role in turning the tide. Yet a seemingly mundane but universal remark made by my interviewees—“it was not like what I had imagined it to be”—captures another important aspect. Most of those who wanted to continue to study were placed in collective farms, mines, and factories near the border; getting recommendations to go to college was not as easy as rumor had it. In-jung, for instance, told me that he swept the alleyways in the neighborhood every day early in the morning and volunteered to work in the factory boiler room every weekend, in hopes of being nominated for the annual college admission quota allotted to his factory. “I impressed my neighbors and co-workers so deeply that my story even appeared in a local newspaper! I was praised as an exemplary tongp’o worker!” In-jung emphatically added. To his disappointment, however, the quota went to somebody else, and In-jung was admitted to a less prestigious open university merely as a part-time student. Moreover, most of my interviewees reportedly experienced harsher labor discipline and more rigid shop floor hierarchy in North Korea than in China. These testimonies are in line with the scholarly findings that the remarkable industrial growth of North Korea throughout the mid-1950s and 1960s—which was duly recognized by a famous British economist, Joan Robinson, as the “Korean Miracle” (Kwon and Chung 2012, 152)— was predicated on the all-out mobilization of its population, not unlike the Great Leap Forward in China. The government promoted the achievement of the production goal as quickly as possible as a sacred obligation of new socialist workers: the Chollima (meaning “swift horse”) Movement, emulating the Soviet’s Stakhanovite Movement, began in 1956; the socalled Pyongyang Speed (the incredible speed at which the public housing project in Pyongyang was completed in 1958) was quickly surpassed by the ­“Vinylon Speed” or “Kangson [a famous industrial city] Speed” in the 1960s; numerous “labor heroes” were promoted and glorified as examples

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to be followed, pushing the already unrealistic production goals to even greater heights (Cheehyung Kim 2010). Legislative changes to reinforce labor discipline made quitting or transferring jobs more difficult (Nam 2008). In this context, working on machines was not as enviable a job as many Korean Chinese of peasant origin had thought. Furthermore, as in other socialist countries that adopted the heavy-industry–centered development strategy, the hard work was not rewarded by the improvement of the standard of living of ordinary North Koreans (Armstrong 2005). My interviewees also commonly reported that they had felt the everyday culture in North Korea to be more authoritarian and repressive than in China. The surveillance and discipline of everyday life, including personal and public hygiene, attire, linguistic conventions, and dating practices, seemed to increase daily.49 North Koreans’ heightened alertness to personal and public hygiene remains one of the most vivid memories of many interviewees up to this day. They excitedly shared with me how, at the reception center, all border crossers were vaccinated and their clothes were boiled to kill lice, how people wiped the street in front of the People’s Palace of Culture with a wet mop before the national holidays,50 or how they were turned away in front of the train station because they could not provide a “certificate of bath”—that is, evidence that they had bathed in public bathhouses. Although some were impressed by these telltale signs of “development,” others, like Kil-yong’s friends, felt suffocated, especially because violating these regulations entailed fines or punishment. Another interviewee, for instance, said that she was frustrated with frequent unannounced sanitary inspections, sometimes at 5 o’clock in the morning.51 The cult of personality also began to emerge about the same time, as Kim Il-sung violently liquidated his competitors in 1958 and institutionalized his autocracy in 1961 (Yong-h. Kim 2002; Nam 2008). In other words, to the disappointment of these “repatriates,” North Korea seemed not very different from China in several critical respects—or more repressive and totalitarian in terms of the modernizing state’s transformative zeal toward its population. It may not have been just the coethnic returnees who were disillusioned. The “fatherland” that initially welcomed coethnic repatriates as a useful source of labor might have found Korean Chinese returnees particularly ungrateful, unreliable, and recalcitrant. These returnees were largely single males in their late teens and early twenties, ready to flee North Korea if

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circumstances did not turn out right. The story of Ku˘m-san, one of my interviewees, is illustrative in this regard. He was placed in a technical high school in the city of Kimch’aek, where a large proportion of the student body was made up of ethnic Korean returnees from China, Japan, and Sakhalin, as well as Korean War orphans brought back from Romania and Bulgaria. “Imagine what would happen if you put a bunch of boys in the dorm without their parents around,” he told me, giggling. Instead of studying hard, he had fun with his new friends, drinking apple cider and sweet Russian liquor and going to the beach to swim. After devoting himself to fun for two months, Ku˘m-san came to conclude that getting a job and earning a salary would be better than wasting time in school. To receive a job assignment, he sneaked onto a train heading to the border area and went to the reception center, pretending to have just crossed the border the previous day. However, the officials discovered his lie based on the rec­ords of his initial placement. They told him that reassignment was not allowed and he should return to school. Unwilling to follow the instruction but also lacking any other alternatives, he decided to return home to China. Some of my other interviewees and a former returnee interviewed by Yo˘n-san Ryu also confirmed that around 1963 the Korean Chinese “repatriates” who caused trouble in local communities or simply disappeared overnight—leaving machines stopped or local women engaged, pregnant, and abandoned like Kil-yong’s fiancée—became the subject of gossip and chastising comments of local cadres (Y. Ryu 2007). Once “repatriates” decided to return to China, exiting the country was not extremely difficult.52 Certainly, they needed a modicum of resources, skills, and luck to travel to the northern border area (if they had been resettled in the interior) and to cross the river without authorization. In North Korea, traveling a long distance by train required a train ticket, a certificate of bath (to prevent the spread of epidemics), and a travel permit from the local police office. If arrested while fleeing, “repatriates” faced punishment as North Korean citizens. Under the new labor regime, just leaving workplaces without permission was a punishable crime, resulting in six to twelve months of imprisonment in a labor camp (Nam 2008). Still, even if the initial attempt failed, some tried to leave again and eventually managed to cross the border. The critical question, therefore, was not so much whether they could exit North Korea but how they would be received in China.

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Return from the “Return”: The End of Korean Chinese Dual Membership In the winter of 1965, In-jung crossed the frozen Tumen River back to China, but he was arrested at a train station near the border, after his Korean-made pants attracted the attention of the border patrol. In-jung explained that he was not a North Korean but a Korean Chinese (Chaoxianzu), but the interrogating officer dismissed his claim as irrelevant: the guard said that In-jung’s hukou registration must have been nullified in any event, and he should be deported back to North Korea. In-jung was handed over to the North Korean border patrol with approximately seventy to eighty other Korean Chinese in a similar situation, and they were imprisoned in a labor camp after a summary trial. Undaunted, however, Injung made another attempt after being released, and this time he was able to return to his village without being caught. His venture to North Korea hardly affected his life as a peasant for about a decade. However, when he was nominated for an annual college admission quota allotted to his production team in 1973, the local CCP chapter canceled his nomination, citing his unauthorized border crossing a decade earlier. Kil-yong successfully returned to China in January 1965. On crossing the frozen Tumen River, he threw away his clothes and wore an old Mao jacket that his mother had sent him in advance. He also held the People’s Daily, a Chinese-language newspaper, under his arm. He knew that if he looked like a Han Chinese, the border patrol would be unlikely to question him. Kil-yong’s problem lay somewhere else, though. Unable to recover his urban hukou, he had to become an irregular worker at a tofu-processing factory in Yanji so that he could at least eat the leftover tofu even without proper grain cards (liangpiao). A year later, his father, a cadre, was able to help him recover his registration, but with the onset of the Cultural Revolution several months later, the life of Kil-yong’s family was quickly turned upside down. In addition to being one of the leading cadres who were especially vulnerable to the Red Guards’ aggression, his father had been a member of the official goodwill mission dispatched to North Korea in 1948. The Red Guards accused Kil-yong’s father of having secretly served the revisionist agenda of North Korea; it was alleged that Kil-yong’s venture to North Korea had been part of this secret mission. Because both his father and Kil-yong were labeled “antirevolutionaries,” his whole family not only lost the urban hukou but was discriminated against in every aspect of

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their lives for almost ten years. Finding no way to communicate with his pregnant fiancée in North Korea and feeling obligated to support his aging parents and young siblings in dire need, Kil-yong eventually married another woman and gave up his initial plan to go back to North Korea.

In analyzing popular resistance in the era of Stalin, historian Lynne Viola (2002) persuasively shows how the authorities’ retrospective attribution of meaning to a given action—not the action’s inherent quality or the actor’s opaque motivation—often determined whether the same action was severely punished as “counterrevolutionary resistance” or simply dismissed as petty crime, impulsive defiance, or an act of self-protection on the part of benighted peasants. This insight applies to the Chinese state’s varying and shifting responses to the massive unauthorized exit and return of the Korean Chinese. As illustrated by In-jung and Kil-yong’s postreturn trajectories, these exits and returns were interpreted in varying ways by the authorities, leaving highly divergent consequences for individuals who partook in this particular migration venture. The reason for flight, the original social status of the returnee, and the timing of return were important, but the highly variable discretionary decisions of border guards or local bureaucrats also mattered greatly. Understandably, most of those who had been victimized by various political campaigns dared not return. In other cases, however, reentry per se was not a critical issue, at least before the mid-1960s (In-jung’s deportation described in the preceding paragraph is an exceptional case, reflecting the changing political climate at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution, which will be discussed shortly). If returnees were arrested by the Chinese border patrol on their way back, they were mostly placed in prison (near the border) for a few months and then released. That is, Korean Chinese returnees were received—and punished—as Chinese citizens. For those who returned, the most urgent task was reestablishing their hukou registration, especially if they had been away for longer than a year. Some returnees who brought North Korean spouses or newborn children to China also had to take care of their family members’ registrations. In the planned economy, living without registration could mean the loss of essential staples and services that were distributed almost exclusively through communes (for peasants) or work units (for urbanites). As In-jung’s experience illustrates, peasants who returned to their production teams had relatively little difficulty reintegrating into the rural community. The villagers and rural cadres, especially in the villages where

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Koreans outnumbered Han Chinese, were generally tolerant—and sometimes even sympathetic—toward their returning neighbors.53 If the fugitives were young boys, many of their neighbors saw their flights more as a case of juvenile delinquency than as a serious crime. In the case of urbanhukou holders, consequences varied. The recovery of their privileged hukou rested, on the one hand, on their capacity to make a deal with local bureaucrats, and, on the other, on the political climate at the time of their return.54 Those who could not regain the urban hukou, like Kil-yong, became peasants or unregistered irregular workers in cities. North Korean spouses were usually granted legal resident status but not citizenship, whereas children had a better chance of being registered as Chinese citizens. The authorities’ flexible and relatively lenient responses should be understood again in the broader context of the time. Numerous communes and work units across China were dealing with the repercussions of the famine of previous years. Punishing all those who had left without authorization was deemed impractical and undesirable. An article published in Chibu Saenghwal (Local chapter life) in 1964 suggests that even CCP membership was not always nullified simply because the person left the commune or work unit without authorization (Chibu Saenghwal 1964). In response to the question, “How should we handle CCP members who left their designated places without authorization, did not return, and did not pay their membership fee for years?” the article recommended a case-by-case approach. It listed various reasons for unauthorized departure: yearning for life in the city; hardships caused by natural disaster (a euphemism for the Great Famine); persecution by ill-meaning colleagues (referring to a series of political campaigns in previous years); and fear of punishment for their wrongdoings. Because conduct after departure also varied, the article concluded, making a judgment based on the concrete analysis of each case was more appropriate. It is difficult to know to what extent this instruction from the center effectively regulated circumstances in individual communes and work units in the northeastern periphery or whether this flexible attitude also applied to those who crossed the state border without authorization. But it is clear that the central government allowed much room for discretion on the local level rather than offering a strict uniform guideline. The consequences of unauthorized exit and return, however, became more formidable with the onset of the Cultural Revolution. As studies of the PRC’s minority policies have shown, the Cultural Revolution entailed

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a violent assimilationist assault on ethnic minorities (Dreyer 1968). Mongols and Koreans, however, were affected more directly by the collapse of China’s diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and North Korea than the general assimilationist push. Toward the late 1960s, the Sino–Soviet relationship degenerated to the point of occasional border clashes. The North Korean leadership, which initially tried to maintain balance between the two communist giants, declared self-reliance as the cardinal guiding principle of the nation in 1965. It began to criticize the leadership in both Mao’s China and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (Szalontai 2005), especially the former’s “leftist opportunism.” In this geopolitical context, Mongols’ ties to the Mongolian People’s Republic (which was under the heavy influence of the Soviet Union) and Korean Chinese ties to North Korea became a source of political liability. The two groups were accused of serving as a fifth column, instead of being derided as backward yet harmless, as was the case for other ethnic minorities (Hyer and Heaton 1968; Bulag 2002). As in previous political campaigns, the primary victims of this rising geopolitical tension were cadres and intellectuals. Numerous people were imprisoned, tortured, and killed for supposedly harboring separatist ideologies, instigating subversive acts against China, and committing espionage acts for North Korea. The most conspicuous victim was the legendary Korean Chinese leader Zhu Dehai, who had been the chair of the Yanbian prefecture for almost twenty years; he was accused of treason and died of complications from being tortured. In the 1968 Infiltrator Affair, 175 Korean Chinese cadres in the fields of jurisdiction and policing—which, in Yanbian, amounted to 70 percent of the Korean Chinese cadres in these fields—were arrested, tortured, and killed as spies for North Korea (So˘ng 2004, 86). At Yanbian University, twenty-five of thirty-six Korean Chinese professors were fired and subjected to various forms of harassment including physical assault (Y. Ryu 2009). Indeed, the entire university was exposed to intense suspicion and accusations: a leftist group argued that Yanbian University secretly served as a branch of Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang, and that 1,640 of 3,200 graduates between 1949 and 1964 had betrayed China and fled to North Korea (I. Yo˘m 2010, 529). Although this number may well be an exaggeration, precisely these types of political charges, which had victimized Korean Chinese intellectuals even prior to the Cultural Revolution, forced a large number of graduates to find refuge in North Korea. Most notably, in the summer of 1967, the core members of the faction that defended Zhu Dehai fled to North Korea after their defeat

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in an intense gunfight with members of another faction that opposed him. By the late 1960s those arrested while departing China without authorization began to face charges of treason and sentences of ten to fifteen years of forced labor (Y. Ryu 2002). As this accusation against Yanbian University and the treason charge reveal, unauthorized exit to North Korea began to be couched in the language of loyalty and security. A Korean Chinese novelist, Hye-so˘n Ri (1998, 204–205), conveys the atmosphere of the time in a scene from her novel Ppalgan ku˘rimja (Red shadow), in which a Korean Chinese character is harassed by a Han Chinese neighbor questioning the loyalty of the Korean Chinese: “Is it true that you Korean Chinese are planning to betray the fatherland [choguk] and flee to your ancestral hometown [kohyang]? You folks have no scruples. Where are you going to live, if not in China? South Korea is a capitalist country. North Korea is known to be revisionist. How can you betray your socialist fatherland? As the old saying goes, you raise a dog, and it just bites your heel!” In this highly politicized context, past glory and privilege could become a critical liability: Korean War veterans who had returned after serving in the KPA by the order of the CCP or Korean Chinese who had connections with the powerful cadres in North Korea (like Kil-yong’s father) became easy targets of suspicion, harassment, and oftentimes imprisonment. Simple mail exchanges across the border could also be criminalized. Having a close family member in North Korea (not to mention in South Korea) could invite humiliation by the Red Guards or even an espionage charge. Ordinary people could also experience discrimination, if not outright persecution, due to their cross-border family ties or a history of unauthorized exits and reentries, which were belatedly unearthed and politicized. One of my interviewees, who without much difficulty had been able to recover his urban hukou on his return from North Korea in 1963, lost it with the onset of the Cultural Revolution and was sent to a remote rural village as belated punishment. As previously mentioned, Injung’s migration venture—which had been embarked on in the hope of going to college—resulted in the cancellation of his nomination for an annual college admission quota ten years later. The viability of North Korea as an exit option for the Korean Chinese was short lived. The Cultural Revolution vigorously attacked minority cultures, virtually halted the entire educational system, and forcibly subjected a large swath of students (including those with urban hukou) to a radical rustication program (involving forced migration to the countryside).55

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These developments, however, did not engender another exodus of Korean Chinese. The China–Korea border was heavily fortified on both sides and marked by a number of billboards proclaiming the superiority of the one regime and denouncing the dogmatism or revisionism of the other. Crossborder transactions via regular channels were halted for almost ten years, including mail exchanges. As mentioned earlier, arrested would-be border crossers were sentenced to ten to fifteen years of forced labor under dire circumstances. Understandably, unauthorized exit became an irrevocable one-way trip, a last resort attempted by only the most desperate. A radical policy shift also occurred in North Korea, which began to reinforce its own population surveillance system at approximately the same time. Between 1964 and 1967, the government undertook a large-scale classification project vis-à-vis the entire population, and massive purges and arrests ensued. From 1966 onward the residential registration system required every resident to report the identities of a broad range of relatives (I. Hyo˘n 2008). The government also divided the entire population into three classes (the core, wavering, and hostile classes) and fifty-one subcategories according to their alleged level of loyalty to the regime. The more paranoid the ruling regime became about possible challenges to its despotic authority, the more the loyalty of those having ties to other countries was questioned. South Korean defectors and coethnic repatriates from Japan, China, and the Soviet Union—once held up as glorified symbols of North Korea’s superiority over its contender, South Korea—became categorized by default as the “wavering class” (Nam 2008). They were singled out for a series of nationwide investigative projects throughout the 1970s and were subject to the constant attention of security agents (S. Ryang 2004; I. Hyo˘n 2008). I suspect that, apart from the changes in the leadership and the broader geopolitical context, the massive “defection” of Korean Chinese returnees in the earlier years may have had a bearing on this radical policy shift in North Korea toward coethnic “repatriates.” In summary, in both China and North Korea, the identity of the Korean Chinese as Chinese citizens came to be construed as incompatible with their ties to North Korea. By the time diplomatic relations between the two states were normalized and the border was reopened in the mid1970s, the Korean Chinese were no longer considered potential members of North Korea by either state. Virtually no one who remained in North Korea, except a few prominent political exiles, was able to recover her or his Chinese citizenship.56 Korean Chinese (quasi-) dual membership in China

Beyond “Bamboo Curtain” and “Hermit Kingdom” 167

and North Korea, which had been explicitly or implicitly recognized by the two states for two decades, was over.

War Making, State Making, and Nation Making (or Unmaking) across the Border The superimposition of Cold War geopolitics onto the turbulent decolonization process in postwar northeast Asia set Koreans who remained in Manchuria and Japan on diametrically different trajectories. In Japan, the colonial legacy was undone by expelling the category of Koreans (Chōsenjin) from that of Japanese (Nihonjin) and making the two categories mutually exclusive. In China, by contrast, the colonial legacy was undone by incorporating Koreans (Chaoxianren) into the Chinese nation-in-the-making (Zhonghua minzu), an inclusion that had been opposed both by the Japanese and Chinese authorities throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Within a few years of the collapse of the empire, Koreans in Manchuria were transformed from the “running dog of Japanese imperialism” to a model minority Chaoxianzu, proudly awarded a place in the PRC’s newly created “ethnotaxonomic orthodoxy” (Mullaney 2011). Their active participation in the civil wars in China and Korea played a critical role in this unmaking of the colonial legacy. The analysis of this break from the past, however, should be balanced by a recognition of profound continuity and enduring legacy. The incorporation of Koreans into China did not entail the dissolution of the category of “Koreans” into the melting pot of the Chinese nation. The CCP’s distinctive stance on the national question in postimperial China helped maintain the boundary of the category of “Koreans”: the CCP, unlike its competitor the GMD, imagined the Chinese nation as composed of multiple, mutually exclusive, ethnonational groups, one of which was the Korean Chinese. Yet it should be duly noted that this vision was readily intelligible to the residents in northeast China because it dovetailed nicely with the prevailing categorical practices developed throughout the colonial period (Chapter One). While the meaning of Chōsen/Choso˘n changed in Japan during the Cold War (Chapter Two), in China Chaoxian/Choso˘n remained an encompassing category designating the ethnogeographic origin of all Korean Chinese, regardless of their individual differences in regional origins or ideological allegiances. This continuity explains in part why there was hardly any contestation over the boundary separating the Korean Chinese

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(Chaoxianzu) from the Han Chinese (Hanzu). This boundary had already been sufficiently naturalized by various institutional arrangements and vernacular categorization practices. What instead became recurring issues in the following decades were the location and meaning of the boundary separating the Korean Chinese (Chaoxianzu) from North Korean citizens (Chaoxian gongmin). Unlike Japan, China made South Korea irrelevant to its Korean minority by diplomatic fiat, a decision unchallenged both by the Korean Chinese and, up until the late 1980s, by the anticommunist South Korean state. By contrast, until the mid-1960s, the incorporation of the Korean Chinese into the Chinese nation was construed as compatible with their special tie to North Korea by all three parties involved (China, North Korea, and Korean Chinese). To examine the shifting ways in which these different actors embraced, tolerated, or repressed varying interpretations of the transborder tie between the Korean Chinese and North Korea, I have extended the analysis beyond the much studied citizenship laws, political campaigns, and minority policies to include the inducement and the handling of a series of migration flows by the Chinese and North Korean states. This analytic shift offers a picture very different from the dominant historiography underscoring Korean Chinese progressive integration into communist China—whether this linear development is conceived positively (as a proof of the CCP’s successful minority policies) or negatively (as a proof of assimilationist, or even chauvinistic, Chinese nationalism). I have shown that North Korea tried to integrate Korean Chinese into its anti-imperialist socialist state building between the mid-1940s and mid1960s. This does not mean that North Korea brought “the bosom of the socialist fatherland” out to “its” people in China, as it did with Koreans in Japan. To be sure, the Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture exhibited a high degree of “institutional completeness” (Breton 1964), which contributed to maintaining the boundary of the Korean Chinese for decades. Furthermore, unlike the Ch’ongnyo˘n world in Japan, the autonomous prefecture was securely grounded on a territorial basis and empowered by the state’s recognition. Yet, beginning in the early 1950s, North Korea had very little control over the type of Korean identity reproduced by these powerful institutional practices. Scathing attacks on Yanbian University during the Cultural Revolution notwithstanding, Korean Chinese schools in China were not equivalent to the Ch’ongnyo˘n schools in Japan committed to producing overseas North Korean citizens.

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Instead of extending its reach to the Korean Chinese beyond its borders, North Korea constantly tried to pull them inward, perceiving its coethnic population across the border as a potential source of labor vital for its war making, postwar reconstruction, and industrial development. Yet North Korea neither endorsed the ideology of eventual return, nor highlighted the victimization of its coethnics, nor launched a large-scale, eye-catching repatriation campaign. It instead took more pragmatic and less politicized approaches, such as directly lobbying the Chinese state or quietly welcoming unauthorized border crossers as “repatriates,” so as to not offend its powerful ally and neighbor. China, for its part, tolerated or even cooperated with North Korea’s initiatives until the mid-1960s, explicitly or implicitly recognizing the (quasi-) dual membership of its Korean minority. To explain the fluctuation of the Chinese state’s stance toward the membership status of the Korean Chinese, we need to bear in mind the wider horizon of international politics: the bifurcated ideological conflict in northeast Asia that flared up in the two civil wars, as well as the shifting communist alliance among the Soviet Union, the PRC, and North Korea. The distinctive configuration of the triadic relationship between China, North Korea, and the Korean Chinese expands our current understanding of the transborder membership politics in the socialist world. As is well documented, in Central and Eastern Europe the plea for the ethnonational kin populations living under neighboring communist regimes was denounced and repressed as a vestige of obnoxious nationalism and a threat to communist internationalism (Brubaker 1996). The present case, however, reminds us that the Cold War bipolar conflict, internal tensions within the communist bloc, and anti-imperialist nationalist politics all intertwined very differently in non-European contexts, shaping distinctive contours of transborder membership politics in these regions. The case of the Mongolian People’s Republic, the socialist state established in 1924 under the suzerainty of the Soviet Union, is also instructive in this respect. The Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR henceforth), like socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, refrained from declaring itself the homeland for all Mongols. The primary concern in this case, however, was not that such a claim would threaten the communist alliance between the MPR and the PRC. Rather, Pan-Mongolism became an object of intense suspicion in the MPR precisely because of its historic association with the expansionism of China, which successfully kept Inner Mongolia (bigger and more populous than Outer Mongolia) under its control and

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gave up the territorial claim over so-called Outer Mongolia (which later became the MPR) only belatedly and grudgingly (Bulag 1998).57 Instead of claiming to be the homeland of the wider transborder Mongol community, the MPR thus systematically underscored—and produced—the difference of its own population from coethnics in Inner Mongolia by, for instance, officially classifying Mongols into different subgroups or replacing the classic script with the Russian-influenced Cyrillic script (70–80). In this context, Mongols in Inner Mongolia were suspected for their alleged dual loyalty, not only in China but also in their putative homeland, the MPR. Tellingly, many Mongols seeking to flee the famine and persecution in Inner Mongolia in the early 1960s found themselves unwelcome in the MPR. Many were reportedly shot down at the border; those allowed resettlement were put under constant surveillance and denied the MPR passport for decades (184–185). This comparative exercise leads to the last subject of my concluding discussion: what the exceptional (if limited) cross-border mobility—made possible by the distinctive configuration of the PRC–North Korea relations—meant for ordinary Korean Chinese. I have shown how North Korea remained a viable exit option in the back of the minds of Korean Chinese youths as they charted out their mobility strategies. Other Chinese citizens rarely had such an option, not only because of the exit control imposed by the Chinese state (G. Liu 2009) but also because of the entry controls imposed by other states, which assiduously kept their gates even when the Chinese exit control was in shambles. The Soviet republics like Kazakhstan, for instance, facing an influx of famine-stricken coethnic peasants from China, admitted only those who could establish their Kazakh nationality through documentation. Authorities in Hong Kong allowed only a few border crossers vouched for by their relatives in Hong Kong to stay (Ku 2004; Dikötter 2010, 240–241). As previously mentioned, the MPR refused to offer a safe haven to Mongols fleeing Inner Mongolia. In stark contrast, when Korean Chinese “returnees” were interviewed at the North Korean border, they were rarely required to establish their identity—including their ethnic identity—through official identification documents.58 It did not matter whether they had concrete family ties to native North Koreans. That is, North Korea did not enclose itself within paper walls against coethnics seeking entry; in the North Korean state’s encounter with transborder Koreans, the challenge of establishing individual identities in a bureaucratic setting became relatively unimportant.59

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To the disappointment of the welcoming North Korean state, however, Korean Chinese refused to remain a docile labor force captive to their other socialist fatherland, either. Creating North Korean citizens out of the Korean Chinese was only a precarious and revocable achievement. Within a few years, many Korean Chinese voted with their feet again by returning to China, leaving the North Korean leadership a bitter sense of betrayal. Again, this exit option was unavailable not only for native North Korean citizens but also for Zainichi Korean “repatriates,” whose expulsion from the newly reconstituted Japanese citizenry long before their departure made their “repatriation” to North Korea a fatal, permanent, one-way trip. In summary, the porous and malleable territorial and membership boundaries of China and North Korea in the first two decades of their establishment enabled the Korean Chinese to respond to the turbulent socialist transformations of both countries through cross-border migration. These findings suggest that the powerful image of the “Bamboo Curtain” or the “Hermit Kingdom” should not prevent scholars from appreciating the importance of this complex cross-border relationship for war making, state making, and nation making (or unmaking) in both countries, as well as individuals’ agency in straddling the two countries even before China officially “opened” itself. When China did “open” itself decades later, Korean Chinese once again looked to the Korean peninsula—this time, to cope with China’s turbulent incorporation into the global capitalist economy. The destination, however, was not North Korea but South Korea. And South Korea’s reluctant embrace of its long-forgotten coethnic “brethren” would bear little resemblance to North Korea’s active pursuit of the Korean Chinese. I now turn to the second “Korean Wind,” this time called Han’guk Param, which swept the Korean Chinese community in the 1990s and the 2000s, and to the subsequent encounter between the Korean Chinese and the gatekeeping homeland state, South Korea.

four

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Korean Chinese “Return” Migration to Post–Cold War South Korea

During the Cold War period, subsidized repatriation was North Korea’s major policy platform toward colonial-era Korean migrants who remained in Japan and northeast China. Promoting repatriation, however, had never been part of the policy repertoire of its nemesis, which preferred keeping both groups at arm’s length. After all, the containment of millions of Korean Chinese behind the heavily fortified geopolitical frontier was convenient for the anticommunist authoritarian regime in South Korea; it was already trying to keep its border tight against the perceived communist threat embodied by Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans. This situation, however, began to change in the late 1980s, with the attenuation of the regional Cold War order, the remarkable economic development and gradual democratization of South Korea, and the rapid incorporation of post-Mao China into the global capitalist economy. The ensuing influx of large numbers of Korean Chinese migrants into South Korea—although it was not the outcome of a deliberate repatriation policy—became the focus of transborder membership politics throughout the 1990s and the 2000s. Korean Chinese migration to South Korea is an instance of what has been called “ethnic affinity migration” (Brubaker 1998), “ethnically privileged migration” (Münz and Ohliger 2003), “ethnic (return) migration” (Joppke 2005; Tsuda 2009), or “transgenerational migration” (Durand and Massey 2010; Mateos and Durand 2012): migration of those who are considered external members of the state (due to their ethnic affinity with the native population) to their putative homeland. Scholars have examined the macrohistorical conditions that engender such movements at specific his172

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torical conjunctures;1 states’ varying immigration and citizenship policies toward coethnic migrants;2 political and ideological tensions that such policies generate in liberal democratic states;3 and the complex reconfiguration of the identities of these “returnees” due to their economic, social, and cultural integration (or lack thereof ) into their putative homeland.4 One of the common approaches of this body of scholarship has been to contrast the relatively smooth legal integration of coethnic migrants into their ancestral homeland with their enduring economic, social, and cultural marginalization. The Korean case, however, does not fit this pattern. The South Korean state did not adopt preferential immigration and citizenship policies toward coethnic migrants from China for long. It embraced them only reluctantly and selectively, limiting their access to its territory, labor market, and citizenship. The existing studies of the Korean case therefore have emphasized how and why the South Korean state prioritized its own instrumentalist agenda (for example, economic growth, control of labor market, or national security) over ethnic solidarity.5 I argue that these studies overstate the foresight and power of the South Korean state, while building their explanations on the problematic binary of instrumentalism and culturalism. My analysis instead underscores the less coherent, less coordinated, and ad hoc nature of South Korea’s policy development vis-à-vis the Korean Chinese. The influx of the Korean Chinese became a crucible for South Korea’s management of homeland politics and immigration politics, which collided head-on with each other. Both were unfamiliar terrains for South Korea, a long-time emigration state that had shunned ethnic Koreans in communist countries during the first three decades of its existence. This chapter highlights the protracted confusion, uncertainty, and ambivalence that both state and nonstate actors in South Korea experienced in coming to terms with the belated claim to membership of the Korean Chinese. I show how the organizational practices, bureaucratic techniques, and idioms of identification inherited from the Cold War period contributed to such reactions of state and nonstate actors. I also argue that the exclusionary policies of South Korea were much more vulnerable to Korean Chinese challenges than the existing studies suggest. The fierce struggles of the Korean Chinese for inclusion forced the reluctant homeland state to gradually open both its front and back doors to coethnic migrants. I first show how the high-profile political struggles of Korean Chinese migrants at the turn of the 2000s brought considerable

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changes to the immigration and citizenship policies of South Korea. The Korean Chinese migrants focused on representing themselves as members of the “transborder nation” who, unlike other foreign migrants, had a special claim to their “homeland” state. I argue that the bureaucratic and semantic infrastructures of transborder nation building—established in the colonial period (see Chapter One) and reactivated in the post–Cold War period—provided critical resources for Korean Chinese struggles for inclusion by expanding the institutionalized and imagined scope of the Korean nation to include all colonial-era migrants and their descendants. Korean Chinese struggles for inclusion, however, were not limited to the legal, political, and public spheres. Korean Chinese migrants challenged state policies not only by proposing alternative views on how they, as a collective, should be classified (struggles over group identity) but also by disrupting and disputing official classifications of their individual identities in bureaucratic settings (struggles over individual identification). This chapter closely examines the latter dimension—that is, micropolitical struggles over individual identification in bureaucratic settings—which has rarely been examined in studies of ethnic (return) migration.6 I argue that South Korea’s family-based immigration policies became the major venue of such struggles. To scholars of comparative immigration policies, it may seem odd that family-based immigration policies had a privileged connection to ethnic (return) migration. Indeed, granting privileges in immigration and citizenship to the immediate family members of citizens is an ethnically blind practice commonly observed in contemporary liberal democracies; this arrangement is justified, not as a tool for ethnic selection, but as the state’s respect for its citizens’ (or in some cases, noncitizens’) fundamental—and often constitutionally grounded—right to family life.7 In fact, family-based immigration policies have been analyzed as a primary conduit through which those who are ethnically different from the majority of the receiving society gain access to the developed countries in North America and Western Europe (Catherine Lee 2013). In the present case, however, the development of a variety of family-based immigration policies was inexplicably intertwined with the migration not of ethnic “others,” but of ethnic “brothers and sisters”—that is, coethnic migrants from China. I argue that this distinctive characteristic of South Korean family-based immigration policies is not so much a product of historic Korean ethnic nationalism8 as it is a contingent and unintended outcome of the two decades

Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion 175

of dynamic interactions between Korean Chinese migrants and the South Korean immigration bureaucracy. The South Korean state, in the face of an unexpected influx of Korean Chinese, constantly adjusted the parameters of who could claim which rights under what conditions, institutionalizing a myriad of terms of inclusion and exclusion and creating multiple sites of gatekeeping. Limiting preferential treatment only to the Korean Chinese who could establish their concrete family ties to South Korean citizens was one way of doing so. That is, establishing one’s ethnonational identity as a Korean was not sufficient; having verifiable kinship ties with individual South Korean citizens was the key. Not surprisingly, Korean Chinese tried to make the most of these limited opportunities by mobilizing old family ties to their long-lost South Korean relatives, forging new family ties via marriage, or faking the existence of old or new family ties. The state’s gatekeeping understandably focused on restricting Korean Chinese utilization of family-based immigration policies by narrowing the eligibility criteria or imposing stringent evidentiary requirements for the verification of claimed family relationships. In examining these micropolitical struggles, this chapter offers a detailed ethnographic account of the multifaceted ways in which official documentation practices shape transborder membership politics. I first show that the South Korean state relied heavily on official documentation practices—as the locus of its own symbolic power (Bourdieu 1991) as well as the most reliable “memory of the state” (Matsuda 1996)—to validate the belated claims of the Korean Chinese to family ties, or by extension, to national belonging. This worked to the disadvantage of this particular transborder population whose documentary trails were often nonexistent or fragmentary. Yet I equally emphasize the porosity of the paper walls within which the reluctant homeland state enclosed itself. Korean Chinese migrants challenged such gatekeeping practices by mobilizing alternative genres of identification other than official documents or by mimicking the writing of the state and thereby creating their own “papereality” (Dery 1998). These counterstrategies undermined the efficacy and legitimacy of the state’s verification procedures, forcing it to frequently change the procedures to make them more workable and defendable. The ramifications of these dynamic interactions were not limited to the bureaucratic field of the “homeland” state. This chapter breaks with most of the existing studies on ethnic (return) migration by examining not only the receiving context but also the sending context,9 especially the

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multifarious “spillovers”10 of these micropolitical struggles back into Korean Chinese communities in northeast China. By distributing migration opportunities unevenly among its transborder coethnic population, South Korean policies reconfigured various preexisting divisions and hierarchies within Korean Chinese communities and led to the rapid increase of various migration brokers. I analyze how these circumstances shaped Korean Chinese migrants’ strategic and moral reasoning underlying their involvement in “illegal” schemes. Their deep sense of entitlement to membership in South Korea—and their resentment of its denial—further contributed to the moral ambiguity of the situation. Korean Chinese protests against stringent evidentiary requirements offer a useful lens through which to analyze this distinctive moral economy, as do requests for amnesty for those who violated immigration laws, acts of irreverent defiance in the mundane interactions between Korean Chinese migrants and South Korean immigration bureaucrats, and counternarratives subverting the criminalizing and stigmatizing view of the South Korean state.

Shifting Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion reunited families, reunited nation I became a PRC citizen without asking for it. . . . I have South Korean [Han’guk] ancestors and my country [nara] is South Korea. . . . Please send us the repatriation consent forms. It has been my lifelong dream to live, if only for one day, in the bosom of the country of my parents, my brothers, and mine. . . . If it is difficult to send us the repatriation consent forms, please issue us at least South Korean ID cards. It seems that nobody in the PRC possesses the card yet. I want to be the first person that has it. “A Message to Fatherland [choguk]” cited in K. Yu (1984, 35)

In Chapter Two, I showed how various registration and documentation practices—for example, the foreigner’s registration in Japan, and the “nationals abroad” and family registration in South Korea—performatively created “South Korean citizens abroad” (chaeoe kungmin) out of colonialera migrants in Japan. Those who maintained the Chōsen designation and refused to join this documented community became the object of hostility and suspicion. They were still included, however, in the annual official

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report on “South Korean nationals abroad” (chaeoe Han’gugin) through the category “the unregistered.” This category embodied a belief that these holdouts would (or should) eventually be incorporated into South Korea; their conversion—which would make “the unregistered” category obsolete—was one of the main goals of South Korean policies toward Zainichi Koreans. By contrast, colonial-era migrants who remained in communist countries were almost completely erased from the organizational, bureaucratic, and discursive practices of the South Korean state for almost three decades (see Chapter Three). Ironically, such collective amnesia may have contributed to producing an overly romanticized portrayal of the Korean Chinese when they began to reappear in the national media decades later. Increasingly confident in South Korea’s rapidly developing economy, and encouraged by changes in the geopolitical environment after President Nixon’s visit to China, the Park Chung-hee administration lifted the ban on mail exchanges with communist countries in 197411 and sought to repatriate a small number of select Korean Chinese with the assistance of the International Red Cross. In 1982, the next president, Chun Doo-hwan, publicly pledged that South Korea would open itself to coethnic populations (tongp’o) residing in communist zones, including North Korea. The South Korean media also began to publish a series of articles on the Korean Chinese in the mid-1970s, based on Japanese and American sources12 and interviews with a handful of recent repatriates.13 The articles invariably stressed, in an unmistakably nostalgic tone, the well-preserved ethnocultural practices of the Korean Chinese, their intense curiosity about South Korea, and their longing to return and reunite with their families (Kwang-o˘ Kim 1987; Heh-R. Park 1996). An article published in Hankook Ilbo in 1982 merits a separate discussion. While reporting on the estimates of ethnic Koreans in communist countries (“2.2 million in communist China and 400,000 in the Soviet Union”), the reporter remarked that these “South Korean nationals” (Han’gugin, 韓國人) in communist countries constituted 62 percent of all “South Korean nationals abroad” (chaeoe Han’gugin) (Hankook Ilbo 1982). By counting the hitherto forgotten group and including them as an important part of “South Korean nationals abroad,” the article marked a major shift in the representation of transborder Koreans—although a parallel shift in the official census did not occur for another decade. Terminology, however, remained confusing: in what sense were ethnic Koreans in communist countries “South Korean nationals abroad”? At the time, the distinction

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between ethnocultural and legal nationality was often blurred, even in official publications.14 However, referring to the Korean Chinese as South Korean nationals (Han’gugin) did not simply reveal a lack of conceptual precision. Rather, the practice reflected the history of transborder membership politics in the Cold War period, in which the question of how to identify Koreans in Japan—as Kankokujin (that is, Han’gugin) or as Chōsenjin (Choso˘nin)—was the very focus of fierce struggles (Chapter Two). Calling the Korean Chinese Han’gugin was an expression of the “right” ideological stance. Referring to the Korean Chinese as South Korean nationals also exhibited the pride and aspiration of South Korean elites, who no longer considered their country the underdog in the competition with North Korea. There was no better object onto which to project their newfound confidence than these “rediscovered” ethnonational kin in China, a former enemy country that was lagging far behind South Korea economically. South Korean elites were ready to actively promote South Korea as the sole legitimate homeland state for the Korean nation in toto. One of these promotional efforts was to create several radio programs specifically targeting the Korean Chinese population.15 These programs soon evolved into major venues through which South Koreans and Korean Chinese searched for long-separated family members. Some sent letters, poems, memoirs, and photos from China, looking for families or expressing their nostalgia for the lost homeland in a sentimental tone. Others expressed their hope to permanently repatriate to South Korea or obtain South Korean citizenship, as shown by the letter cited at the beginning of this section. Regardless of the impracticality of such requests, they were not viewed as unreasonable. One of the broadcasting companies reportedly recovered the family registration documents of some of the letter writers and mailed them copies, adding a note, “Nobody can deny that you are a proud citizen of the Republic of Korea” (K. Yu 1984, 44). Note that the aspirations of belonging (on the part of the Korean Chinese) and the generous gesture of embrace (on the part of the South Korean elites) were enacted through various official documents (for example, a request for South Korean ID cards or the provision of old family registration documents). As in the case of Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans, these enduring documentary trails, which survived decades of corporeal absence, symbolized the unbreakable bond of the Korean Chinese to their patrilineage, to their hometown, and, by extension, to the nation.

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To be sure, these self-celebratory discourses whitewashed the history of mutual disownment and oversimplified a much more complex reality, as I will discuss shortly. Yet many Korean Chinese, especially those originally from the southern part of the Korean peninsula, heartily welcomed the growing attention from South Korea. Even before the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and China, an increasing number of Korean Chinese visited South Korea for family reunions between the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Insofar as these individuals located their South Korean relatives, and the relatives agreed to send invitations, the South Korean government issued temporary travel permits for their homecoming trips without much inconvenience. On these trips, which usually lasted one to three months, Korean Chinese visitors met family members, visited family gravesites, added their names to family genealogy books, and attempted to locate more relatives using kin networks or documentary traces left in village offices. The images of these homecoming trips dovetailed nicely with the prevailing understanding of Korean nationhood, which was heavily invested in the notion of common descent. The reunion of these divided families signified the ingathering of the tragically broken nation.16 For many Korean Chinese, however, efforts to find long-separated kin meant more than a sentimental search for roots. By the mid- to late 1980s, peddling trips to neighboring cities or to the border region of North Korea17—and a few years later to the Soviet Union—had become a common source of additional income for many Korean Chinese households trying to survive in China’s quickly transitioning economy. Selling Chinese medicine in South Korea was much more lucrative than, say, selling vegetables or kimchi (a traditional Korean side dish) on the streets of nearby cities in China or selling processed foods and consumer goods in North Korea or the Soviet Union. South Korean relations were turning into the most valued resource among those seeking to get ahead in quickly marketizing and globalizing China. Yet these were an extremely scarce resource. Above all, most of those who were originally from the northern part of the peninsula did not have South Korean relations. This North–South divide explains why most early visitors were not from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture but from the Heilongjiang Province, where later migrants from the southern part of the peninsula were concentrated. Even in the case of southerners, it was not easy to locate long-separated kin by relying solely on scant ­information

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that had not been updated for almost forty years. One of my interviewees who left his hometown as an infant with his widowed mother was able to locate his mother’s younger sister in South Korea thanks to a copy of the old family registry (which showed the address of his natal village) and an old family photo that his deceased mother left him. Others, however, found themselves with no information or personal mementos whatsoever. Even for those who managed to locate South Korean relatives, these relatives did not always willingly send invitations.18 Furthermore, the longawaited homecomings often generated feelings of disappointment, disillusionment, or humiliation. Once the initial tearful moment passed, many South Koreans felt burdened by the prolonged stay of their (distant) kin who needed various forms of support. In some cases, South Korean relatives were simply afraid that the reappearance of the long-lost kin might unsettle their inheritance arrangements.19 For whatever reasons, many South Koreans ignored or refused requests for additional invitations. Korean Chinese visitors, in turn, resented the shabby treatment they received. Such mutual disillusionment was so ubiquitous that those in the Red Cross and the related broadcasting companies who assisted family reunions used to comment that most reunited families began to have problems after two months, calling the phenomenon a “two-month ridge” (tudal kogae) (K. Yu 1990, 34). With the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea in 1992, these cross-border family ties came to take on a different meaning. They were no longer the only means by which the Korean Chinese could have access to South Korea. Diplomatic rapprochement, however, did not mean that the door of the affluent “homeland” was now wide open. Although the homeland stance prevailed in the early phase, over the course of the 1990s the immigration optique emerged as a competing framework through which the South Korean state perceived and grappled with the unexpected influx of its rediscovered “kin.” homeland politics versus immigration politics Last year in China, there were approximately 160 assault and homicide cases victimizing South Koreans. We are only halfway through this year, yet the number has already reached over 100. It turns out that a fair number of these crimes have been committed by Korean Chinese. Long-time South Korean residents in China tell us: “Korean Chinese

Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion 181 are becoming duplicitous. If you see a house with a new tiled roof, you can be sure that one of the family members is currently working in South Korea. Nevertheless, they speak ill of South Korea whenever they open their mouths! They curse us, all the while benefiting from us. From the perspective of us South Koreans, we are helping them, only to get slapped in the face!” “Choso˘n ‘jok’ kwa Chungguk ‘ inmin’ sai” (Between being ethnic Koreans and being Chinese citizens) (Chosun Ilbo 1996)

The normalization of diplomatic relations between South Korea and China in the early 1990s brought multifaceted changes to South Korea’s relationship with the Korean Chinese. First of all—and not without irony—it clarified the status of the Korean Chinese as foreigners. Until 1988, the South Korean government had issued the Korean Chinese traveling to South Korea temporary travel certificates, which were usually issued to South Korean nationals who did not possess proper passports.20 However, after President Noh’s July 7 Declaration for Reunification (an equivalent of the beginning of West Germany’s Ostpolitik at the turn of the 1970s), the government began to issue the Korean Chinese entry permits, which were usually issued to foreigners, to Korean Chinese. This change was based on South Korea’s implicit recognition of the statehood of the PRC and the status of the Korean Chinese as foreign nationals. With the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and China in 1992, Korean Chinese traveling to South Korea were required to carry Chinese passports and proper entry visas issued by the South Korean consular office, finally confirming their status as Chinese citizens. Many questions, however, remained unanswered. Had the Korean Chinese ever been South Korean citizens? If so, when did they lose their citizenship? Would it be possible for them to reacquire South Korean citizenship? If so, under what conditions? South Korean nationality law stipulated that those who voluntarily acquired the citizenship of another state would automatically lose South Korean citizenship; it remained unclear, however, whether the unilateral and collective grant of Chinese citizenship to the Korean Chinese had the same effect. Neither the Constitution, nor the nationality law, nor the belated bilateral treaty with China in 1992 had definitively settled this question. The government’s permanent repatriation policy (which was in place from the late 1970s to the late 1990s) intensified these

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ambiguities by recognizing that those Korean Chinese who repatriated during these early years already possessed South Korean citizenship despite the fact that they had never been registered as “nationals abroad” in the consular office (Kap-t. Kim 1996, 37–38).21 Why the same reasoning could not extend to other Korean Chinese was unclear.22 These ambiguities and contradictions would be resolved legally, though not politically, in 1997 by the South Korean government’s issuance of The Guidelines for Handling the Citizenship of the Korean Chinese (Po˘mmubu 1997). To situate these guidelines in the proper political context, it is necessary to discuss the dramatic changes that occurred in the relationship between the Korean Chinese and their rediscovered affluent homeland over the course of the 1990s. The increasing contact with Korean Chinese communities in northeast China enabled the South Korean state to plausibly represent itself as the homeland state of all Koreans abroad. In 1993, the new civilian leadership, bolstered by its new democratic credentials and improved geopolitical standing after the collapse of the Soviet Union, vowed that South Korea’s commitment to the Korean nation in toto transcended differences in ideology. The rhetorical practices of high-ranking officials, the annual statistics issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and various official reports on the “Korean diaspora” or the “Korean network” all represented the Korean Chinese as an essential part—indeed, the largest part—of this newly imagined transborder Korean nation. Changes in an annual report of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs capture this shift in perspective. In 1991, the new report for the first time included figures for ethnic Koreans in China (1,920,597) and the former Soviet Union (437,000), doubling the size of transborder Koreans in a single year. The report also employed various representational techniques for the first time to visualize the transborder dispersion of the Korean nation: maps showing the geographical distribution of Koreans across the entire globe; a pie chart showing the proportion of Koreans in each region; and a bar graph showing the annual increase in Koreans abroad, which highlighted the break in 1991, when the number doubled. These practices underscored the hefty presence of the Korean Chinese in this new portrayal of the transborder Korean nation. Terminological confusions of earlier years were also gradually resolved. In 1991, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs changed the title of the aforementioned report from “Report on the Current Conditions of Nationals Abroad [chaeoe kungmin]” to “Report on the Current Conditions of Overseas Coethnics [haeoe tongp’o].” The legal category “nationals abroad” (chaeoe

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kungmin)—applicable only to those who had registered in the consular office as South Korean citizens—now seemed too limited as a way of conceiving and embracing all transborder Koreans. Instead, the category tongp’o (coethnics) reemerged. As discussed in Chapter One, tongp’o had come into wide use during the colonial period, denoting Koreans as a community of descent, history, and destiny that had survived the extinction of “its own” state and transcended the territorial boundary of the colony. During the Cold War period, however, tongp’o became less widely used in the official discourse; the term was often replaced by the alternative terms kyop’o or kyomin, the connotations of which emphasized the post-1962 emigration context.23 However, by the mid- to late 1990s, “coethnics abroad” (chaeoe tongp’o) became the official umbrella term denoting all ethnic Koreans abroad, regardless of their citizenship.24 The reemergence of tongp’o indexed the expansion, or more precisely the restoration, of the imagined scope of the Korean nation, which had contracted during the Cold War era. This category, however, did not simply look back to the traumatic past. The dispersion of Koreans across the globe took on a new meaning in the 1990s as an index of the future potential of the Korean nation (and relatedly, the South Korean state as its hub) in an increasingly globalizing world.25 This self-celebratory discourse, however, lost its luster before the figure of Korean Chinese migrants. As early as 1989, The Plan for the Mutual Exchange with, and Support for, Koreans in China, published by the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security (under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), pronounced that the ultimate goal of South Korean policies toward the Korean Chinese was to “help them enjoy a stable and prosperous life in China, strengthen their ties to the fatherland [South Korea], and take pride in their national origin” (Oegyo Anbo Yo˘n’guso 1989, 44; italics mine). Clearly, at this point, the South Korean government had no foresight that “strengthening ties to the fatherland” would entail the massive influx of coethnic migrants. But by the time diplomatic normalization finally opened the long-closed border in 1992, South Korea had become an immigration state in denial. Its secondary labor market could not operate without migrant workers from neighboring countries, although the government still made every effort to prevent their long-term settlement (Seol and Skrentny 2009b). Korean Chinese communities in northeast China had already become the largest source of aspiring migrants determined to enter and work in South Korea.

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In northeast China, the abolition of the People’s Commune System in 1983 and the relaxation of internal migration controls engendered the influx of a large number of young peasant-status holders to nearby cities. The slackening economy of these cities, however, did not provide these migrants with stable jobs. Many collective and state firms went bankrupt in the early 1990s, further increasing the pool of potential migrants. In this context, Korean Chinese did not stay put to serve as a springboard for South Korea’s advance into China, as their globally ambitious homeland state would have preferred. Instead, many Korean Chinese considered migration to South Korea the most viable option for their own economic survival. South Korea’s secondary labor market promised higher incomes than either better jobs in China or peddling in North Korea and the former Soviet Union. Moreover, for many Korean Chinese, settlement in other fast-developing urban and industrial centers within China (for example, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Suzhou, or Qingdao) was no less challenging than settlement in South Korea. Apart from the hukou system that discriminated against internal migrants in the provision of public goods and services, the Korean Chinese were an ethnic minority whose presence outside the northeastern region was insignificant and whose proficiency in Mandarin was inevitably compromised (though to varying degrees across generations and educational levels). Their migration to these cities, in fact, has been largely predicated on the growing presence of South Korean companies, which have employed the Korean Chinese as middle managers, translators, and domestic workers (Ye 2009). Overall, the massive city-bound population movement that swept post-Mao China took an international form in Korean Chinese communities in northeast China: the Korean Chinese reportedly had higher rates of cross-border mobility than any other ethno­national groups in the PRC, including the Han Chinese (Zheng 1998, 74). In this context, immigration politics, not homeland politics, began to shape the relationship between the Korean Chinese and the South Korean state in the realm of border control and immigration, if not in the realm of political rhetoric. Other than allotting a greater quota to the Korean Chinese in the recruitment of so-called industrial trainees (Seol and Skrentny 2004, 2009a), the South Korean government at first granted the Korean Chinese virtually no immigration or citizenship privileges. Yet geographic proximity, phenotypical and ethnocultural similarity, and reactivated or newly established family ties to South Korean citizens (in the latter case mostly via “international” marriage) gave Korean Chinese advantages over

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other foreign workers in gaining access to South Korea. Korean Chinese migrants rapidly filled the secondary labor market, working in mines, construction sites, sweatshops, and urban service jobs: by 1999, more than 260,000 (nearly 20 percent of the total Korean Chinese population) had reportedly been to South Korea since the early 1990s, and about 70,000 were residing in South Korea, composing roughly 20 percent of the entire foreign resident population (Ch’ang-s. Kim 2000). The number continued to grow in the following years. Under these circumstances, restrictions on legal entry simply led to a proliferation of counterfeit documents, increased use of brokers and human smugglers, and a greater tendency to overstay visa limits. As a result, by the close of the 1990s, the control of illegal labor migrants had become an alternative master-frame for the South Korean state’s interactions with the Korean Chinese. The Forty Years of History of the Korean Immigration Service, published by the Ministry of Justice in 2003, is illustrative (Po˘mmubu 2003). The book spends many pages describing how the government dealt with “the problem of coethnics from China” (Chungguk tongp’o munje) over the years. It chronicled the arrest and deportation of illegal entrants; their escape from the detention center; the detection of a variety of immigration fraud schemes; a series of meetings of the authorities involved; the publication of large-scale investigative reports; and training sessions for the identification of counterfeit documents. The media representation of the Korean Chinese also shifted dramatically in less than ten years. In place of the romanticized description of the ingathering of the nation, counterfeit documents, the smuggling of undocumented workers, fraudulent marriages, labor market competition, and criminality became the dominant themes (S. Kang 2005). Disillusionment, however, flowed both ways. Korean Chinese migrants were not spared the exploitation, discrimination, stigma, and legal vulnerability suffered by most other foreign migrants in South Korea. Their sense of entitlement as coethnics made these hardships seem all the more unjust. The reports on South Korea in mainstream Korean Chinese newspapers increasingly took a negative tone throughout the 1990s (Kang-i. Kim 2000). Several books on the identity crisis of the Korean Chinese that made headlines in Korean Chinese media in the mid-1990s unanimously placed more emphasis on their identity as Chinese citizens, comparing Korean Chinese to a married woman whose ultimate loyalty should lie with her husband’s family (China), not in her natal family (Korea), according to the Confucian

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family norm (P. Cho˘ng 1996). As illustrated by the article in Chosun Ilbo cited earlier, many South Koreans found such an attitude to be an indication of ingratitude and betrayal, lamenting that they were “helping” their coethnics all the while “getting slapped in the face.” challenging exclusion from the homeland Most of those who migrated prior to the establishment of the Republic of Korea are coethnics [tongp’o] in China or in the former Soviet Union, who could not but leave their fatherland [choguk] to participate in anticolonial struggles or to avoid compulsory drafting and exploitation by the Japanese imperialists. . . . This Act discriminates against, rather than helps, those who had no choice but to leave their fatherland because of these bleak historical circumstances. No other countries engage in such an act, which can hardly be justified even on basic humanitarian grounds, not to mention from the nationalistic viewpoint [minjokcho˘k kyo˘nji]. State interests that such a discriminatory policy may serve are too meager to offset the serious wounds and divisions it may cause among the same coethnics [tongp’o]. Ho˘nbo˘p Chaep’anso (Constitutional Court) (2001)

The clash between homeland and immigration politics over the question of Korean Chinese migrants peaked at the end of the 1990s. Two policies announced by the Ministry of Justice in 1997 and 1999 highlight this contradiction. The first is the 1997 Guidelines for Handling the Citizenship of the Korean Chinese (which was revised slightly in 2001; hereafter referred to as Guidelines); the second is the 1999 Act on the Immigration and Legal Status of Coethnics Abroad (hereafter referred to as the Coethnics Abroad Act).26 As mentioned briefly in the previous section, the Guidelines resolved remaining ambiguities regarding the citizenship status of the Korean Chinese, albeit in a restrictive direction. Preventing network migration was the ulterior agenda of the South Korean government. The Guidelines first defined “coethnics from China” (Chungguk tongp’o) as those who had themselves migrated or whose patrilineal ancestors27 had migrated from the Korean peninsula to China and had resided there since the colonial period. They then specified that everyone who fit this description became a South Korean citizen on August 15, 1948 (the official day of the establishment of

Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion 187

South Korea), but collectively lost that citizenship as of October 1, 1949 (the official day of the establishment of the PRC), as a result of their collective acquisition of Chinese citizenship. Hence, all “coethnics from China” who were born before this date were eligible for the recovery of South Korean citizenship, whereas those born later were able to obtain South Korean citizenship only through naturalization (because they had never been South Korean citizens). This formula shows the government’s dismissal of a competing view (for example, see No 1996, 1999) that at least some firstgeneration Korean Chinese should be considered to have retained South Korean citizenship all along because their acquisition of Chinese citizenship was not voluntary. In fact, this was the view adopted by Japanese jurisprudence informed by analogous legal doctrines and practices: the colonial settlers who could not repatriate back to the Japanese archipelago from the Soviet Union and China after the collapse of the empire were deemed to have retained Japanese citizenship all along regardless of their acquisition of Soviet or Chinese citizenship (Kap-t. Kim 1991; Efird 2004). The Guidelines, however, rejected this view by bureaucratic fiat. Moreover, the government subjected Korean Chinese acquisition of South Korean citizenship to a set of separate strict rules, instead of applying the more lenient general procedures specified in the nationality law. First, the government required applicants to submit their colonial-era family registration documents as proof of their peninsular origin. This was a documentary requirement that most Korean Chinese found exceedingly difficult to satisfy: many remained undocumented or inaccurately documented or simply had no idea where to find their family registration documents (these difficulties will be discussed further in the next section). Second, only those who were legally residing in South Korea at the time of application were eligible for the recovery of citizenship or naturalization. This restriction significantly suppressed the pool of potential applicants: as indicated in the previous section, the opportunity for legal entry was extremely limited, with over 60 percent of Korean Chinese migrants estimated to be in South Korea illegally in 2000 (Ch’ang-s. Kim 2000, 73). Third, unlike native South Korean citizens, Korean Chinese who had managed to obtain South Korean citizenship previously (via permanent repatriation from China or marriage to South Korean citizens) were unable to petition for the immigration and naturalization of their immediate family members remaining in China.

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The discriminatory nature of the Guidelines notwithstanding, they were insulated in the realm of administration, avoiding outright politicization for several years. This was not the case for the 1999 Coethnics Abroad Act (Chaeoe Tongp’o Po˘p), initially drafted in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 1998 to strengthen economic ties between investment-seeking South Korea and its overseas emigrants in North America.28 This act entitled “coethnics abroad” (chaeoe tongp’o)—regardless of their citizenship status—to preferential treatment in admission to the territory of South Korea and, once there, in employment, economic transactions, and investment opportunities. A few scholars opposed granting a membership status to any coethnics who had lost South Korean citizenship as a discrimination against non-Korean foreigners (I. Cho˘ng 1999). But the most vociferous controversy focused on which coethnics should be eligible for the new status. The Coethnics Abroad Act made “the former possession of South Korean citizenship” by the applicant, a parent, or a grandparent 29 a prerequisite for the acquisition of this status. Yet how could the “former possession of South Korean citizenship” be established by colonial-era migrants who, strictly speaking, had not been South Korean citizens when they left the Korean peninsula? The enforcement ordinance stipulated only one way of accomplishing this: by having registered as South Korean “nationals abroad” in the consular office (or with a designated organization, practically meaning Mindan in Japan) before they obtained citizenship in their host state. Although this had been possible for Zainichi Koreans—and, as discussed in Chapter Two, such registration had indeed been strongly urged by the South Korean state—it had been virtually impossible for colonial-­era migrants who had settled in China. The Ministry of Justice defended the exclusion of the Korean Chinese, arguing that including the group would entail protests from China,30 loss of labor market control, and security risks.31 The defense, however, was quickly met by a powerful challenge. The Coethnics Abroad Act made the “coethnics abroad” category a legal status, linked this status directly to privileged access to South Korea’s labor market, and excluded all Korean Chinese from eligibility. The Act thereby became the lightning rod for nationwide protest by Korean Chinese migrants, whose resentment had been growing throughout the 1990s. They mobilized extensive and cohesive migrant networks, built a broad coalition (comprising NGOs, churches, lawmakers, and scholars), and combined various social movement strategies

Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion 189

(for example, launching hunger strikes, exercising pressure on lawmakers, and seeking constitutional judgments). The protesters drew on rich symbolic resources as well. Korean Chinese exclusion was at odds with the emotionally resonant and normatively charged vernacular understanding of the term coethnics (tongp’o), which had been revived during the previous ten years precisely to embrace the Korean Chinese as rediscovered “brethren.” The exclusion was also at odds with the recent discursive and institutional practices of the South Korean state, which had begun to incorporate these previously forgotten transborder coethnics in its official representation of the transborder Korean nation. The exclusion seemed so arbitrary that the act was mockingly referred to not as Chaeoe (在外) Tongp’o Po˘p (The Coethnics Abroad Act), but as Cheoe (除外) Tongp’o Po˘p (The Coethnics Exclusion Act). The protesters also relied on the familiar family metaphor, comparing the Korean Chinese to a daughter who was denigrated and discriminated against by her own natal family (South Korea) simply because she married into a poor family (China). Most fundamentally, by making 1948 (the year when South Korea was established) the baseline for determining the initial boundary of the state’s citizenry, the exclusion was at odds with the founding myth of the post­ colonial South Korean state, namely its constitutional self-definition as the sole legitimate successor of the historic Korean polity and the sole representative and custodian of the entire Korean nation. The Coethnics Abroad Act did not collectively acknowledge colonial-era migrants’ ties to the South Korean state, instead requiring these ties to have been individually reestablished through registration in the consular office soon after South Korea’s inception—yet this was categorically impossible for colonial-era migrants who were now citizens of China. This contradiction was the focus of the 2001 Constitutional Court ruling that the Coethnics Abroad Act violated the constitution by discriminating against “coethnics abroad” who migrated prior to 1948 (Ho˘nbo˘p Chaep’anso 2001). The tautological element in the ruling is worth emphasizing: the judgment on the legitimacy of the specific definition of “coethnics abroad” was made on the assumption that a clearly bounded group of “coethnics abroad” already existed and that it was not permissible to discriminate between members of this group. In other words, the court ruling did not merely recognize a preexisting group but participated in the post–Cold War construction of “coethnics abroad” in a powerful, definitive, and binding way. As cited at the beginning of this section, this construction was achieved through a legal narrative­

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incorporating the historical and cultural idioms of Korean nationhood, which cast the Korean Chinese in the typical template of victimization, dispersion, and nationalist struggle under an alien regime. In response to the Constitutional Court ruling, the Ministry of Justice revised the Coethnics Abroad Act in 2004. The revised enforcement ordinance no longer predicated proof of “former possession of South Korean citizenship” on registration as a national abroad but instead on documentation (of the applicant, a parent, or a grandparent) in the colonial-era family registry. Recall that registration as nationals abroad was the very bureaucratic practice that marked the contraction of the Korean nation during the Cold War (Chapter Two). Not surprisingly, this registration was profoundly at odds with the expansive idea of nationhood evoked by the revitalized term tongp’o. The colonial family registry, on the other hand, had long provided the enduring documentary infrastructure for Korean transborder membership, for the imagined community of Choso˘n tongp’o, whose unity had been tragically broken by Cold War politics. The revision of the Coethnics Abroad Act brought the institutional scope of the Korean nation into alignment with its imagined scope and pressured the South Korean state into embracing colonial-era migrants in their entirety as “its own.” Therefore, the new documentary requirement, though still too onerous for many Korean Chinese to meet in practice, was less vulnerable to constitutional or political challenge. The requirement was consistent with both the self-definition of the South Korean state as the successor of the historic Korean polity and the official method of defining and identifying “Koreans,” which had been established for almost a century. Although the ongoing gatekeeping practices of the South Korean state rendered the particular benefits of the coethnics abroad status unavailable to many Korean Chinese for a few more years,32 the high-profile political struggles of the Korean Chinese brought considerable changes to South Korean policies in the 2000s. A consensus emerged within the South Korean government that excluding the Korean Chinese from the domestic labor market or treating the Korean Chinese on exactly the same terms as other foreign migrants was practically infeasible, economically unwise, and politically costly; instead, the government came to favor the selective and regulated inclusion of Korean Chinese in the body politic of South Korea. In this spirit, beginning in 2002, the government began to allow those Korean Chinese who were able to establish family ties to South Korean citi-

Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion 191

zens (including naturalized Korean Chinese) to work in designated sectors of the secondary labor market with an H-2 visa. In 2006, this preferential treatment was extended by lottery to coethnic migrants who did not have established family ties to South Korean citizens, provided that they passed a test of proficiency in Korean. In addition, the government launched a series of legalization programs, first in 2002 and 2003 (including all foreign migrants) and again in 2005 and 2006 (targeting only coethnic migrants). Applicants for this legalization program had to report to the immigration service, depart South Korea before the designated deadline, and then reenter the country after a certain period of time with the working visa (H-2) mentioned earlier. As a result of these legalization programs, by 2008 the number of illegal Korean Chinese migrants had fallen to about 30,000—approximately 8 percent of the total Korean Chinese population in South Korea (378,345), the smallest percentage in twenty years (Po˘mmubu 2008). Finally, the government expanded the opportunities for the Korean Chinese to obtain South Korean citizenship. In 2005, the Ministry of Justice replaced the 1997 Guidelines for Handling the Citizenship of Korean Chinese with new guidelines that comprehensively regulate the acquisition of South Korean citizenship by all “coethnics abroad with foreign citizenship.” The government still maintained the stance that all Korean Chinese lost their South Korean citizenship as of October 1, 1949, but significantly relaxed other restrictions. It removed the initial patrilineal limitation, making those whose matrilineal ancestor migrated from the Korean peninsula to China eligible for the acquisition of South Korean citizenship. It also loosened the stringent evidentiary requirements: supplementary forms of evidence could remedy the absence of or the defects in the colonial family registry (the implications of this change in evidentiary requirements will be discussed in depth in the next section). In addition, the legalization programs mentioned in the preceding paragraphs contributed to an increase in the number of Korean Chinese who legally stayed in South Korea, expanding the pool of potential applicants for naturalization. Finally, the government almost completely eliminated the discrimination against naturalized citizens in the realm of family reunification.33 As a result of all these policy changes, by 2008, the Korean Chinese came to constitute 42.4 percent of the total number of foreigners in South Korea (Po˘mmubu 2008), not including Korean Chinese who obtained South Korean citizenship one way or another (estimated at just under 100,000).

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I have so far chronicled the trajectory of post–Cold War transborder membership politics from the 1980s to the 2000s, focusing on the struggles of the Korean Chinese for inclusion that unfolded in the South Korean legal, political, and public spheres. I now shift my analytic focus from macro­politics to micropolitics, examining their struggles for inclusion that unfolded in the South Korean bureaucratic field, as well as the multifarious spillovers of these struggles into Korean Chinese communities in northeast China. Despite shifting policies and changing political dynamics over the last two decades, family ties to South Korean citizens have retained their paramount importance for Korean Chinese access to South Korea’s territory, labor market, and citizenship. This is well illustrated by the changing ways in which Yo˘ng-il and his family, introduced at the beginning of the book, secured entry to South Korea. Invitation by rediscovered South Korean relatives was the only means by which Korean Chinese could visit South Korea prior to the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea. As the government tightened eligibility for the family visitation visa in the 1990s, forging new family ties via marriage (for example, the paper marriage of Yo˘ng-il’s daughter) emerged as a better alternative, which might even bring South Korean citizenship with all its accompanying benefits. The expansive reforms of the 2000s enumerated earlier did not decrease, but rather increased, the utility of these family ties, by allowing Korean Chinese who could establish family ties to South Korean citizens (including Korean Chinese who had previously acquired South Korean citizenship) to work legally in the secondary labor market and to acquire citizenship more easily than those who had no such ties. Not surprisingly, throughout this period, establishing the authenticity of a certain family relationship, which would bring various benefits in immigration and citizenship, was the focus of micropolitical struggles between Korean Chinese migrants and South Korean front-line immigration bureaucrats. I now turn to the ways in which South Korean immigration bureaucrats and Korean Chinese migrants struggled to verify or establish two types of family relationships—namely, kinship (primarily by descent) and marriage.

Kinship Ties and Inclusion in the Community of Descent documentation and its discontents

I was invited to a small, friendly gathering of middle-aged Korean Chinese men who had been long-time friends. While we shared northeastern

Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion 193

cuisine and drinks, Sang-jin, a professor at Yanbian University, proudly recounted his quarrel with South Korean customs officers on his return from his first visit to South Korea in the early 1990s. The purpose of the visit was to look for his maternal grandfather, and the search, which was fruitless, made him overstay his visa limit by two days. His refusal to pay a 100,000 won (US$100) fine led to a quarrel with customs officers at the airport. Sang-jin said, “I told them, ‘Why are we Korean Chinese living in China? It is because your ancestors could not keep their own lands [from Japan] and made their own people starve. After decades, the door was reopened and I came here, excited about finally visiting my motherland (moguk). I overstayed my visa limit by just two days while I was looking for my own flesh and blood (hyo˘ryuk). And you fine me 100,000 won?’ Because I made enough of a scene, they simply let me go.” “If only peasants could talk back to them like you!” lamented Sang-jin’s friends at the table in unison.

This episode indicates neither Sang-jin’s general disregard of laws nor his stinginess. In fact, he earlier expressed plain contempt for lower-class Korean Chinese working in South Korea who “did not give a shit about what is legal or illegal to pursue short-term interests” and thereby “brought disgrace on the collective reputation of the Korean Chinese.” To Sang-jin and his friends, the fine was unacceptable because it signified the unjust treatment that the Korean Chinese experienced in South Korea. In his story, a primordial sense of entitlement, as expressed through such terms as moguk (motherland) and hyo˘ryuk (flesh and blood), is pitted against the artificial legalism of South Korean immigration officers. How would Korean Chinese then respond if South Korean immigration bureaucrats applied the same kind of artificial legalism to the verification of the “flesh and blood” relationships that the Korean Chinese claimed for immigration purposes? By establishing the existence of a kinship tie to a native or naturalized South Korean citizen, a Korean Chinese migrant was able to secure privileged access to South Korean territory (through a short-term family visitation visa) and, after several policy changes in the early 2000s, to its secondary labor market (through a special working visa [H-2]) as well as citizenship (through the recovery of citizenship or fast-track naturalization). The South Korean state initially relied exclusively on official documentation to verify the existence of the claimed kinship tie. When the verification of family ties to native South Korean citizens was at stake, the government required the claimant to submit the colonial-era family registry, buried in the administrative archives of their hometowns for decades, as evidence. When

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kinship relationships to naturalized South Korean citizens were concerned (that is, Korean Chinese who had acquired South Korean citizenship and thereby the ability to serve as a sponsor for their kin in China), the applicant had to submit the equivalent official document issued by the Chinese government. Most Korean Chinese migrants, however, found these documentary requirements extremely onerous. First, even a legitimate applicant found it very difficult to provide a colonial-­era family registration document. Whether or not a Korean Chinese migrant could provide this document depended on, among other things, the migration timing of the first-generation migrants, their community of origin, their level of education, and the younger generation’s knowledge of the family migration history. Although the Japanese government implemented the family registration system in Korea in 1909, it was only during the 1920s that the system became a feature of everyday life in colonial Korea. It took another decade and the impending Pacific War for the colonial state to strengthen its administrative grasp on the colonial population both inside and outside the Korean peninsula, as discussed in Chapter One. Accordingly, later migrants from the southern peninsula who had migrated through the state-sponsored campaign during the late 1930s and the early 1940s were more likely to have been registered than earlier migrants from the northern peninsula, whose migration history dated to the late nineteenth century. Moreover, the postcolonial North Korean state abolished the family registration system, making it almost impossible for northerners to find their old records in North Korea, let alone submit them to the South Korean government. Other factors, however, compromised the capacity even of southerners to secure this document. Many 1.5-generation migrants were too young at the time of migration to remember precise information about their hometowns. Although some interviewees spontaneously told me their hometown address in a standard order—starting with the province, then narrowed down to the county, village, and street name—others said that they barely remembered the details and could only explain how their natal villages looked or what these villages were informally called by the locals. The capacity to remember the “address” of one’s abode depends not only on a person’s age but also on his or her familiarity with the way the state classifies its territory for administrative purposes; this official address does not necessarily coincide with the local naming of the place (Scott, Tehranian, and Mathias 2002, 4–6). Given that women in general received less education

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and had less contact with state agents, it’s not surprising that fewer women than men could recollect this information. Moreover, the Cultural Revolution forced many Korean Chinese to destroy in fear any personal mementos (such as copies of old family registries, photos, or inherited family genealogy books), which, if preserved, might have compensated for fading or lost memories and helped them find their registration documents. Even if Korean Chinese migrants could locate their family registration documents, they faced further difficulties. The memory of the state could be as fallible as that of individuals. It was common for the birth date or the name in the old family registry not to coincide with the applicant’s record in China for any number of reasons. The impoverished and illiterate rural population in colonial Korea tended to report the births of babies a couple of years late because of the high infant mortality rate. Little attention was paid to the accurate registration of names. Girls were much less likely than boys to be documented properly and consistently. Many also intentionally reported incorrect information (and therefore maintained their illegibility to the eyes of the state) to avoid mobilization for the Pacific War. These omissions and discrepancies posed a practical challenge for a great number of applicants. The government required affidavits from at least two close South Korean relatives to reconcile inconsistencies in the record, yet relatives might have died or might be unwilling to help; further, the trustworthiness of the affidavits was determined at the discretion of immigration and consular officers. It was not much easier to verify a kinship relationship to a Korean Chinese individual who had acquired South Korean citizenship. In China, the hukou (household as a unit of cohabitation) rather than the family has been the basic unit of population registration. Accordingly, the household registry (hukoubu) alone often could not establish a family relationship if family members were registered in separate households. Local police offices, grassroots party organizations, or work units may have gathered the necessary information for administrative and surveillance purposes (Stephens 1998). Yet the type of information in these files (called dang’an, 档案) was not standardized. Most important, Chinese local bureaucrats were not obliged to issue documents that would authenticate an individual’s claimed family relations (such as dang’an or changzhu renkou dengjika, the permanent resident registration cards). The issuance of such documents was not the right of ordinary citizens but was largely left to the discretion of local bureaucrats, especially those working at the Public Security Bureau. As frequently

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noted in studies of petty corruption and guanxi in post-Mao China or other postsocialist countries,34 lack of the rule of law tended to foster the rule of relationship: securing the “right” kind of document required forming the “right” kind of relationship, which needed to be nurtured by the continual exchanges of gifts, bribes, or favors. In this context, the soaring demand for official documents simply meant increased opportunities for rent seeking for many Chinese local officials on all levels of administration. Given these conditions, exclusive reliance on official documents in immigration proceedings—whether they were colonial-era family registration documents or official Chinese documents of various sorts—generated several unintended consequences for Korean Chinese communities in northeast China. First, by favoring southerners over northerners, the official verification practice contributed to reconfiguring the historic regional divide between these groups, which often manifested as a divide between Yanbian (disproportionately northerners) and non-Yanbian residents (disproportionately southerners). In general, the elevation of South Korea from the “enemy state” to the affluent “homeland” reversed the preexisting regional hierarchy in northeast China. Although southerners’ association with South Korea was potentially a political liability during the Cold War (see Chapter Three), old family ties to South Koreans or rediscovered family registries became a springboard for migration ventures in the 1990s and the 2000s. The southern dialect and customs, once considered marginal to the Yanbian standard, now helped southerners mingle with or pass as South Koreans more easily than northerners. My southerner interlocutors often took pains to distinguish themselves from northerners when they talked among themselves or with South Koreans like me. Some stressed their cultural-­ linguistic affinity with South Koreans and, by extension, their greater entitlement to membership in South Korea; others blamed the bad reputation of Korean Chinese migrants on northerners by drawing on prevalent stereotypes of “Yanbian people”; still others insinuated that northerners had close associations with North Korea. Northerners, for their part, especially those who were highly educated and enjoyed higher social status in Yanji (the capital of the autonomous prefecture), resented such “frivolous” behavior and the “groundless” accusations. Some Korean Chinese intellectuals based in Yanji, for instance, complained to me that the “uncivilized behavior” of uneducated peasants from non-Yanbian regions, who constituted the majority of early migrants, had a negative impact on the collective reputation of the Korean Chinese in South Korea. This comment implies that

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not only regional divide but also various other divides in Korean Chinese society (the urban/rural divide, class hierarchy, party membership, and so on) shaped varied reactions among the Korean Chinese to the so-called Korean wind (Han’guk Param). For example, although some of my interviewees with higher socioeconomic status stressed that they did not have to sneak into South Korea and toil in manual jobs, some early migrants who had been peasant status holders underscored their entrepreneurial spirit, which enabled their migration venture and brought considerable wealth; they attributed the upward mobility they achieved to the fact that they had no reason to cling to the extant social system or worry about losing face like those who had benefited from that system.35 Second, many second- or later-generation Korean Chinese developed a renewed interest in their family genealogy or the migration history of their parents, partly in anticipation of the concrete benefits that this knowledge might bring. The costly search for long-forgotten South Korean kin or for the long-buried family registry became common for pragmatic, rather than sentimental, reasons. Some visited a special library in the city of Puch’o˘n, South Korea, that archived family genealogy books, in the hope of finding South Korean relations for immigration purposes.36 More common than this genealogist attitude was simply to rely on the commercialized migration industry. Migration brokers profited by providing assistance to clients in search of old relatives or old family registries; advertising fliers of these brokers were easily found at a bus stop in a remote farming village in northeast China. To those who were unlikely to have South Korean relations, these brokers even sold “dead family registries” (the registries that had not been updated for over thirty years) with the matching counterfeit ID cards and passports (Kukmin Ilbo 2008). This last point leads to the third unintended consequence of the South Korean state’s heavy reliance on official documentation: the strict evidentiary requirement imposed in the name of fraud prevention actually led to its proliferation. The soaring demand for Chinese official documents contributed tremendously to the growth of migration brokerage services and the formation of a market for fake identities in northeast China. Most aspiring migrants who could not pull strings themselves turned to migration brokers, who had nurtured special connections to Chinese officials and developed intimate knowledge of this delicate economy of gift-favor exchange. Many also purchased from migration brokers a range of official documents, whether they originally belonged to other people or were

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counterfeited. Migration brokers usually delivered a package of services by combining all these methods. This was the case for the most prevalent migration scheme in the 1990s and the early 2000s, whereby a middleaged couple (a man and a woman who could be complete strangers to each other) entered South Korea as if they were the parents of a Korean Chinese bride who married a South Korean man. Brokers purchased and sold a set of necessary documents from the real parents (for example, ID cards, passports, Chinese official documents verifying their relationship to the bride, and the short-term family visitation visas [C-3] issued by the South Korean consular office), “changed the skull” (kol pakkuda) if necessary—meaning, in local terms, changing the passport photo—and bribed local bureaucrats in case complications arose. There were many different permutations of this practice. For instance, when Ok-sun, one of my interviewees, married a South Korean man in 2001, the broker recruited a couple wishing to go to South Korea, bribed local bureaucrats to add their names to ­Ok-sun’s household registration document in place of her deceased parents, and then sold all related documents to the couple at a high price; a portion of the profit was handed out to Ok-sun for her cooperation so that she could make up for the expensive brokerage fee she had spent for her paper marriage arrangement.37 These circumstances made it necessary for even bona fide Korean Chinese migrants to negotiate with local bureaucrats for the issuance of the required documents or, alternatively, to rely on immigration brokers who sold forged documents. For example, after an officer at the Public Security Bureau in China refused to authorize my interviewee’s relationship to his deceased father (whose old family registration document that remained in South Korea would have enabled the interviewee’s fast-track naturalization), my interviewee sought the assistance of a broker in his neighborhood, who sold him what looked like a permanent resident registration card with a forged stamp at a lower price than the bribe the officer at the PSB had insinuated. Many eligible claimants had to engage in such a complex “bargaining of law in the shadows” (Coutin 2000, 63), just as those seeking to create the appearance of a nonexistent relationship did. To make matters even more paradoxical, fake but perfectly prepared documents often passed a series of screenings without problem, while genuine claimants were often denied entry visas, work permits, or citizenship because their documents had been judged suspicious or insufficient.38 “Fake will work—truth won’t!” became a mantra in Korean Chinese communities.

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This situation reversed the fundamental assumption underlying the logic of verification employed to distinguish genuine from fraudulent documents, bona fide from duplicitous claimants. Is it fraud if an individual has to use a counterfeit document to substantiate a genuine identity? This type of behavior may be illegal, but is it illegitimate or morally condemnable? In fact, it could be seen as an admirable feat to jump through all the expected and unexpected hoops and procure the necessary documents regardless of their authenticity. Involvement in such migration schemes signified the possession of extraordinary skills, such as finding competent and trustworthy brokers, securing their assistance at a reasonable cost, protecting oneself from possible deception, obtaining funds to pay for the hefty brokerage fee on time, and overcoming seemingly endless bureaucratic hurdles (also see Freeman 2011, 74–75). By contrast, if an individual remained helpless— that is, if one refused to engage in these shady dealings or constantly failed in his or her endeavor—this could be taken as a sign of incompetence, lack of versatility, or obstinacy rather than moral superiority. This distinctive sense of legitimacy and morality is commonly found in other border ­areas or migrant-sending communities.39 Yet, particularly in this case, it was reinforced by the shared understanding among the Korean Chinese that South Korea’s gatekeeping was fundamentally unjust. The government’s “obsession with bureaucratic trivialities” and indifference to the impasses blocking even qualified applicants seemed to reveal its hidden agenda to disqualify as many coethnic “brethren” as possible. In this context, it was easy to turn conventional moral judgment on its head. in search of alternatives: biometric information and the “primordialist defense of instrumentalism”

I met Tae-hu˘i, a middle-aged peasant in his late fifties, right after he submitted his second application for a family visitation visa. Two years earlier, sponsored by his aunt (a South Korean citizen), Tae-hu˘i had submitted a huge pile of papers (including dozens of photos) to the South Korean consular office in Shenyang. But when a staff member called without notice to verify his identity, he was so nervous that he got the birth order of his eight siblings wrong. Because his family was so poor, his parents had to have one of his brothers adopted by another family, a fact that slipped his mind at the moment. His visa application was summarily rejected, and Tae-hu˘i had no choice but to go through the complex application process all over again. He had to persuade his aunt to invite him again and send all the relevant

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documents from South Korea; he also had to get all the required official documents from the Chinese authorities, have a paid broker comb through the new application packet for possible errors, and submit his packet to the consular office after traveling for a day by train from Yanbian to Shenyang. Tae-hu˘i was just hoping that the previous rejection record would not negatively influence the decision on his second application.

Tae-hu˘i’s story describes a different regime of verification to which Korean Chinese migrants came to be subjected in the mid-2000s. Their active and passive resistance to the previous verification procedure, involving highprofile political protests on the one hand and “fraudulent” behavior on the other, undermined its legitimacy and efficiency, forcing the South Korean state to accept other types of identification rather than relying exclusively on official documentation. For example, 2005 administrative guidelines allowed those seeking South Korean citizenship to submit other forms of evidence to remedy the absence of or defects in the colonial family registry. Applicants were now required to submit a detailed statement narrating the migration history of their family, their relationship with native South Korean kin, and the reasons they decided to “recover” their South Korean citizenship. To verify this statement, various private documents were reviewed, including family genealogy books, letters exchanged with South Korean kin, old photos with kin, and endorsement letters from at least two South Korean relatives. Applicants were also required to appear for interviews, in which immigration officers tested their knowledge about alleged kin and looked for affinities in appearance between alleged parents and children. Around the same time, the South Korean consular office in China also reinforced the role of interviews (including unannounced telephone interviews) in issuing entry visas for Korean Chinese migrants who had been invited by their South Korean relatives. However, this policy change engendered a different set of problems. As various documents became recognized as supplementary evidence, applications for entry visas, work permits, and citizenship skyrocketed. The series of reforms in the early 2000s that made naturalized Korean Chinese eligible for family visitation and reunification also contributed to a sharp increase in the number of these applications. These changes seriously overburdened immigration and consular offices, which had to handle a flood of applications, supporting documents, and interviews. According to the report of the Ministry of Justice in 2006, one consular officer in Shenyang

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had to review 800 visa applications per day, increasing the average waiting time for the issuance of visas from four to ten months; the backlog for naturalization reached 80,000 in 2007 (quoted in Tongp’o T’aun 2007). Furthermore, the complication of the procedure created multiple points at which bureaucratic discretion prevailed and corruption grew, earning the consular office in Shenyang, in particular, a negative reputation as a “visa dealer” (Freeman 2011, 184–187). Some Korean Chinese found the revised verification procedure—which required a combination of complementary documents, tricky (and in some cases, humiliating) negotiations with South Korean kin, and anxiety-provoking interviews—to be just as prolonged, draining, and arbitrary as the original one. It is understandable that Tae-hu˘i—after all his monetary, emotional, and time investments— found it extremely unfair that the consular office rejected his application based on a single wrong answer he gave during the unannounced phone interview. But South Korean immigration bureaucrats, for their part, were frustrated because the new procedure seemed to be just as prone to false positives as false negatives. They expressed concerns about the rumor that some migration brokers simply provided their own phone numbers on application forms so that they could flawlessly answer the questions on behalf of the real applicants! The comment of one of my interviewees nicely captures the paradox inherent in a verification procedure that relied heavily on the applicant’s performance. Recounting how his inability to correctly remember the birthdays of his four children had triggered the officer’s suspicion, he lamented: “I am in my seventies. And old people like me, we don’t remember those things. We were too poor to make a big deal about birthdays! Besides, that’s my wife’s work, not mine! If there are those who can perfectly answer such questions without hesitation, the officer should be suspicious of them, because they are the ones who memorized all those details to disguise who they truly are!” In this context, the DNA test, another identification method introduced by the 2005 reform, was particularly appealing to both immigration bureaucrats and Korean Chinese migrants. To immigration bureaucrats, the DNA test was an effective remedy for easily forgeable official documents and hackneyed or deceptive performances. Examining DNA samples seemed to be a more efficient and precise way of verifying family relationships than cross-checking a pile of submitted documents or evaluating the credibility of the applicants through interviews. Moreover, because

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the DNA sample was perceived as impervious to fraud, a positive test result sped up the review process and reduced the workload of immigration officers. The DNA test was also attractive to some Korean Chinese who were frustrated with the onerous evidentiary requirements of the existing verification procedures. Although the test was costly (US$800 in 2005), and some applicants took offense at the immigration office’s request for a DNA sample, this method drastically reduced the waiting time in 2008 from a few years to a few months—a benefit much appreciated by those seeking prompt access to the South Korean labor market. The test was particularly appealing to those whose applications for entry visas had been repeatedly turned down because the submitted documents had been judged suspicious or insufficient or because the applicant could not pass the interviews. The DNA test became so popular among Korean Chinese migrants that it triggered a dramatic increase in the number of testing labs near immigration offices in South Korea (Kukmin Ilbo 2005). Many Korean Chinese applicants even began to voluntarily submit DNA test results (genuine or fabricated) to the consular office without an official request. In fact, the consular office could not afford to examine the authenticity of all the unsolicited DNA samples and eventually issued a public announcement, warning applicants not to fall for the marketing strategy of immigration brokers who urged them to take costly DNA tests (Chu So˘nyang Taehan Min’guk Ch’ong Yo˘ngsagwan 2008). This episode shows that even biometric information may not be completely free from what is often called the Goffmanian paradox: the more inspectors rely on a certain expression of identity, the more they become susceptible to those intent on using it as a prop for passing (Goffman 1959). It is interesting that biometric information was also considered a powerful weapon in the fight of the Korean Chinese against “unjust” exclusion. From this perspective, the evidence of descent imprinted in biology was a better indicator of entitlement than “artificial” documentation or “deceptive” performances; this particular genre of identification seemed to embody the idea that the Korean Chinese entitlement to membership was “natural” and “authentic,” whether the arbitrary and capricious policies of the South Korean state recognized it as such or not. The story of Kwanghyo˘n and his mother vividly illustrates this point. Kwang-hyo˘n’s mother acquired South Korean citizenship in 1992 by marrying a South Korean citizen after her husband, Kwang-hyo˘n’s father,

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died. However, at that time, marriage migrants were not allowed to petition for the immigration of their children from previous marriages. Kwanghyo˘n instead resorted to a human smuggler to enter South Korea in 2000 and worked there for five years until he was eventually arrested and deported. Even after the restrictive and discriminatory family-reunification policy changed, Kwang-hyo˘n, having been blacklisted as a result of his previous deportation, could not benefit from this reform like his two elder brothers. Frustrated, he decided to claim to be the youngest son of his aunt who had recently obtained South Korean citizenship and to apply for fast-track naturalization. A Korean Chinese broker, collaborating with a Chinese officer at the Public Security Bureau, managed to create an entire life record of this fictive person. But this identity fraud was eventually discovered during his naturalization process in South Korea, which led to his second arrest. In a public hearing at the National Assembly, Kwanghyo˘n’s mother took the stage and implored the authorities to grant her son amnesty. On the verge of tears, she said, “I am a South Korean citizen . . . My parents, brothers, and sisters were all here, my ancestors have lived here generation after generation, and now I am living here, too. But my son had to be left in China for a long time without his mom because of bad policies. He managed to come here and worked like a cow. But now he paid a big fine, was detained for months, and will be kicked back to China again! Is this what the ‘Republic of Korea’ is like? He is my real son! I can give you the DNA test result!” At first glance, bringing up the DNA test may seem like an odd and uninformed reaction: technically speaking, Kwang-hyo˘n’s relationship to his mother was irrelevant to his arrest and scheduled deportation. This scene becomes intelligible, however, if we properly grasp the paradoxical logic underlying what I call the primordialist defense of instrumentalism.40 On numerous occasions (ranging from informal conversations to public hearings), Korean Chinese migrants like Kwang-hyo˘n and his mother defended their instrumentalist fabrication of family ties on paper by appealing to a primordialist understanding of blood relationships and, by extension, to a primordialist understanding of the nation. From this perspective, the South Korean government had placed various “arbitrary” obstacles (like a discriminatory family reunification policy) in the way of their claiming the right that was “naturally” theirs by virtue of descent. Korean Chinese migrants thus had no choice but to take the matter into their own hands. The DNA test (as opposed to official documents) was a perfect medium

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through which to express this particular idea of personhood, belonging, and entitlement. Even though in this case the primordialist defense of instrumentalism was an ex post facto rationalization rather than an ex ante justification for noncompliance with immigration laws, to Kwang-hyo˘n and his mother it was no less valid. This line of defense had a broad appeal both inside and outside the Korean Chinese community and shaped the discursive field in which the criminality of these “offenses” was discussed and amnesty was granted. For example, invoking the proverbial family metaphor, an editorial in one of the Korean Chinese newspapers compared Korean Chinese who violated immigration laws to a daughter who had to sneak into the house of her unwelcoming natal family (Yong-p’. Kim 2009). Stressing that the Korean Chinese—regardless of the existence of verifiable individual family ties to South Korean citizens—belonged to the Korean nation, to a family writ large, this familial metaphor urged the South Korean state to embrace those who violated its law (including those who fabricated family ties on paper) as the victims of its unjust policies.

Truth and Morality in Marriage for Immigration Purposes assessing authenticity of marriage

In the late 1980s, Na-mi’s parents, originally from the Cho˘lla Province in southern Korea, were able to find their South Korean relatives, whose multiple invitation letters enabled the South Korea-bound migration of her family members. Yet, being the mother of an infant, Na-mi herself could not take advantage of the offer right away. She was going to join her husband, who overstayed the designated visa limit and was working in South Korea without documents, after a few years. But by then the South Korean government, increasingly concerned about the control of the labor market, banned Korean Chinese in their mid-fifties or younger from entering South Korea with a family visitation visa. In frustration, Na-mi contacted a broker, who arranged for her a paper marriage with a South Korean man. She arrived in South Korea in 1997, obtained citizenship right away, and reunited with her “real” husband. “Although it was a fake marriage, all documents were real. They were not counterfeited,” Na-mi told me emphatically.

Since the early 1990s, arranging marriage with a South Korean citizen has been the easiest and lowest-cost migration scheme for many Korean Chi-

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nese, especially for women. The central and local governments in South Korea initially promoted such marriages not only as a practical solution to the “marriage crisis” among South Korean rural bachelors but also as a symbol of national reunification in the offing (Freeman 2011, 43–47). Although the government quickly became skeptical of this overly romanticized view, the popularity of “international marriage” did not wane among Korean Chinese aspiring migrants. Unlike other kinship-based migration schemes, this option was open to northerners; southerners like Na-mi also increasingly resorted to this scheme as the South Korean government narrowed eligibility for other kinship-based preferential policies. Moreover, the accompanying benefits were comparably greater. Marrying a South Korean man opened access not only to South Korean territory but also to its citizenship, unconditionally and immediately before 199841 and conditionally and after a certain period of waiting time after that. Such marriages could also generate a chain of subsequent migration flows, as citizens’ spouses came to enjoy an increasing range of rights to family invitation and reunification. The acquisition of a South Korean passport also meant greater freedom of cross-border movement: it enabled its holders to visit their family in China, engage in various business enterprises requiring frequent international travels (such as trade or international marriage brokerage), or gain access to the labor market of other developed countries (such as Japan) free of strict visa screening. Not surprisingly, during the 1990s, marriage between Korean Chinese and South Koreans increased by leaps and bounds; runaway brides and fraudulent marriage scandals caught the attention of the South Korean media and the government as early as 1994. It was against this backdrop that, in 1998, the revised South Korean nationality law began to require that foreign spouses, regardless of gender, maintain an uninterrupted lawful stay in Korea for a minimum of two years before they could apply for citizenship. This change subjected foreign spouses, and by extension international marriages, to surveillance by the immigration bureaucracy for at least two years. Na-mi’s assertion that “all documents were real” (a statement that I heard over and again from other Korean Chinese marriage migrants) shows how critical it was to establish the authenticity of documents in the Korean Chinese migration process in general. But in the verification of marriage, what mattered most was not the authenticity of documents but the congruence between these papers and the reality they alleged to represent. Even if the couple had secured the required documentation in China and Korea, South Korean

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law ­enforcement officials retained the right to refuse to issue the spouse an entry visa, renew the foreigner’s registration card, or recognize the eligibility for naturalization, based on various types of interviews and observations conducted at each stage. A negative decision annulled the marriage. The residence status and citizenship status of the migrant spouse, which had been acquired through marriage, were also nullified. Underlying this retroactive revocation of marriage was a legal doctrine, established long before the “sham marriages” of Korean Chinese became a heated issue:42 the Supreme Court ruled that lack of “the intention to actually have such a mental and sexual union as is commonsensically recognized as marriage” (Taebo˘bwo˘n 1985; emphasis mine) could annul a marriage, even if there had been a mutual agreement between the couple. The state thus retained the right to regulate the terms of marriage to guarantee a certain level of congruence between the form and substance of marriage. “Fraudulent registration” also made the couple liable to criminal prosecution for “having damaged public trust in official documents” (T. Pak 2006). It did not matter if the resulting incongruence harmed no individual. After all, “fraudulent registration” was a crime because it had a corrosive effect on the state’s symbolic power to authorize an individual’s identity. Nevertheless, in the case of marriage between South Korean citizens, it was generally presumed that the substance would match the form of the marriage; the state rarely pried into the substance of marital relations unless someone (usually one of the couple who felt that the original terms of the informal agreement had been breached) brought the issue to court. Therefore, the registration of marriage and its documentation exercised immense performative power: a marriage registration document was not just a public manifestation, but a critical constituent, of one’s civil status. In the case of international marriages, however, the 1998 reform made it mandatory for immigration officers to investigate the match between form and substance, document and reality, even when there was no petition from either spouse. It should also be noted that the retrospective revocation of marriage could bring more serious consequences to the migrant spouse than the native South Korean citizen: deprivation of legal resident status and deportation. But how can we ascertain if the substance of marriage is congruent with its form? Although in principle “the intention to live as married” was the object of adjudication, intention was “a notoriously tricky state of mind to prove” (Dubler 2000, 982). Whoever was obliged to judge (a consular officer, immigration officer, police officer, prosecutor, or judge) could only

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examine the available indicia of intention and in effect make a “commonsense” judgment about the plausibility of the claim to be “genuinely” married. The verification procedures reflected this underlying logic. Pressed to handle too many cases within a short time, the immigration office built a multitiered filtering system to speed up the investigation process without compromising its detection capacity. A categorical distinction based on the profile of the couple was instrumental for this purpose. In 2006, certain categories of couples were singled out to be interviewed for visa issuance in local immigration offices in Korea, whereas others underwent much briefer reviews by the consular office. If the profile of the spouses diverged from the norm (for example, if the age gap between the spouses was more than ten years), if the couple had remarried quickly (for example, if one of the spouses had been divorced less than one year earlier), or if the marriage was likely to bring exceptional benefit to the migrant spouse (such as in cases where the migrant spouse had been undocumented, blacklisted, or deported), the couple was immediately placed in the high-risk category. Couples who had children together were categorized as the lowest-risk group and were exempted from the comprehensive interview for naturalization.43 The naturalization interview in its full-blown form aimed to be a thorough assessment of the entire trajectory of this putatively personal relationship. By 2008, the applicant and his or her sponsor were required to provide abundant information about the courtship, marriage, and subsequent married life during interviews, which were conducted separately and crosschecked later. The involvement of a commercial marriage broker or evidence of monetary exchanges between the husband and the wife increased suspicion; extensive records of long-distance courtship (such as a history of international phone calls), broad recognition from other family members, or the observance of ceremonial formalities decreased suspicion. Familiarity with seeming trivialities (for example, the husband’s drinking or smoking habits, yesterday’s dinner menu, the first presents the couple exchanged, information about household appliances in the home, or the route the couple took to get to the immigration office that morning) was considered as critical an indicator of a genuine relationship as congruent answers to more serious questions (concerning, for example, the couple’s monthly income, insurance policy, debts, sex life, or relationship with their in-laws).44 If the paper review and the face-to-face interview failed to reassure immigration officers, they visited the couple’s home and/or inquired among neighbors. A

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field officer who had undergone years of training would not miss such small details as the wardrobe in which the couple’s clothes should be hanging together, the refrigerator in which leftovers from home-cooked meals might remain, or the recollection of a neighbor who had seen the couple together at night. contesting the state’s categorization and moral gatekeeping

It was another busy day for Ms. Song, a pro bono counselor at a Korean Chinese community center. One of the visitors that day was a middleaged woman who was worrying about the investigation at the police office scheduled the next day. She came to South Korea via marriage and had maintained a legal resident status for about three years. But the recent arrest of the broker who arranged her marriage provoked the South Korean police to investigate the authenticity of all marriages he had brokered in the past. The woman was agonizing over whether she should respond to the summons. Her biggest concern was her living arrangement: she had been living not in the registered residence with her husband but in the dorm of a factory where she was working. She defended this living arrangement as a necessary compromise. Her husband was abusive, violent, and alcoholic; he rarely came home himself, either working at a faraway construction site or gambling all night. She was worried that the police would not buy her defense, though; they might simply conclude her marriage was a fake and arrest her right away. Sympathizing with her concern, all her Korean ­Chinese friends advised her not to show up for the investigation but instead to go underground. Ms. Song, however, persuaded the woman to cooperate with the police to avoid further complications. Ms. Song also advised that she might want to preemptively pursue judicial divorce with her husband: if she could successfully claim to have been the victim of an abusive South Korean spouse, she might be able to request the extension of her lawful stay or apply for naturalization without the sponsorship of her husband. With her face brightening up, the woman told Ms. Song that she did obtain a medical certificate and an X-ray photograph a couple of years ago when her husband broke her nose during the fight. Praising her cleverness, Ms. Song then asked if the husband happened to be a credit delinquent, to which she answered yes. To their disappointment, however, she had no documented record showing that she had paid back many of his debts on his behalf.

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No matter how exhaustive and meticulous immigration officers’ ever-­ expanding checklist (described in the previous section) might seem, it was essentially a measure of the couple’s performance after the wedding rather than of their intentions at the time of marriage. The case I described above (like countless other cases I observed as Ms. Song’s assistant), however, shows that the extremely tangled and fluid characteristics of these unions—mostly between lower-working-class Korean men and Korean Chinese women—made it extremely challenging for these couples to fulfill the conventional conception of marriage, even if neither spouse intended to fake the relationship at first. Although marrying a South Korean had once been seen, as one of my study participants put it, as “winning a lottery ticket to heaven,” the goals of marriage migrants, a considerable proportion of whom were single mothers or divorcees,45 had become more realistic by the early 2000s: they wanted to go to South Korea, make money without fearing deportation, and financially support their family, especially their children, left behind in China. If the marriage worked out, they would find decent husbands and might be able to help their family members work in South Korea; their children would also be able to study and work in South Korea or acquire South Korean citizenship. Even if the marriage did not work out, and even if they were unable to maintain their marriage-based legal status, it was still worth trying; at the minimum, the women would be able to secure entry into South Korea and work without documents, or they might be able to find an alternative way to legalize their status after they entered South Korea. The motivations of South Korean spouses could be just as “instrumental.” They had even less to lose even if the marriage did not succeed, especially if they were recruited systematically through the international commercial marriage market. In most cases, marriage brokers paid for their travel to China and related costs, which would be reimbursed later by the Korean Chinese spouse. Once married, their wives would not only provide domestic and sexual services but also bring in income from employment outside the household.46 This income could be a big attraction for poor urban men who were unemployed or working at various irregular jobs; these men were often in debt. Understandably, a lack of information and commitment, mutual distrust, and cultural difference plagued many marriages from the beginning. Some migrant spouses found that the self-presentation of the groom-to-be

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had been exaggerated or was outright false. Many women (like the one described at the beginning of this section) experienced economic exploitation and emotional or physical abuse, which made continued cohabitation difficult or undesirable. A broad and dense coethnic network and the ­capacity to find work relatively easily (by virtue of their proficiency in Korean) enabled Korean Chinese brides to leave (temporarily or permanently) their malfunctioning marriages more easily than other foreign brides. This “subversive” capacity, however, could aggravate the anxiety of the South Korean spouse and prompt him to turn his wife in to the police as an expression of frustration or as an act of revenge, (mis)representing himself as a victim of or an accomplice in a sham marriage scheme. Few couples could satisfy all three of the most important indicators of a “normal” marriage—that is, cohabitation, commingling of finances, and the existence of offspring— that immigration bureaucrats were looking for. Between the ideal types of bona fide marriage and fraudulent marriage lay a continuum of unions, sustained by differing combinations of affective attachment and instrumental reasoning. Moreover, both spouses tended to constantly recalibrate their relationship along this continuum as circumstances shifted over time. Not surprisingly, a number of unions were too precarious to last even two years. Facing these murky and volatile circumstances, some frontline officials became ambivalent, if not cynical, about the efficiency and legitimacy of their attempts at clear-cut categorization. Some officers did take pride in their gatekeeper role of protecting the dignity and sacredness of citizenship. One officer, for instance, asserted, “I cannot sell citizenship for 100,000 won” (referring to the US$100 application fee). Others, however, felt that it was impossible to reliably distinguish legitimate from illegitimate claimants out of “this chaotic jumble.” One resignedly admitted that “only the unfortunate would be singled out.” Some of the interviewed officers themselves wondered if the final decision might hinge less on the underlying “truth” than on the “social skills” of the foreign spouses under investigation. As with every other performance, acting married could be a deceptive façade. The self-doubt of some frontline officials aside, the migrant spouses were the ones who had to bear the brunt of this “misfit between preconceived categories . . . and the complex, fragmented, and overlapping social reality” (Calavita 2000, 8) in the most consequential way. The success of a migrant’s bid for favorable categorization depended on her or his capacity to secure the continuous and consistent cooperation of the citizen spouse. Securing cooperation, however, often became too costly due to the citizen

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spouse’s incompetence, sabotage, abuse, or demands for extra rewards. Another client of Ms. Song, Ae-sun, a divorced single mother, offers one such example. Ae-sun remarried a South Korean man who initially promised to financially support her daughter who remained in China. Her husband, however, did not keep his promise and told Ae-sun to earn money herself if she wanted to send remittances. “With [her] husband’s consent,” she began working at a restaurant in Seoul and sleeping there to save money and commuting time. But when Ae-sun asked her husband to extend her foreigner’s registration card a year after their marriage, he complained about their living arrangement and demanded 20 million won (US$20,000) for his assistance. When she refused, he threatened to “falsely” report to the police that their marriage was a sham. Although he did not follow through with his threat, she ended up giving him 1 million won (US$1,000), fearing possible complications. However, this was not the end of her ordeal. She later learned that her husband had reported to the police that she was missing after having run away from home and had obtained a divorce from the court! As a result, her foreigner’s registration card had already been canceled. Ms. Song told Ae-sun that, even if she decided to petition the decision of the immigration office, it might work to her disadvantage that she had not lived with her husband and gave him money he asked for. Korean Chinese migrants responded to these quandaries in various ways. First, as Ms. Song suggested to the woman whose husband broke her nose, a marriage migrant could turn to a joint-petition waiver that, since 2004, had enabled foreign spouses who had suffered abuse by their South Korean spouses to extend their lawful stay or to apply for naturalization on their own. To succeed, the petitioner had to prove that the marriage was not a fake and that her husband, not she, was responsible for the dissolution of their matrimonial relationship. To make their case, many petitioners first had to challenge the established criteria of normal marriage. Some argued that paying matchmakers was a normative cultural practice in China, rather than evidence of criminal conspiracy. Others highlighted the challenging material conditions of lower-working-class families (for example, inadequate housing, irregular employment involving extended leave, long work hours, and night shifts) that made middle-class models of “normal” family life almost impossible to realize. The lack of confirming evidence was presented not as an indicator of a fake marriage but as the outcome of a broken marriage of which they were the victims. For example, the lack of recognition by in-laws was attributed to the rejection and ­humiliation

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that they had suffered as “Chinese” brides and to the conflict derived from the cultural difference between the “traditional” and “patriarchal” kinship norms of South Korea and the more “modern” and “egalitarian” kinship norms of the PRC (seen as a product of communist reforms) (also see Freeman 2011, 114–130). To represent themselves as ideal victims with a good moral standing, petitioners also contrasted the deception, exploitation, abuse, and abandonment on the part of the citizen spouses with the petitioners’ sustained commitment to and sacrifice for their husbands, stepchildren, or in-laws. They argued that, if the couple had commingled their finances, it would have perpetuated the wife’s exploitation and even threatened the economic survival of the entire family, given the inveterate gambling habits and the increasing debts of their husbands. As Ms. Song’s advice reveals, it was critical to support this narrative with as much documentation as possible (such as medical records, bank accounts, credit rec­ ords, and so on), that is, the lingua franca of the modern bureaucracy possessing “a greater fixity and truth value within the epistemological sphere of the law” (Ewick and Sibley 2003, 1360). Second, some Korean Chinese migrants, instead of defending the authenticity of their marriages, sought to limit the punitive reach of the South Korean state by challenging the legitimacy of the most severe punishment, that is, the retrospective revocation of their legal status. Many Korean Chinese brides who had pled guilty to fraudulent marriage, especially those in earlier cohorts, had not been properly notified of the radical consequences that such a conviction would bring. Furthermore, inefficient communication and cooperation between different government agencies (for example, the municipal administration, immigration office, and the courts) had enabled them to live as South Korean citizens for five to eight years after their trials. In the meantime, they paid taxes, enjoyed health care services for citizens, traveled with South Korean passports, and even voted in the presidential election!47 When administrative streamlining finally and belatedly deprived them of their citizenship and arrested them for unlawful presence in South Korea, they were completely taken aback and found themselves in a profound limbo. Because the Chinese government was unwilling to rehabilitate their Chinese citizenship, it was not only practically cumbersome but also politically infeasible for the Ministry of Justice to simply deport them to China. Hence, the government bailed them out of the detention center, extending their temporary residential permits every three months. Sympathetic immigration officers often advised them to marry South Ko-

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reans as a way out of this Kafkaesque situation. The profound irony in this well-intentioned advice, however, did not go unnoticed. “The South Korean government nullified all my documents and made me live like a ghost because I was involved in a sham marriage! And they advised me to marry a South Korean again to get out of this mess?!? Aren’t they fostering a crime then?” one of them told me in disbelief.48 This group of women—with the support of sympathetic NGO activists, politicians, lawyers, and scholars— petitioned for amnesty, emphasizing their otherwise law-abiding characters, the victimless nature of their offenses, the extreme suffering caused by the belated revocation of citizenship, and the fait accompli of their prolonged and multifaceted integration into South Korea, for which the South Korean government was partially responsible (Yong-p’ Kim 2009). Third, a few defiantly refused to play the game according to the rules established by the South Korean immigration bureaucracy. They instead problematized the entire premise of the relevant bureaucratic and legal apparatuses, denouncing its fundamentally discriminatory character. They asked why only certain categories of international marriages should be subject to scrutiny, when instrumentalist motivations, an extremely low fertility rate, presumably pervasive extramarital affairs, and a high divorce rate characterized marriage practices and family life in contemporary South Korea in general. An episode an immigration officer related to me offers a perfect example of this third type of response. He was examining the cell phone records of a Korean Chinese woman who applied for naturalization via marriage. One number, which was not her husband’s, appeared quite often. He asked whose number it was, and she answered with her eyes rolling, “My lover’s (aein).” Her application for naturalization was rejected because the officer doubted that she was genuinely married to her husband. Outraged, she walked up to his desk and yelled, “You bastard! All of my South Korean co-workers have affairs and, what, you now tell me we Korean Chinese can’t? It has nothing to do with my marriage, and it’s none of your business!” This episode shows that some marriage migrants directly challenged what a legal scholar Helena Wray called the “accidental moral gatekeeping” (Wray 2006) of immigration officers, namely, their unintended imposition of the ideal of a “normal marriage” (including marital fidelity) on internationally married couples. Such a subversive and confrontational response, however, was rare. Recall the unanimous advice that Ms. Song’s client received from her Korean Chinese friends (“Don’t show up for the police investigation”). When

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complications arose, the majority of Korean Chinese brides simply chose to go underground, hoping to avoid arrest for as long as possible. It was common for migrant spouses to lose their legal status simply because they had not answered the summons from the immigration office. Seeking the ­intervention of the state could be risky. Most Korean Chinese did not have enough knowledge of and trust in the working of the South Korean legal system to navigate this complex terrain, which required savvy negotiation skills and unaffected performance. They feared that they would be unable to defend themselves before hostile immigration officers and thus be deported on the spot. This reaction also stems from the fact that many migrants staked their reputation and moral self-understanding not so much on how they were labeled by the social control agencies of South Korea as on how they were seen by their family and communities in northeast China. I thus now turn to the perspective of the sending community. “sham marriage,” female virtue, and the moral order of the sending community

I followed Han-jun to visit his old friend, Ku˘m-nan, in a small village near the city of Longjing in northeast China. They were both in their early sixties. After two and half hours of conversation, Han-jun asked Ku˘m-nan about the villagers who had gone to South Korea through marriages. Ku˘mnan told us that at least two women in her village (which included approximately fifty households) had obtained South Korean citizenship through sham marriages about ten years ago. She explained that the first woman was currently running a restaurant in South Korea. Han-jun immediately asked, “Does she run the restaurant on her own or with her South Korean husband?” “On her own, her family said. But who knows? We haven’t seen it with our own eyes.” Ku˘m-nan added that the woman financially supported the education of her two sons, who recently became college students. She also bought her “real husband” an apartment in Longjing and a taxi so he could support himself. “He is now living with another woman. [Looking at me] You know, he is a young man. How can he manage otherwise? The wife also understands this.” Han-jun commented that she seemed to have done her best. Ku˘m-nan, however, was still unforgiving toward the wife. “This is for her own good. What if her husband insisted on following her to South Korea? He could be a pain in the ass. Now her husband can support himself by driving a taxi while enjoying his life here. Why would

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he go through all those hardships and humiliations in South Korea?” Ku˘mnan moved on to talking about the second woman who had obtained South Korean citizenship via sham marriage. She eventually took her two children to South Korea while leaving her husband behind. Han-jun lamented, “So the husband lost not only his wife but his kids. It is like he lost his nose and then both of his ears to South Korea!” Ku˘m-nan agreed, “I know! Once you drink the water of South Korea, you can’t live in China!”

A “sham marriage” by definition creates incongruity between reality and what has been called “papereality” (Dery 1998). In South Korea, this incongruity was generally considered undesirable; it had to be corrected, either by bringing the latter into line with the former (through the nullification of the marriage registration) or by bringing the former into line with the latter (as in the case of some couples who had originally planned to get married only on paper but later agreed to make their relationship enduring and binding). By contrast, the most frequently heard comment about sham marriage in northeast China was “it is really easy for a fake divorce [which might be a necessary prelude to a sham marriage] to become a real one.” Maintaining the incongruity between reality and “papereality” was the goal for many families. The rapid transition from socialism to a market economy, combined with the migration boom, placed tremendous strain on gender and family relations in Korean Chinese communities. Similar phenomena have been observed in many rural villages in post-Mao China (Jacka 2005), but they took a particularly acute and disruptive form in Korean Chinese communities because it was Korean Chinese women, not men, who were at the forefront of the struggles to survive in the rapidly transitioning economy. Several articles published in 1997 issues of a monthly magazine, Yo˘nbyo˘n Yo˘so˘ng (Yanbian women), describe this reversal of the “appropriate” gender roles in a highly critical tone. So˘n-hu˘i Ri and Sun-hu˘i Kim (1997), for example, observed that women were all busy “picking wild greens to be sold in the market; selling clothes on the street; traveling a long way to buy cheap wholesale products; washing dishes in restaurants; going to North Korea for peddling; and working in the apparel factories in Saipan.” Meanwhile, they lamented, “Men were simply playing mahjong or singing karaoke.” The increasing strain on existing family and gender relations manifested itself, among other ways, in a high divorce rate. In 2000, the Yanbian

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Korean Autonomous Prefecture recorded a divorce rate of approximately 30 percent (S. Yi 2004), which was as high as, or higher than, the rate in Shanghai.49 The high divorce rate, however, was not simply a negative outcome of the migration boom. To many families with limited resources, “divorce” could also be a critical means of realizing their own “Korean dream”: for those who were already married, a “fake” divorce in China had to precede the “fake” marriage in Korea. Accordingly, the “sham marriage” provoked greater anxiety than any other migration scheme. Many Korean Chinese elites accused sham marriages of causing the breakup of real families and thereby threatening the stable reproduction and moral order of the Korean Chinese community as a whole. Some of these elites attributed this “pathology” to the crude materialism and utter disregard for order and morality among people with low “cultural standards” (wenhuashuiping, 文化水平).50 Yet the phenomenon was too pervasive to be safely blamed on those at the margins of Korean Chinese society; in fact, the expense of the brokerage fees as well as the complexity of the necessary bureaucratic procedures (Freeman 2011, 75) meant that the poorest of the poor among the Korean Chinese were unlikely to be the main cast members of this unfolding social drama. The fact that South Korean spouses were likely to be of lower socioeconomic status also hurt the pride of the community; they asked what made “our” women choose those “scum” over “our” men, despite the risk, humiliation, and sometimes violence that they had to endure. At stake was not only the respectability of individual families but also that of the historic ethnic community in northeast China—the family writ large. Or, given the profoundly gendered nature of these sham marriage ventures, one might argue that it was not so much the reputation of the entire community that was threatened as it was the collective male pride that needed to be assuaged (U. Kim and Min 2006). Under these circumstances, one way of dealing with communal anxie­ ties and humiliation was to emphasize the pure instrumentality underlying this type of marriage. For instance, Sang-hak, a Korean Chinese businessman in his early forties, told me how offended he was every time he heard South Korean men complaining about their “sly” Korean Chinese brides who deceived them into marriage and ran away after achieving their goal. “I want to say, ‘Dude, face it! Look what kind of person you are!’ Did they realistically believe that these women really wanted to live with men like themselves who were old, ugly, unemployed, literally at the bottom of soci-

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ety, for the rest of their lives? Only a few, I would say 10 percent, of Korean Chinese brides would marry these men in earnest. Our Korean Chinese women are not such idiots! They wouldn’t be infatuated with those scum just because they have South Korean citizenship!” In this context, the sham marriage had to remain a sham; the incongruity between the reality and the papereality had to be maintained, lest the “real” marriage and the “real” family in China be torn apart and the male pride at stake be undermined. From this perspective, an ideal scenario was as follows: the migrant acquired South Korean citizenship, divorced her fake South Korean husband, and then used her newly acquired citizenship to better support or reunite with her “real” family either in China (by returning home with a fortune) or in Korea (by petitioning for family reunification as a naturalized South Korean citizen). Indeed, for some migrants, this ideal scenario became a reality, as was the case for the family of Sun-ch’o˘l, a college student whom I met in Yanji. Sun-ch’o˘l’s mother’s first attempt to clandestinely enter South Korea in 1997 had ended prematurely with her arrest and deportation. This aborted venture left her extended family members, who pooled their financial resources for her migration venture, heavily indebted. It took her four years to cobble together the brokerage fees again so that she could try a sham marriage this time. And to her relief, the second attempt worked out without serious problems. Sunch’o˘l’s mother obtained South Korean citizenship in 2004 and divorced her fake husband. Although her “real” husband worked in a construction site in South Korea, she went to Japan in 2005 to work at a higher wage in a Korean restaurant near Tokyo; her South Korean passport, by exempting her from the stringent visa process at the Japanese consular office, was instrumental in this move. The family had an optimistic outlook on their future: they paid back all their debts; Sun-ch’o˘l, who was raised by his grandmother, became a college student; and with a few more years of hard work and family separation, Sun-ch’o˘l’s parents would have enough savings for their son’s marriage as well as for their own postretirement life back in China. Admittedly, the saga of Sun-ch’o˘l’s family embodied the worst nightmare of the South Korean immigration bureaucracy: these migrants not only escaped bureaucratic surveillance but also shrank the meaning of citizenship—and in this case, ancestral citizenship—to the possession of a passport. From the migrants’ point of view, however, these stories exemplified their vibrant agency, their agile reorganization of family life across

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borders, and their persistent devotion to their families in China. By contrast, an unwillingness to try a sham marriage venture could be interpreted as signaling the lack of all the virtues attached to these adventurous and yet devoted brides. Chung-mun’s complaint about his wife illustrates this point. In 2004, Chung-mun, a peasant in his late forties, was introduced to a Korean Chinese woman who had obtained South Korean citizenship and agreed to marry him on paper. However, the South Korean immigration office, having concluded at a very early stage of the investigation that their marriage was a sham, refused to issue him an entry visa. His family incurred a 50,000 RMB debt (about US$8,000) due to this aborted migration venture. Chung-mun was frustrated that his “real” wife (from whom he was now legally divorced), despite this huge debt, would not even try to find a way to go to South Korea herself. “We are already divorced on paper. Wouldn’t it be easier for her to go to South Korea through sham marriage than for me to look for other ways to pay back the debt? But she doesn’t have the guts to try that. She doesn’t want to endure the hardship of manual labor in South Korea, either.” Surprised by his seemingly peculiar complaint, I tried to mollify him, saying, “Well, I hear you. But you can look on the bright side! Other people I’ve met were worried because their wives always wanted to leave, and there are many couples who eventually spilt up after the fake divorce.” But Chung-mun immediately shot back, “If you’re afraid of things going wrong, you shouldn’t even eat! And why be so negative? Most people succeed!” Despite Chung-mun’s insistence, however, “successes” were rare; they were the exceptions that proved the rule that “it is really easy for a fake divorce to become a real one.” The remaining spouse, generally the husband, could feel disconcerted, humiliated, and alienated by unwelcome changes in his wife—her “Koreanized” manners, habits, tastes, accent, and even ways of thinking. Some husbands were disappointed to learn that their wives were so accustomed to their lives in Korea that they did not want to return. An essay published in Yo˘nbyo˘n Yo˘so˘ng in 2004 (So˘l 2004), for example, shows how annoyed and frustrated the author of this essay was when his wife, after returning home, began every single sentence with, “In our Korea . . .” She also kept complaining about the “filthy streets of Yanji” and “greasy Chinese foods.” Ku˘m-nan’s comment had resonated strongly among the people left behind: “Once you drink the water of South Korea, you can’t live in China!” Phone calls that became sporadic or a delay in sending monthly remittances could trigger suspicions of betrayal.51 From

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the perspective of the remaining husband, if the woman fell in love with her “fake” South Korean husband, it was less like a fairy tale come true (as depicted in South Korean media) and more like a nightmare that wouldn’t end. Almost every Korean Chinese I met had a cautionary tale to tell about a broken family—that is, how the “betrayal” of a wife left her husband and children indebted, devastated, and abandoned.52 A change in South Korean policies that required an extended engagement with the “fake” South Korean husband aggravated the anxiety of the “real” husband further—although the “threat” might just as easily come from an extramarital affair with another South Korean man or Korean Chinese migrant as from a growing intimacy with a “sham” South Korean spouse. Migrant spouses, for their part, could become just as irritated by their husbands’ “inertia,” “incompetence,” “parochialism,” and “undisciplined way of life”—which, the wives reasoned, had forced them to toil on “foreign” soil in the first place. Wives might feel upset, or even betrayed, by the ways their remittances were “wasted” on foolhardy investments, intemperate drinking, or inveterate gambling, rather than the purchase of an apartment in the city or the education of the children. The specter of infidelity also haunted migrant spouses. It was common that “leftover” husbands sought sexual or emotional gratification of their own, whether through fleeting encounters in the growing adult entertainment industries of the region or by forming enduring relationships with other women also left behind in northeast China. As revealed by Ku˘m-nan’s comment on a village man who ended up living with another woman after his wife went to South Korea, the deeply entrenched double standards on marital infidelity meant that extramarital affairs of the remaining husband were generally more accepted in northeast China than the migrant wife’s “betrayal.” In sum, both spouses could easily feel that their own sacrifice was unrecognized and unrewarded. In this context, questions of trust, documentation, and performance emerged again, yet in a diametrically different way. Once a marriage has been legally dissolved (albeit through a “fake” divorce), how can the couple establish or verify that the marriage persists in a substantive sense, without the symbolic power of the state to support this claim? How effectively can informal moral sanctions, enacted through transborder networks of family, kin, and neighbors, serve as a substitute for legal sanctions? Many migrant women tried to sustain their commitment to their families in China by performing an array of wifely and motherly actions, even if the marital

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relationship had been legally dissolved long ago. To compensate for the absence of official recognition and to protect their reputations, these women paid regular visits, combined their finances with their husband’s, sent remittances, and fulfilled familial duties to their children (regardless of the ­formal custody arrangement) or to their in-laws. The pressure to overcompensate made some study participants comment in a self-deprecating manner that they suffered doubly: unlike other women who had to deal with only one husband, they had to deal with the “abusive fake husbands” to secure their continued cooperation while also taking caution not to offend their “cranky and suspicious real husbands”! No amount of overcompensation, however, could completely shield their reputation from community gossip, policing, and stereotyping, as the conversation between Han-jun and Ku˘m-nan quoted earlier suggests. If the substance of the marriage ultimately dissolved, that is, if either spouse came to lose trust in the other and wanted to end the relationship, the couple—already formally divorced—had to reach an economic settlement or adjust the previous custody arrangement without the guidance or protection by courts or other regulatory bodies.53 The story of In-suk illustrates how difficult and consuming this negotiation could become. I came to know her because her Korean Chinese husband visited Ms. Song, the pro bono legal counselor mentioned previously, to inquire about a way to turn in his wife to the police for having engaged in a sham marriage with a South Korean man in the past. After receiving a threatening call from her husband, In-suk also visited Ms. Song the next day to convey her side of the story in utter fury and desperation. In-suk acquired South Korean citizenship in 1992 through a sham marriage, but she and her “real” husband in China were able to remain legally married because she used a counterfeit identification document for this sham marriage venture; by building one paper truth (a sham marriage) onto another (a fictitious identity), she was able to marry, divorce (from her fake South Korean husband), work, and obtain citizenship as that fictitious person in South Korea. Despite seventeen years of separation, she maintained her commitment to her family, she argued. She visited China every few years, sent remittances to her husband, financially supported her sons, and attended the family events of her in-laws dispersed between South Korea and northeast China. Because the couple remained legally married, her husband was also able to benefit from her pension from the Chinese government. However, he recently became suspicious that In-suk was having an affair and insisted that she

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return to China. She denied the allegation but refused to return. She did not want to spend the rest of her life with a person she no longer loved. She also cherished the autonomy that she had achieved away from her controlling husband. After seventeen years, South Korea now felt like home. Outraged by such “betrayal,” her husband threatened to turn her in to the police for having engaged in a sham marriage. He demanded 30 million won (US$30,000) as compensation for remaining silent and agreeing on divorce. In-suk’s husband presented himself as the victim of his gold-­digging, deceptive, and unfaithful wife. From In-suk’s perspective, however, her husband had voluntarily cooperated with the scheme and had enjoyed the fruit of her hard work, living comfortably for years with money from her remittances and pension.

Circumventing Paper Walls of the Homeland State In previous chapters, I examined how the colonial and postcolonial states in the Korean peninsula sought to claim certain transborder populations as their own and how these transborder Koreans responded to these initiatives. The long-overdue encounter between South Korea and the Korean Chinese, however, led to a more ambivalent homeland stance. The South Korean state could finally redeem this long-forgotten transborder kin as “its own” and thereby refashion itself as the homeland state for the Korean nation in toto. The bureaucratic and semantic infrastructure of transborder nation building, inherited from the colonial period, played a critical role in expanding—or restoring—the imagined and institutionalized scope of the Korean nation. The unexpected influx of the Korean Chinese into South Korea’s secondary labor market, however, added an internal dimension to post–Cold War transborder membership politics by effectively transforming transborder coethnics into potential and actual immigrants (Brubaker 2010, 66–67). The South Korean state neither completely sealed nor widely opened its territorial and membership boundaries to the Korean Chinese but rather built multiple gates to regulate their access to its territory, labor market, and citizenship, if in a more trial-and-error than well-coordinated fashion. In this sense, post–Cold War South Korea was a reluctant homeland state at best. In explaining the changing contours of these gatekeeping practices, I have highlighted the agency of the Korean Chinese who struggled to pursue inclusion in the affluent homeland on their own terms. The m ­ acro­political

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struggles in the legal and political arenas took the form of Korean Chinese migrants differentiating themselves collectively from other foreign workers. They represented themselves as an essential part of the Korean nation as a family writ large and thereby justified their special claim to the South Korean state as a “motherland.” The micropolitical struggles in bureaucratic settings, by contrast, took the form of Korean Chinese migrants individually presenting themselves before immigration bureaucrats as having concrete kinship or marriage relationships with South Korean citizens. Despite having attracted little attention in both policy circles and academia, I argue, it was the latter type of struggle that preoccupied aspiring Korean Chinese migrants, mediated their reiterative encounters with the homeland state, shaped their own understandings of their vulnerability as well as agency, and transformed their communities of origin in multiple ways. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in both receiving and sending communities, this chapter traced the unfolding of these less conspicuous, yet important, micropolitical struggles over the past two decades. I have shown how bureaucrats and migrants used various types of “identity tags” (Goffman 1959, 1970) to evaluate or establish the authenticity of claimed family relations and, in so doing, how they acted on, espoused, or dismissed different understandings of personhood, belonging, and entitlement. When South Korean bureaucrats referred primarily to official documents to establish the claimed family relationship, they enacted and thus reinforced the symbolic power of the state to monopolistically determine individual identities. The colonial-era family registration document, for instance, was considered the most reliable “memory of the state” (Matsuda 1996), which could substantiate the belated claims to national belonging made by Korean Chinese migrants. This enduing documentary trail compensated for the decades of corporeal absence of the Korean Chinese and contributed to reforging their long-defunct ties to the homeland. However, the “homeland” state’s uneven, sporadic, and belated embrace of the colonial-­era Korean migrants to Manchuria and their descendants— embodied in the absence of or defects in the family registration documents—worked to the disadvantage of many Korean Chinese migrants. This constraint led to their exclusion from various benefits that recognized transborder members could enjoy. Yet the Korean Chinese were not helpless. They challenged the dominant state identification practices by undermining their efficacy and legitimacy. Ironically, it was the state’s reliance on the “papereality” (Dery 1998)

Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion 223

that the state created and authorized that made official documents vulnerable to false reporting, fabrication, and impersonation. Some migrants manufactured their own “papereality” and usurped the “aura of irrefutability” (Tarlo 2003) carried by official documents. By authorizing counterfeit documents in exchange for bribes, gifts, and favors and refusing to issue genuine ones, state officials in the sending community were often implicated in this production of legality by illegitimate means (compare Sadiq 2008, 57–70). This situation blurred the distinction between genuine and fraudulent documents, bona fide and duplicitous claimants, making it increasingly difficult to defend official documents as a privileged source of the “truth” about individual identities. In response, a variety of gatekeepers (such as consular officers, immigration officers, prosecutors, and courts) turned to another type of “identity tag,” namely, the public demonstration or enactment of the alleged identity. Instead of simply ascertaining consistency within the closed circuit of stateauthorized documents, they tried to evaluate the congruence between papereality and reality, or papereality and (corpo)reality. A logic of plausibility and verisimilitude was central to this genre of identification; the more closely a claimant’s performance reflected “commonsensical” understandings of the identity in question, the more likely the individual would be seen as what he or she claimed to be. However, “common sense” is always ambiguous and plural. Moreover—setting aside the questionable validity of any such distinction—it is difficult to distinguish an ingenuous and spontaneous revelation of an individual’s “real” identity from a perfectly choreographed but deceptive masquerade. Disputes over various measures with which to verify the authenticity of marriage relationships illustrate this point nicely. South Korean immigration bureaucrats turned to still another type of identity tag, biometric information, as an effective remedy for easily forgeable official documents and deceptive performances. Interestingly, Korean Chinese migrants also invoked a particular vision of selfhood, belonging, and entitlement signified by this genre of identification to problematize the gatekeeping practices of the homeland state. From this perspective, the evidence of descent imprinted in migrants’ biology was a better indicator of their membership than “artificial” documentation or “deceptive” performances. Many migrants defended their involvement in “identity fraud” by contrasting their “natural” and “authentic” entitlement with the “arbitrary” obstacles the South Korean government had imposed. This “primordialist

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defense of instrumentalism” shaped the discursive field in which migrants questioned and attempted to diminish the criminality of these offenses. Contemporary immigration scholars have generally emphasized how the use of biometric information in immigration proceedings considerably narrows migrants’ room to maneuver.54 Yet my analysis suggests that, even if the body “does not lie” (Aas 2006, 145), the kind of truth it tells can be interpreted differently by parties with different vested interests. We should ask how this newly available technology undermines or reinforces the established authority of the other indicia of identity and how it contributes to reshaping the cultural repertoire through which personhood and belonging are imagined.55 The ramifications of these dynamic interactions between South Korean immigration bureaucrats and coethnic migrants from China were not limited to the “homeland” state. I also examined their multifarious spillover effects in Korean Chinese communities in northeast China. Unlike the analysis of macropolitical struggles, which tends to represent the group under examination as a homogeneous unit, the analysis of individual strategies highlights intragroup differences. South Korean policies reconfigured various preexisting divides and hierarchies within Korean Chinese communities, based on differences in regional origin (the southern versus the northern part of the Korean peninsula), hukou registration (urban versus rural residents), and gender. These disparities stemmed in part from South Korea’s reluctant and selective embrace of the Korean Chinese in the post– Cold War era—standing in stark contrast with North Korea’s broadly welcoming attitude during the Cold War (Chapter Three). That is, South Korea distributed opportunities for “return” unevenly among its transborder coethnic population, enabling first-generation southerners on the one hand, and women in the marriageable ages on the other, to serve as “bridgeheads” (Böcker 1994) for the subsequent migration of their family members left in China. Because it was easier to fake marriage relationships than to rediscover or recover old kinship ties and because the spouses of citizens enjoyed more privileges in immigration than their extended kin members, the migration strategies of many families focused on creating the former linkage, leading to the proliferation of sham marriage schemes and the anxieties, tensions, and conflicts that accompanied them. These findings resonate closely with studies of transnational families in other contexts, highlighting how migration creates new inequalities in material, cultural, and mobility resources within migrants’ families and how this engenders

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disputes between migrant and nonmigrant family members, derived from their different moral interpretations of such inequalities.56 This development leads to my last point. By extending the analytic focus beyond the receiving state, this chapter provides an ethnographic account of how Korean Chinese migrants themselves made sense of and experienced their “fraudulent” claims making for immigration purposes. Migrants’ efforts to circumvent, or find shortcuts through, the gatekeeping practices of the South Korean state (and in some contexts, the rent seeking of the Chinese state) led to the rapid development of migration brokerage, which provided indispensable logistical assistance for Korean Chinese cross-border migration. In northeast China, the default assumption about going abroad was that an individual had to “walk in through the back door” (zouhoumen in Chinese or twinmunch’ igi [literally, knocking on the back door] in Korean). These circumstances profoundly shaped how the Korean Chinese understood the working of the hierarchically organized global mobility regime, suspected the legitimacy of state restrictions on their mobility, and justified their reactions to such restrictions, including their involvement in illegal schemes. In the counternarratives of Korean Chinese migrants, accepting the forced immobility imposed on them by states could be seen as a sign of pitiful incompetence, timid conformism, or useless obstinacy. By contrast, obtaining the necessary documents (regardless of their authenticity) or successfully carrying out sham marriage schemes often exemplified not their moral deficiency but rather their vibrant agency, admirable savvy, broad connections, and, above all, persistent devotion to their families in China. In sum, by situating themselves in the context of transborder social ties and citing alternative social norms and moral obligations, Korean Chinese migrants were able to neutralize the stigmatizing view of the South Korean state. The intricate moral parameters within which Korean Chinese migrants and their families sought to establish trust, maintain respectability, and resolve disputes remained profoundly dissonant with the basic premise of bureaucratic justice and the vision of morality upheld in South Korea. To summarize, this chapter offers one of the most agentic and dynamic analyses of ethnic (return) or transgenerational migration. Although the existing scholarship has tended to take for granted the convertibility of the so-called ethnic capital (Durand and Massey 2010; Mateos and Durand 2012),57 the Korean Chinese migration to South Korea glaringly exposes that mobilizing ethnic capital for migration purposes was anything but a

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smooth and unencumbered process. Drawing on extensive ethnographic data, this chapter’s analysis highlights the malleability of ethnic boundaries, intragroup heterogeneity, and the shifting salience of ethnic identification in the context of ethnic (return) migration. Most ­important, it brings into sharp relief how multiple actors involved—regulatory (homeland) state authorities, profit-seeking migration brokers, and aspiring (coethnic) migrants themselves—shape the “capitalization” of ethnicity in various macropolitical, mesoinstitutional, and microinteractional contexts. I therefore suggest that the growing body of scholarship on ethnic (return) migration expand the domain of comparative analysis beyond formal policies. We need to examine the varying circumstances under which, and the multi­ faceted forms in which, ethnicity serves (or fails to serve) as migrationfacilitating “capital” and the ways in which this dynamic process reshapes the meaning of ethnicity.

conclusion

Ethnic Nationalism, Globalization, and the Future of Transborder Membership Politics The Republic of Korea [Taehan Min’guk], with its per capita income currently approaching $30,000, has grown into one of the top ten world economic powers in barely sixty years since its establishment. It is all thanks to 7.2 million coethnics abroad [chaeoe tongp’o], who overcame all kinds of hardship and successfully settled in foreign countries, ­raising the status of the Korean nation [Han minjok]. The Republic of ­Korea is now taking another step, seeking to rise as Global Korea, leading world peace and human development. The cooperation of 7.2 million coethnics abroad and the expansion of close exchanges with the motherland [moguk] are essential to achieving this goal. A message from the sixth President of the Overseas Koreans Foundation, published in the foundation’s official organ (Kyo˘ng-g. Kim 2012)

Over the last two decades or so, scholars have debated whether globalization has undermined the presumed congruence among territory, citizenry, and nation—the regulatory ideal of the modern nation-state system. Those focusing on the challenges that increasing immigration poses to affluent liberal democracies in the North have argued that nation-states’ monopolistic claim to the loyalty, belonging, and identity of their domestic populations has been considerably weakened by the rise of the postnational, multicultural, transnational, and cosmopolitan forms of membership and belonging.1 Those focusing on the thickening ties between developing countries in the South and their emigrant or diaspora populations in the North, for their part, have argued that globalization has produced “deterritorialized nation-states” (Basch et al. 1994), “long-distance nationalism” (Anderson 1998), and “diasporic public spheres” (Appadurai 1996), suggesting a fundamental shift in the territoriality of the nation-state and nationalism in 227

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“a world that has become deterritorialized, diasporic, and transnational” (Appadurai 1996, 188). The transformation of South Korea in the last two decades into one of the major migrant-destination countries in East Asia has also been characterized in a similar fashion: from ethnic nationalism to multiculturalism and globalism.2 Transborder membership politics in twentieth-century Korea, however, cautions us to view with a dose of skepticism such sweeping claims of an epochal shift. On the one hand, I have demonstrated that the claim about the novelty of the phenomenon—that is, the decoupling of territory, citizenry, and nation as a product of intensifying globalization and the resultant rise of transnational forms of membership and belonging—is exaggerated. Transborder membership politics in Korea emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, when the rapid incorporation of northeast Asia into the expanding interstate system engendered large-scale cross-border migration, solidified international borders, and gave rise to competing nationalist projects, all at the same time. Transborder membership politics makes sense “only in a world organized as a system of states that accept each other’s ‘embrace’ of particular populations as subjects (or citizens) and that recognize international borders as significant dividers between national territories” (Gabaccia, Hoerder, and Walaszek 2007, 63). Seen in this light, diaspora is not the “paradigmatic Other of the nation-state” (Tölölyan 1991, 5). The nation-state system is not antithetical to, but constitutive of, transborder membership politics. In a similar vein, the Korean case reveals how claims of an epochal shift—and the accompanying discourse on the nation-state’s “loss of control”—neglect the nation-state’s own involvement in the reconfiguration of the relationship among territory, citizenry, and nation.3 The attenuation of the Cold War and the deepening globalization from the 1990s onward enabled, rather than debilitated, the South Korean state’s effort to conceive, enumerate, and reclaim all “Koreans” outside its territorial reach as members of the transborder nation, whose allegiance and dedication it could legitimately solicit from its position as the “motherland” (moguk). As illustrated by the official organ of the Overseas Koreans Foundation (a governmental organization created in 1997 under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) cited at the opening of this Conclusion, the dispersion of Koreans across the globe is now mapped out and accounted for meticulously by state officials to an unprecedented degree. And this dispersion—seen not only as a vestige of the nation’s colonial past but also as a harbinger of its global

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future—is fueling the South Korean state’s effort to achieve transborder ethnonational unity and loyalty. By contrast, North Korea’s retreat from the post–Cold War transborder membership politics is closely related to its isolation from an increasingly globalizing world. In a nutshell, the nexus between globalizing and nationalizing forces is far more complex than has been suggested by the conventional transitional narrative.

Contested Embrace: Relational, Historical, and Agentic Perspective Instead of relying on the meta-narrative of the global shift beyond the nation-­state, I have situated transborder membership politics in Korea within the long-term macrohistorical transformations of twentieth-century northeast Asia and paid close attention to the contingent configuration of power and the legal, bureaucratic, and semantic infrastructure of transborder nation building at each historical conjuncture. The following five analytic themes connect the comparative, historical, and ethnographic analysis of transborder membership politics in Korea during the colonial, Cold War, and post–Cold War periods presented in this book. First, by showing the ways in which “homeland” and “transborder nation” have been made, unmade, and remade during the colonial, Cold War, and post–Cold War periods, I have highlighted the fundamentally political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation building. The colonial and postcolonial states often struggled to produce the docile and loyal nation out of transborder populations who were ambivalent ­toward the aggressive courtship of their states of origin. On other occasions, transborder populations struggled for recognition as members of their state of origin, which was unwilling to extend to them access to various material and symbolic benefits entailed by that membership. The homeland stance of the state of origin varied not only across time but also across transborder populations (that is, transborder Koreans in Japan and China) and policy domains (for example, citizenship laws, immigration policies, consular practices, conscriptions, labor market control, production of statistics, and registrations). The states of settlement sometimes cooperated, and at other times competed, with the various homeland stances taken by the states of origin (such as safe haven, broker, and gatekeeper). I paid particular attention to the contestations engendered by the “return” migration of transborder Koreans (to North Korea during the Cold War [Chapters

230  Conclusion

Two and Three] and to South Korea during the post–Cold War era [Chapter Four]). The struggles over the identity of these coethnic migrants—the question of whether they were repatriates, immigrants, or refugees—often highlighted for the first time the boundary that separated them from the “homeland.” These findings present a strong case against the ethnoculturalist view that conceives the relationship between the “homeland” state and the trans­border nation as a more or less self-evident ethnodemographic fact. This book, however, also maintains distance from a strictly instrumentalist perspective that prioritizes the realpolitik considerations of state elites to explain the shifting trajectory of transborder membership politics. I have instead analyzed the changing institutional field of transborder nation building, which shaped, and was shaped by, the complex triadic interactions among the homeland state, the transborder population, and their state of settlement. In each chapter, I have identified various organizational arrangements, bureaucratic practices, and idioms of identification that constituted this institutional field at a given historical conjuncture and have shown how these factors contributed to circumscribing the scope of the transborder nation by, among other ways, shaping the categories of perception of the actors involved. Second, by focusing on the role of state bureaucratic practices in transborder membership politics, I sought to generate a productive cross-­ fertilization between the literature on transborder membership politics and the recent culturalist/cognitive turn in sociological and anthropological theorization of the modern state. Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and of Michel Foucault, the latter body of scholarship has revealed the ways in which bureaucratic practices enable the state to render legible its population; naturalize its categorization schemes; shape people’s perception, representation, and performance of their own identities; and thereby constitute the population in whose name the state claims to exist and govern. I have extended these insights beyond the territorial boundary of the state and have applied them to the context of transborder membership politics, focusing on how the seemingly mundane bureaucratic procedures mediate actual and reiterative encounters between the “homeland” state and its transborder populations. During the colonial and Cold War periods, the creation of various bureaucratic techniques enabled the putative homeland state to define, identify, and thereby create a certain transborder population as its own, often against the preferences of these transborder Koreans themselves or against the rival claims of other states. By providing transborder K ­ oreans

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with an indispensable—and in some cases, desirable—bureaucratic persona, these practices also encouraged an increasing number of transborder coethnics to identify themselves as “Koreans” (Choso˘nin) (Chapter One), “South Koreans” (Han’gugin) (Chapter Two), or “coethnics abroad” (chaeoe tongp’o) (Chapter Four), aligning vernacular categorization practices with official classification schemes. Weak or fragmentary documentation, on the other hand, posed serious challenges not only to the state’s capacity to embrace its transborder populations but also to the transborder claims making of those who were imperfectly documented. The ordeals of the Korean Chinese as they sought to substantiate their belated claim to membership in South Korea offer a good example (Chapter Four). These discussions highlight the ways in which historically evolving and mutually interlinked bureaucratic practices provide a crucial institutional scaffolding for transborder membership politics: they transform newly emerged borders and unfamiliar state categories into the experiential reality of ordinary people and open a new venue for micropolitical struggles over individual identification. These are the insights hitherto overlooked in the literature on transborder membership politics limiting its analytic scope largely to the highly visible processes that unfold in the legal, political, and public spheres. The historically evolving nature of these infrastructural practices leads to the third common theme of the book. By exploring the genesis of the bureaucratic and semantic infrastructures of transborder nation building and showing how these infrastructures have woven the complex tapestries of transborder membership politics for subsequent decades, I have highlighted the deeply historical nature of transborder membership politics. The infrastructural scaffolding of the Korean nation constructed by the colonial state—its legal definition of “Koreans,” the concrete bureaucratic techniques it used to establish this legal identity, and the entrenched organizational practices through which it engaged with transborder Koreans— left an enduring imprint on the nationality laws, consular practices, and minority, repatriation, and immigration policies of the succeeding states in the region during the Cold War and post–Cold War periods. For example, the colonial family registry—which had served as the ultimate documentary foundation of membership in the Korean nation—came to constitute the “memory of the state” (Matsuda 1996), enabling the postcolonial state to distinguish its members from nonmembers and substantiate transborder Koreans’ claims to national membership. The category of tongp’o (co­ ethnics)—which had been used to invoke the affective attachment among

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all Koreans and to exhort the colonial state to act as their custodian (Chapter One)—continued to serve as the most important symbolic resource for transborder nation building, especially when coethnic “return” migrants sought access to the territory, labor market, and citizenship of their “homeland” (Chapter Four). These infrastructures not only informed ensuing transborder membership politics but were also transformed by them. For instance, the term Choso˘n, which had become an unchallengeable ethnonym during the colonial period, later became a politicized marker closely associated with North Korea—an association that was embraced, promoted, or stigmatized by transborder Koreans and their states of settlement in Cold War Japan and China (Chapters Two and Three). Sociologist David CookMartín’s recent work (2013) examining the changing relationship between Italy and Spain and their emigrant populations (and their descendants) in Argentina shows a striking similarity to the Korean case in demonstrating the deeply historical nature of transborder membership politics. These findings together caution us against the analytic myopia of presentism that prevails in many social scientific disciplines. Instead of claiming an epochal transition from nationalism to transnationalism, we need to examine more carefully how long-term institutional legacies from the time when national and transnational forms of membership were co-constituted shape immigration, citizenship, and transborder membership politics in the contemporary phase of globalization. The fourth common analytic theme concerns the ways that state bureaucratic and symbolic practices are embedded in the broader regional interstate system. By analyzing transborder membership politics against the backdrop of competitive and hostile interstate relations in twentieth-­ century northeast Asia, I have shown that the symbolic efficacy of the state’s claims to transborder jurisdiction depends not only on its own infrastructural power but also on the willingness and the capacity of other states to cooperate. During the colonial period, the sparse and uneven state presence in Manchuria and the competing jurisdictional claim posed by China undermined the “homeland” state’s symbolic power—that is, its capacity to authoritatively define Korean migrants as its own and naturalize its own categorizing scheme (Chapter One). In a similar vein, North Korea’s disadvantage in Cold War transborder membership politics targeting Zainichi Koreans stemmed not so much from its deficit in empirical statehood as from its deficit in juridical statehood: North Korea was unable to compel other states or international and supranational organizations to consistently

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categorize Zainichi Koreans as its own overseas citizens. By contrast, South Korea’s eventual ascendancy in this competition was predicated on its registration and documentation practices, which were commensurate with, and thus buttressed by, the similar practices of other states operating on a global scale (Chapter Two). The importance of cross-border coordination and cooperation in transborder nation building is also demonstrated by the changing relationship between the Korean Chinese and North Korea during the Cold War (Chapter Three). By specifying the conditions under which the symbolic power of the modern state can be exercised not only within but also across state borders, these findings help us overcome the territorial and sedentary bias in the related literature and advance our theoretical understandings of state and nation building—or their undoing—as a process shaped by changing geopolitical relations and the classificatory schemes and identification regimes coevolving in the broader region. Lastly, by paying sustained attention to the struggles of transborder populations on both the macro- and micropolitical levels, I have highlighted the ways in which transborder populations have mobilized a variety of counterstrategies in response to state policies and thereby have shaped the contours of transborder membership politics in unexpected ways. Transborder Koreans often effectively resisted their forcible incorporation into their state of origin. During the colonial and Cold War periods, for instance, they sabotaged the state’s demand for prompt and accurate documentation of their identities, seeking to keep the predatory and violent colonial and postcolonial states at a safe distance. The threat of power was never enough for these states to overcome such resistance; they had to concretize the benefits entailed by transborder membership, as illustrated by the changing policies of the colonial state toward Koreans in Manchuria (Chapter One), of the South Korean government toward Zainichi Koreans (Chapter Two), and (if to a lesser extent) of the North Korean government toward the Korean Chinese (Chapter Three). As David Fitzgerald (2009) eloquently put it, emigrant citizenship—or transborder membership, more broadly—often takes the form of “citizenship à la carte”: transborder members, situated beyond the territorial reach of the state’s coercive power, can enjoy more leverage than their domestically contained counterparts in negotiating the terms of exchange with the state. On other occasions, transborder Koreans mobilized a variety of counterstrategies to circumvent or challenge the gatekeeping practices of their putative homeland. Korean Chinese struggles in post–Cold War South Korea are a case in point (Chapter Four). In the

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realm of macropolitics, the Korean Chinese represented themselves as an essential part of the Korean nation and thereby justified their special claim to membership in the South Korean state. In the realm of micropolitics, the Korean Chinese engaged in manifold struggles to induce favorable categorization of their individual identities, sometimes by deliberately misrepresenting who they were to South Korean immigration bureaucrats. I have shown how these macropolitical and micropolitical struggles combined to undermine the efficacy and legitimacy of the government’s exclusionary policies and thereby resulted in changes in these policies. These findings suggest that the politics of immigration, citizenship, and transborder membership should be studied both from above and from below, and both on the macropolitical and micropolitical levels, in order to properly grasp their dynamic and complex interplay and to trace the unintended consequences of state policies.

Through the Lens of Kinship: The Analytic Value and Limitations of Ethnic Nationalism Korea has been labeled as one of the few “truly” ethnically homogeneous nation-states by several reputable scholars of comparative nationalism.4 Despite the pitfalls of the “substantialist” perspective on ethnicity (Brubaker 1996, 14) underlying this claim, it is certainly true that “the powerful sense of ethnic nationhood constitutes one layer of reality” (Chulwoo Lee 2010b, 232; italics mine) in Korea. This belief, as it were, is a doxa in the Bourdieusian sense, which performatively produces, reproduces, and naturalizes the facticity of Korean ethnic nationhood through various institutional arrangements and everyday practices. The trajectory of transborder membership politics in Korea, however, shows that the membership status of ethnic Koreans abroad was far from a settled matter throughout the twentieth century even in this quintessential case of ethnic nationalism. The case thus invites us to reflect on the utility of “ethnic nationalism” as an analytic category in explaining and predicting the contours of immigration, citizenship, and diaspora politics. I would like to approach this question by contemplating the complex and contradictory ways in which the category of kinship shaped the contested encounters between transborder Koreans and their putative homeland state. The significance of kinship metaphors in nationalist imagination (that is, the imagination of the nation as a family writ large) is well documented,

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and the Korean case is no exception. In fact, the predominance and prominence of kinship metaphors (with a strong biological connotation) in the “narrative of the nation” (Bhabha 1990) has often been cited as the most tangible evidence of the strong ethnic characteristic of Korean nationalism.5 My findings are in line with this argument to a certain degree. I have shown, for example, how various familial metaphors—for example, co­ ethnic brethren (tongp’o), fatherland (choguk), motherland (moguk), or “an unwelcome daughter married to a poor family”—provided a powerful symbolic resource both for the states seeking allegiance of coethnics abroad and for transborder Koreans seeking inclusion in their ethnonational homeland. Bringing the discussion beyond the discourse analysis, I have further demonstrated how the family registration system provided one of the most powerful institutional mechanisms for buttressing the deeply held cultural belief in the shared “blood and flesh” (hyo˘ryuk) among Koreans, which supposedly transcended geographic dispersion and ideological conflicts that cut across the transborder ethnic community. Through the family registration system, membership in the Korean nation was mediated through membership in the patrilineage (envisioned along the patrilineal and patri­local principle), the documentation of which had been an important state affair since the colonial period (Chapter One). This explains why many Koreans in Japan considered their proper documentation in the South Korean family registries not only practically necessary but also emotionally assuring (Chapter Two). It also contextualizes the action of some civil society actors in South Korea who recovered and mailed some Korean Chinese their old family registration documents, claiming that these documents were the proof of their possession of South Korean citizenship, despite the uncertain legal foundation of such a claim (Chapter Four). Apart from the practical benefits the registration could bring, for many ethnic Koreans in Japan and China the family registration document came to serve as a cultural artifact, compensating for their prolonged corporeal absence from—and weakening, tension-ridden, or severed ties to—their kin across the border, and by extension, their ancestral homeland. Nevertheless, this widely shared belief in ethnic unity—reaffirmed by the primordial resonance of kinship ties meticulously documented by the state—has never unequivocally triumphed over other economic, political, and bureaucratic considerations in Cold War and post–Cold War Korea. Rather, the North and South Korean states that emerged from the flames of the internecine civil war were especially suspicious of the subversive

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­ otential of cross-border kinship ties. The presumably private and intimate p realm of family thus became a primary battlefield on which the two mutually antagonistic postcolonial states ferociously fought for the ownership of the nation. In both Koreas, if any of the absentee family members was classified as a sympathizer of the enemy regime (for example, in North Korea, a family member who fled to South Korea during the Korean War and, in South Korea, a family member who “repatriated” to North Korea from Japan in the late 1950s or was active in Ch’ongnyo˘n), the entire family were subjected to constant surveillance, social stigma, and severe restrictions on their civil rights.6 My ethnographic research shows that some families in South Korea responded to such persecution by misrepresenting their “black sheep”—or, if I may, “red sheep”—as dead or missing in their family registries. These families desperately hoped that such a poignant act of disownment, materialized on official documents, would free them from guilt by association. In short, rather than an inspiration for national unity, the existence of kin members across the ideological faultline was a source of intrafamilial tension and political liability (and even, in extreme circumstances, grounds for exclusion from the imagined or the documented community of the nation) throughout the Cold War period. The virtual disappearance of Koreans who remained in Manchuria from the public discourse in South Korea for decades also cannot be explained without considering this pervasive fear. The attenuation of the Cold War significantly changed this state of affairs, at least in South Korea. The portrayal of the nation as a family writ large—the reunited one at that—proliferated in the South Korean public sphere along with the revitalization of the term tongp’o with its strong biological connotation. This portrayal served as a master frame with which to make sense of the belated reencounter between the South Korean society and the long-forgotten ethnonational kin from the former communist countries. Yet the analytic shift from macropolitics to micropolitics, from political rhetoric to day-to-day bureaucratic operations, reveals a very different picture. In the realm of immigration and citizenship, the emphasis placed on the transborder kinship ties of Korean Chinese—and the family registration document as an official validation of such ties—began to serve as a mechanism of exclusion rather than inclusion. By granting privileged access to its territory, labor market, and citizenship only to those who were able to establish concrete kinship ties to South Korean citizens by bureaucratic means, the affluent “homeland” state transformed the family registra-

Conclusion 237

tion document from the symbol of primordial transborder ethno­national unity into an eligibility criterion that needed to be established case by case.7 To add another layer of irony, Korean Chinese responded to this particular gatekeeping practice of their reluctant homeland state by creating “fake” kinship ties on paper, turning the state’s preoccupation with the documentary evidence on its head, and pushing the constructed and malleable nature of kinship ties—as opposed to the conventional belief in their biological rigidity—to an extreme. The instrumentalization (or the manipulation) of the category of kinship by both parties observed in the bureaucratic sphere stands in stark contrast to the primordial resonance that the revitalized kinship metaphors evoked in the political and public spheres. The discussion so far cautions us against attributing unwarranted explanatory power to ethnic nationalism in an investigation of the immigration, citizenship, and transborder membership politics in Korea and other similarly categorized cases. As several recent comparative studies have shown, preferential immigration policies tailored to people of ethnic affinity (however ethnic affinity is defined in a given country) are common on both sides of the proverbial dichotomy between civic and ethnic nationalism.8 Moreover, the state’s willingness to embrace transborder coethnics, as well as the particular category of difference (for example, ancestry, language, religion, phenotype, time of migration, declaration of identity, or, most likely, a combination of some of these) given primacy in the state’s determination of “ethnic affinity,” varies significantly even among the countries conventionally classified as ethnic nationalism cases. These differences produce interesting variations in the ways in which the politics of identity on the both macro and micro levels unfolds across these cases. Furthermore, the state’s willingness and the criteria of membership may change over time as the geopolitical configurations, international norms, and domestic political considerations evolve. Contested Embrace contributes to the emerging comparative literature on the migration of ethnic affinity, or more broadly, diaspora engagement,9 by offering a much more nuanced portrayal of how ethnic nationalism has shaped the contours of transborder membership politics in twentieth-century Korea not only from above but also from below. By taking a comparative historical approach, overcoming the prevalent territorial bias in the existing literature, extending the analysis to the hitherto unexplored bureaucratic field, and attending to both state and nonstate actors, I have identified the historical genesis of the bureaucratic and semantic infrastructures of Korean ethnic nationalism, its

238  Conclusion

variable manifestations (or lack thereof) in different policy domains and “repertoires of contention” (Tilly 2003), and its persistence as well as metamorphosis over time. In so doing, I have illustrated not only the values but also the limitations of ethnic nationalism as an analytic category.

The Future of Transborder Membership Politics in Korea and Beyond I opened this chapter by citing the official organ of the Overseas Koreans Foundation (Chaeoe Tongp’o Chaedan) published in 2012. It showcases the maturation of the discourse on the transborder ethnonational unity in South Korea, which adroitly combines the historic national question with contemporary aspirations to obtain global influence. However, this is by no means a grand denouement of the contentious transborder membership politics in twentieth-century Korea. The seeming promotion of close exchanges between “7.2 million coethnics abroad” and “the mother country” is belied by the persistent ambiguity and inconsistency in South Korea’s treatment of Zainichi Koreans with the Chōsen designation, illustrated most glaringly by their difficulty in obtaining travel permits from the South Korean consular office. Even after Cold War tensions attenuated, the South Korean government has remained undecided about whether to treat those who retained the Chōsen designation as “stateless ethnic Koreans” or as “North Korean residents.” Article 10 of the Law on the Exchanges and Cooperation between North and South Korea, first enacted in 1991, allows “stateless ethnic Koreans” (that is, ethnic Koreans abroad who had obtained neither foreign citizenship nor South Korean passports) to travel to South Korea with permits issued by the consular office. However, Article 30 of the same law stipulates that “the members of the overseas organizations under the guidance of North Korea be deemed North Korean residents” whose entry should be treated with more caution. South Korean consular officials often reject applications for travel permits by those identified as Chōsen, arguing that the designation signifies their membership in Ch’ongnyo˘n, seen as an “overseas organization under the guidance of North Korea.” This entry control was significantly relaxed between 1998 and 2007 under the reformist leadership; this is why Chin-t’ae, whose story opened this book, could finally visit his hometown in 2006 for the first time in over seventy years. But the subsequent two conservative administrations reinforced the control again

Conclusion 239

beginning in 2008, frequently refusing to issue travel permits unless the applicants changed their nationality designation from Chōsen to Kankoku. Those who had been denied travel permits took their cases to the South Korean National Human Rights Commission and the court, yet the Supreme Court eventually ruled for the government in 2013, citing that the issuance of travel permits to those identified as Chōsen falls within the purview of the consul’s discretion. In other words, the South Korean state has not entirely given up its gatekeeper role vis-à-vis Zainichi Koreans despite its official rhetoric promoting closer exchanges between “7.2 million coethnics abroad” and the “motherland.” The new vision of Global Korea is also compounded by the Chinese state’s renewed interest and power in claiming the ownership of the Korean Chinese or what this ethnonational group stands for on the global stage. In 2011, for example, the Chinese government officially designated the traditional Korean costumes (hanbok), the famous Korean folk song Arirang, and the traditional Korean string instrument kayagu˘m as part of the intangible cultural heritage of China (Kyunghyang Sinmin 2011). Although this announcement was welcomed by some Korean Chinese elites as a proud sign of their equal membership in multinational—and indeed, multicultural—China, it was criticized in South Korea as a scandalous appropriation of the distinctive national culture of Koreans. From the perspective of South Koreans, these ethnocultural heritages should represent Korea, not China, wherever they are preserved and practiced.10 A similar competition takes place over the question of who represents the Korean Chinese living outside China. The transborder nation-building project of emerging China has begun to consciously include its ethnic minority populations abroad as an essential part of Huaqiao Huaren, an official neologism referring to overseas Chinese (A. Li 2003). To illustrate, Chinese consuls in South Korea, Japan, and the United States often pay visits to the major events organized by Korean Chinese immigrant organizations in these locations, recognizing their hard work and praising their contribution to making “their” fatherland (zuguo) China a new global hegemon. Meanwhile, the mobility strategy of the Korean Chinese, which capitalizes on their dual membership, further complicates the self-congratulatory narrative of Global Korea. Some Korean Chinese (like Yo˘ng-il’s son, mentioned in the Introduction) obtain South Korean citizenship simply for the exemption it grants them from the visa regulations that other First World countries apply to Chinese citizens.11 This seems to effectively reduce their

240  Conclusion

tie to the ancestral homeland to a form of “passport citizenship” (Harpaz 2013) that enhances their own global mobility. Pursuing membership in the ancestral homeland in this case is not a demonstration of the sentimental attachment to ethnonational roots, the powerful primordial pull of diasporic belonging, or the proverbial “long-distance nationalism” (Anderson 1998). One might rather consider this an example of what Christian Joppke (2010) calls the “inevitable lightening of citizenship,” that is, the weakening of the nation-state’s monopolistic claim to the loyalty and affection of “its” people in the context of the multiplication of rights on the subnational, supranational, and transnational levels. Some states of origin, however, may actively harness the relatively higher value of their passport—instead of lamenting its trivialization—as a means of transborder nation building, as the South Korean state has done vis-à-vis Zainichi Koreans. Despite the proliferation of aquatic metaphors announcing the “death of distance” (Cairncross 1997) and the “mobility turn” (Urry 2007) in our global age, cross-border mobility that opens access to the desirable labor market of affluent countries remains a scarce good for the absolute majority of the world population, whose “bad” passports make their migration ventures constant struggles to overcome blockage rather than an unencumbered flow.12 Pragmatic concerns about global mobility therefore can change the valuation of transborder membership in the ancestral “homeland” or ethnonational “kin” state in a new way. Students of international migration and citizenship are beginning to analyze this phenomenon, focusing particularly on how the glare of EU citizenship generates a pursuit of ancestral or kin-state citizenship by a vast range of groups, such as Israelis of Central and Eastern European origin, Argentines of Italian and Spanish origin, ethnic Hungarians in Serbia, or ethnic Bulgarians in Macedonia.13 In each case, this pursuit is likely to generate complex triadic interactions—among the state of origin, the state of settlement, and the transborder population—that are shaped at once by nationalizing and globalizing forces. And these interactions would in turn alter both the instrumental and affective values of transborder membership and belonging. Instead of announcing definitively the advent of apolitical, anational, and postideological citizenship (Harpaz 2013), Contested Embrace ends with an invitation for the theoretically informed and historically sensitive comparative study of these evolving transborder membership politics in the contemporary phase of globalization.

a ppendi x

Archival and Ethnographic Data

This book draws on archival and ethnographic data collected during eighteen months of multisited field research carried out in South Korea (during the summers of 2005 and 2007 and from September 2008 to January 2009), Japan (from February to April 2009), and northeast China (from May to October 2009).

Archival Data Archival data include transcripts of parliamentary debates, government documents (annual reports, diplomatic statements, administrative circulars, and internal memoranda), court rulings, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, biographies, memoirs, works of fiction, and a collection of oral histories. My access to South Korean materials and major documents published by pro–South Korea and pro– North Korea organizations in Japan was largely unproblematic. I used various digital archives based in South Korea, including Korean History On-line (www .koreanhistory.or.kr/), National Archival Portal Service (http://contents.archives .go.kr/), Korean Integrated Newspaper Data System (www.kinds.or.kr/), and the websites of the Korea Immigration Service (www.immigration.go.kr), the Overseas Koreans Foundation (www.okf.or.kr), and the National Assembly Library (www.nanet.go.kr). I also conducted archival research in the Korean National Assembly Library in Seoul, the Chonbuk National University Library in Cho˘nju (both in South Korea), and the Library of the University of Shiga Prefecture in Japan (which catalogued the privately collected documents of late Zainichi Korean historian Pak Kyung-shik). On the other hand, my access to archival materials published by the North Korean and the post-1949 Chinese governments was extremely limited. Regarding the former, I relied heavily on secondary literature and the limited materials 241

242  Appendix available in my fieldsites. Regarding the latter, I conducted research at the Yanbian University library, located in Yanji, the capital city of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. I examined issues of an official party periodical as well as various magazines published by the government-run publishing company between 1955 and 1966 and after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1978 (most publications stopped during the Cultural Revolution). These include Chibu ­Saenghwal (支部生活, Local Chapter Life), Yo˘nbyo˘n Ch’o˘ngnyo˘n (延边青年, Yanbian Youth), Arirang (阿里郎, Arirang), Yo˘nbyo˘n Munhak (延边文学, Yanbian Literature), Yo˘nbyo˘n (延边, Yanbian), and Yo˘nbyo˘n Yo˘so˘ng (延边女性, Yanbian Women). The limitations of official data produced by authoritarian states are well known, yet such data can still be useful if scholars properly “assess the authorship of official reports, their intended audience, the institutional context which engendered them, and the conditions of their production” (Dikötter 2010, 342). I also read these official sources in conjunction with various sorts of unofficial, albeit retrospective, accounts, including biographies, memoirs, novels, and a collection of oral histories published in South Korea and China in the 1990s and 2000s.

Ethnographic Data To examine Cold War contestations over the membership status of Koreans in Japan (Chapter Two), I complemented the archival research with data from interviews with twenty-four ethnic Koreans in Tokyo, Kawasaki, and Osaka who used to be or are currently aligned with the pro–North Korea organization Ch’ongnyo˘n (Sōren in Japanese). The interviewees were comprised of ten first-generation, nine second-generation, and five third-generation Zainichi Koreans. Fifteen of them were females, and nine males. Because the Cold War regime lingered in East Asia, this population remained understudied until very recently (in English, see the ethnographic accounts of Sonia Ryang, a former affiliate of Ch’ongnyo˘n and now an anthropologist active in the United States). For comparison, I also interviewed nine ethnic Koreans who have never been affiliated with Ch’ongnyo˘n. Five of them were first-generation, two second-generation, and the other two third-­generation Zainichi Koreans; two were females and seven males. I also collected observational data during various formal and informal gatherings of ethnic Koreans in Japan, including classes and commencement ceremonies in Ch’ongnyo˘n schools. To explore the Korean Chinese experience during the Mao era (Chapter Three), I conducted interviews with twenty-five Korean Chinese born between the mid1920s and the early 1950s, ten females and fifteen males. These interview data were particularly helpful in documenting a large-scale “exodus” of Korean Chinese, their resettlement in North Korea, and their return to China in the first half of the 1960s. This exodus and return, despite being an integral part of Korean Chinese collective memory and family histories, is shrouded in official silence. For

Appendix 243 now, the interview data provide an irreplaceable lens through which to explore the background, cause, timing, scale, management, and ramifications of this undocumented migration. Of my twenty-five interviewees, nine had themselves resettled in North Korea in this period, whereas others had close family members or friends who had done so. The ethnographic data are used most extensively in analyzing contemporary contestations over the membership status of Korean Chinese migrants (Chapter Four). In Seoul, I collected ethnographic data in community centers, churches, immigration offices, street protests, public hearings, and various social gatherings of Korean Chinese migrants. In China, I conducted fieldwork mostly in and around Yanji, the capital city of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, carrying out both formal and informal interviews and attending various social gatherings. Although over 40 percent of Korean Chinese are concentrated in Yanbian, I refrained from generalizing the experience of Yanbian residents to all Korean Chinese. The majority of Yanbian residents were originally from the northern part of the peninsula; southerners have resided largely in ethnic enclaves outside Yanbian. In addition to differences in dialect, customs, and colonial-era migration history (Chapter One), the two groups’ experiences of Cold War and post–Cold War transborder membership politics came to differ to a certain degree for reasons explained in Chapters Three and Four. However, my interviewees were almost evenly divided between northerners and southerners because I came to interact with a large number of southerners in South Korea. I interviewed more than eighty Korean Chinese in South Korea and China, including both migrants and their nonmigrant families, the ages ranging from the early twenties to the early seventies, almost evenly divided in gender. I also conducted twelve supplementary interviews with South Korean immigration bureaucrats, community organizers, immigration brokers, and lawyers to illuminate micropolitical struggles in bureaucratic settings from multiple angles. In all fieldsites, I used personal recommendations and snowball sampling to recruit interviewees, beginning from multiple entry points in academia, governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and personal networks. All interviews were informal, in depth, and open ended, and all but four interviews were conducted in Korean (three were conducted in Chinese and one in Japanese with translators present). The interviews lasted two to five hours and were recorded and transcribed. About one-third of the interviewees were interviewed more than once.

Notes

Notes to Introduction 1.  The three ethnographic vignettes that open this book are from my multisited ethnographic research in Korea, Japan, and China. I use pseudonyms for all names cited in the book—except for a few public and historic figures—to protect the anonymity and confidentiality of my research participants. For the romanization of Korean names, see the bibliography. 2.  Chin-t’ae and his wife had been together for a long time, but only in their eighties were they allowed to make the marriage “count” in South Korea. See Chapter Two for a full discussion on how the family relations of Koreans in Japan who refused to align with South Korea were complicated by various punitive actions of the South Korean state. 3.  Precisely speaking, the original category in Chin-t’ae’s foreigner’s registry, Chōsen, does not mark North Korean nationality. For complex reasons that I discuss in Chapter Two, however, it has often been interpreted as such. 4.  See Chapter One for more discussion. 5.  The household registration system that divides the population largely into “city-dwellers” and “peasants” has long been one of the most important mechanisms of social stratification in the People’s Republic of China, along with party membership (for example, cadres versus noncadres). See Chapter Three for a further discussion. 6.  See Bauböck (1994), Stalker (2000), Fox (2005), Barry (2006), and Fitz­ gerald (2006). 7.  See Basch et al. (1994), Bosniak (2000), Faist (2000), Itzigsohn (2000), Levitt and de la Dehesa (2003), Østergaard-Nielsen (2003), Vertovec (2004), and Gamlen (2008).

245

246  Notes to Introduction 8.  See Brubaker (1996), King and Melvin (1998), Stewart (2003), Kántor et al. (2004), Atabaki and Mehendale (2005), Parla (2007), and Mylonas (2013). 9.  See Cohen (1997), Anderson (1998), Fuglerud (1999), Skrbisˆ (1999), Panossian (2003), Shain and Barth (2003), Glick Schiller (2005), Kleist (2008), Hepner (2009), Bauböck and Faist (2010), and Betts and Jones (2012). 10.  This distinction is frequently ignored in many studies of transborder membership politics. For instance, in his review of the literature on “transnational citizenship,” Jonathan Fox (2005, 172) stated that “‘transnational’ will be defined here in commonsense terms as ‘cross border’ (and therefore, technically, ‘trans-state’)” (italics mine). See also Levitt and de la Dehesa (2003) and Levitt and Jaworsky (2007). For a critique of this conceptual conflation, see Waldinger and Fitzgerald (2004). 11.  Most representative of this position are Rouse (1991), Clifford (1994), Appadurai (1996), and Ong and Nonini (1997). 12.  See Brubaker (1996), Anderson (1998), and Brubaker and Kim (2011). 13.  I use citizenship primarily as a legal term, which designates a person’s formal and full state membership status. For the proliferation of the meaning of citizenship in contemporary academia, focusing on a broad range of relations, rights, and benefits entailed by state membership (for example, cultural citizenship, urban citizenship, sexual citizenship, ecological citizenship, and so on), see Joppke (2007). 14.  I borrow this formulation from Brubaker (1996). 15.  This would be a good place to explain why I exclude other transborder Korean groups, also formed in the first half of the twentieth century (in Hawaìi, the continental United States, Mexico, and maritime Russia), from the book. The emigration ban by the Japanese protectorate government (1905–1910) and the severe restriction on Asian immigration in the Western Hemisphere effectively stopped Korean migration to Hawaìi, the continental United States, and Mexico in 1907, keeping the number of Koreans in these regions at just over 10,000 throughout the first half of the twentieth century (Patterson 1988). The geopolitical conditions in these regions were also considerably different from northeast Asia (see R. Kim 2011), the focus of this book. Maritime Russia was another important migrant destination in northeast Asia, but the Japanese influence was limited, especially after 1937 when Stalin deported all Koreans (estimated at 170,000) to Central Asia. Only a few of the Koreans living there were able to repatriate to North Korea (yet not to South Korea) after the collapse of the Japanese Empire. Furthermore, despite official recognition as one of the Soviet “nationalities,” many later-generation Soviet Koreans largely assimilated culturally and linguistically into other Russian-speaking populations—more so than Korean Chinese did into Chinese-speaking populations; this cultural loss—that

Notes to Introduction  247 is, the lack of “ethnic capital” (Durand and Massey 2010)—hampered postSoviet Koreans from “returning” en masse to South Korea in search of better opportunities in the post–Cold War era. Generally speaking, Soviet and post-Soviet Koreans have been marginal to transborder membership politics during the Cold War and the post–Cold War periods. 16.  I sometimes place “Koreans” in quotes because the construction of this category, which made production of statistics on these populations possible, should be explained rather than taken for granted. Chapter One takes up this task, explicating the legal, bureaucratic, and semantic construction of the category of “Koreans.” 17.  See Mitchell (1967), Lee and De Vos (1981), Fukuoka (1993), Hicks (1998), Lie (2001), and Chapman (2008). 18.  Most notably, see Chungguk Choso˘n Minjok Palchach’wi Ch’ongso˘ P’yo˘njip Wiwo˘nhoe (1992–1994). 19.  See Grinker (1998), Em (1999), and Shin (2006). 20.  See Cumings (1999), Waldner (1999), Armstrong (2004), Brazinsky (2007), and Kwon and Chung (2012). 21.  A few recently published monographs on the national identity formation of different groups of transborder Koreans have begun to recognize the complexity and the importance of transborder Koreans’ relationship to their state of origin in the Korean peninsula. See, for instance, Schmid (2002), H. Park (2005), Morris-Suzuki (2007), Lie (2008), and R. Kim (2011). Contested Embrace builds on these monographs, but it is unique in its temporal-spatial scope, the comparative historical approach it adopts, and its theoretical claims. 22.  These include Oguma ([1998] 2014, 2002), Lie (2001, 2004), Schmid (2002), Shin (2006), and Mullaney (2011). 23.  For example, see Hobsbawm (1992, 66), Connor (1994, 96), and Smith (1995, 86). 24.  For a critique of this tendency prevalent in the studies of transborder membership politics in Germany and Israel, see Joppke and Rosenhek (2002) and Brubaker and Kim (2011). 25.  For a similar approach to the issue of racial identification, see Ford (1994). 26.  See Steinmetz (1999); Gorski (2003); Adams, Clemens, and Orloff (2005); Loveman (2005); and Sharma and Gupta (2006). 27.  Mann (1986) and Tilly (1992) are most representative of this. 28.  See Mitchell (1999), Fuller and Bénéï (2001), Hansen and Stepputat (2001), Trouillot (2001), Mountz (2002), and Painter (2006). 29.  See Starr (1992), Eriksen (1993), Diamant (2001), and Corbridge et al. (2005).

248  Notes to Chapter One 30.  See Torpey (2000), Caplan and Torpey (2001), Zolberg (2003), McKeown (2008), and Robertson (2009). 31.  See Green and Weil (2007), Choate (2008), and Fitzgerald (2009). 32.  For example, see Goffman (1959), A. Robinson (1994), and Lau (2006). 33.  I conceive international dynamics here much more broadly than the real­ politik considerations of state elites. Instead of taking the state as a self-evident unit of analysis, I analyze how the bureaucratic practices under examination came to constitute an essential component of the “world culture” (Meyer et al. 1997), how they operate more or less effectively depending on their commensurability with the practices of other states, and how this variation affects varying degrees of “stateness” in different contexts. 34.  Three interviews were conducted in Chinese and one in Japanese with translators present. 35.  These include Fukuoka (1993), Sugihara (1993), Kashiwazaki (2000), Tai (2004), Y. Lim (2009), Ye (2009), and Yoon (2013). 36.  Economic deterioration and increasing isolation from the global economic and political order kept North Korea from actively participating in transborder membership politics during this period.

Notes to Chapter One 1.  See note 15 of the Introduction regarding other Korean settlements formed in the first half of the twentieth century. 2.  See Schmid (2002, 199–252), Lie (2008, 168–194), and R. Kim (2011). 3.  I use “diasporic nationhood” instead of “diasporic nationalism” or “longdistance nationalism” (Glick Schiller 2005). The latter terms entail commitment to a certain political ideology or project, which presents itself as an antithesis of colonial rule. This chapter rather seeks to highlight how colonial power, along with anticolonial nationalism, could be coproducers of this particularly transterritorial type of imagination of the nation. In addition, while “diasporic nationalism” usually concerns people outside the putative homeland, I am also interested in how people inside the homeland come to imagine their nation in transterritorial terms. 4.  John Lie (2004, 1) defines modern peoplehood as various scales (“larger than kinship but smaller than humanity”) of “inclusionary and involuntary group identity with a putatively shared history and distinct way of life,” such as tribe, race, ethnicity, and nation. 5.  See also Steinmetz (2007). 6.  See Vail (1989), Appiah (1993), and Benton (1999). 7.  See Cook (1996) and Elkins and Pedersen (2005).

Notes to Chapter One  249 8.  See Stoler (1992), Young (1995, 142–158), Wildenthal (1997), and Barrera (2002). 9.  See Young (1976), Mamdani (1996), and Longman (2001). 10.  See Duncan (1998) and Hwang (2007). 11.  This, of course, does not mean that the official racial ideology remained undisputed. Uchida (2011, 20, 25, 382), for instance, shows that the specter of miscegenation loomed large behind Japanese settlers’ ambivalence toward the colonial state’s pronounced commitment to the assimilation of Koreans. Oguma (2002) shows that a strong opposition to the assimilation policy emerged within the state as well, as the eugenics took hold in the Japanese intellectual landscape during the wartime period. Also see Fujitani (2011, 17, 355–374). 12.  The “military rule” by Governor Terauchi in the 1910s was upended by the nationalist uprising in 1919, and the following liberal interlude (the “cultural rule”) transitioned into a set of radical assimilationist policies (called kōminka, literally “imperialization”) after the outbreak of the Sino–Japanese War in 1937. 13.  The term tongp’o existed in the premodern lexicon of northeast Asia and literally meant siblings born from the same womb. The word had always been used metaphorically, invoking a certain sense of fraternity among kindred people (P. Kwo˘n 2005). Yet the term took on a new meaning at the turn of the twentieth century, signifying the horizontal ties and affective attachment among those who belonged to the same nation. 14.  For males who belonged to the literati or the commoner class, full names—comprised of the clan seat (pon’gwan), surname (so˘ng), and proper name (iru˘m)—were recorded. For married females, both aristocrats and commoners, only the surnames of their natal families and their titles (which varied depending on the social statuses of their husbands) were recorded (Kyo˘ng-n. Kim 2003, 109–133). Most slaves and others of lowly birth, regardless of gender, did not even possess surnames; for these individuals, only proper names were documented. It was also common that slaves were counted only in numbers without names and added as an appendix to their master’s registries. Aristocrats, on the other hand, frequently added unsolicited information to their entries (for example, official titles, hereditary privileges [including tax exemption status], estates, and slaves) and used the authority of the state’s record to support and perpetuate their prestige (So˘ 2006, 34–37). 15.  See Bohnet (2008) for a qualification. 16.  The total enumerated population was 6,607,604 in 1890, but it dropped to 5,198,248 in 1896. See Table 1 in Hwang (2004, 365). 17.  These six regions were classified into a three-tiered structure: (1) Japan proper, including Hokkaido and Okinawa as quintessential internal colonies; (2) Formosa (Taiwan), Chōsen (Korea), and Karafuto (southern Sakhalin) as

250  Notes to Chapter One three formal colonies; and (3) Kantōshū (comprising the leased territory on the Kwantung peninsula and the South Manchuria Railway with its narrow right-ofway) and the Nan’yō (the mandated islands of Micronesia) as foreign territories in which the legal power of the Japanese state was nevertheless exercised (Chen 1984). Japan proper began to be called “inland” (naichi, 內地) to avoid confusion with the Japanese Empire in its entirety. As a counterpart to “inland,” all the other regions were categorized as “outland” (gaichi, 外地) from 1929 onward (Chen 1984). 18.  Although some scholars call this “household registration system” (for instance, see Winther 2008), I translate it as “family registration system.” As will be discussed shortly, the unit of registration (ko, 戶), was not so much what is normally considered a household (the unit of coresidence) but rather a family (ie, 家). Ie was a conceptual unit modeled on a specific type of stem family and the Confucian notion of hierarchy and harmony (Pelzel 1970, Smith 1996). 19.  For the lingering exceptional treatment of minorities, see Chapman (2014, 96–98). For a similar argument about the role of the unified civil registration system in producing cultural homogeneity among citizens, see Noiriel (2001) and Scott, Tehranian, and Mathias (2002). 20.  To be clear, ie was not purely an invention of Meiji Japan. It had its “navel” in the Tokugawa bakufu period (Ooms 1998), to borrow Ernest Gellner’s metaphor (Gellner 1996). 21.  This discrepancy between honseki and residence obliged the government to introduce other complementary population enumeration systems for taxation, conscription, education, social services, and other administrative purposes (Pak and So˘ 2003). 22.  The 1909 system, which had various transitional characteristics (Hwang 2004, Cho˘ng-s. Yi 2008), came to more closely resemble the family registration system of the metropole by the early 1920s. This 1923 system (Hong and Yang 2008) again went through a radical change in 1939 as the empire reshuffled its imperial governance structure in preparation for the upcoming war (Mizuno 2008). 23.  See Kyu-t’. Cho (1981), Hwang (2004, 382), and O and Ryu (2009). Such standardization had been attempted by Korean reformers through the enactment of the 1896 New Household Registration System, yet its success, as previously discussed, was largely limited. The standardization of registration, imposed by the 1909 family registration system, posed various challenges to local bureaucrats who had to fill the gap between the state’s demand and local practices. The registration of women’s names provides a good illustration. Because women’s proper names had seldom been used in everyday life after puberty, many had only childhood names. These names were often made up of vernacular Korean words

Notes to Chapter One  251 (Mizuno 2008, 44–45), but the colonial state forbid registering such names. During registration, local officials had to create new names for many women, combining Chinese characters that had the pronunciations or meanings similar to their original names (Kyu-t’. Cho 1981). Many women did not know under what name they were registered or how to read their registered names. 24.  The colonial state, through its investigation of “native customs” and the practices of its courts and jurists, determined which Korean customs deserved the state’s protection and which did not. Further, the judiciaries occasionally declared that certain Korean customs had disappeared as a result of their increasing cultural assimilation and broadened the scope of the application of the Japanese civil code (H. Yang 1998; Marie S. Kim 2007). 25.  See Chatterjee (1993), Cohn (1996), Bennett (2004), and Hoffman (2010). 26.  During the debate on the 1939 ordinance, the author of a widely circulated pamphlet, titled “Isn’t It Reckless to Allow Koreans the Ancestral Surnames of the Japanese? A Critique of the Ministry of Colonial Affairs and the Government General of Korea,” argued that Japanese-style surnames were proof of their pedigree from the emperor and thus should not be randomly assigned to Koreans (Mizuno 2008, 193–195). The Ministry of Police Affairs notably remained the governmental branch most skeptical about the name change policy, expressing a concern that the policy would seriously compromise its capacity “to know who was who” (187–190). This assimilation policy also provoked strong reaction from the broader Korean population. They accused the policy of annihilating their ethnocultural identity and obliterating their patrilineage, whereas some Korean elites passionately welcomed it as a sign of equal treatment of Japanese and Koreans (Mizuno 2008; Caprio 2009). 27.  For example, a Korean woman who had become Japanese via marriage would be erased from the Japanese family registry and became Korean again if divorced. That is, her record, if not her corporeal self, had to return to Korea, along with her regional-cum-ethnonational membership. See Michael Kim (2014, 116) for incoherent applications of this principle, especially before the ­passage of the Coordination Law in 1918. 28.  The police played an important role in conducting the initial survey in 1909 (Hwang 2004, 367–368), enforcing timely registration and managing the registries. Although the management of the registries was transferred to the civilian administration in 1915, police involvement remained substantial. 29.  See Cumings (1999, 69–94), Fujitani (2011, 42–43, 63), and Uchida (2011, 23, 68). 30.  From 1923 onward, the legal validity of marriage, divorce, adoption, or the cancellation of adoption became dependent on registration, and this significantly increased women’s registration rate (O and Ryu 2009). The family

252  Notes to Chapter One registries also became important in disputes over inheritance (S. Lim 2012). The steady expansion of primary education throughout the 1920s provided another important incentive for voluntary registration (So˘ 2006, 218–219). 31.  See K. Robinson (1992), Batten (2003), and Lewis (2003). 32.  In 1902, the Korean government began to issue passports to a small number of Koreans who migrated to Hawaìi and Mexico as coolie laborers (So˘ 2006, 273). The Japanese protectorate government enacted a passport law in 1907 and banned these migration flows to eliminate competition for Japanese emigrants (Patterson 1988). 33.  The permit contained meticulous information, including an employer’s endorsement, an expected reentry date, and a recent photo of, and the detailed demographic information about, the permit holder (Kwang-y. Kim 2006). 34.  According to the Statistical Yearbook of the GGK, the percentage of elementary school attendance among Koreans increased from 4.4 percent in 1920 (1.2 percent in the case of women) to 33.2 percent (women, 16.2 percent) in 1938 and then to 47.7 percent (women, 29.1 percent) in 1942 (quoted in Hyo˘ng-m. Kim 2009). Still, in 1936, only about 8 percent of Koreans had any competence in the Japanese language (Fujitani 2011, 37). 35.  Also see Maeil Sinbo (1938a) and Tonga Ilbo (1939a). 36.  Migration restrictions were finally abolished in March 1945 in a desperate attempt to unite the crumbling empire and secure loyalty of colonial subjects amid total war, but many Koreans in Japan at this point were attempting to exit the Japanese archipelago by all means, anticipating the deadly air raids that might pummel Japan at any time. 37.  Other examples include Tong-gu Yi’s ([1933] 2004) “Tohang nodongja” (Migrant worker), Nam-wo˘n Yi’s ([1935] 2004) “Pusan” (Pusan), and Pyo˘ng-ju Yi’s ([1968] 2006) Kwanbu yo˘llakso˘n (The Shimonoseki–Pusan ferryboat), quoted as this section’s epigraph. 38.  For more on this organization, see Kawashima (2009, 130–168). 39.  The opening of the Japanese police office in Longjing in 1907 provoked agitated responses from Korean settlers as well as the protest by the Chinese authorities. The stern tone of the notice put up for Korean settlers by the police office hints at the atmosphere of the time (T’onggambu p’ach’ulso ch’oech’o u˘i kosi 1907). The notice, written in vernacular Korean, stressed that the police office was installed “to protect the lives and properties of Korean subjects [Han’guk sinmin, 韓國臣民],” and Koreans therefore should trust and succumb to the ­police office instead of being “agitated by slanderous rumors.” 40.  Among the GGK’s powers were those to appoint the consul general of Kantō (Kando), review the records of consular trials involving Koreans, and

Notes to Chapter One  253 bring arrested Koreans back to Korea for interrogation and trial (T’ae-g. Kim 2002). 41.  For instance, before the early 1920s, local administrations in eastern Manchuria often exempted Korean naturalization applicants from one of the documentary requirements (the certificate of the renunciation of previous nationality) with the knowledge that the Japanese consular office would never issue such a document (T’ae-g. Kim 2002, 32). 42.  The Chinese government severely punished Chinese nationals who entered into land contracts with Japanese, Koreans included (C. Son 2001, 189–219). It also sought to forcefully “nationalize” Koreans (whether they were legally naturalized or not) by replacing private Korean schools with Chinese public schools and controlling their curricula, uniforms, and personnel (Sin 2002, 67–68). The authorities of Jilin Province even prohibited Koreans from wearing traditional Korean clothes (T’ae-g. Kim 2002, 149). 43.  On expansion of Japanese consular offices throughout the 1920s, especially a sharp increase in its police force, see Esselstrom (2009, 65–91). 44.  In villages ravaged by the massive “counterbandit” operation in 1920, the authorities made the registration almost mandatory by randomly arresting those who could not produce the certificates of defection/absolution issued by the Korean Association (T’ae-g. Kim 2002, 61–62). 45.  This was unlike the situation in the United States, where Koreans were banned from naturalization on racial grounds (R. Kim 2011). 46.  See Kaebyo˘k (1923) and Tongmyo˘ng (1923). Tonga Ilbo also closely followed the unfolding of this event through a series of reports from February 16 to April 6, 1923. 47.  For the adoption metaphor, see Horiguchi (2011, 24). 48.  Manchukuo built its own national army, signed treaties with other states, imposed customs on goods imported from Japan, and created all the symbols of the nation-state such as a national flag, a national anthem, national holidays, and the rank and decorum of the army. The pace, intensity, and breadth of state building in Manchukuo stunned many contemporaries (S. Han 1995). 49.  Manchuria became a powerful magnet for Chinese migrants throughout the 1920s. In the early 1920s, 0.8 to 1 million Chinese migrated to Manchuria every year. By 1930, the number of Chinese reached more than 30 million whereas that of Japanese remained at around 0.24 million (Yamamuro 2006, 10). According to the Manchukuo census in 1940, the ethnic composition of Manchukuo was as follows: among the estimated total of 43,203,000, Han Chinese were 82 percent, Manchu 6 percent, Hui (meaning the Muslim population) 4 percent, Mongol 2 percent, Koreans 3 percent, Japanese 1.6 percent, and others (including Jews and White Russians) 1.4 percent (Watt 2009, 31).

254  Notes to Chapter One 50.  I borrow this term from Thomas Mullaney’s work (2011) on the making of the official ethnic classification system in the People’s Republic of China. 51.  Militant Korean nationalists considered Manchukuo Japan’s informal colony and continued to carry out guerilla struggles, although anti-Japanese military struggles increasingly became an uphill battle, with Manchuria firmly under Japan’s control. The support from the Chinese Communist Party was critical for their survival in this period, and the memory of the anti-imperialist struggles fought together came to form the core of the official historiography of the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). See Chapter Three for more. 52.  The following articles in Manso˘n Ilbo (Manchuria–Korean Daily), the only Korean-language newspaper published in Manchukuo from 1937 onward, offer a peek into the status of Koreans in Manchukuo and their relationships with other groups: C. Han (1940), Kil (1940), and Mong (1940). 53.  Note that even Manchukuo officials could not reach a consensus about what to call “non-Japanese” residents. This disagreement reveals the precarious state of multiethnic nation building in Manchukuo. The quandary was partly derived from the fact that officials could not use “Chinese” (中国人) as an umbrella category; using this term would risk legitimizing the Chinese Nationalist government’s claim that Manchuria was an integral part of “China” (中国). For a discussion of Japan’s insistence on calling China “Shina” (支那), instead of “Chūgoku” (中国, meaning Middle Kingdom), to avoid acknowledging the Chinese claim to its own centrality in the region, see Doak (2001, 93). 54.  The fact that a small number of Taiwanese in Manchuria were also classified as Japanese rather than Chinese in this binary scheme corroborates this point (Endō 2010, 235). 55.  Even in October 1940, Koreans made up the most significant portion of the unregistered population of Manchukuo. See Manso˘n Ilbo (1940). A source cited by Michael Kim estimates that approximately 600,000 out of 1.3 million Koreans in Manchuria remained unregistered by 1941 (Michael Kim 2010, 217). 56.  These include the Kwantung Army (a military unit that had played a critical role in Japanese intrusion into Manchuria since 1905), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, and the GGK. 57.  This began to change in the late 1930s with the radical assimilationist shift in colonial policies. The government began to censor the deep-rooted linguistic convention that distinguished Chōsen (Korea) from Nippon (Japan). For instance, the government promoted using Hantōjin (person of peninsular origin, 半島人) instead of Chōsenjin, and kokugo (national language, 国語) instead of Nihongo (Japanese, 日本語) (I. Hong 1999, 58). The term Choso˘n minjok (Korean nation, 朝鲜民族) could no longer be found in state-censored publications.

Notes to Chapter One  255 58.  See Duara (2003), Tamanoi (2005), Watt (2009), and Uchida (2011). 59.  A few historical studies (Brooks 2000; Endō 2010) suggest that an analogous relationship between migration control and state and nation building in the colony can be found in Taiwan, another important colony of Japan. Although the Government General of Taiwan tried to control migration from Taiwan to the Japanese archipelago, it sought to capitalize on Taiwanese migrants in southern China to make a foray into the larger continent and competed with the Chinese authorities over how to define and identify who were “Taiwanese.” A myriad of registration and documentation systems (including the family registration system) and police and consular practices inside and outside Taiwan played a critical role in producing “Taiwanese” out of these migrants, distinguished not only from “Japanese proper” but also from “Chinese.” The coethnic ties between “Taiwanese” and “Chinese” (including cross-border kinship ties) and the prevalence of cyclical migration, however, seem to have made this officially sanctioned boundary look even more arbitrary to those classified as such, and the problem of “passing” even more recalcitrant to the states involved, than in the Korean case. For instance, many residents of southern China, in their effort to seek extraterritorial privileges accorded to Japanese nationals (broadly defined), presented themselves as Taiwanese by registering in the Japanese consular office; the Japanese authorities sometimes sanctioned and at other times condoned such unauthorized boundary crossings, depending on their shifting interests (Endō 2010, 74–114). How these processes shaped the self-understanding of Taiwanese migrants and what enduring institutional legacy they left to postcolonial nation building in Taiwan and (if to a lesser extent) in the People’s Republic of China would be worth pursuing in comparative perspective. 60.  For a similar argument, see Caprio (2009) and Fujitani (2011). Mark Choate (2008, 221) states that, unlike Italian migrants (the object of his analysis), “Emigrants from multinational empires could not call upon a fatherland” because “no independent state of Israel, Poland, or Ireland existed to coordinate, support or protect the populations of Jews, Poles and Irish abroad.” This statement, however, does not apply to the colonial-era migration of Koreans, as I have shown in this chapter. 61.  See van der Veer (1995), Bates (2001), and Harper and Constantine (2010). 62.  See McKeown (2008), Sadiq (2008), and Amith (2011). 63.  One potentially useful study would compare the exceptionally aggressive approach of the GGK, which built a sizable bureaucracy for migration control, with the more hands-off policies of the colonial Indian government, which governed its heterogeneous population through a combination of direct and indirect rule (Lange, Mahoney, and vom Hau 2006, 1429–1430). Another possibility

256  Notes to Chapter Two would be to compare the contours of struggles over Korean migrants in Manchuria with struggles over Indian migrants in white settler colonies: although the GGK made migrants’ Korean identity compulsory and immutable when confronted by China’s competing ownership claim, the Indian government appealed to the notion of imperial citizenship when confronted by the exclusionary immigration and citizenship policies of white settler colonies toward Indian immigrants (Gorman 2002; Gammerl 2009; Banerjee 2010). Lastly, one could comparatively examine how the postcolonial states (North and South Korea on the one hand, and India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh on the other) inherited, unmade, revived, or reconstructed colonial legacies, as they responded to postwar ethnic unmixing, to the persecution of transborder coethnics in their states of settlement (for example, Japan, Kenya, and Uganda), or to the imperative to globalize their economies.

Notes to Chapter Two 1.  See Lubkemann (2005), Shepard (2006), Smith (2006), and Watt (2009). 2.  See Freeman (1979), Lee and De Vos (1981), Favell (1998), Joppke (1999), and Bleich (2005). 3.  See Migdal (1988); Migdal, Kohli, and Shue (1994); Herbst (2000); and Centeno (2002). 4.  See Tambiah (1989); Mamdani (1996); Blanton, Mason, and Athow (2001); and Longman (2001). 5.  In both cases, one party chose to remain disengaged while the other actively claimed to be the custodian of its transborder “kin.” See Nyírí (2002) and J. Wang (2007) for a comparison between the policies of Mainland China and Taiwan during the Cold War period. See Ther (1996), Wolff (2003), and Brubaker and Kim (2011) for comparisons between the policies of East and West Germany. 6.  For the meaning of “Zainichi” and the related terminological issue, see the Introduction. 7.  This famous distinction created by Robert Jackson (1990) has produced a productive line of inquiry that attributes the failure in nation building in many postcolonial states to their deficit in empirical statehood, that is, the incapacity to fulfill the basic functions required of the modern state. The North Korean case, however, enables us to recognize the importance of juridical statehood in successful (transborder) nation building. 8.  Given the clandestine nature of such “return,” it is hard to estimate precisely how many Koreans entered Japan after 1945 and how many of those who did were former repatriates. The statistics of the Japanese government show that nearly 48,000 Koreans were deported for illegal entry between 1945 and 1950,

Notes to Chapter Two  257 suggesting that tens of thousands of Koreans may have been able to enter Japan without being arrested at the border (Morita 1996). The records of deportation or legalization proceedings and the oral histories and ethnographic evidence collected by myself and others (J. Kim 2005; Oguma and Kang 2008) confirm that the majority of these “illegal migrants” were from Kyo˘ngsang Province or Cheju Island, where Korean repatriates from Japan were concentrated. In these regions bloody clashes between communist guerillas and the South Korean regime claimed the lives of many civilians. This violence may have added incentives to flee. But Cumings (1981, 276–278) suggested that the causality could have operated in the opposite directions: regions with a high concentration of repatriates were prone to leftist politics and thus tended to experience more civil disturbances characterized by mass uprisings and brutal confrontations with the U.S. or South Korean authorities. 9.  For the general ideological landscape of postindependence Korea and the popularity of North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, see Cumings (1981) and Armstrong (2004). 10.  This is the second verse of the song entitled “Uri charang iman cho˘man anirao” (Our pride is inexhaustible), one of the most popular songs among Ch’ongnyo˘n members. The lyrics were written by Han To˘k-su [Han Duk-su], who served as the chair of Ch’ongnyo˘n for forty-six years until his death in 2001. 11.  Also see S. Ryang (1997) and Uri hakkyo (Our school) (2006), a documentary film by South Korean director Myo˘ng-jun Kim. For the significance of the “gift” from the Great Leader in the moral economy in North Korea, see Kwon and Chung (2012, 151–182). 12.  See Bilig (1995) for a discussion on the significant role of indexical language (for example, we, our, the) in producing banal and prosaic, yet nonetheless powerful, forms of nationalism. 13.  Sonia Ryang (1997), after examining language switching among Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans, cogently argues that a kind of “linguistic division of labor” helped Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans flexibly navigate the two worlds in their everyday lives. That is, their organizational lives were performed through the Pyongyang standard Korean language, whereas the lives outside these arenas were managed through various Korean regional dialects (in the case of the first generation) or the Japanese language (in the case of the second or third generation). 14.  The Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) was not formally established until 1961. It drew on the membership of its predecessor, Korean Counterintelligence Corps (KCIC), which formed much earlier. The cited booklet published in 1964, however, simply used KCIA (Kankoku Chūo Jōhōbu) to describe incidents that took place before 1961. I’d like to thank Jesse Lichtenstein to bring my attention to this.

258  Notes to Chapter Two 15.  For more information about this organization, see note 23 below. 16.  For the largely neutral position of the United States on this matter, see Morris-Suzuki (2007, 198–207). 17.  The chronic postwar labor shortage in North Korea was aggravated by the massive repatriation of Chinese soldiers who had fought in the Korean War and remained in North Korea during the post–civil war reconstruction; at the end of 1957, the Chinese Communist Party ordered the soldiers to return for its own Great Leap Forward. Morris-Suzuki (2007, 178) reports in passing that North Korea also began to encourage the repatriation of ethnic Koreans from northeast China to compensate for this loss in the labor force, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter Three. 18.  The festivity surrounding the repatriation campaign is captured well by a film, Chi to hone (Blood and bones) (2004), based on So˘gil Yang’s novel and directed by Yōichi Sai, a renowned second-generation Zainichi Korean novelist and filmmaker, respectively. One scene in particular portrays a massive crowd of Zainichi Koreans in a train station, shouting in excitement, waving the North Korean flag, and singing the North Korean national anthem in unison before the train, full of repatriates, leaves for the port city of Niigata, where the ship bound for North Korea awaits them. 19.  Pachinko is both a recreational arcade game and a gambling device popular in Japan. Partly due to severe discrimination in the formal sector of employment, Zainichi Koreans came to dominate the pachinko business; in the 1990s, Zainichi Koreans owned an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the 18,000 pachinko parlors (Lie 2008, 73). 20.  Also see Kyo˘ng-h. Cho (2015, 66–67) and Cho˘ng-u˘. Yi (2015, 99–101). 21.  With regard to the ethnonym for the Korean nation, left-wing nationalists preferred Choso˘n/Chōsen while Han/Kan attracted some right-wing nationalists in the colonial era. This divide became rigid around 1948 as North Korea used Choso˘n and South Korea Han for their respective names (Im 1993). 22.  Jiyū Minshutō Seimu Chōsakai (1970). 23.  The cases summarized in this and the next paragraph were collected by Zainichi Chōsenjin no Jinken o Mamoru kai (The Association for the Protection of the Human Rights of Korean Residents in Japan). For more information about this organization established by Japanese lawyers in 1963, see Kashiwazaki (2009, 131). Kashiwazaki correctly noted that this group of lawyers tried to enlighten the Japanese public that Korean residents should be treated not as inferior former colonial subjects but as “full-fledged foreign nationals with inalienable basic human rights just like American or British people.” However, she did not clarify that this organization frequently formed a coalition with Ch’ongnyo˘n and protested the government’s denial of equal statehood to North Korea.

Notes to Chapter Two  259 24.  Ministry of Justice (December 28, 1954). 25.  Zainichi Chōsenjin no Jinken o Mamoru kai (1964, A29–A31). 26.  For example, while more than 120,000 Koreans residing in Japan in 1962 came from Cheju Island, fewer than 100 per year visited their hometowns before 1961; most of the recorded visitors were either relatively affluent Korean entrepreneurs participating in government-sponsored homecoming events or athletes participating in the National Sports Festival (Chaeil Tongp’o Moguk Kongjo˘k Chosa Wiwo˘nhoe 2008, 167). When asked why they had not visited their hometowns for so long, most of my interviewees answered that they were simply too poor in the 1950s and 1960s, preoccupied with how to put food on the table lest their children starve. 27.  The military service law in 1957 stipulated that South Koreans abroad were not exempted from prosecution for evasion of military service. 28.  Zainichi Chōsenjin no Jinken o Mamoru kai (1964, B18–B21). A man interviewed by Kyo˘ng-hu˘i Cho (2015, 53) recalls that one-third of his alumni in Ko˘nkuk school (a non-Ch’ongnyo˘n-line Korean school in Osaka) in the early 1950s were older students who had defected from the military during the Korean War. 29.  The screening of residence records was almost abolished in May 1969 as a result of the intense lobbying by Mindan and the South Korean government. 30.  See Taet’ongnyo˘ng Piso˘sil (Presidential Secretariat) (1969, 1970). The revised military service law, enacted in January 1971 (the application deadline), stipulated in article 24-2 that “those who have obtained permanent resident status as South Korean citizens in Japan or other countries are exempted from military service” (italics mine). 31.  Jiyū Minshutō Seimu Chōsakai (1970). 32.  I cite the conservative statistics of the Ministry of Justice (Jiyū Minshutō Seimu Chōsakai 1970). Ch’ongnyo˘n daily newspaper Choso˘n Sinbo cited a much larger figure, possibly to encourage its readers to participate in this countercampaign, claiming that more than 4,000 had successfully changed their designations from Kankoku to Chōsen. 33.  The different biographies and political convictions of Rhee Syngman (the president of South Korea from 1948 to 1960) and Park Chung Hee (the president of South Korea from 1961 to 1979) also partly explain this shift. Unlike Rhee, whose hostility toward Japanese and Zainichi Koreans was well known, Park, a graduate of the military academy of Manchukuo, actively pursued diplomatic rapprochement with Japan and the co-optation of Zainichi Koreans. 34.  Some native Koreans, for their part, saw the returning Zainichi Koreans as half-Japanese snobbish show-offs. Hyo˘k-t’ae Kwo˘n (2007) argues that the

260  Notes to Chapter Two l­ingering hostility among South Koreans toward their former colonizers may have reinforced such a negative representation of Zainichi Koreans. 35.  The Overseas Koreans Foundation published in 2008 a compilation of such stories, entitled Moguk u˘l hyanghan chaeil tongp’o u˘i paengnyo˘n chokcho˘k (One hundred years of dedication of coethnics in Japan to their motherland) (Chaeil Tongp’o Moguk Kongjo˘k Chosa Wiwo˘nhoe 2008). This belated appreciation came as the South Korean state began to reinforce its outreach effort to ethnic Koreans abroad to survive the global competition in the post–Cold War period. See Chapter Four for more. 36.  Heonik Kwon (2006) shows that the Vietnam War—another ideologically charged civil war in which the United States was actively involved, albeit with opposite outcomes to the Korean War—left the same imprint on many families in newly unified Vietnam. Despite the cultural significance of ancestral worship rituals, those with family members who died fighting the war on the side of South Vietnam could not commemorate their deaths for fear of persecution. 37.  Despite the lack of reliable data on the North Korean side, most economic historians agree that South Korean economy began to surpass its competitor in the mid- to late 1970s. See Figure 2.4, which shows the per capita GDP trends of South and North Korea between 1950 and 2008. 38.  Zainihon Chōsenjin Jinken Kyōkai (2004, 300–301).

25,000

20,000

15,000

10,000

5,000

19 50 19 53 19 56 19 59 19 62 19 65 19 68 19 71 19 74 19 77 19 78 19 83 19 85 19 89 19 92 19 95 19 98 20 01 20 04 20 07

0

South Korea

North Korea

F igu r e 2.4. Per capita GDP trends of South and North Korea between 1950 and 2008. s ou rc e : Maddison Project (www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm).

Notes to Chapter Two  261 39.  Sonia Ryang (2004, 759–760) found that repatriates from Japan to North Korea kept observing the principle of exogamy and the ancestral worship practices, even though both practices, considered a remnant of the “feudalistic past,” remained taboo in North Korea for a long time. 40.  A personal communication with Pak Chae-hwa, a former teacher and principal of a Ch’ongnyo˘n-line elementary school and Ch’ongnyo˘n activist in Yokohama, Japan. 41.  I could not find the exact provenance of this editorial. A clipping of this editorial was included without information about its provenance in the collection of Han’guk Sinmun, Mindan’s old official gazette, currently compiled in the central library of Chonbuk National University (Han’guk Sinmunsa 2004). Given its critical tone, I suspect that the editorial was not from Mindan’s official gazette, but the note of concern suggests that it was not taken from one of Ch’ongnyo˘n’s newspapers, either. 42.  The 38th parallel refers to a circle of latitude in the Northern Hemisphere used by the occupying Allies in 1945 to divide the Korean peninsula. 43.  Zainihon Chōsenjin Jinken Kyōkai (2004, ch. 1). 44.  See endnote 3 of S. Ryang (2000, 52n3) for a survey of the varying viewpoints of Japanese legal scholars on this issue. Although in rare cases the Japanese court recognized North Korean laws as the lex domicilii of Zainichi Chōsenjin, it often could not find the equivalent laws in the socialist legal system of North Korea to apply to inheritance cases (Zainihon Chōsenjin Jinken Kyōkai 2004, ch. 7). 45.  For how this policy changed with the attenuation of Cold War tensions in the region, albeit with enduring ambiguity, see the discussion in the Conclusion. 46.  According to my interviewees, the following indicators were used to certify de facto membership in Ch’ongnyo˘n: whether individuals or their children attended Ch’ongnyo˘n schools, whether they subscribed to the Ch’ongnyo˘n newspapers, and how regularly and consistently they paid membership dues. Because many affiliates have obtained South Korean citizenship over the last decade, Ch’ongnyo˘n lately tends to stress that the designation in the foreigner’s registry should not be taken as a sign of one’s allegiance, in a manner reminiscent of South Korea’s argument in the early 1950s, when most Koreans were registered as Chōsen. 47.  Zainihon Chōsenjin Jinken Kyōkai (2004, 198) 48.  See T. Mitchell (1999), Fuller and Bénéï (2001), and Painter (2006). 49.  S. Ryang (2000, 45) reported that, by 1998, many Koreans in Japan believed that a certain amount of money had to be paid to Ch’ongnyo˘n to ensure the safety and well-being of their repatriated families in famine-stricken North Korea. There were even rumors that they were able to invite their repatriated

262  Notes to Chapter Three family members to Japan for a month, as long as they paid 8 million yen (approximately US$61,500 at the 1998 exchange rate) to North Korea via Ch’ongnyo˘n. True or not, these widespread rumors reveal the sense of resentment felt by some Koreans in Japan; some of my interviewees commented that their families in North Korea were held hostage. The films of Zainichi Korean director Yonghi Yang (Yo˘ng-hu˘i Yang), especially her 2012 Kazoku no kuni (literally translated as “The Family’s Country,” yet released with the English title, “Our Homeland”), provide a poignant portrayal of this circumstance based on her own experience. 50.  To illustrate, many academics and activists who have intimate knowledge of Zainichi Koreans suspect that the naturalization rate is likely to be higher among those who have South Korean citizenship than those who maintain the Chōsen designation. I could not obtain the statistical evidence to support or invalidate this speculation.

Notes to Chapter Three 1.  For instance, see Chungguk Choso˘n Minjok Palchach’wi Ch’ongso˘ P’yo˘njip Wiwo˘nhoe (1992–1994). 2.  See Suh and Shultz (1990), Olivier (1991), Harrell (1994), Gladney (1996), and Rossabi (2004). For an exception, see Bulag (2002). 3.  See Cumings (1997, 238–243), Chung-s. Kim (2000), Chong-s. Yi (2000), I. Yo˘m (2002, 2004, 2008, 2010), H. Cho˘ng et al. (2006), Cathcart (2010), and Cathcart and Kraus (2011). 4.  See the Appendix for a detailed discussion on data and method. 5.  See Shirk (1982), Lary (1999), and Dikötter (2010). 6.  For a similar critique, see Lewin (1985), Shue (1988), Fizpatrick (1996), and Kligman and Verdery (2011). 7.  Japanese civilians in Manchuria, by contrast, were mostly repatriated between 1946 and 1948 according to the Potsdam Agreement. The family registration document played an important role in establishing an individual’s Japanese identity and thereby securing a place in the repatriation vessel bound for one of the regional repatriation centers in Japan. See Watt (2009, 105–107). 8.  Yanbian was initially designated as an “autonomous region” in 1952, but two years later it became an “autonomous prefecture,” a smaller-scale administrative unit with reduced capabilities (Olivier 1991, 67–102). 9.  Koreans comprised more than 90 percent of the Communist Party membership in eastern Manchuria in the late 1920s (P. Kim 1999, 139). The CCP sought to place Korean communists (a substantial portion of whom had originally belonged to the separate Korean Communist Party) under its control, citing the “one Communist Party in one country” doctrine pronounced in the 1929 Sixth Congress of the Communist International. This central command led to

Notes to Chapter Three  263 factional struggles among Korean communists and a violent purge of a large number of Korean communists who opposed the merger (H. Han 1999, Chin-y. Yi 2000, Cathcart 2010). The early recognition of Koreans as one of the minority nationalities in China was not unrelated to the CCP’s effort to win the support of Korean communists amidst these intra–Communist Party tensions. 10.  Despite its generally Han-centric policies, the GMD’s alliance with these militias does not necessarily mean that it took a radically nativist position against Koreans. Nevertheless, the GMD used whatever forces were available to fight the CCP, including the remaining Japanese forces or the Chinese who had collaborated with the Manchukuo regime, while postponing the minority question until after its victory in the civil war (Watt 2009, 45–46; Mullaney 2011, 29). In addition to remaining tolerant to the violence of Han Chinese militias, the GMD forced several thousand Koreans in Liaoning into concentration camps for repatriation (Cathcart 2010, 32). 11.  For the factors that dampened the desire for repatriation to the Korean peninsula and the fate of Korean “collaborators” who remained in Manchuria, see Cathcart (2010, 30–31). 12.  Official CCP documents issued before the 1930s used Gaoliren (高丽人) or Hanguoren (韩国人) more often than Chaoxianren (朝鲜人) to designate Koreans. By 1945, however, Chaoxian emerged as the sole legitimate ethnonym with the “right” ideological connotation (from the perspective of the CCP) for the same reason discussed in Chapter Two. 13.  Also see Lankov (2007). 14.  See Cathcart and Kraus (2011, 30). The linkage between the North Korean leadership and the CCP’s military force was not limited to these troops transferred at the dawn of the Korean War. Korean communists who fought antiJapanese guerilla wars in Manchuria under the CCP’s leadership (including Kim Il-sung himself) constituted an important—and later, the most powerful— faction of the North Korean regime (Armstrong 2004). 15.  This secret intelligence report shows that, although some Koreans indeed argued that Koreans in China should join the war to defend their fatherland, others blamed the Chinese for not reciprocating Koreans’ sacrifices during the Chinese civil war. Still others lamented the pitiful fate of Koreans, who had been whipped up for three straight wars: the Pacific War, the Chinese civil war, and now the Korean War (quoted in I. Yo˘m 2004, 326–329). See also Y. Ryu (2002, 301–314). 16.  According to this statistic, no country other than Japan, Taiwan, and the United States had more than 100 Koreans. As a result, when the Department of Overseas Koreans (kyominkwa) was created in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the early 1960s, it was housed within the Asian Affairs Bureau. As emigration

264  Notes to Chapter Three beyond Asia grew, an independent bureau in charge of consular affairs was created in 1970 (Oemubu 1979, 305). Yet, even in 1978, Koreans in Japan (668,036) constituted more than 50 percent of all “nationals abroad” (chaeoe kungmin) (1,296,139) in the census of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Oemubu 1979, ch. 8: sec. 2). 17.  For the meaning of kyop’o, see note 23 of Chapter Four. Even in the very rare cases that official publications mentioned Korean settlement in Manchuria under colonial rule, they never discussed what happened to these residents after the collapse of the empire. For instance, see Chaeoe kungmin silt’ae chosa (Report on the current conditions of nationals abroad) published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1968 (Oemubu 1968). Publications of nongovernmental provenance began to break this silence in the mid-1970s, but it took another fifteen years for the Korean Chinese to reappear in official censuses. See Chapter Four for more. 18.  Francine Hirsch (2005, 225), commenting on minority policies in the Soviet Union, similarly explains how the creation of “a common vocabulary and standardized administrative procedure” that national minorities had to use “to fight for resources and assert their rights” had the effect of anchoring them in the Soviet state and society. 19.  For the massive scale and vast range of material aid provided by China for North Korea, see Cathcart and Kraus (2011, 45–46). 20.  For the U.S. CIA estimate, not yet verified in the Chinese archives, see Cathcart and Kraus (2011, 48). 21.  The volunteers for resettlement in North Korea were not limited to those who had cross-border family ties. Yanhexiang, for instance, is a Korean Chinese township in Heilongjiang Province, made up of over 700 households originally from the southern region of the Korean peninsula. About 200 households in this township moved to North Korea in 1959 through this resettlement program (Killim Sinmun 2007). 22.  After all, the transfer had not been voluntary. The majority of those in the lower ranks had not even known about the transfer until the last moment (H. Cho˘ng et al. 2006). 23.  This is an estimate made by historian Chung-saeng Kim (2000, 256–259). In 1981, the Chinese government conducted a survey of Korean Chinese soldiers who had served in the Korean People’s Liberation Army and returned. Although the central government has not publicized the results of this survey, it is possible to have access to local statistics. After examining some of these local statistics, Chung-saeng Kim estimated that 11,000 soldiers returned to China in the 1950s. He also estimated that 15,000 to 18,000 remained in North Korea.

Notes to Chapter Three  265 24.  See the interviews of Yi Chong-ho and Yo˘m Kwan-il conducted by Cho˘ng and his colleagues (H. Cho˘ng et al. 2006, 24, 105). 25.  These radical measures in 1957 were in part a response to policy mistakes made a year earlier. Anticipating quick economic growth as a result of the Socialist High Tide campaign, the CCP admitted a much larger number of students than in previous years. As it became clear that actual industrial growth could not accommodate the surplus workforce, the CCP radically reduced the number of students in 1957, making the entrance exam that year more competitive than ever (Shirk 1982, 27). 26.  For instance, Chang Han-ch’o˘l, interviewed by Chong and his colleagues (H. Cho˘ng et al. 2006, 195–323), was highly educated (a graduate of a prestigious private senior high school) and a high-ranking official when discharged; he was placed in the accounting department of Yo˘nbyo˘n Ilbo (a government newspaper). Another veteran, Ri Pong-nyong, who returned to China in 1953, was placed in the editing department of Yo˘nbyo˘n Ilbo and was even able to study at People’s University in Beijing (192–194). 27.  Those who became prisoners of war (POWs) and were later transferred to China were subjected to the worst treatment. They were subject to suspicion that they might have voluntarily surrendered to the enemy or might have been brainwashed by American and South Korean authorities at the POW camp. The Chinese government allowed these former POWs to return home only after spending a year in a labor camp. See H. Cho˘ng et al. (2006, 44–45) and Y. Ryu (2002, 309) for further details. 28. See Yo˘nbyo˘n ch’o˘ngnyo˘n vol. 8 to vol. 12, published in 1958. Yo˘nbyo˘n ch’o˘ngnyo˘n often presented a letter allegedly sent from a reader and then published a series of critical responses from other readers. I suspect that this format was used not so much for an open discussion as for ideological edification. It is highly likely that some letters, if not all, were fabricated precisely for a pedagogical purpose. Nevertheless, these articles—especially the initial letters, which were almost certainly going to be criticized by the following letters—provide useful data in the sense that they reveal potential sources of complaints and grievances among the general population. 29. See Arirang vol. 4 for this play and vol. 7 to vol. 11 for a series of critiques. The CCP was fully aware of the sensitivity of the divorce issue among the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The Marriage Law, which in general protected women’s right to divorce to a considerable degree, included separate— and more restrictive—clauses and guidelines for handling the separation and divorce cases filed by the fiancées and wives of PLA soldiers (Diamant 2000, 226–280).

266  Notes to Chapter Three 30.  This was one of many policies that attempted to induce young people to work in communes and factories (Shirk 1982). The policy shows the CCP’s increasing tendency to reward students’ political rather than academic ­performance. 31.  Despite a thorough search, I was unable to find a systematic social history of the Great Leap Forward or the People’s Commune Movement in the Yanbian region. Only a collection of oral histories, memoirs, journalistic reports, and a few fictional accounts allow a peek into this unwritten history. See, for example, Y. Ryu (2002, 378–389) and Hak-c’ Kim (1996). 32.  The total number of colleges and universities decreased from 1,289 to 407 between 1960 and 1963 (Guang 1990, 200). 33.  For abbreviations of the archival data cited in this chapter, see Table B.1 in the Bibliography. YC. vol. 6 (June 1955), 1–2; YC. vol. 29 (May 1957), 9–11; YM. vol. 42 (June 1960), 1–11; CS. vol. 21 (1960), 24–27; YB. vol. 2 (June 1961), 5–6; YB. vol. 14 (June 1962), 8–12; and YB. vol. 38 (June 1964), 22–23. 34.  YC. vol. 6 (June 1955), 2–5; YC. vol. 24 (December 1956), 17–18; CS. vol. 21 (1960), 28–48; YC. vol. 84 (February 1961), 15–18; YB. vol. 2 (June 1961), 40–44; and YB. vol. 14 (June 1962), 13–15. 35.  YB. vol. 40 (April 1958), 22–25; YB. vol. 41 (May 1958), 12–16; ARR. (October 1958), 15–16; YC. vols. 71–74; YM. vol. 48 (December 1960), 17–19; YB. vol. 2 (June 1961), 35–37; and YB. vol. 14 (June 1962), 20–21. For a discussion of the benefits of party membership in Mao-era China, see Shirk (1982), B. Li and Walder (2001), and X. Wu (2001). 36.  ARR. (July 1957), 5–8; YM. vol. 49 (January 1961), 6; YB. vol. 2 (June 1961), 40–44; YB. vol. 14 (June 1962), 16–19; and YB. vol. 16 (August 1962), 42, 44–48. 37.  YC. vol. 36 (December 1957), 6–7; YC. vol. 45 (September 1958), 4–5; CS. vols. 23–24 (1959), 59–71; and CS. vols. 17–18 (1960), 2–71. 38.  YC. vol. 53 (May 1959), 21–23; CS. vol. 208 (October 1959), 2–7; ARR (January 1960), 1–4; and YM. vol. 45 (September 1960), 7–11. 39.  See ARR. (October 1958), 10–12. 40.  CS. vols. 23–24 (1960), 118–20, and YB. vol. 17 (September 1962), 17, 20–21. Also see P. Cho˘ng (1997, 186–188). 41.  These cultural elites included professors and students in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Yanbian University, teachers in various levels of Korean schools, and writers of various types (Y. Ryu 2002, 610–628; 2009, 114–115). 42.  Several interviewees who had settled in North Korea in this period confirmed the repatriation of Korean War orphans.

Notes to Chapter Three  267 43.  One might wonder whether the regional origin of Korean Chinese individuals influenced their decisions to resettle in North Korea. Although the statistics that would enable me to answer this question are unavailable, my ethnographic data suggest that cross-border social networks clearly served as an encouraging factor in migration decisions. I found, however, that even southerners often had family members, friends, or former neighbors living in North Korea as a consequence of the government-sanctioned resettlement of many Korean Chinese during and after the Korean War. For example, see note 21 above. 44.  For the socialist stratification system in Mao-era China, also see Lü and Perry (1997) and X. Wu (2001). 45.  YC. vol. 6 (June 1955), 2–5. 46.  An individual’s class label was determined by the class label of the male householder at the time of the initial classification. It remained an ascribed, unchangeable, and inherited status throughout the Mao era (Watson 1984). 47.  A confidential memorandum issued in 1958 lists those who should not be admitted to colleges: (1) applicants whose immediate family members were classified as counterrevolutionaries or antiparty, antisocialist reactionaries; (2) applicants who had close relationships with those engaged in antirevolutionary activities in capitalist countries; and (3) applicants whose families belonged to exploiting classes such as landlords, rich peasants, capitalists, and reactionary officials (Mi-r. Kim 2009, 125). 48.  Ri Ki-hu˘i, interviewed by late Korean Chinese scholar Yo˘n-san Ryu (2007), was also placed in a sugar-processing factory in the border city of ­Hoeryong; he found that almost half of the workers in his factory were Korean Chinese. 49.  Cheehyung Kim (2010) offers a theoretically informed analysis of how the state-led socialist transformation in North Korea unfolded through the reorganization of the everyday life of its citizens from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. 50.  See Mironenko (2014, 67–71) for how the “chaos” in urban streets became the focus of the transformative zeal of the modernizing state in postwar North Korea, especially its vision of a new Pyongyang, where “disciplined citizens [should be] moving purposefully through a maze of imposing structures” (71). 51.  The last comment refers to North Korea’s distinctive population surveillance system enacted in late 1958, called the Five-Household Responsibility System: an officer was assigned to every five households, observing, recording, and disciplining the intimate relations, children’s education, and daily habits of the residents under his or her control (Nam 2008). 52.  Admittedly, a selection bias built into my sample must be taken into account. Without systematic research on those who ended up staying in North

268  Notes to Chapter Three ­ orea, it is difficult to assess to what extent exit was a challenge, and more generK ally, to comprehensively explain what may have deterred some, but not others, from returning. I discuss some of these factors in the next section. 53.  My interviewees reported that, in villages where Han Chinese outnumbered Koreans, returnees experienced more humiliation or punishment. I could not validate this claim. It is quite plausible, however, that returnees in these villages may have faced more harassment during the Cultural Revolution when the transborder ties of the Korean Chinese to North Korea became criminalized and securitized. 54.  I suspect that, in some cases, the postreturn negotiations with local bureaucrats may not have been experienced as radically different from other hukourelated negotiations (for example, negotiations to obtain urban hukou), which have been a constant feature of ordinary Chinese citizens’ mobility strategies. 55.  For the rustication campaign, see Pepper (1996), Zhou and Hou (1999), and Seeberg (2000). K. Ri and colleagues (2008) offer a collection of oral histories of Korean Chinese who partook in the rustication program as students. The inequality between students with rural and urban hukou still persisted even though both were targeted by the radical rustification program. The former (called “the youths who returned to the village” [guixiang qingnian, 归乡青年]) were enduringly disadvantaged in comparison with the latter (called “the youths who went down to the village” [xiaxiang qingnian, 下乡青年]) in terms of the distribution of opportunities to return to the city and the calculation of seniority at the time of promotion and retirement if they eventually landed urban jobs (Walder and Hu 2009). 56.  In a few cases, political exiles or their descendants who became North Korean citizens requested monetary compensation for the wrongful persecution of themselves or their parents. These requests were granted by the CCP in one form or another after Mao’s death (Y. Ryu 2002, 325). 57.  In the MPR, pan-Mongolism was also associated with the counterrevolutionary uprising in the early 1920s against the communist regime, which was led by Buddhist monks and instigated by Japan. Because Inner Mongolia was put under the control of Manchukuo beginning in the early 1930s, Mongols in Inner Mongolia were also often seen as Japanese spies (Bulag 1998). 58.  I am unaware if there were cases of Han Chinese trying to pass as Korean Chinese to resettle in North Korea, and if North Korean officials had ever considered this possibility. This circumstance is conceivable: Han Chinese born and raised in Korean Chinese villages are often indistinguishable from Korean Chinese. However, my interlocutors uniformly gave a bewildered look when asked about this hypothetical circumstance, confessing they had never thought about such a possibility. In my view, this reaction does not mean that there were no

Notes to Chapter Four  269 such cases; it simply reveals a tendency prevalent among Korean Chinese to take for granted the boundary between the Korean Chinese and the Han Chinese as natural and rigid. 59.  The fact that documented identities played a less important role in this episode of transborder membership politics poses several intriguing questions— although pursuing this line of inquiry in earnest is beyond the scope of this book. Is this simply a product of an exceptional and historically contingent circumstance? Or does this point to a more profound—and yet undertheorized— difference between the capitalist and socialist regimes in terms of the significance of the state’s bureaucratic practices, given that the freedom of movement, the rule of law, and more generally, the state–society relation are configured differently? Or does the fact that the North Korean state is often characterized as a “modern theater state” (Kwon and Chung 2012)—which prioritizes the routinization of charisma over the bureaucratic rationalization of the rule—have any bearing on this finding?

Notes to Chapter Four 1.  See Brubaker (1998), Joppke (2005), and Tsuda (2009). 2.  See Joppke and Rosenhek (2002), Levy and Weiss (2002), Rock and Wolff (2002), Münz and Ohliger (2003), Joppke (2005), Skrentny et al. (2007), and Brubaker and Kim (2011). 3.  Joppke (2005) offers the most systematic analysis. 4.  See Thränhardt (2001), Tsuda (2003), Long and Oxfeld (2004), Marko­ witz and Stefansson (2004), Čapo Žmegač (2005), Fox (2007), Cook-Martín and Viladrich (2009), and Remennick (2009). 5.  See J. Park and Chang (2005), Choe (2006), Skrentny et al. (2007), Seol and Skrentny (2009a, 2009b), and Tsuda (2010). 6.  Christian Joppke (2005, 174–88), in his discussion on ethnic migration in Israel and Germany, presents an exceptionally elaborate discussion on the changing administrative and juridical practices for establishing who were Jews or ethnic Germans. Yet his discussion does not include the corresponding struggles on the part of aspiring migrants, who sought to be classified as Jews or ethnic Germans. 7.  See Demleitner (2003), Strasser et al. (2009), and Catherine Lee (2013). 8.  For example, Caren Freeman (2011, 13) argues that “the restoring of kinship ties severed as a result of national division operates . . . as an explicit goal of South Korea’s immigration policies toward” the Korean Chinese (italics mine) and that “marriage between [Korean Chinese] women and South Korean men on the one hand and family reunions between [Korean Chinese] and their consanguineal family members in South Korea on the other constituted two primary

270  Notes to Chapter Four sites where the South Korean government projected its hope for the resuscitation of divided families and, by extension, the divided nation-state.” In my view, this is an overstatement of the rhetoric of political elites in the very early phase of ­Korean Chinese migration to South Korea, which quickly lost currency as the immigration optique came to dominate South Korean policies toward the Korean Chinese in the 1990s. As the latter half of this chapter will analyze in depth, the South Korean government used “kinship ties” not as a tool for promoting the ingathering of the divided nation but, quite to the contrary, as a tool for con­ trolling Korean Chinese access to South Korea. I discuss this seeming irony further in the concluding chapter. 9.  Caren Freeman’s recent monograph (2011) is a notable exception. 10.  I borrow the term spillover from Roger Waldinger (2007), who uses the term to specify under what circumstances various home-oriented practices of migrants (such as the activities of hometown associations) affect their home societies across the border. 11.  This policy shift coincided with the beginning of the Mindan-organized homecoming trips for Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans discussed in Chapter Two. Both instances reveal the increasing self-confidence of the South Korean regime vis-à-vis its northern competitor. 12.  The United States and Japan reestablished diplomatic relations with China in the early 1970s, which enabled some Japanese and American citizens to visit China. The main sources of the South Korean media reports include the following: the eyewitness accounts of Japanese scholars, journalists, and officials who visited northeast China; Japanese who had been left behind in postwar Manchuria but were able to return to Japan after the recovery of diplomatic relations (Watt 2009, 167–189); and Korean expatriates who visited northeast China as U.S. citizens. 13.  Although the father of a high-ranking South Korean official repatriated in 1965 (K. Yu 1990, 31), this was a very exceptional, one-time incident. After a thirteen-year hiatus, four Korean Chinese were allowed to permanently repatriate in 1978, and about 200 followed until the reestablishment of diplomatic relations in 1992. 14.  For more on the array of terms used to refer to the Korean Chinese in the 1970s and 1980s, see K. Yu (1990, 30). Two books published in 1972 by the Haeoe Kyop’o Yo˘n’guso (The Research Institute on Overseas Koreans) were titled A History of “Han’gugin” in the Soviet Union and A History of “Han’gugin” in Manchuria and Mongolia (K. Hyo˘n 1972a, 1972b; quotation marks mine). Kyop’o, tongp’o, and Han’gugin were used interchangeably in these books. 15.  Various media organizations, including the public broadcasting network (KBS), were involved in the programs. The active involvement of the Far East

Notes to Chapter Four  271 Broadcasting Corporation (FEBC) is particularly interesting. As one of the Christian broadcasting corporations in Korea, FEBC has been using these radio programs for missionary purposes ever since. See J. Han (2010) and Jung (2011) for a description of the missionary activities of Korean evangelical churches targeting ethnic Koreans in communist countries and the missiological significance of these activities for Korean evangelicals. 16.  See Grinker (1998) and Foley (2009). 17.  The incidence of peddling trips to North Korea peaked between 1987 and 1989, during which over 100,000 Korean Chinese visited North Korea every year (Hwa-s. Kim 2010, 61). Such trips were most popular among the Korean Chinese peasants in Yanbian. On the surface, Chinese and North Korean officials allowed the exits and entries of these peddlers based on their claims that they were visiting family members. However, whether these peddlers actually had family members in North Korea did not much matter. Invitation letters from the alleged kin, skill in handling the questions of the police officers or border patrols, and bribes for these street-level bureaucrats were usually sufficient. Because hosting Korean Chinese peddlers was also beneficial for many North Koreans suffering from an acute shortage of food and consumer goods, finding host families who would send invitation letters was not difficult. Of the eight interviewees who had been to North Korea for this purpose, seven admitted that they were not related to their host families. 18.  This reluctance was so common that one of my interviewees frequently boasted about how he shrewdly won over his newly found relatives by sending expensive Chinese medicines with an audiotape in which he introduced his family in China and talked about his deceased grandmother. 19.  Interestingly, some Ch’ongnyo˘n Koreans confronted a very similar response when they changed their Chōsen designation to Kankoku and visited their hometown for the first time in decades. This tension was also common between West and East Berliners in Cold War Germany (Borneman 1992). 20.  This was based on Han Chunggong kan isan kajok chaehoe samu ch’o˘ri kyujo˘ng (The guidelines for handling separated families between Korea and China) issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1981. For detail, see Chulwoo Lee (2010a, 18–20). 21.  These repatriates were mostly the descendants of those whom the government recognized for their anti-Japanese struggles or other types of meritorious service to the nation. 22.  An article published in a legal journal in 1991 also reveals the authorities’ confusion and uncertainty about Korean Chinese nationality status (Kap-t. Kim 1991). This article, written by the director of the Department of Legal Affairs in the National Court Administration, offered guidance to lower-level ­bureaucrats

272  Notes to Chapter Four and certified judicial scriveners who were at a loss as to how to handle the requests of an increasing number of ethnic Koreans from communist countries to register in the South Korean family registry. The author introduced three different views on the nationality status of the Korean Chinese and eventually supported the view that some, if not all, Korean Chinese should be seen as having retained South Korean nationality all along and hence should be allowed to register in the family registry. As will be discussed shortly, this view was later dismissed by bureaucratic fiat. 23.  Although the Chinese character 同 (tong/dong) in tongp’o emphasizes common origin, the Chinese character 僑 (kyo/qiao) in kyop’o emphasizes the context of migration, mostly understood as a short-term sojourn. For a slightly different usage of the same character in huaqiao (often translated as “overseas Chinese”), see G. Wang (1981, 119). “Overseas” (haeoe) often qualified kyop’o, excluding Koreans in China and the Soviet Union who are not actually overseas whereas including those in Japan, the United States, and other countries. In the Cold War lexicon, kyomin referred to those who were more or less permanently residing in other countries as opposed to “sojourners” (ch’eryuja). 24.  The reports published in 1992 and 1995 show various transitional characteristics. It was not until the publication of the report in 1999, entitled “Report on the Current Conditions on Coethnics Abroad [chaeoe tongp’o],” that decades of terminological conflation were finally resolved. 25.  The emerging discourse on the “Korean diaspora” or the “Korean network” often referred to the Chinese and Jewish diasporas as its model. For a discussion of the elitist bias in the prevailing representation of overseas Chinese, see Thunø (2001) and Nyírí (2002). For an explanation of the conjunction of the nationalist and globalist discourses in neoliberal South Korea, see Gi-wook Shin (2006, 204–222) and Eleana Kim (2010). 26.  The official English title of this act is the “Act on the Immigration and Legal Status of Overseas Koreans,” better known as the Overseas Koreans Act. However, I use the phrase “Coethnics Abroad” instead of “Overseas Koreans” because the latter cannot show that “chaeoe tongp’o” (translated as coethnics abroad in this book), the term commonly used in the political and administrative arenas in the 1990s, became a legal status through this act. I appreciate Chulwoo Lee for bringing this point to my attention. 27.  This specification was based on the pre-1998 nationality law, which ­adopted the patrilineal jus sanguinis principle. 28.  Since the passage of the Overseas Emigration Act in 1962, a large number of South Koreans—approximately 2.5 million by 1999—have emigrated. These emigrants, especially those in the United States, have been increasingly active in

Notes to Chapter Four  273 calling for more support from, and more rights and participation in, South Korea. See Chulwoo Lee (2010a, 236–237). 29.  The Coethnics Abroad Act, in line with the revision of the Nationality Law in 1998, allowed the inheritance of the “coethnics abroad” status through matrilineage. 30.  The Chinese government had been vigilant about the ramifications of the increasing contact between its Korean minority and South Korea. Making comments on the Coethnics Abroad Act, the Chinese ambassador argued that the Korean Chinese, like the Han Chinese, were first and foremost Chinese citizens and that granting preferential treatment only to the former was unjustifiable (Park and Chang 2005). 31.  The Ministry of Foreign Affairs voiced a concern that North Korean spies might try to pass as Korean Chinese. 32.  The South Korean government made it difficult for the Korean Chinese to apply for the “coethnics abroad” visa (F-4) for a few more years. It required applicants from countries designated as producing a large number of “illegal” migrants—including China—to submit additional documentation supporting their claim that they would not work in the secondary labor market; favorable decisions were rarely granted before 2008. The government’s intention was to channel Korean Chinese migrants into the newly available work visit status (H-2) to prevent their permanent settlement in South Korea (with no limit to renewals, the F-4 visa is considered quasi-permanent resident status). However, beginning in 2009, the government started to issue the coethnics abroad visa to broader categories of Korean Chinese who could be classified as “skilled” migrants (including entrepreneurs with credible records and students studying at graduate schools in South Korea). Even this skilled–unskilled distinction quickly lost any substantive meaning, as the government subsequently created multiple pathways for the transition from the work visa status (H-2) to the coethnics abroad status (F-4) by expanding the definition of “skilled” workers by bureaucratic fiat (S. Lee and Chien 2016). These policy changes reveal that the South Korean government was pushed to bring the de jure status of Korean Chinese migrants into line with their de facto integration into the South Korean labor market. 33.  The controversial campaign of Korean Chinese migrants in 2003, led by a conservative pastor Suh Kyung-suk, loomed large behind this sweeping policy shift. Hundreds of Korean Chinese (mostly first-generation migrants from the southern part of the Korean peninsula) went on a hunger strike and sought constitutional judgment on the 1997 Guidelines, claiming their entitlement to South Korean citizenship on the grounds that their acquisition of Chinese citizenship had been involuntary. This collective request for South Korean

274  Notes to Chapter Four c­ itizenship—more precisely, the subtly anti-Chinese language of the protest (pressuring the South Korean government into embracing its coethnics who had “suffered” under an alien regime)—provoked a negative response even within Korean Chinese communities and was eventually dismissed by the Constitutional Court (Ho˘nbo˘p Chaep’anso 2006). Yet the protest—which even led President Roh Moo-hyun (from the center left party) to visit the site of the hunger strike—successfully politicized the hitherto invisible administrative practice and induced the government to preemptively change the practice before its constitutionality was adjudicated by the court. 34.  See A. Liu (1983), Jones (1994), M. Yang (1994), and Ledeneva (1998). 35.  For a similar observation in other contexts, see Chu (2010, 59–99). 36.  For a similar observation in the Argentine context, see Cook-Martín (2013). 37.  The last hurdle in this type of migration scheme was to pass through the screening by South Korean immigration officers at the port of entry. It was more common for younger people to try to pass as older ones: many of my interviewees told me, often in amused tones, how they changed their appearances (for example, dying hair gray and wearing old-style, shabby clothes) and demeanor (such as walking with a limp) to look ten years older in front of the customs officer. Freeman (2011, 174) even reports on the rumor that in Beijing, “South Korea-bound migrants could undergo a surgical procedure to add [temporary] wrinkles to their foreheads.” These border interactions point to the importance of performance that matches the documented identity. This will be discussed in depth in the later section regarding the struggles of Korean Chinese migrants to establish the authenticity of marriage relations. 38.  Caren Freeman (2011, 185–186) also provides a similar observation with fine-grained details. Old Piao, a broker she met in Shenyang, China, claimed that he was able to identify all the nitpicky points that might serve as red flags to South Korean immigration officials. These included the appearance of Chinese characters rarely used in South Korea in the documents allegedly issued by South Korean authorities or the different ways in which official documents were perforated in South Korea and China. 39.  See van Schendel and Abraham (2005) and Chu (2010). 40.  The opposition between “primordialist” and “instrumentalist” approaches has long structured debates on ethnicity and nationalism; the former emphasizes the natural grounding of ethnic and national identifications in kinship, descent, and shared culture, whereas the latter underscores the ways in which ethnic and national identifications are shaped by situationally variable economic and political interests.

Notes to Chapter Four  275 41.  The pre-1998 patrilineal nationality law granted no preferential treatment to foreign husbands married to South Korean women, but this situation changed in 1998. 42.  It is worthy of note that these earlier Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s and 1980s came from the cases in which the contending parties, South Koreans or Korean Americans, had agreed on “fake divorce” and “fake marriage” to become eligible for family-based immigration to the United States. I thank David Straub for informing me that the analogous micropolitical struggles over the verification of the authenticity of family ties took place in the U.S. consular office in Seoul, South Korea, in this earlier period. 43.  The official statistics issued by the Ministry of Justice show that, among the foreign spouses who applied for naturalization between 2003 and 2005, Chinese spouses (including Korean Chinese) were least likely to have had children with their South Korean spouses: 15.9 percent of these couples had children, whereas 94.2 percent of Korean–Vietnamese couples had children (quoted in Ch’un-j. Kim 2007). Also see Hyun Mee Kim (2007) for a discussion of the ways in which demographic concerns shaped the South Korean government’s shifting reactions to internationally married brides. 44.  This verification procedure shows that immigration bureaucrats made certain assumptions about what were appropriate or inappropriate economic transactions between spouses in assessing the authenticity of the marriage under investigation. See Zelizer (2005, 225–226) for a similar observation in the U.S. context. 45.  A newspaper article, citing statistics from the Yanbian prefectural government, reported that, of the 14,431 Korean Chinese who had married foreigners between 1994 and 2001—90 percent of them married South Koreans—7,442 (51 percent) were unmarried, 5,495 (38 percent) were divorcees, and 1,494 (11 percent) were widows (Tongp’o T’aun 2005). According to many of my interviewees (both South Korean immigration bureaucrats and Korean Chinese immigrants), the proportion of divorcees would have been larger if more recent statistics had been included. Hwa-so˘n Kim’s (2010, 136–137) ethnographic study of a Korean Chinese village in northeast China shows an even more skewed result. In the village where she conducted her field research in 2008, twenty-two women had gone to South Korea via marriage. Only four had not been previously married. Four remarried South Koreans after the deaths of their husbands, and eighteen remarried after divorce. As many as ten cases were sham marriages (as acknowledged by the persons directly involved). 46.  It should be noted, however, that in other cases, South Korean husbands’ opposition to their Korean Chinese wives’ employment outside the household became a source of serious spousal conflict. As Caren Freeman (2011, 124–130)

276  Notes to Chapter Four elaborately describes, South Korean husbands “tended to view the workplace as full of hidden dangers and temptations,” including the “inappropriate” approach from other men (South Koreans or Korean Chinese) and the “bad” influence of other Korean Chinese female co-workers. The restriction on working outside the household was what most Korean Chinese brides found very difficult to accept, not simply because of the different gender norms in South Korea and China (Freeman 2011, 134) but also because of the importance of securing an independent source of income to financially support their children left in China. 47.  For a similar case in the European context, see Foblets and Vanheule (2006). 48.  When some of these women actually tried this option, however, they were not allowed to register their marriages because they did not have proper stateauthorized identity documents of either Chinese or South Korean ­provenance. 49.  Other sources reported even higher divorce rates in major cities in Yanbian (Y. Ryu 2002, 722). The change in the spousal relationship is only one of many profound changes that Korean Chinese families underwent in the last two decades. Multiple forms of transborder family dispersal became the norm in Korean Chinese communities in northeast China, radically transforming not only the spousal but also the parent–child relationship. Analyzing the latter, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. 50.  Chu (2010, 80) explains that the term wenhua refers not only to an individual’s educational level but also to the person’s “entire way of being.” In the village in southern China where she conducted ethnographic research, urbanites often attributed various migration-related problems to peasants’ “low culture.” 51.  See J. Kwon (2015) for a brilliant ethnographical analysis of the meaning of remittances and the work of waiting in the context of the transnational separation of Korean Chinese spouses. 52.  For a similar ethnographic observation, see Hwa-s. Kim (2010, 177–178) and Freeman (2011, 211–218). 53.  Many legal scholars in China consider “fake marriage” a legitimate basis for the annulment of marriage. The present PRC marriage law and the courts, however, have adopted a strict formalist stance, granting a great deal of legal authority to registration while seldom recognizing unregistered relationships equivalent to common law marriage. It thus remains unclear whether the Chinese legal system recognizes the effect of “fake divorce” (T. Yun 2008). 54.  See Taitz, Weekers, and Mosca (2002); Aas (2006); and Broeders and Engbersen (2007). 55.  For a similar argument about biometric information and the changing conception of identity, see Davis (1994), Haney López (1996), Cannold (2008), and Nelson (2008).

Notes to Conclusion  277 56.  See Böcker (1994), Menjívar (2006), Carling (2008), Freeman (2011), and J. Kwon (2015). 57.  For an exception, see Brubaker (1996, 1056).

Notes to Conclusion 1.  Most representative of this position are Soysal (1994), Kymlicka (1995), Appadurai (1996), Jacobson (1997), Faist and Kivisto (2007), and Spiro (2008). 2.  See for example Institute of Migration and Overseas Koreans (2008), T. Lim (2010), and N. Kim (2014). 3.  For a systematic critique of the globalization and citizenship studies along this line, see Brenner (1999, 65–67), Pogonyi (2011), and Weil (2011). 4.  For example, see Hobsbawm (1992, 66), Connor (1994, 96), and Anthony Smith (1995, 86). 5.  See Grinker (1998), Jager (2003), Shin (2006), and Freeman (2011). 6.  For a similar phenomenon in the post–civil war Vietnam, see H. Kwon (2006). 7.  This particular screening process was not the result of the South Korean elites’ preoccupation with ethnic purity conceived largely in biological terms; it was rather the product of “exclusionary intensions and a bureaucratic habitus of closure” (italics in original), as legal scholar Chulwoo Lee (2010b, 246) astutely put it. For an extended discussion, see Chulwoo Lee (2012). 8.  See Joppke (2005), Gamlen (2008), and Shevel (2011). 9.  For instance, see Brubaker (1996); King and Melvin (1998); Iordachi (2004); Kántor et al. (2004); Atabaki and Mehendale (2005); Joppke (2005); Skrentny et al. (2007); Tsuda (2009); Pogonyi, Kovács, and Körtvélyesi (2010); Brubaker and Kim (2011); and Shevel (2011). 10.  For how globalization generates cultural politics over the ownership of distinctive national culture rather than making it irrelevant, see Handler (1988) and H. Wang (2004a). 11.  Unlike the cases reported in Harpaz (2015), this does not make people like Yo˘ng-il’s son dual citizens: China does not allow dual citizenship; South Korea does, yet only selectively, and the Korean Chinese are generally excluded from this selective provision (Cho˘ng-g. Kim 2013). 12.  For citizenship as one of the most important mechanisms of inequality, see Macklin (2007) and Shachar (2009). 13.  See Neofotistos (2009), Tintori (2011), Cook-Martín (2013), and Harpaz (2013, 2015).

Bibliography

Note on Korean Romanization In general, the book follows the McCune-Reischauer system in Korean romanization. Below are the exceptions. • The romanization of the names of public organizations (for example, universities, newspapers, broadcasting companies, and so on) follows the romanization officially endorsed by these organizations (for example, Chosun Ilbo instead of Choso˘n Ilbo). • The romanization of the names of historical and public figures follows the well-established convention (for example Kim, Il-sung, instead of Kim, Il-so˘ng). • The author names of English-language publications remain unaltered (for example, Lee, Chulwoo instead of Yi, Ch’o˘l-u). • The romanization of the names of Korean Chinese authors follows the language of the publication: they were romanized into Korean in Koreanlanguage publications, Chinese in Chinese-language publications (for example Ye, Tong-gu˘n, instead of Rui, Donggen when appearing in Korean ­publications). • If the author expresses an explicit preference for Ri, Rim, or Ryu for her or his surname to more conventional Yi, Im, or Yu (a common phenomenon among Korean Chinese authors), Ri, Rim, or Ryu was used (for example, Ri, Hyeso˘n, instead of Yi, Hye-so˘n).

279

  Bibliography table B.1. Abbreviations of the materials cited extensively in Chapter Three. Abbreviation

Chinese title

Korean title

YC ARR YM

延边青年 阿里郎 延边文学

Yo˘nbyo˘n ch’o˘ngnyo˘n Yanbian Youth Arirang Arirang Yo˘nbyo˘n munhak Yanbian Literature

English translation

Note Monthly magazine Monthly magazine Monthly magazine

YB 延边 Yo˘nbyo˘n Yanbian Monthly magazine CS 支部生活 Chibu saenghwal Local Chapter Life Bimonthly party periodical

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Index

Ae-sun (pseudonym), 210–11 American imperialism, 81, 99, 135 Anderson, Benedict, 15, 30, 58, 69–70, 83, 227, 240, 246nn9,12 Appadurai, Arjun, 227, 228, 246n11, 277n1 Argentina: Italian and Spanish immigrants in, 232, 240 Armstrong, Charles K., 139, 140, 151, 159, 257n9, 263n14 Barth, Aharon, 8 Basch, Linda, 227, 245n7 Bettinger, Christopher P., 38 Bhabha, Homi K., 235 Bilig, Michael, 257n12 biometric information, 17, 202, 223, 276n55; DNA tests, 201–2, 203–4, 223–24 Böcker, Anita, 224 border policing/control, 13, 17, 31, 42–49, 53–54, 67, 78, 86–87, 146, 154–55, 161, 162 Borneman, John, 271n19 Bourdieu, Pierre, on symbolic power, 12, 14–20, 123, 175, 206, 219, 222, 230, 232, 233, 234 Brecht, Bertolt, 124

Brenner, Neil, 277n3 Breton, Raymond, on institutional completeness, 83, 168 Breuilly, John, 30, 68 Brooks, Barbara, 51, 53, 255n59 Brubaker, Rogers, 12, 69, 82, 110, 126, 127, 169, 172, 221, 234, 246nn8,12,14, 247n24, 256n5, 269nn1,2, 277nn57,9 Bulag, Uradyn E., 151, 164, 170, 267n2, 268n57 Bulgarians, ethnic, 240 Bureaucratic practices, 13, 14–20, 27, 28, 42, 121, 123–24, 174, 175, 192, 212, 222, 230–31, 237, 243, 248n33, 269n59, 275n44. See also documentation practices; nation-state; symbolic power Cairncross, Frances C., 240 Calavita, Kitty, 210 Caplan, Jane, 248n30 Caprio, Mark E., 46, 78, 79, 251n26, 255n60 Cathcart, Adam, 134, 135, 262n39, 263nn10,11,14, 264nn19,20 Central Asia, 7 Central Europe, 7, 126, 129, 151, 169, 240



  Index chaeoe kungmin/chaeoe Han’gugin (“South Korean nationals abroad”), 94, 100, 121, 137, 176–77, 182–83, 188, 190, 263n16, 264n17 chaeoe tongp’o (“coethnics abroad”), 183, 188, 189, 227, 231, 272nn24,26, 273nn29,32. See also tongp’o. Cha-gyo˘ng (pseudonym), 110–11 Chang, Han-ch’o˘l, 141 Chang, Paul Y., 269n5, 273n30 Chaoxianzu, 138, 141, 149, 161, 167–68. See also China: ethnic minority policy; Korean Chinese Chapman, David, 39, 40, 247n17, 250n19 Cheju Island, 78, 81, 103, 109, 257n8, 259n26 Chen, Edward I-te, 250n17 Cheng, Tiejun, 143 Chibu saenghwal, 144–45, 163 China, geography: Heilongjiang Province, 152, 179, 264n21; Jilin Province, 152, 253n42; Liaoning Province, 152; Yunnan, 151. See also Manchuria; Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture China, interstate relations: premodern Qing court, 34, 50, 51–52, 55; relations with Japan, 12, 29, 33, 51–52, 53, 54, 56, 59, 89, 270n12; relations with North Korea, 4, 5, 90, 127, 128, 129, 132, 134–35, 136, 139–40, 141–42, 149–50, 155, 161–67, 168, 169, 170, 254n51, 264n19; relations with South Korea, 127, 133, 137, 168, 179, 180, 181, 191, 270n13; relations with Soviet Union, 140, 143, 155, 164, 169; relations with United States, 135–36, 177, 270n12. See also Korean War; Nationalist Party (Guomindang/GMD) China, policy: citizenship policy, 127–28, 131, 133–34, 140–41, 162, 163, 166–67, 181, 187, 212, 277n11; economic conditions/policy, 142–44, 147–48, 171, 172, 179, 184, 215, 265n25; education, 142–43, 145, 146, 148, 152–54, 165, 168, 265nn25,26, 266nn30,32, 267n47; Ethnic Classification Project, 137–38; ethnic

minority policy (minzu zhengce), 9, 21, 127–28, 130, 131–33, 136, 137–38, 149, 153–54, 164–165, 167–69; household registration system (hukou zhidu), 131, 133, 142–44, 146, 151, 157, 161, 162–63, 165, 184, 195, 198, 224, 245n5, 268nn54,55; marriage/divorce policies, 265n29, 276n53; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 129, 135, 140, 147, 150, 154. See also Korean Chinese; Zhonghua minzu China, politics and political system: Anti-Rightest Movement, 4, 128, 145, 149; civil war, 4, 5, 126, 132–34, 167, 263nn10,15; class labels in, 153, 154, 267nn46,47; Communist Party (CCP), 4, 5, 20, 75, 126, 127–28, 130, 131–32, 134–35, 137, 142–43, 144–45, 148–50, 149–50, 152–55, 161, 163, 165, 167, 168, 245n5, 254n51, 256n5, 258n17, 262n9, 263nn12,14, 265nn25,29, 266n30, 268n56; Cultural Revolution, 5, 128, 146, 161–62, 163–66, 168, 195, 242, 268n53; Great Famine, 128, 145, 148, 150–51, 155, 163; Great Leap Forward, 145, 148, 150, 158, 258n17, 266n31; People’s Commune System, 147–49, 184, 266nn31,41; People’s Volunteer Army, 135, 139, 140, 142, 145; Public Security Bureau, 195, 198, 203; rustication program, 165, 268n55; Socialist High Tide campaign, 265n25; Three-Anti and Five-Anti Movements, 136 Chin-su (pseudonym), 84 Chin-t’ae (pseudonym), 1–4, 6, 10, 13, 14, 81, 103, 123, 238, 245nn2,3 Chi to hone (Blood and bones), 258n18 Cho, Kyo˘ng-hu˘i, 78, 259n28 Cho, Yo˘l, 61 Choate, Mark I., 71, 255n60 Ch’oe, Cho˘ng-yo˘n: Kwihwanbyo˘ng (A returned soldier), 145, 265n29 Choguk (“fatherland”), 104, 134, 149, 165, 176, 186, 235 Choi, Deokhyo, 79 Cho˘n, Min-hu˘i, 143

Index   Cho˘ng, Chin-so˘ng, 43 Cho˘ng, Chong-hyo˘n, 58 Cho˘ng, Hyo˘n-su, 132, 139, 141, 262n3, 264n22, 265nn24,26,27 Cho˘ng, In-so˘p, 188 Cho˘ng, P’al-lyong, 152, 185 Ch’ongnyo˘n/Sōren (Association of Korean Residents in Japan), 23, 88, 91, 94, 97, 102, 104–5, 106–7, 109–11, 113, 115, 120, 121–22, 137, 168, 178, 236, 257n13, 258n23, 261n49, 270n11; Choso˘n Sinbo, 81, 83, 99, 100, 110, 259n32; Choso˘n University, 123; fatherland trips, 1, 122–23; ideology of “eventual return,” 84–85; and Korean language skills, 21, 22, 83, 257n10; membership in, 116, 117, 238, 261n46; relations with Japanese government, 80, 87, 89–90, 96, 99, 100–101, 116; relations with South Korean government, 80, 87, 89–91, 92–93, 97, 99–100, 103–8, 110–14, 116, 172, 238–39; and Repatriation Campaign, 89–90, 92–93, 97, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127, 151, 258n18, 261n49; schools, 22, 81–82, 83, 84, 93, 107, 108, 115, 119, 121, 122–23, 168, 242, 257n11, 261nn40,46 Cho˘ngu˘ibu, 56 Chōren (League of Resident Koreans in Japan), 79, 131 Chōsenjin Minkai (Korean Association), 54–55, 56, 61, 62, 64–65, 253n44. See also Manchuria; Manchukuo Choso˘n/Chōsen, 38, 76, 94, 113, 133, 232, 258n21 Choso˘n court, precolonial, 35–37, 50–51 Choso˘nin/Chōsenjin, 68, 69, 77, 96, 118, 134, 167, 231, 254n57 Choso˘n Sinbo, 81, 83, 99, 100, 110, 259n32 Chosun Ilbo, 180–81, 186 Chow, Kai-wing, 34 Chu, Julie Y., 18, 274n39, 276n50 Chun, Doo-hwan, 177 Chung, Byung-Ho, 122, 158, 247n20, 257n11, 269n59 Chungguk Choso˘njok Kyoyuksa P’yo˘nch’anwi, 138

Chung-mun (pseudonym), 217–18 citizenship: in China, 127–28, 131, 134, 140, 140–41, 162, 163, 166–67, 176, 181, 187, 212, 277n11; dual citizenship, 277n11; emigrant citizenship, 7–8; EU citizenship, 240; expatriate citizenship, 7–8; imperial citizenship, 256n63; and inequality, 277n12; in Japan, 24, 75, 131, 187; lightening of, 124; meaning, 246n13; in North Korea, 116, 133, 140–41, 156, 157, 166–67; passport citizenship, 240; in South Korea, 6, 77, 174, 178, 181–82, 184, 186–87, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193–94, 200, 202–3, 205–6, 209, 210, 212–13, 214, 217–18, 220, 235, 236, 239–40, 262n50, 273n33, 277n11; transnational/transborder citizenship, 7–8, 246n11 Clifford, James, 246n11 “coethnics abroad” (chaeoe tongp’o), 183, 188, 189, 227, 231, 272nn24,26, 273nn29,32 Cohen, Robin, 30 Colonization Companies, 64 Concordia Association, 61 Confucianism, 185, 250n18 Connor, Walker, 149, 247n23, 277n4 Constantine, Stephen, 71 consular practices: of Japan, 6, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 67, 252n40, 253nn41,43, 255n59; of North Korea, 93; of South Korea, 95, 100, 105, 107, 108, 111, 116, 121, 181, 182–83, 188, 189, 195, 199, 200, 202, 207, 223, 231, 238–39, 275n42; of United States, 275n42 Cook-Martín, David, 232, 269n4, 274n46, 277n13 Coutin, Susan Bibler, 198 cross-border migration between North Korea and China, 127, 128–30, 133–34, 144, 146–47, 267n43; reception and resettlement of migrants in North Korea, 4–5, 140, 150–60, 169, 170–71, 242–43; return of migrants to China, 5, 129, 156, 158, 160, 161–67, 171, 242–43, 267n52, 268n53

  Index Cumings, Bruce, 79, 132, 247n20, 251n29, 257nn8,9, 262n3

Dudden, Alexis, 34 Durand, Jorge, 172, 225, 247n15

decolonization, 73–74, 126; of Japan, 3, 4, 13, 75, 78, 118, 167 de la Dehesa, Rafael, 246n10 Dery, David, on papereality, 2, 16, 175, 215, 222–23 Desrosières, Alain, 138 Diamant, Neil J., 247n29, 265n29 diasporas, 8, 14, 74, 227, 228, 234, 237; Korean diaspora, 182, , 272n25; Korean diasporic nationhood, 26, 29–30, 31–33, 67–72, 248n3 Dikötter, Frank, 34, 148, 150, 170, 242, 262n5 DNA tests, 201–2, 203–4, 223–24 Doak, Kevin M., 34, 254n53 documentation practices, 6–7, 42–46, 66–67, 98–99, 123–25, 212, 217, 253nn41,44, 255n59; counterfeit ­documents, 16, 17, 47, 48, 185, 197–99, 203–4, 220, 222–23, 225, 237, 274nn37,38; documentation of identities, 13, 44, 69, 70, 121, 124–25, 157, 170, 175, 202, 206, 220, 222, 223–24, 233, 234, 269n59, 274n37, 276n48; invitation letters, 6, 14, 179, 180, 192, 204, 271n17; in North Korea, 111, 116–17, 140, 160, 170; and “papereality,” 2, 16, 175, 215, 222–23; in South Korea, 2–4, 6, 14, 27, 103, 105–6, 107–8, 118, 121, 122, 137, 175, 176, 178, 180, 181, 187, 190, 193–95, 198, 200–201, 204, 205, 222–24, 225, 235, 236–37, 272n22, 273n32, 274n37, 276n48; and symbolic power, 12, 14–20, 123, 175, 206, 219, 222, 230, 232, 233, 234. See also bureaucratic practices; family registration system; Foreigners’ Registry; passports; travel permits; visas Dreyer, June, 164 Duara, Prasenjit, 59 Dubler, Ariela R., 206 DuBois, Thomas D., 61

Eastern Europe, 7, 126, 129, 151, 169, 240 East Germany, 74, 127, 151, 256n5, 271n19 Efird, Robert A., 187 Elkins, Caroline, 70 Elliott, Mark C., 50 Endō, Masataka, 40, 60, 254n54, 255n59 Eng, Kuah Khun, 146 Esselstrom, Erik, 53, 55, 253n43 ethnic nationalism: and kinship metaphors, 234–35, Korean ethnic nationalism, 9, 11, 29, 30, 33, 37, 57, 134, 174, 234–38, 254n51; role in transborder membership politics, 11, 28, 234–38. See also nationalism European colonialism, 30–31, 40 Evans, Grant, 146 Ewick, Patricia, 16, 212 Faist, Thomas, 245n7, 246n9, 277n1 family registration system: colonial-era (koseki/hojo˘k), 37–42, 44, 48, 54, 64–65, 67, 118, 194–95, 231, 235, 250nn18,19,22,23, 251nn27,28,30, 254n55, 262n7; honseki/ponjo˘k (“place of origin”), 39, 40–41, 64, 107, 250n21; ie (family), 38–39, 41, 250nn18,20; in Japan, 79, 96, 131; in South Korea, 97, 107, 187, 190, 191, 193, 196, 197, 198, 200, 222; women’s names, 249n14, 250n23. See also family relationships family relationships, 184–85, 189–91; ancestor worship, 106–7, 261n39; Korean Chinese homecoming trips to South Korea, 179–80, 192, 271n18; family genealogy documents, 5–6, 14, 106, 200; patrilineality, 31, 106, 186, 191, 235, 251n26, 261n39, 272n27, 275n41; proverbial family metaphor, 189, 204, 234–35; South Korean family-based immigration policies, 174–75, 204–22; Zainichi Korean homecoming trips to South Korea, 97, 101, 103–4, 259n26,

Index   270n11. See also family registration system; marriage Far East Broadcasting Corporation (FEBC), 270n15 financial crisis of 1998, 188 Fitzgerald, David, 233, 245n6, 246n10, 248n31 Ford, Christopher A., 247n25 Foreigners’ Registry, 14, 76, 86, 90, 122, 125, 176, 261n46; Chōsen designation, 87, 94–96, 97, 98, 100, 103, 105, 107, 108–10, 111, 115–16, 117–18, 120, 121, 124–25, 167, 176–77, 178, 238, 239, 245n3, 259n32, 262n50, 271n19; Foreigners’ Registration Act, 78–79, 86, 87, 94; Kankoku designation, 94, 95–96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105, 108–10, 111, 114, 115, 116, 120, 121, 124, 178, 239, 259n32, 271n19 Forty Years of History of the Korean Immigration Service, The, 185 Foucault, Michel, 14, 15, 119, 230 Fox, Jonathan, 246n10 France: Algerian migration to, 71 Freeman, Caren, 199, 201, 205, 212, 216, 269n8, 270n9, 274nn37,38, 275nn46,52, 277nn56,5 Fujitani, Takashi, 42, 45, 46, 58, 249n11, 251n29, 252n34, 255n60 Fukuda, Tokuzō, 47 Gabaccia, Donna R., 228 Gaddis, John L., 126 Gao, James Z., 135 Gellner, Ernest, 250n20 gender, 215, 224, 242, 243, 251n27, 252n34, 275n46; matrilineality, 273n29; patrilineality, 31, 106, 186, 191, 235, 251n26, 261n39, 272n27, 275n41; women’s names, 249n14, 250n23 Germans, ethnic, 7, 247n24, 256n5, 269n6 GGK. See Government General of Korea Giddens, Anthony: on container model of society, 19

Glick Schiller, Nina, 9, 128, 227, 245n7, 248n3 globalization, 14, 16, 28, 124–25, 171, 172, 183, 227–29, 240, 256n63, 260n35, 277nn3,10; relationship to nation-state, 227–28, 232; Global Korea, 184, 239–40; global mobility, 24, 125, 225, 239–40 Gluck, Carol, 39 GMD. See Nationalist Party (Guomindang/GMD) Go, Julian, 72 Goffman, Erving: Goffmanian paradox, 18, 202; on identity tags, 17, 18–19, 202, 222 Gottschang, Thomas, 29, 59 Government General of Korea (GGK), 46–47, 49, 51, 53, 54, 58, 61, 252n34, 252n40, 254n56, 255n63; and Home Ministry of Japan, 43, 45, 47; and Manchukuo, 64, 65 Great Britain, Indian migration to, 71; Indian colonial government, 255n63 group (collective) identity vs. individual identification, 11–12, 174, 221–22 Guang, Liu, 266n32 guanxi, 196 guomin, 34. See also kokumin; kungmin Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo, 102 Guidelines for Handling the Citizenship of the Korean Chinese, The, 182, 186–88, 191, 200, 273n33 Hacking, Ian, 15 Haeoe Kyop’o Yo˘n’guso (The Research Institute on Overseas Koreans), 270n14 Hamamatsu detention center, 86 Han, Ch’ang-un, 254n52 Han Chinese (Hanzu), 50, 53, 59–60, 63, 66, 132, 134, 149, 161, 163, 165, 168, 253n49, 263n10, 268nn53,58, 273n30. See also Zhonghua minzu Han, Hongkoo, 262n9 Han, Suk-Jung, 59, 60, 61, 253n48 Han, To˘k-su, 80, 257n10

  Index Han’gugin (“South Korean nationals”), 177–78, 231, 270n14. See also chaeoe kungmin/chaeoe Han’gugin (“South Korean nationals abroad”). Han’guk sinmin, 252 Han’guk Sinmun, 261n41 Han’gungmal, 21, 22–23. See also Korean language Han-ik (pseudonym), 86, 88–89, 92, 99 Han-jun (pseudonym), 214–15, 220 Hankook Ilbo, 177–78 Harpaz, Yossi, 124, 239, 240, 277n11; on passport citizenship, 240 Harper, Marjory, 71 Hawaii: ethnic Koreans in, 246n15, 252n32 Heaton, William, 164 Hirsch, Francine, 264n18 Hirschman, Albert O., 55 Hobsbawm, Eric J., 38, 247n23, 277n4 Hoerder, Dirk, 228 Hong, Il-p’yo, 58, 254n57 Hong Kong, Chinese refugee flow to, 130, 151, 170 honseki/ponjo˘k (“place of origin”), 39, 40–41, 64, 107, 250n21. See also family registration system Hu, Songhu, 153, 268n55 huaqiao, 272n23; Huaqiao Huaren, 239. See also Zhonghua minzu Hui, 132, 253n49 Hungarians, ethnic, 7, 82, 240 Hutton, Chris, 146 Hwa-ji (pseudonym), 108, 110 Hwang, Kyung Moon, 35, 36, 41, 249n16, 250n22, 251n28 Hwangso˘ng Sinmun, 37 Hyer, Paul, 164 Hyo˘n, In-ae, 166 Hyo˘n-dong (pseudonym), 92 identity tags, 17–19, 202, 222, 223–24. See also Goffman, Erving ideology of “eventual return,” 84–85. See also Ch’ongnyo˘n/Sōren (Association of Korean Residents in Japan)

ie (family), 38–39, 41, 250nn18,20. See also family registration system Infiltrator Affair, 164. See also China, politics and political system In-jung (pseudonym), 146, 152, 157, 158, 161, 162, 165 Inner Mongolia, 151, 169, 268n57 Inokuchi, Hiromitsu, 79 In-suk (pseudonym), 220–21 International Red Cross, 89, 90, 91, 122, 177, 180 invitation letters, 6, 14, 179, 180, 192, 204, 271n17 Israel, 240, 247n24, 269n6 Jacka, Tamara, 215 Jackson, Robert, 256n7; on empirical statehood vs. juridical statehood, 77, 256n7 Jacobson, David, 277n1 Janelli, Roger L., 106 Japan: Meiji era, 34, 38–39, 250n20; Civil Code, 40, 251n24; state building in, 33–34. Japan, postcolonial: citizenship policy, 24, 75, 131, 187; during Cold War, 3, 22, 77–78, 167, 232; decolonization of, 3, 4, 13, 75, 78, 118, 167; Livelihood Protection Payment program, 91–92; Ministry of Health and Welfare, 91–92; Ministry of Justice, 96, 100–101, 259n32; Osaka, Ikaino, 111, 112, 113; Permanent Residence by Treaty, 76, 98–101, 102, 108, 112, 113, 120, 121, 259n29; relations with China, 89, 270n12; relations with North Korea, 76, 85, 89–90, 115, 117, 120–21, 122, 258n23; relations with South Korea, 76, 85, 87, 88, 95, 96–98, 99–100, 102, 105, 120, 126–27, 259nn29,33; relations with United States, 79, 89, 258n16. See also Foreigners’ Registry; Japanese colonialism; Japanese Empire; Koreans in Japan Japanese colonialism, 51–52, 57–58, 183, 229, 230, 231–32, 233, 246n15,

Index   252n32, 255n60; classification practices regarding Korean subjects, 27, 30, 31–33, 37–42, 44, 48–49, 51, 54, 60–61, 62–67, 68–69, 70, 86, 94, 96, 108, 118, 133, 167; Coordination Law, 41, 251n27; economic conditions, 43–44; and education of Koreans, 252n34; vs. European colonialism, 30–31, 40; Korean customs under, 40, 251n24; and Korean diasporic nationhood, 30, 31–33, 67–72, 248n3; legacies of, 2, 8–9, 13, 25–26, 28, 29, 31, 68, 70, 73–74, 96, 118, 167, 188, 231–32, 235, 255n59, 256n63, 259n34; migration control policies, 42–49, 252n33; migration of Koreans to Japan, 1–4, 6, 7, 8–9, 10, 25, 29, 31, 32, 38, 42–49, 52, 53–54, 55, 67–72, 74, 77, 86, 87, 88, 96–97, 98, 99, 119, 120–21, 256n8; migration of Koreans to Manchuria, 4, 5, 7, 8–9, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 49–72, 74, 138, 188, 194, 243, 253n41, 254n55; names of Koreans under, 40, 250n23, 251n26; policies of assimilation, 31, 48, 249nn11,12, 251n26, 254n57; postearthquake riot of 1923, 44. See also family registration system; Government General of Korea; Japanese Empire Japanese Empire: collapse of, 5, 8, 13, 24, 25, 66–67, 73–74, 85, 152, 187, 246n15, 252n36, 264n17; expansion of, 2, 13, 29, 31–32, 34, 62, 70–71; Home Ministry, 43, 45, 47; Korea as Cho˘sen, 2, 38; Kwantung Army, 254n56; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 51, 254n56; Ministry of Police Affairs, 251n26; relations with China, 12, 29, 33, 51–52, 53, 54, 56, 59; relations with Russia, 33; six regions of, 37–38, 249n17. See also Japanese colonialism Japanese language, 21, 33–34, 254n57; Koreans’ fluency in, 42, 95, 252n34, 257n13 Jaworsky, B. Nadya, 246n10 Jia, Yu, 78, 79

Joppke, Christian, 124, 172, 240, 246n13, 247n24, 256n2, 269nn1-3,6, 277nn8,9; on “lightening of citizenship,” 124 jus sanguinis principle, 11, 272n27 jus soli principle, 11 Kaebyo˘k, 253n46 Kafka, Franz, 16 Kakure Chōsenjin, 109 Kang, In-ch’o˘l, 132 Kang, Sang-jung, 257n8 Kang, So˘n-yo˘ng, 185 Kang, Tong-guk, 37 Kang, Wi-wo˘n, 131 Kashiwazaki, Chikako, 78, 248n35, 258n23 Kawashima, Ken C., 47, 108, 252n38 Kazakhstan, 151, 170 Khrushchev, Nikita, 164 Kil, In-so˘ng, 43 Kil, Kap-su, 254n52 Killim Sinmun, 264n21 Kil-yong (pseudonym), 4–5, 10, 13, 14, 129, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 160, 161–62, 163, 165 Kim, Bumsoo, 98 Kim, Ch’ang-so˘k, 185, 187 Kim, Cheehyung, 151, 158, 267n49 Kim, Chong-guk, 138 Kim, Cho˘ng-gyu, 277n11 Kim, Chung-saeng, 133, 262n3, 264n23 Kim, Doo-Sub, 74 Kim, Eugine C. I., 44 Kim, Hak-ch’o˘l, 266n31; Po˘nyo˘ng (Prosperity), 143–44, 153 Kim, Hwa-so˘n, 271n17, 275n45 Kim, Hyo˘ng-mok, 252n34 Kim, Il-sung, 1, 4, 5, 80, 82, 83, 123, 134, 139, 155, 157, 159, 257n11, 263n14 Kim, Jackie, 109, 257n8 Kim, Kang-il, 185 Kim, Kap-tong, 137, 182, 187, 271n22 Kim, Kihoon, 53, 64 Kim, Ku˘n-t’ae, 35 Kim, Kwang-o˘k, 177 Kim, Kwang-yo˘l, 44, 45, 47, 252n33 Kim, Kyo˘ng-gu˘n, 227

  Index Kim, Kyo˘ng-nan, 35, 249n14 Kim, Kyu Hyun, 34 Kim, Man-so˘n: “Ijung kukcho˘k” (Dual nationality), 58–59, 66–67; “Kwigukcha” (Repatriates), 66 Kim, Marie Seong-Hak, 39, 40, 251n24 Kim, Michael, 65, 251n27, 254n55 Kim, Mi-ran, 267n47 Kim, Monica, 88 Kim, Myo˘ng-jun, 257n11 Kim, Pyo˘ng-ho, 132, 133, 262n9 Kim, Richard S., 70, 246n15, 247n21, 253n45 Kim, Seonmin, 50 Kim, Su-gi, 109–10 Kim, Sun-hu˘i, 215 Kim, T’ae-gi, 97 Kim, T’ae-guk, 52, 55, 56, 253nn40–42,44 Kim, Tae-so˘, 61, 139 Kim, U˘n-sil, 216 Kim, Yo˘ng-dal, 40 Kim, Yong-hyo˘n, 159 Kim, Yong-p’il, 204, 213 kinship, 192–95, 197, 200, 205, 211–12, 222, 234–38, 269n8; matrilineality, 273n29; patrilineality, 31, 106, 186, 191, 235, 251n26, 261n39, 272n27, 275n41. See also ethnic nationalism; family registration system; family relationships; marriage Kivisto, Peter, 277n1 kokumin, 34, 37, 49, 68. See also guomin; kungmin Korean Chinese, 4–6, 8–9, 22–24, 26, 74, 246n15, 262n9, 263nn10–12,14, 264n21, 273n30; Chinese government policies regarding, 10–11, 22, 27, 49–50, 51, 52, 53, 55–56, 58, 61, 119, 125, 127–28, 130, 131–33, 134–35, 136, 137–38, 142–46, 149–50, 154–55, 161–67, 168, 169, 181, 187, 199–200, 212, 232, 239, 253nn41,42, 262n9, 273n30; homecoming trips by, 179–80, 192, 271n18; during Korean War, 128, 134–36, 140, 165, 167, 258n17, 263n15, 264nn22,23, 267n43; “Korean

Wind” (Choso˘n Param), 155; “Korean Wind” (Han’guk Param), 171, 197; and migration brokers, 176, 197–98, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 225, 226, 243, 274n38; migration to South Korea as ethnic (return) migration, 4–5, 18–19, 21, 23–24, 25, 27–28, 73, 119, 172–76, 180–204, 225–26, 229–30, 232, 269n8; northerners vs. southerners among, 64, 178–79, 194, 196, 205, 243, 267n43; North Korean policies regarding, 9–11, 27, 127, 128, 129, 130, 138–42, 146, 150–60, 166–67, 168–69, 170–71, 172, 194, 224, 229–30, 233, 242–43, 258n17, 264n21, 267n43; South Korean policies regarding, 6, 9–11, 23–24, 27–28, 127, 129, 136–37, 171, 172, 173–79, 180, 181–226, 230, 233–34, 235, 236–37, 263n16, 264n17, 269n8, 270nn11,13,15, 271nn20–22, 273n32, 273n33, 277nn7,11. See also cross-border migration between North Korea and China; Manchuria; Manchukuo Korean Educational Ordinance of 1938, 65 Korean ethnic nationalism, 9, 11, 29, 30, 33, 37, 57, 134, 174, 234–38, 254n51 Korean language, 21–22, 83, 257n13; as Han’gungmal, 21, 22–23; in schools, 65, 79, 82–83, 131, 138, 149; as “urimal,” 22; as Yo˘nbyo˘nmal, 22 Korean Liaison Mission, 95, 96, 97 Korean People’s Army, 134–35, 140–41, 165, 264nn22,23 Koreans in Japan/Zainichi Korean, 1–4, 6, 7, 8–9, 21–22, 23, 24–25, 29, 31, 32, 38, 42–49, 52, 53–54, 55, 57, 64, 67–72, 157–58, 160, 229, 242, 259n26, 262n50, 263n16, 272n23; homecoming trips to South Korea, 97, 101, 103–4, 259n26, 270n11; Japanese policies regarding, 9, 10–11, 21, 27, 30, 51, 54–56, 60–61, 62–63, 64, 65, 68–69, 75, 76–77, 78–79, 82, 84, 85–88, 89, 90–92, 94, 95–96, 97, 98–101, 102, 108, 112, 113, 115–16, 117, 118, 120,

Index   121, 122, 127, 131, 167, 168, 171, 233, 256n8, 259n29, 261n44; North Korean policies regarding, 9–11, 26, 27, 74, 75–94, 95, 97, 114, 116–17, 118–19, 120, 121, 124–25, 129, 140, 151, 166, 168, 171, 172, 229–30, 232–33, 258n18, 261n49; South Korean policies regarding, 2–4, 9–11, 26–27, 74, 75–77, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92–93, 94–108, 109–10, 114, 116, 118–21, 136, 137, 172, 176–77, 178, 188, 189, 233, 235, 236, 238–39, 240, 245n2, 259nn27,29,30,33, 260n35, 261n46, 263n16, 270n11. See also Ch’ongnyo˘n/ Sōren (Association of Korean Residents in Japan); Foreigner’s Registry; Mindan (Korean Residents Union in Japan) Korean Volunteer Army, 132 Korean War, 74, 75, 76, 78, 88, 133, 139, 235–36, 259n28, 260n36, 263n14; Korean Chinese during, 128, 134–36, 140, 165, 167, 258n17, 263n15, 264nn22,23, 267n43; orphans from, 151, 160, 266n42; veterans of, 140, 142–46, 165, 258n17, 264nn22,23, 265nn26,27,29 Kraus, Charles, 135, 262n3, 263n14, 264nn19,20 Ku, Agnes S., 170 Kukmin Ilbo, 197, 202 Ku˘m-nan (pseudonym), 214–15, 218, 219, 220 Ku˘m-san (pseudonym), 160 kungmin, 34, 37, 57, 68, 77, 263n16. See also guomin; kokumin Kwang-hyo˘n (pseudonym), 202–3 Kwantung Army, 254n56 Kwihwanbyo˘ng (A returned soldier), 145, 265n29 Kwi-suk (pseudonym), 81 Kwon, Heonik, 106, 122, 158, 247n20, 257n11, 260n36, 269n59, 277n6 Kwon, June Hee, 276n51 Kwo˘n, Podu˘rae, 34, 37, 249n13 Kwo˘n, Su-dal, 93 Kwo˘n, T’ae-san, 54

Kwo˘n Hyo˘k-t’ae, 114, 126, 259n34 Kymlicka, Will, 277n1 kyomin, 183, 272n23 kyop’o, 136, 183, 264n17, 270n14, 272n23 Kyunghyang Sinmun, 239 Lampton, David M., 155 Lange, Matthew, 255n63 Lary, Diana, 29, 59, 130, 142, 150, 262n5 League for Choso˘n International Students in Japan, 84 League of Nations, 59 Ledyard, Gari, 35 Lee, Catherine, 174 Lee, Chulwoo, 234, 272n26, 273n28, 277n7 Lee, Hyun-Jeong, 57 Levitt, Peggy, 246n10 Lie, John, 25, 70, 78, 109, 247nn17,21,22, 248n2, 258n19; on ideology of “eventual return,” 84–85; on peoplehood, 30, 248n4 Lieberthal, Kenneth G., 155 Liu, Guofu, 170 Liu, Lydia H., 34 Lo, Ming-Cheng M., 38 Logan, John R., 152 Loveman, Mara, 15, 16, 18, 247n26 Lüthi, Lorenz M., 140 Lynn, Hyung Gu, 53, 63 Macedonia: ethnic Bulgarians in, 240 MacFarquhar, Roderick, 147 Macklin, Audrey, 277n12 Maeil Sinbo, 47, 64, 65, 252n35 Mahoney, James, 255n63 Malkki, Liisa H., 17 Manchukuo, 58–67, 132, 232, 233, 253n49, 254nn52–56, 263n10, 268n57; establishment of, 32, 58–60; ethnic classification system in, 60–63; Han Chinese in 63, 66, 132, 253n49; Japanese migrants in, 60, 61, 62, 63, 253n49, 262n7; policies regarding Koreans, 60–61, 62–63, 64–66; relationship to Japanese Empire, 59, 254n51;

  Index Manchukuo (continued ) state building in, 59, 60–61, 62, 65, 253n48 Manchuria: before 1931, 32, 49–58, 67; Chinese Communist policies in, 132, 254n51, 262n9; colonial-era migration of Koreans to, 4, 5, 7, 8–9, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 49–72, 74, 138, 188, 194, 243, 253n41, 254n55; Dunhua, 4; Han Chinese in, 50, 53, 59–60, 263n10; Kando, 51, 64, 252n40; Korean Communist Party, 262n9; Longjing, 252n39; Qing policies in, 50, 51–52, 55; Republican policies in, 55–56; Soviet occupation, 5, 132; Taiwanese in, 254n54. See also Korean Chinese; Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture Mann, Michael, 16, 31, 75, 247n27 Manso˘n Ilbo (Manchuria–Korean Daily), 254nn52,55 Mao Zedong, 134, 155, 164, 268n56 March First Uprising (1919), 44, 52–53 marriage, 106, 198, 276n49; form vs. substance in, 206–10, 223; marriage brokers, 206, 208, 209, 216, 217; principle of exogamy, 106, 261n39; sham marriages, 204, 205–6, 209, 210, 212–13, 214–15, 216–21, 224, 275nn42,45, 276n53; South Korean policies regarding, 184, 192, 202–3, 204–21, 222, 223, 245n2, 269n8, 274n37, 275nn41,43,44, 276n48; taboos against interethnic marriage, 84, 106. See also family registration system; family relationships Massey, Douglas S., 225, 247n15 Mateos, Pablo, 172, 225 Mathias, Jeremy, 194, 250n19 matrilineality, 273n29 Matsuda, Matt K.: on “memory of the state,” 15, 18, 175, 222, 231 McCormack, Gavan, 53 methodology, 20–25, 241–43; archival data, 20, 241–42; ethnographic data, 20–21, 242–43, 245n1 Mexico, 7; ethnic Koreans in, 246n15, 252n32

Meyer, John, 248n33 Migdal, Joel S., 97, 256n3 Min, Ka-yo˘ng, 216 Mindan (Korean Residents Union in Japan), 98, 105, 109, 110–11, 112, 116, 122, 188, 259n29; homecoming trips organized by, 101, 103–4, 270n11; relationship to South Korea, 96, 97, 100, 107–8, 114, 120–21 minjok, 34, 37, 49, 51, 57, 68, 69, 77, 95, 138, 254n57. See also minzoku; minzu Minjung Sibo, 46 minzoku, 34, 68, See also minjok; minzu minzu, 34, 128, 133, 137, 138, 149, 167. See also minjok; minzoku; minzu zhengce minzu zhengce (ethnic minority policy), 9, 21, 127–28, 130, 131–33, 136, 137–38, 149, 153–54, 164–165, 167–69. Mironenko, Dmitry, 267n50 Mitchell, Timothy, 123 Mitsuya Agreement, 53 Miyata, Setsuko, 40 Mizuno, Naoki, 40, 46, 250n22, 251nn23,26 Moguk (motherland), 193, 227, 228, 235 Mong, Cho˘ng-saeng, 254n52 Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR), 151, 164, 169–70, 268n57 Mongols, 61, 132, 164, 169–70, 253n49 Morita, Yoshio, 257n8 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 247n21, 258nn16,17 Mortimore, Doretha E., 44 Mullaney, Thomas S., 34, 138, 146, 167, 247n22, 254n50, 263n10 Münz, Rainer, 172 Nam, Ku˘n-u, 158, 159, 160, 166, 267n51 Na-mi (pseudonym), 204, 205 nation, translation of. See guomin; kokumin; kungmin; minjok; minzoku; minzu nationalism, 8, 14, 126, 227–28, 232; banal nationalism, 257n12; and preferential immigration policies for coethnics, 237; primordialist vs. instrumentalist

Index   view on, 274n40. See also ethnic nationalism; Korean ethnic nationalism; nation-states Nationalist Party (Guomindang/GMD): civil war with Communists, 4, 132–34, 167, 263nn10,15; Republican regime, 34, 53–54, 55–56, 59, 254n52 nation-states: bureaucratic practices, 13, 14–20, 27, 28, 42, 121, 123–24, 174, 175, 192, 212, 222, 230–31, 237, 243, 248n33, 269n59, 275n44; congruence of territory, citizenry and nation, 7, 28; culturalist/cognitive approach to, 10, 14, 16, 230; identification documents, 15–18, 19–20, 28, 42–46; internal others vs. external members, 7; loyalty to, 6, 7, 10, 17, 34, 52, 74, 80, 120, 124, 134, 150, 165, 166, 170, 227, 229, 240, 252n36; recognition by and cooperation of other states, 19, 27, 28, 77–78, 122–24, 228, 232–33; relationship to globalization, 227–28, 232. See also citizenship; documentation practices; nationalism; state building; state of origin Navaro-Yashin, Yael, 123 New Household Registration System (Siksik Hojo˘k), 35–36, 249nn14,16, 250n23 Nishinarita, Yutaka, 43 Nixon, Richard, 177 No, Yo˘ng-don, 187 Noiriel, Gérard, 15, 16, 250n19 Nonini, Donald, 246n11 North Korea: Chollima Movement, 158; as Choso˘n/Chōsen, 22, 87, 95, 103, 105–6, 110, 116, 117, 133, 141, 168, 176; citizenship policy, 116, 133, 140–41, 156, 157, 166–67; economic conditions, 90, 139, 151, 155, 158, 159–60, 169, 178, 184, 248n36, 258n17, 260nn37,38, 261n49, 271n17; education policy, 152–53, 156, 158–59; Five-Household Responsibility System, 267n51; Hoeryong, 267n48; Kimch’aek, 160; Kim Il-sung, 1, 4, 5, 80, 82, 83, 123, 134, 139, 155, 157, 159,

257n11, 263n14; Kim Il-sung University, 164; Korean Labor Party (KLP), 144–45, 156; legal system, 261n44; as modern theater state, 269n59; Nam­ yang, 4, 154; Pyongyang, 141, 158, 164, 267n50; Pyongyang standard Korean language, 83, 257n13; relations with China, 4, 5, 90, 127, 128, 129, 132, 134–35, 136, 139–40, 149–50, 155, 161–67, 168, 169, 170, 254n51, 264n19; relations with Japan, 76, 85, 89–90, 115, 117, 120–21, 122, 258n23; relations with South Korea, 74–75, 80, 85, 94, 139, 235–36, 270n11; relations with United States, 79–80, 81, 99, 135; Repatriation Campaign, 89–93, 97, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127, 151, 258n18, 261n49; residential registration system, 166; state building in, 10, 13–14, 26, 74, 76, 77, 81, 83, 84–85, 89, 101, 111–12, 118–19, 120, 121, 124–25, 129, 168, 256n7, 267n50; Wonsan, 4. See also Korean War Nyírí, Pál, 256n5, 272n25 O, Ch’ang-hyo˘n, 41, 250n23, 251n30 O, To˘ng-nyo˘l, 151 Oegyo Anbo Yo˘n’guso (Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security), 183 Oguma, Eiji, 34, 78, 247n22, 249n11, 257n8 Ohliger, Rainer, 172 Okinawa 249n17 Okinawans, 78 Ok-sun (pseudonym), 198 Olivier, Bernard V., 262n8 Ōmura detention center, 85, 86, 87–89 Ong, Aihwa, 246n11 Osaka, Ikaino, 111, 112, 113 pachinko business, 92, 258n19 Pacific War, 45, 65, 252n36, 263n15 Painter, Joe, 17 Pak, Keu˘m-hae, 65 Pak, Kyung-shik, 241 Pak, Myo˘ng-gyu, 250n21

  Index Pak, Tong-nyul, 206 Palais, James B., 31 Pan-Asianism, 59 Park, Alyssa, 36 Park, Chung Hee, 99, 177, 259n33 Park, Heh-Rahn, 177 Park, Hyun Ok, 51, 52, 61, 64, 247n21 Park, Jung-sun, 269n5, 273n30 Park, Saeyoung, 104 passports, 14, 17, 24, 44, 70, 76, 140, 252n32; of China, 181; of MPR, 170; of North Korea, 111, 116–17; passport citizenship, 217, 239–40; of South Korea, 2–4, 6, 77, 97, 104, 107, 111, 114, 117, 121, 124, 197, 198, 205, 212, 217; of TRNC, 123 patrilineality, 31, 106, 186, 191, 235, 251n26, 261n39, 272n27, 275n41 Patterson, Wayne, 36, 246n15, 252n32 Pedersen, Susan, 70 Pelzel, John C., 38, 39, 250n18 Pepper, Suzanne, 148, 268n55 Permanent Residence by Treaty, 76, 98–101, 102, 108, 112, 113, 120, 121, 259n29 Plan for the Mutual Exchange with, and Support for, Koreans in China, 183 Pogonyi, Szabolcs, 277nn3,9 Pok-sun (pseudonym), 104–5 Potsdam Agreement, 262n7 Primordialist defense of instrumentalism, 203–4, 223, 274n40 Pusan, 3, 42–43, 48, 88, 252n37; Citizens’ Rally, 46–47 Qing court, 34, 50, 51–52, 55 remittances, 7, 23, 103, 120, 218, 219, 220, 276n51 Repatriation Campaign, 89–93, 97, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127, 151, 258n18, 261n49 Rhee, Syngman, 89, 92, 259n33 Ri, Hye-so˘n: Ppalgan ku˘rimja (Red shadow), 133, 165 Ri, Ki-hu˘i, 267n48

Ri, So˘n-hu˘i, 215 Rim, Hye-yo˘ng, 152 Robinson, Joan, 158 Roh, Moo-hyun, 273n33 Roh, Tae Woo, 181, 274n33 Romania: ethnic Hungarians in, 7, 82; Hungarian schools in Transylvania, 82 Rosenhek, Zeev, 247n24 Rouse, Roger, 246n11 Russia, 7, 33, 36, 50. See also Soviet Union. Ryang, Cho˘ng-bong, 143 Ryang, Sonia, 80, 81, 91, 95, 114, 117, 158, 166, 242, 257nn11,13, 261nn39,44,49 Ryu, Kyo-yo˘l, 46 Ryu, Sang-yun, 41, 250n23, 251n30 Ryu, Yo˘n-san, 134, 141, 146, 147, 149, 152, 160, 164, 165, 263n15, 265n27, 266nn31,41, 267n48, 268n56, 276n49 Sadiq, Kamal, 17, 223, 255n62 Sai, Yo˘ichi, 258n18 Saitō Makoto Bunsho, 56 Sakamoto, Shin’ichi Y., 40 Sakhalin Koreans, 151, 160 San Francisco Peace Treaty, 75, 79, 131 Sang-hak (pseudonym), 216 Sang-jin (pseudonym), 193 Schmid, Andre, 34, 35, 51, 68, 70, 247nn21,22, 248n2 Scott, James C., 15, 18, 47, 194, 250n19 Selden, Mark, 143 Seol, Dong-Hoon, 183, 184, 269n5 Serbia: ethnic Hungarians in, 240 Shachar, Ayelet, 277n12 Shain, Yossi, 8 Shimonoseki, 42–43, 46, 48, 252n37 Shin, Gi-Wook, 247nn19,22, 272n25, 277n5 Shirk, Susan L., 143, 153, 154, 262n5, 265n25, 266nn30,35 Shue, Vivienne, 142, 155, 256n3, 262n6 Sibley, Susan, 16, 212 Sin, Kyu-so˘p, 52, 55, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 253n42

Index   Skrentny, John, 183, 184, 269nn2,5, 277n9 Smith, Anthony, 247n23, 277n4 Smith, Michael P., 102 Smith, Robert, 38, 39, 250n18 So˘, Ho-ch’o˘l, 36, 51, 249n14, 250n21, 252nn30,32 So˘, Meng-Sun, 109 Sōaikai, 48, 108 Solinger, Dorothy J., 143 So˘l, Cho, 36, 51, 218 Son, Ch’un-il, 55–56, 61, 64, 253n42 Song, Ki-chan, 109 Song, Ms. (pseudonym), 208–9, 210, 212, 213, 220 Song, Wenzhi, 129, 140, 141, 147, 152, 154, 155 Son, Su˘ng-hoe, 55, 57 So˘ng, Ku˘n-je, 164 South Korea, economy and politics: April Revolution, 93; Chun Doo-hwan ­administration, 177; democratization, 172; economic conditions, 172, 177, 178, 183, 184, 185, 188, 209, 227, 260nn37,38; Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations, 238–39; Park Chung Hee administration, 99, 177, 259n33; relations with Japan, 76, 85, 87, 88, 95, 96–98, 99–100, 102, 105, 120, 126–27, 259nn29,33; relations with North Korea, 74–75, 80, 85, 94, 139, 235–36, 270n11; relations with United States, 126–27; Rhee Syngman administration, 89, 92, 259n33; Roh Moo-hyun, 273n33; Roh Tae Woo administration/Declaration for Reunification, 181, 274n33; state building in, 10, 13–14, 26, 74, 76, 77, 97, 101, 111–12, 119–21, 122, 124, 137, 221, 240. See also Korean War South Korea, geography and language: Cheju Island, 78, 81, 103, 109, 257n8, 259n26; Cho˘lla Province, 83, 204; Kyo˘ngsang Province, 257n8; Puch’o˘n, 197; Pusan, 42–43, 46–48, 252n37; Seoul standard Korean language, 21, 22–23

South Korea, government, law, and policy: citizenship policy, 6, 77, 174, 178, 181–82, 184, 186–87, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193–94, 200, 202–3, 205–6, 209, 210, 212–13, 214, 217–18, 220, 235, 236, 239–40, 262n50, 273n33, 277n11; Coethnics Abroad Act, 186, 188–90, 272n26, 273nn29,30; conscription in, 99–100, 100, 229, 259nn27,28,30; Constitutional Court, 186, 189–90, 273n33; family registration in, 2–4, 6, 14, 28, 103, 105–6, 118, 121, 137, 176, 178, 180, 235, 236–37, 272n22; as Han’guk/ Kankoku, 22, 94, 95–96, 100, 101, 103, 109–110, 111, 114, 115, 121, 178, 239; homeland politics vs. immigration politics in, 173, 180–87; immigration policies, 6, 23, 174–75, 184–85, 186–87, 193–95, 200–226, 231, 236; KCIA, 85, 89, 257n14; Korean Counterintelligence Corps (KCIC), 257n14; Law on the Exchanges and Cooperation between North and South Korea (Article 10), 238; Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Oemubu), 51, 88, 90, 91, 106, 107, 136, 182, 183, 228, 263n16, 264n17, 271n20, 273n31; Ministry of Justice (Po˘mmubu), 114, 186, 188, 191, 200–201, 212, 275n43; National Court Administration, 271n22; Nationality Law (1998), 205–6, 272n27, 273n29, 275n41; National Security Law, 116; Overseas Emigration Act, 272n28; Overseas Koreans Foundation, 227, 228–29, 238, 260n35; passport of, 2–4, 6, 77, 97, 104, 107, 111, 114, 117, 121, 124, 197, 198, 205, 212, 217; policies regarding labor market, 23, 173, 183–85, 188, 190–91, 221, 236, 273n32; policies regarding marriage, 184, 192, 202–3, 204–21, 222, 223, 245n2, 269n8, 274n37, 275nn41,43,44, 276n48; Supreme Court, 206, 239; Taebo˘bwo˘n (Supreme Court), 206; Taet’ongnyo˘ng Piso˘sil (Presidential Secretariat), 259n30

  Index South Korean nationals abroad (chaeoe kungmin/chaeoe Han’gugin), 177–78 Soviet Union, 75, 89, 90, 264n18; citizenship policy, 187; collapse of, 182; ethnic Koreans in, 74, 75, 119, 136, 151, 160, 177, 182, 246n15, 272n23; relations with China, 140, 143, 155, 164, 169; Stakhanovite Movement, 158; during Stalin era, 162, 246n15 Soysal, Yasemin, 124, 277n1 Spiro, Peter J., 277n1 Stalin, Joseph, 162, 246n15 Star, Susan L., 125 state building: empirical statehood vs. juridical statehood, 77, 256n7; and Japanese colonialism, 37–42, 45–46, 70; in Manchukuo, 59, 60–61, 62, 65, 253n48; in Meiji Japan, 33–34; in North Korea, 10, 13–14, 26, 74, 76, 77, 81, 83, 84–85, 89, 101, 111–12, 118–19, 120, 121, 124–25, 129, 168, 256n7, 267n50; postcolonial state building, 9, 25, 31, 73–77, 97, 256nn63,7; in precolonial Korea, 33–37; in South Korea, 10, 13–14, 26, 74, 76, 77, 97, 101, 111–12, 119–21, 122, 124, 137, 221, 240 state of origin, 7–8; as broker, 27, 76, 94–101, 120, 229; as gatekeeper, 10–11, 27, 45, 76, 101–8, 120–21, 172, 223, 229, 233, 238–39, 270n8; as safe haven, 27, 77–80, 119, 229 Stephens, David O., 195 Stoler, Ann L., 11, 30, 249n8 Suh, Kyung-suk, 273n33 Suk-cha (pseudonym), 92, 101, 104 Sun-ch’o˘l (pseudonym), 217 Su-yo˘ng (pseudonym), 88, 92, 99 symbolic power, 12, 14–20, 123, 175, 206, 219, 222, 230, 232, 233, 234 Szalontai, Balázs, 151, 164 Szanton Blanc, Christina, 227, 245n7 Taebo˘bwo˘n (Supreme Court), 206 Taehan Empire, 36–37, 69 Taehan Ilbo, 37 Tae-hu˘i (pseudonym), 199–200, 201

Taet’ongnyo˘ng Piso˘sil (Presidential Secretariat), 259n30 Taiwan: as Japanese colony, 249n17; legal status of Taiwanese, 38, 40, 68, 78, 254n54, 255n59; as Republic of China, 74, 107, 123, 126–27, 136, 256n5, 263n16 Tamanoi, Mariko Asano, 60, 62, 255n58 Tanaka, Ryūichi, 61 Tarlo, Emma, 16, 222 Tehranian, John, 194, 250n19 Ther, Philipp, 256n5 Thunø, Mette, 272n25 Tilly, Charles, 47, 238, 247n27 Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, 65 Tölölyan, Khachig, 228 Tonga Ilbo, 46, 47, 49–50, 54, 56, 58, 64, 252n35, 253n46 “T’onggambu p’ach’ulso ch’oech’o u˘i kosi” (The first notice put up by the police office of the Residency General of Korea), 252n39 Tongmyo˘ng, 253n46 tongp’o (“coethnics”), 57–58, 182–83, 186, 190, 231–32, 235, 236, 249n13, 270n14, 272n23. See also chaeoe tongp’o (“coethnics abroad”) Tongp’o T’aun, 201, 275n45 Torpey, John, 14, 46, 65, 70, 248n30 transborder membership politics, 8–14, 24, 25, 26–28, 32, 58, 62, 67, 68, 71–72, 118, 172, 221, 228–30, 246nn10,15, 248n36; definition of transborder members, 10, 11–12, 13; and globalization, 227–28; historical nature of, 231–32; and historicity of international borders, 8; identification of transborder members, 10, 11–12, 13, 18–20, 28, 42–49, 174; role of bureaucratic practices in, 14–20, 175, 230–31; role of ethnic nationalism in, 11, 28, 234–38; role of international recognition in, 19, 27, 28, 77–78, 122–24, 228, 232–33; role of macroregional processes in, 12–13, 20; in socialist countries, 130, 169–70, 269n59; struggles for inclusion, 173–74, 176,

Index   186–92, 200, 202–3, 221–22, 233–34, 237, 273n33; transborder nation building, 14, 28, 89, 229–30, 233, 240, 256n7 transnational: transnational citizenship, 7–8, 227–28; transnational family, 224, 276n51; transnationalism, 13, 232, 240, 246n10; “transnationalism from below,” 102–3 travel permits, 1, 17, 103–4, 117, 150, 160, 179, 181, 238–39; Japanese colonial travel certificate system/voyage certificate system, 44–45, 46, 252n33 Tsuda, Takeyuki, 172, 269nn1,4,5, 277n9 Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), 123 Uchida, Jun, 43, 46, 249n11, 251n29 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, 116 United States: American imperialism, 81, 99, 135; ethnic Koreans in, 136, 246n15, 253n45, 263n16, 272nn23,28, 275n42; relations with China, 135–36, 177, 270n12; relations with Japan, 79, 89, 258n16; relations with North Korea, 79–80, 81, 99, 135; relations with South Korea, 126–27 “Uri charang iman cho˘man anirao” (Our pride is inexhaustible), 80, 257n10 Uri hakkyo (Our School), 257n11 Urry, John, 240 Vietnam, 126–27, 151, 260n36, 277n6 Viola, Lynn, 162 visas, 17, 24, 123, 239; for Japan, 45, 117; for South Korea, 6, 181, 185, 191, 192, 193, 198, 199–201, 204, 205–6, 273n32 vom Hau, Matthias, 255n63 Walaszek, Adam, 228 Walder, Andrew, 153, 266n35, 268n55 Waldinger, Roger D., 246n10; on spillover, 270n10

Walker, Kenneth R., 142 Wanbaoshan Affair, 56–57 Wang, Gungyu, 272n23 Wang, Horng-Luen, 123, 277n10 Wang, Joan S. H., 256n5 Watson, James L., 150, 267n46 Watt, Lori, 29, 78, 91, 253n49, 255n58, 256n1, 262n7, 263n10, 270n12 Weber, Max, 15, 16 Weil, Patrick, 277n3 Weiner, Michael, 34, 43, 44, 45 wenhua, 216, 276n50 West Germany, 74, 127, 256n5, 271n19; Ostpolitik, 181 Wimmer, Andreas, 9, 74, 128 Winichakul, Thongchai, on geobody, 30, 107 Winther, Jennifer A., 39, 250n18 Wolff, Stefan, 256n5 Wray, Helena, 213 Wu, Yiching, 148 Xinjiang, 151 Yamamuro, Shin’ichi, 51, 59, 253n49 Yanbian Diwei, 133, 134 Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, 134, 136, 141, 152, 153, 164, 168, 196, 266n31, 275n45; divorce rate, 215–16, 276n49; established, 131, 262n8; Korean language in, 21, 22–23; peddling trips to North Korea from, 179, 271n17; Tumen, 4; Tumen River, 133, 154, 161; Yanji, 3, 4, 133, 161, 196, 217, 242, 243. See also Manchuria Yanbian University, 131, 149, 164, 168, 242, 266n41 Yang, Ae-sun, 107 Yang, Hyunah, 39, 250n22, 251n24 Yang, So˘gil, 258n18 Yang, T’ae-ho, 40 Yang, Yonghi: Kazoku no kuni, 262n49 Ye, Tong-gu˘n, 184 Yi, Chin-yo˘ng, 134, 262n9 Yi, Chong-so˘k, 132, 135, 139, 262n3 Yi, Cho˘ng-so˘n, 40, 132, 135, 139, 250n22 Yi, Myo˘ng-jong, 45

  Index Yi, Pyo˘ng-ju: Kwanbu yo˘llakso˘n (The Shimonoseki–Pusan ferryboat), 43, 252n37 Yi, Pyo˘ng-nam, 85, 87 Yi, Sang-suk, 129, 141, 147, 152, 154, 155 Yi, So˘n-mi, 215 Yi, Tong-gu: “Tohang nodongja” (Migrant worker), 252n37 Yim, Dawnhee, 106 Yo˘m, Kwan-il, 141 Yo˘m, In-ho, 133, 134, 135, 146, 153, 164, 262n3, 263n15 Yo˘m, Sang-so˘p: Mansejo˘n (Before the March First Uprising), 48 Yo˘nbyo˘n ch’o˘ngnyo˘n (Yanbian youth), 145, 153, 265n28 Yo˘nbyo˘n Ilbo, 265n26 Yo˘nbyo˘nmal, 22 Yo˘nbyo˘n Yo˘so˘ng (Yanbian women), 215, 218 Yo˘ng-ch’o˘l (pseudonym), 115, 118, 125 Yo˘ng-il (pseudonym), 5–6, 10, 13, 14, 23, 192, 239

Yu, Kwan-ji, 178, 180, 270nn13,14 Yu, Pyo˘ng-ho, 50, 51 Yu, Sam-yo˘l, 93 Yu, Wan-sik, 139 Yugoslavia, former: civil war in, 126 Yun, Hwi-t’ak, 62, 65, 66 Yun, T’ae-sun, 276n53 Zainichi Cho˘senjin no Jinken o Mamoru kai, 258n23, 259nn25,28 Zainihon Chōsenjin Jinken Kyōkai, 260n38, 261nn43,44,47 Zainichi Koreans. See Koreans in Japan Zelizer, A. Viviana, 275n44 Zhang, 132 Zheng, Xinzhe, 184 Zhonghua minzu, 34, 133, 138, 149, 167. See also Han Chinese; minzu; minzu zhengce Zhou Enlai, 155 Zhu, Dehai, 164–65 Zolberg, Aristide R., 45, 280n30

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