The Chosonjok are Koreans that immigrated to China from the beginning of the 18th century to late 19th century for various economic, political and religious reasons. The immigrants began to be called Chosonjok during the mid-19th century as they moved to China. In 1636 the Manchurians who destroyed the Ming dynasty and moved the capital to Beijing and established the Qing dynasty. The Qing dynasty declared the area containing Mt Baekdu and the Tumen River as its holy land and strongly prohibited access. But as the populations of Hebei, Shandong and Henan increased sharply and the demand for new land grew they allowed for immigration to Manchuria in 1885 both the Han people and Chosonjok people began to migrate.
The Chosonjok put up with a migration where one would leave in the morning and come back at night or seasonal migration where one would migrate for the spring and return during the fall for 200years while immigration to Manchuria was a prohibited policy. Especially during the 1860s and 1870s many fell victim to the continuous disasters and crop failures, immigration to the fertile Gando province started to increase.
Then in 1910 after the Japanese annexation of Korea the immigration of Koreans to overseas countries accelerated. Large numbers of people who had no choice but to become peasants following the land that was stolen from them by the Japanese during the land surveys increased and with the formation of the Oriental Development Company, Korean produce was exploited and turned over to keep the Japanese full. The population of Chosonjok living in Manchuria grew from 100,000 in 1910 to 600,000 in 1930.
The Japanese that caused the Manchurian Incident of 1931 started to migrate large numbers of Koreans in order to use Manchuria as a supply base for continental invasion, therefore the number of Chosonjok hit 1.45million by 1945. Through China’s process towards communism the Chosonjok had to go through many changes, the nationalist government begins to call Korean-Chinese, Han Gyo and urged them to migrate back to Korea, whilst the Chinese Communist Party officially recognized them as an ethnic minority and treated them well. During the Korean War more than 60,000 Chosonjok participated and nearly 3500 died during the war. For their sacrifice the People’s Republic of China awarded ethnic autonomy to the Chosonjok. In 1949 the Chosonjok were the first of the ethnic minorities to establish a university- Yanbian University. And in 1952 they founded the Yanbian Korean autonomous prefecture.
The relationship between communist China and the Chosonjok may have been friendly at first but in the 20years following China’s reforms that began in 1956, things took a dive. This reached its zenith during the cultural revolution of 1968. Unlike its name this movement was countercultural and against humanity. There were massive purges of intellectuals, scholars and technicians. Schools were destroyed and the cultures of the ethnic minorities obliterated. The Chosonjok too had to witness an estimated 3000 of their scholars be executed during this process. One of the representative cases was of the captain of the Yianbian Autonomous prefecture, Chu Deok Hae who was silenced, he had been an important member of the anti-Japanese movement in China and a fighter for Chinese liberation.
The Chosonjok needed a strategy for survival. That strategy was following the orders of the Chinese Central government. Though Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward movement had left the whole region of China impoverished, the autonomous district for the Chosonjok had a relatively strong growth. Conforming to birth control policy and having one of the lowest birthrates was another result of their strategy for survival.
The Chosonjok is the 13th largest ethnic minority in China. Among the China’s ethnic minorities there are those such as the Zhuang people, Manchu people and the Hui people who have assimilated to the Han people but on the other hand there minorities like the Uyghur people and the Tibetan people who have kept their unique ethnic identity. The Chosonjok maintain their strong ethnic identity while working hard to adapt to the Chinese society.
The ethnic minorities of china make up only 8% of the population but they hold 60% of the total area. This is why the ethnic minority issue is so serious for China’s national defense and the economy. The past dynasties of China suffered from the hands of attacking minorities and needless to say they know the importance of the underground resources that the ethnic minorities hold.
China’s policy towards their ethnic minority groups can be summarized as pluralistic and one body. While recognizing the diversity of the ethnic minorities the political powers adhere to a single communist system. So using a method of holding and standing firm on big things and allowing for the small, they tried to assimilate all of China into Han Chinese. They did not allow for any core positions of power to be given to the ethnic minorities and any fruits of economic growth were taken by the Han Chinese whilst blame for environmental degradation and underdevelopment is pushed onto the plates of the ethnic minorities.
The Chosonjok were a people living adjacent to their motherland and after Inner Mongolia, the second people to form an ethnic autonomous region. From the 20 ethnic minorities that have home countries that were set up by their nation that surround the Chinese border, it was only the Chosonjok who had a motherland as strong as Korea. It is also the reason why along with Tibet, Uyghur, Mongol, the Chosonjok were classified as countries that posed a threat to the safety of China in 1994. The reason for China’s powerful backlash against the Korean government’s policy to guarantee to allow unrestricted access into Korea to overseas Koreans in 1998, lies here. The Chosonjok are currently excluded from this law for overseas Koreans.
China’s Chosonjok policies can be divided into 3 phases.
Firstly, when the liberation wars were in full swing in the 1920s-1930s, China thought very highly of the leverage value of the Chosonjok. They declared and gave Chosonjok rights to land ownership and residency so that they were no longer a minority but had equal rights.
Secondly, from 1930 to 1945 they greatly appreciated the role the Chosonjok had in their victory against the Japanese. During this time those with family were called citizens and those without were called immigrants.
The Chosonjok people’s background and reasons in participating in both the anti-Japanese movement and Chinese war were related to land ownership rights. The Chinese government promised fair land distribution to all the people and in keeping with that promise, 40,000 Chosonjok households received 50,000 hectares of land in the Heilongjiang province while 90,000 Chosonjok households received 12,000 hectares of land in the Yanbian province.
The distribution on Chosonjok is closely related to rice farming. In 1848 they experimented with rice cultivation near the province of Jilin and in 1933 they succeeded in cultivating rice in the near impossible Heilongjiang province.
Because rice cultivation requires a large labor force, a village was naturally formed. The formation reasons for Chosonjok villages include voluntary immigration but more often than not many were forcibly migrated by the Japanese. The Japanese understood the importance of Manchuria as a post for continental invasion and they enforced policies in which they forcibly moved Choson farmers to 39 different provinces. What is unusual is that the people who migrated to the Yanbian province were from Hamgyong, the migrants to the Liaoning province were mostly from Pyongan. People from the Jeolla, Gyeongsang and Chungcheong province immigrated to Heilongjiang. Gyeongsang province villages: Andohyeon and Jangheung, Jeolla province villages: Samdohyang and Namdochon and Chungcheong province villages: Namsujin and Jeongamchon were formed. Chosonjok villages within China.
One of the reasons behind why these villages were able to last for so long was the family policy that the Chinese government implemented. The family policy was actually conceived to control the movement of Chinese nationals but through its execution it also allowed for the Chosonjok to stay as a strong national community. But after 1980 because of policy change and economic growth rural residents started to move to bigger cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Dalian etc. Currently the Chosonjok have moved and scattered throughout not just the nearer countries such as Russia, Japan, Korea but also the U.S., Canada and other different continents.
According to the 2013 immigration statistics there are currently 500,000 ethnic Koreans holding Chinese nationalities living in Korea.
In January 2011 the Torch foundation held a “Chosonjok Diaspora Missions seminar” in Yanji, Besides Yianbian, 86 Chosonjok Diaspora gathered from Liaoning province, Jilin province, Heilongjiang province to pray together and share strategies for the future of China and North Korea’s evangelization and missions. The Chosonjok leaders are seeing fruit from their evangelization of ethnic minorities, and evangelization of the Han people. Their less restrictive passage to North Korea allows them to share the gospel in various different forms to the people of North Korea.