Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion
Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion
Korean Chinese “Return” Migration to Post–Cold War South Korea
Post Cold-War transborder membership politics gained momentum from the influx of Korean Chinese into South Korea. Chapter 4 highlight the protracted confusion, uncertainty, and indeterminacy that both state and non-state actors in South Korea experienced in trying to “properly” classify the long forgotten ethnonational kin, substantiate their belated claim to membership, and regulate their access to the affluent “homeland.” It also reveals the porosity of the walls within which South Korea enclosed itself to exclude the Korean Chinese from transborder membership. On the one hand, 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. But equally importantly, Korean Chinese migrants challenged the state’s monopolistic truth claim about their individual identities by engaging in micropolitical struggles in bureaucratic settings, mobilizing alternative genres of identification and creating false paper identities for themselves.
Keywords: globalization, ethnic return migration, immigration bureaucracy, family immigration, marriage migration, illegality, documents, South Korea, China, Korean Chinese
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