Break the Cycle!: The Re/formation of the Korean Chinese Transnational Migrant Class

Since the early 1990s, Yanbian, the Korean Chinese ethnic prefecture of China on the border of North Korea, has experienced widespread out-migration to South Korea, a phenomenon known as the “Korean Wind.” Understanding the “Korean Wind” as a reflection of a new political economy that articulates global Korea with privatizing China, this presentation explores the new material realities and the re-evaluation of the Korean Wind in face of the China’s global economic rise. On the one hand, Korean Chinese have formed themselves into transnational migrant workers by participating in the Korean Wind. However, they are now facing a social imperative to break the cycle—to “stop being a migrant and become an entrepreneur”—as the Korean Wind has waned and the Chinese dream waxed. This paper argues that Korean Chinese transnational migration has become a constant collective endeavor to break the cycle that they have been caught in, both as socialist subjects struggling within a privatizing China and as migrant workers suffering under South Korean capital.