Why are ethnic Chinese leaving South Korea in their thousands?
- The Chinese diaspora – or ‘huaqiao’ – in South Korea has dwindled to less than 20,000, prompting warnings that the community faces ‘extinction’
- Many blame lingering legal restrictions and prejudices that date back to the 1960s
When Ma Jian-xian and his wife converted a cattle shed in a suburb of Seoul into a modest restaurant specialising in pork bone soup in 1989, they had just one customer on their first day of business.
But within a few weeks hundreds of people were queuing up to taste the couple’s speciality dish, known locally as “pyeo haejang guk”. Today, nearly 30 years later, the success of that dish has served the couple well. Ma, now 68, owns assets worth more than US$10 million.
“You may call it a successful China-Korea joint venture,” says Ma as he explains that his Korean wife had adapted a recipe used by his Chinese mother.
As Kuo Yuan-yu, the secretary general of the Chinese Residents’ Association in Seoul, puts it: “South Korea is the only country in the world with a huaqiao community facing the danger of extinction.”