A stranger in an Owellian land

By James Khan | Member, KCPC

"We don't serve Pyongyang-style raengmyon (or cold-broth noodle)," a female receptionist at the North Korea-run Ryugyong Restaurant in Dandong, dressed in a bright pink traditional Korean costume, said disdainfully. "Not for South Koreans."

Following a large defection of restaurant employees in April and May 2016, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un prohibited North Korean restaurants in China from accommodating South Koreans.

Earlier this year, at the start of joint US-South Korean military exercises, Kim reportedly issued a similar directive. North Koreans avoided South Koreans.

Ethnic Korean Chinese and overseas Chinese from North Korea who engaged in border trade avoided contact with South Koreans.

The city of Dandong, visited in mid-April, was desolate. On a clear spring day, even under the glaring sun, the entire city was lifeless.

The Chinese city on the border with North Korea, once bustling with Chinese, ethnic Korean Chinese, North Koreans, overseas Chinese, and South Koreans mingling together, was quiet.

The trade brokerage offices lining both sides of the streets in downtown Dandong were all locked up tight. Korean Street, lined with North Korean restaurants, was also quiet.

The street vendors along the bank of the Yalu River have all but disappeared.

Travel agencies selling tickets for North Korea cruise tours were closed, and North Korean goods were hard to find in the souvenir shops.

North Korean cigarettes and wine, which were scarcely found, were considerably more expensive than they were in the past.

Shopkeepers, many of whom are ethnic Koreans, whispered that border controls made it difficult to get North Korean goods because they had been smuggled in now.

There were horrifying rumors about a spate of suicides among border traders who could not shoulder the rising interest on their bank loans, warehouse fees, and the loss on discarded goods.

The desolate atmosphere was not limited to Dandong, the city that faces Sinuiju, the gateway to North Korea; the gloomy cloud loomed across the border region.

It was surging through the entire region where I visited for the first time in five years. At the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party in October 2003, China adopted ambitious plans for developing the backward northeastern region.

But the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 interrupted them. After three years of coronavirus lockdown, the three provinces of northeastern China—Liaoning, Heilongjiang, and Jilin—seem to still be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the pandemic.

The COVID-19 travel ban has been in effect until most recently, especially for South Korean nationals.

While the Chinese government had lifted restrictions on entry to China in January 2023, it was not until early March that it exempted South Koreans from a post-arrival PCR test.

Nonetheless, those who want to visit China are still required to download WeChat and submit a negative PCR test result along with a customs declaration using the QR code before boarding their flight to China.

The passengers are denied boarding without downloading the Chinese web application. No exceptions, no choice.

The rising tension between North and South Korea is not the only reason why South Korean travelers may feel uneasy when visiting the border region.

The deteriorating relationship between China and South Korea may also have been a contributing factor in recent years.

This year, North Korea has been increasing its threats to the South by test-firing various missiles and confronting the Yoon Suk-yeol administration, which has countered North Korea's moves with military measures centered on strengthening the U.S.-ROK alliance.

China, on the other hand, interpreted the deepening of the US-ROK partnership as a hostile act against it.

Though Seoul has elucidated its intention otherwise, Beijing has criticized Seoul for being manipulated by the United States.

The sparks of the confrontation between the U.S. and China have spilled onto bilateral relations between Beijing and Seoul.

Chinese perceptions of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) deployment, the U.S.-ROK military alliance, and the war in Ukraine are very different from those of South Koreans.

They believe that South Koreans are only exposed to American media and are biased toward American and Western perspectives.

However, despite their claims that they are exposed to more diverse international opinions, they are also trapped by their own confirmation bias.

"What is South Korea going to do if China and North Korea attack South Korea together?" they ask, wondering what's in it for South Korea when it's antagonizing China.

President Yoon's pro-American policies are strongly criticized.

The uncomfortable Sino-South Korean relationship adds to the chill for South Korean visitors traveling to the Chinese border region.

China has remarkably progressed during the past three years of the coronavirus lockdown: Chinese cities in the relatively backward Northeast have been linked to affluent coastal regions by expressways and high-speed trains, and modern skyscrapers have sprouted up everywhere.

The streets in the frontier cities have become cleaner, and the shops have become noticeably more upscale.

The changes appear to testify to socialist China's rise to the status of G2 alongside the United States.

Capitalism entrusts the distribution of limited resources within a system to the invisible hand of the market—the price mechanism based on the interaction of supply and demand.

Socialism, on the other hand, entrusts it to the planning and control of the state.

Given the difficulty of accurately identifying the demand for resources by various different sectors of society and coordinating their supply, centrally planned economies have been inevitably ineffective compared to market economies.

The development of science and technology, however, presents new possibilities. Socialism equipped with advanced information technology and artificial intelligence may significantly improve the efficiency of central planning and control.

The Soviet experiment with socialism in the agrarian and industrial ages of the 20th century ended in failure, but how the People's Republic of China will fare in the IT age of the 21st century is yet to be observed.

At the same time, advances in information, bio, and artificial intelligence technologies are quickly upgrading the Big Brother state described by George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984.

An Orwellian society maintains social order through institutionalized surveillance of its members.

With advanced IT technologies in hand, every citizen's every move is constantly monitored.

The Chinese government watches the movements of its citizens by reading photos taken by speed cameras installed every few hundred meters along every city street with a facial recognition program.

LED signs at highway tollgates display the license plates of vehicles passing the checkpoints along with the amount of toll they should pay.

When traveling by train, all passengers are required to show their ID both at the boarding and arriving gates.

Foreigners are required to present their passports.

At the airports, foreigners are asked to provide information on the local people they will be contacting during their stay in China.

The authorities then contact the locals immediately to verify the statements.

The identity and contact information of the local people accompanying foreign visitors are also required at hotel front desks and train stations.

For local residents, all commercial transactions are made using QR codes.

The entire population is under close surveillance, including foreigners, and even more so for South Koreans.

Is this an unfounded feeling?

Local Chinese people say they actually feel safer with tightened surveillance because their government can provide them better protection from the risk of crime using the state-of-the-art surveillance system.

Perhaps how you feel about the high level of surveillance all depends on one's perspective.

Another reason for the sense of desolation I felt while traveling through the three northeastern provinces can be traced to the changes in the Chinese government's domestic policy toward ethnic minorities, particularly toward ethnic Koreans.

When the Yanbian Korean Autonomous District was first established on September 3, 1952, there were 530,000 Koreans, making up 62.5% of the total population of 854,000 in the region.

In 1955, however, the district was downgraded to an autonomous prefecture, even with the inclusion of Dunhua County.

Since then, the Chinese government has constantly facilitated the integration of Han Chinese into the prefecture.

In 1993, the government issued an ordinance stipulating that "ethnic minorities must constitute at least 30 percent of the total population" to establish even an "ethnic zone," an administrative unit smaller than an autonomous prefecture.

At the end of 2021, the total population of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture grew to approximately 2.03 million, of which Han Chinese accounted for 60.19 percent and Korean ethnicity accounted for approximately 700,000, or barely 35.6 percent of the total.

In the meantime, it is estimated that about 700,000 ethnically Korean Chinese are currently residing in South Korea.

Since Xi Jinping came to power, the Chinese government has emphasized Chinese nationalism and national unity, intensifying its intolerant policies toward ethnic minorities.

For instance, in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Region, shops were initially mandated to display their business names in both Korean and Chinese characters of equal size on their signboards, with the Korean characters positioned either on top of the Chinese characters or to their left.

However, on July 25, 2022, the government of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Region issued new ordinances on the usage of the Korean language and characters.

These required state institutions, enterprises, social organizations, and self-employed individuals to use both Korean and Chinese characters on their signs, with the Chinese characters preceding the Korean.

In practice, however, the government has not enforced these rules on signboards that display business names in Korean in smaller characters, place them below Chinese names, or do not display Korean names at all.

In 2020, the government also abolished Korean language classes in ethnic Korean kindergartens and replaced Korean-language textbooks in Korean middle schools with Chinese ones.

Perhaps I was not mistaken when I sensed that the staff at Yanji Airport were deliberately avoiding speaking the Korean language.

This, however, is an inevitable wave of the times. Yanji, the capital of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, is just a three-and-a-half-hour flight from Seoul.

A quick flight lands you in a city full of Korean-speaking people and Korean-language signboards.

This city allows you to leave Seoul early in the morning, run your errands, and return home the same evening.

For many Koreans, Yanbian is not a foreign land.

However, it will all soon become a fond memory of the past, just like the history of Gojoseon (or Ancient Joseon) in the land of Liaodong and Gando (or Middle Island, Jiandao) in the northern basin of the Tumen River.

I was certainly a stranger in Yanbian, Dandong, and the three provinces of northeastern China, which I visited after five years.

April 30, 2023

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this website are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of KCPC, its members, or affiliated persons and organizations.