Same Blood or Cultural Other?: The Paradoxical Racialisation of Korean Chinese Migrants amid South Korea's Multicultural Turn

This paper addresses the fusion, rupture and transformations in the notions of race, nation, and culture by attending to the contradictory but reciprocal relationship between racial nationalism and the ‘cultural’ deployment of multicultural rhetorics. Focusing on the South Korean context, the contemporary racialisation of Chosŏnjok (Korean Chinese) migrants in tandem with the rise of the autochthonous far-right is examined as an illuminating case study. South Korea, a country that considered itself to be racially homogeneous, has begun to experience the influx of labour and marriage migrants from less developed countries since the 1990s. More than half of these migrants come from China and among them, the majority is Korean Chinese who have been rhetorically constructed as part of the Korean nation by the state and the Chosŏnjok rights movement, under the rubric of the tongp’o (blood kinship of overseas Koreans) discourse. Yet Chosŏnjok migrants are created as a distinctive group both discursively and legally (through a discriminative immigration system) and concurrently situated somewhere in between autochthonous Koreans and racially non-Korean others. Against this background, anti-Chosŏnjok sentiment has become prevalent as autochothonous far-right movements and media have increasingly criminalised and racialised the Chosŏnjok as a cultural Other whose potential damage must be controlled by stricter state regulation and, if possible, through complete assimilation. Ironically, the language of cultural  difference and incompatibility employed to otherise the Chosŏnjok derives from the very cultural rhetoric of multiculturalism, only proving its limitations in contesting the racialised exclusion of this group. Combining discourse analytic and in-depth interviewing techniques, this paper investigates intersecting racial, cultural, ideological and economic rationales that aim at in/excluding the Chosŏnjok and how the boundary of nation is debated and redrawn amid South Korea’s multicultural turn.