The Autonomous Korean Prefecture of Yanbian, Jilin Province, China

For almost no companies, military analysts or diplomats there is a third Korea. The land area covers half the area of South Korea. This is Yanbian, Korean autonomous zone in Jilin Province in China. It has vast resources and few people, with only 2 million inhabitants. The per capita income is about US$800, twice the national level of China.

We extend the phrase - the third Korea - to include the Korean-Chinese minority in China of whom there are probably about 4 million.

Until 1392 the northern frontier of Korea was disputed and stretched far into Manchuria and Siberia. From the end of the nineteenth century until 1945, Koreans migrated into China and Russia seeking both economic opportunity and political freedom from the Japanese.

Stalin moved many of the Russian Koreans to Uzbekistan to avoid a potential powerful minority on his border, but in Manchuria - under Japanese rule until 1945 - a large Korean minority remained.

Yanbian was the first minority area of China to get its own autonomous government in 1954, and until the late 1980s lived a quiet and neglected existence. The Korean minority also moved to other areas of China, mainly within Manchuria, and to the Shandong peninsular opposite Inchon. Because of the close history of the Korean and the Chinese communist party and because the Chinese Koreans pursued their traditional interest in education, a number of Chinese-Koreans rose to high positions in China.

When South Korea and China exchanged diplomatic recognition in 1992, Koreans could travel to Yanbian and establish links with the Korean community. Many South Korean firms thought that Yanbian could be a natural base for them. At the same time Chinese-Koreans began to travel to South Korea to earn wages which seemed unimaginable in China. The first sign of this were the illegal pharmaceutical traders who spread throughout central Seoul in 1992-3 selling traditional Chinese medicines.

Yanbian rapidly became a tourist destination because of its access to the Chinese side of Paektusan, and one of the richest parts of China as Koreans sought to set up joint ventures, restaurants, churches, universities and schools. Relations between the Chinese Koreans and South Koreans remained uneasy.

Relations between the two Koreas were not smooth. South Koreans felt that Yanbian Chinese were greedy, and Yanbian Chinese that the South Koreans were arrogant, individualistic and untrustworthy and without moral civic structure, relative to the Chinese and North Korean communist ideal.

Paektusan

Chanbai Mountains

Yanji City

Yanji City