2020.13: Sharon J. Yoon, The Elusive Promise of Migration: The Experiences of South Korean Business Owners in Beijing
I met Mr. Park through a mutual friend. He was waiting for me in a small office with two other middle-aged South Korean men, casually chatting about his day over a cup of coffee when I walked in. I sat down in a seat in front of him and laid out my notebook, digital recorder, and pens as I waited for the conversation to die down. The men continued to speak for a good half hour, however, barely acknowledging my presence, until their repartee came to a lull after one of the men left the room because he had to run to a meeting.
To put it mildly, I had trouble establishing rapport with Mr. Park. When I asked him about his experiences running a small business in Beijing, he responded with vague answers. Looking back, I presume that the thought of divulging his business failures to a twenty-something woman was mortifying to him. Through a series of fits and starts, I learned that Mr. Park had possessed all the typical markers of middle-class status in South Korea. A graduate of a prestigious university in Seoul, he had worked his way up the corporate ladder at a well-known chaebol (South Korean conglomerates including the likes of Samsung, LG, and Hyundai) before joining the thousands of South Koreans who migrated to Beijing in the early 2000s. During our interview, he explained that he had grown apprehensive of his future as he watched senior colleagues “encouraged” to retire early, while others below him were fired in the mass lay-offs implemented after the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Meanwhile, China joined the ranks of the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its place in the global economy as the next superpower seemed imminent.
“There was nothing left for me in Seoul. The future was in Beijing,” he said. Studies of labor market changes in South Korea after the crisis demonstrate how unprecedented rates of unemployment, homelessness, and poverty shattered the image of South Korea’s economic miracle in the late 1990s (Song 2009). Many who were laid-off turned to self-employment as a means to survive, leading, in turn, to an over-saturation of small businesses that competed for a rapidly dwindling pool of consumers. These trends have only continued to exacerbate over the years. In 2014, one in three South Koreans who had jobs were self-employed (Koo 2019). About seventy-four percent of these self-employed ran businesses where they were the only employee, earning monthly incomes that were sixty percent of their permanently employed counterparts. To make matters worse, more than half of them failed within three years (Lee 2015). While self-employment had, in the past, provided an alternative route to socioeconomic mobility in South Korea, today it represents a step towards economic insecurity.
For many South Korean migrants like Mr. Park, Beijing was perceived as a second chance. They presumed that their savings would be worth more in China when taking into consideration the cheaper cost of living, lower costs of labor, and favorable currency exchange rates. Contrary to their expectations, however, for many, an even worse fate awaited them in Beijing. The Chinese Academy for Social Sciences estimates that between 20,000 and 30,000 South Koreans—or approximately one in three South Koreans in Beijing—left the city in 2009 because they couldn’t make ends meet Some “fled at night” because they were unable to pay their workers and clients for services rendered, while those who were “lucky” returned to Seoul to live with extended family (Park 2009). Others moved to more remote parts of the country where they sought lives of anonymity. But because the vast majority had entered China as tourists they fell deeper into poverty as undocumented migrants lacking access to welfare benefits in a foreign country where they faced enormous linguistic, cultural, and institutional barriers to survival.
Mr. Park’s story opened my eyes to the growing numbers of migrants around the world whose external appearance of privilege belies their more vulnerable circumstances. In recent years, the direction of migration has started to reverse, as an increasing number of migrants from wealthy countries have departed for destinations in the developing world in hopes that the global status of their country of origin will provide social or economic advantages. In the past decade, studies demonstrate how growing numbers of college-educated youth from EU and North America have opted to travel to South Korea, Taiwan, and other East Asian states to teach English (Collins 2016; Lan 2011). Unable to find secure jobs to pay off their mounting student debts, young Americans typically made plans to “temporarily” work in Asia, only to gradually extend their stay one year at a time as their marketability back home languished. But relatively little has been written about the numerous Americans who remain stuck in dead-end jobs in Asia, perpetually waiting for the right opportunity to return home, all the while fearful of having their jobs taken away by an ever-abundant pool of youngsters who arrive each year. Neoliberal restructuring and economic instability have caused frustrated individuals around the world—Japanese retirees in Malaysia (Ono 2015), Chinese merchants in Namibia (Dobler 2009), and British bachelors in rural Thailand (Lafferty and Maher 2020), to name a few—to choose migration as a strategy for maintaining their middle-class lifestyles. But by assuming sojourners from wealthier nations are better situated for success, scholars and journalists alike have continued to turn a blind eye to the hidden precariousness of these migrants. The instability that migrants from advanced industrialized states face is distinct from that endured by migrants from developing states, and I believe that we need to do a better job of understanding this new face of disadvantage.
What implications do new trends of migration have on understandings of social inequality? For centuries, migration has been utilized as a last resort strategy for people facing crises at home. In the case of Korea, famine and natural disasters compelled peasants to travel hundreds of miles by foot until they reached the unoccupied Tumen River Valley in the late 1880s (Park 2019). These migrants risked their lives to cross state boundaries buoyed by the promise of new opportunities waiting across the border. More recently, South Koreans facing stunted mobility during the Park Chung-Hee authoritarian regime moved overseas to start garment factories in Brazil (Buechler 2004) and dry cleaners in the United States (Light and Bonacich 1988). But how useful is migration as a tool for breaking out of bleak circumstances at home today? The experiences of middle-class migrants on the precipice of downward mobility like those of Mr. Park shed light on how the hardening of class boundaries extends beyond national boundaries. His story points to the ramifications that increasingly integrated global markets—and the growing dominance of multinational corporations within this sphere—have had on ordinary people trying to survive.
Sharon Yoon is an assistant professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. You can read more about her research on South Korean migrants in her recently published book, The Cost of Belonging: An Ethnography of Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing's Koreatown (Oxford University Press, 2020). She can be reached at syoon5@nd.edu.
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