The Changing Nature of the Korean People’s Perspective on National Issues, and Fellow Koreans Living Abroad

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper intends to examine the relationship between Korean people’s perspective upon the national issues today and the problem of ethnic Koreans overseas, especially the “Joseon-jok” (people of Korean descent) living in China, with regard to enactment and amendment processes of the Law for Ethnic Koreans. The Law for Ethnic Koreans prior to the recent amendment bears special meaning as it was the law that “officiated” the government’s discriminatory treatment upon specific groups among the ethnic Korean society. How could such significantly flawed bill have been enacted? It must have been made possible because of the misunderstanding regarding issues on ethnic Koreans overseas (especially the issue of China-based ethnic Koreans) that the Korean public has been carrying for a long time.
There is a particular perspective within the Korean society of the concept of a single ethnic group, the concept of a single culture, and the concept of a single state to be the same. This kind of specific consciousness regarding the people’s own sense of being members of a single ethnic group makes the people more sensitive of the “difference” between “us” and “them.” When other factors such as the scale of the state are added to the equation, the people tend to separate even their own overseas brethrens from themselves and take them out of the boundary of “us.” The ethnic Koreans living in China are being perceived differently and ultimately excluded from the Korean ethnic group because they live in China. Our consciousness and perspectives regarding national issues are essentially based upon the boundaries and perimeters of the Korean peninsula. So we tend to differentiate ourselves who are living in such domain from our brethrens who have been living in China or other areas, and our own discriminative intentions and actions perpetrated against the ethnic Koreans in China are justified as such.
What we need to do today is to establish a new type of national sense of identity that is based upon the concept of an equal, free civilian community. Socalled Korean Network could be an appropriate alternative. The identity of the new Korean national community should not be confined to the concept and discourse of “being and composed of a homogeneous ethnic group.” Instead it should be based upon the attitude of acknowledging each other’s differences and the mutual intentions to gather and use all kinds of wisdom obtained in different kinds of historical experiences of various peoples.