Friday 26 December 2008

More Returning Home for Good

South Koreans account for the biggest group of foreigners living in China, with 700,000 people, followed by the Japanese community with about 115,000.

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Guanyu said...

More Returning Home for Good

25 December 2008

South Korea and China normalised diplomatic relations in 1992, and since then, Koreans have flocked to China for employment, business and schooling.

South Koreans account for the biggest group of foreigners living in China, with 700,000 people, followed by the Japanese community with about 115,000.

At the end of September, there were an estimated 19,000 South Korean businesses in China. These include small restaurants as well as large manufacturing firms.

In Beijing alone, there are 120,000 South Korean residents and 2,700 South Korean businesses.

The large South Korean population in Chinese cities has given rise to ‘Korean enclaves’.

Wangjing, a major residential area in the north-east of Beijing, is home to about 70,000 South Koreans and thousands of small South Korean businesses, including about 200 of Beijing’s some 1,000 Korean restaurants.

The Wudaokou area in north-west Beijing, where most of the city’s universities are located, has a Korean population of 30,000, mostly students, said reports.

On a recent visit to Wangjing, the mood among small businesses was gloomy. The talk is that about half of Wangjing’s South Korean residents have moved back home in recent months.

At HyunWoo Air Travel, a travel agency whose customers are mainly South Koreans living in Wangjing, the number of clients buying one-way tickets from Beijing to South Korea has soared from 10 per cent to 80 per cent in the past three months.

‘Year-end is the time when many Koreans take leave to go home, but they usually always buy return tickets. Now, they buy one-way and they say they will not be back,’ said the company’s sales manager who gave her surname as Piao.

The exodus means lean times ahead for the scores of restaurants and shops that cater to a mostly Korean clientele.