Process and dynamics of cross-border marriage

This paper asks how transnational marriage impacts the demographic future of the Korean minority in northeast China. Abnormally high male birthrates in many Asian countries since the 1970s are predicted to cause disruptions in all areas of social life (Hesketh et al 2011). Yet South Korea was the first to address this nationally, partly due to its earlier uptake of sex-selection technology. In the early 1990s, faced with hundreds of thousands of aging bachelors and a plummeting birthrate, the state began funding men to seek brides overseas (Freeman 2011). The largest group of foreign brides came from China’s ethnic Korean minority, who live concentrated in the far northeastern Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. The Korean Chinese have a population of just 2.6 million, but since 1992 over 100,000 women have left for marriage in South Korea (Lee 2008). Fertility in Yanbian declined sharply in response, while sending-households receive considerable remittances. This creates a double-bind for migrant-sending communities: economic and social remittances boost the local economy, yet female depopulation threatens their demographic future. Combining economic and demographic data with ethnographic fieldwork in Yanbian and Seoul, I examine long-term social repercussions of marriage migration as a response to gender imbalance.

Mixed marriages have long been considered important indicators of the social integration of immigrants, as well as potential factors of social and cultural change. Nowadays, much of the interest towards this topic is in the potential adoption for policy purposes of mixed marriages as indicator of social integration of migrants, a dimension still missing in existing sets of indicators which mostly cover the economic dimensions (cf. Huddleston et al. 2011, Eurostat 2011). However, there is not a single measure to analyse mixed marriages. Lanzieri (2011) has reviewed several of them, making a first assessment of their capacity to properly follow the dynamics of mixed marriages. In that preliminary analysis, it is found that some measures do not have the expected behaviour. By using simulated data, this study intends to extend and deepen that investigation, looking at the behaviour of the measures of mixed marriages when their dynamic over time is analysed. The purpose is thus to assess whether those measures provide a reliable indication of the extent and speed of change, looking from the perspective of a user (such as a policy-maker) who needs to monitor the process of migrants' integration.

The Republic of Korea is known as a homogenous country; a recent trend, however, is an increase in young women from other Asian countries who marry Korean men, which challenges the normative familial structure of Korean families and communities. Our analysis uses social media to examine the narrative of Koreans as they discuss what will be required of Korea to accept multicultural families and children. Three Korean web portals—Daum, Nate and Naver—were surveyed over the summer of 2012 for articles and comments on multicultural families. While we acknowledge that posters are not a representative sample of all Koreans, the web portals offer a slice of information about the public debate surrounding multicultural families. Korean web portals are a form of social communication that is not replicated in countries such as the United States; the web portals offer a timely assessment of public opinion that would be missed in nationally representative surveys. Preliminary findings show that the number of postings and concern about multi-cultural families has increased and that the public discourse on the internet is meaningful in the development of a community of “netizens” as a reflection of contemporary Korean society.

The author previously proposed a model of the quantitative distinction between hypergamy and hypogamy in international marriage. In this model, hypergamy means marriage to a foreign bride from a less developed country and to a foreign groom from a more developed country; whereas hypogamy means the other types of marriage. This study modifies the model by applying it to the latest statistics of Japan and Korea.
The previous model consists of some equations that represent the following three laws on marriage between an arbitrary pair of countries. (1) If the hypergamy-hypogamy ratio is defined as the quotient of the numbers of hypergamies and hypogamies, the ratio in one country equals approximately to that in the other country; (2) The ratio is scarcely influenced by short-term reduction of the economic difference between the two countries, although the ratio should theoretically approach to 1.0 if the difference almost disappears; (3) The economic difference may control the total amount of marriages between the two countries.
The result of the application allows us to conclude as follows: the law (1) is strongly supported; as regards the law (2), the ratio is influenced by medium and long-term reduction of the economic difference; the law (3) should be carefully examined using other data.