Socio-demographic impacts of marriage migration from Yanbian, China, to South Korea

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.