Joint U.S. Korea Academic Studies
From the Issue
Joint U.S.-Korea Academic Studies 2012About Joint U.S. Korea Academic Studies
For over twenty years, KEI has sponsored annual major academic symposiums at universities across the country and major academic conferences. Each year, papers are specially commissioned to fit panel topics of current policy relevance to the U.S.-ROK alliance and implications for the Korean peninsula. Following the symposium, KEI edits and publishes those papers in an annual volume entitled “Joint U.S.-Korea Academic Studies.”
With increasing economic interdependence between South Korea and the PRC since the 1990s, in recent years, over two million South Koreans are reported to cross the sea for tourism and employment opportunities in China each year.1 Many of the first South Korean grass-roots entrepreneurs who ventured to the PRC in search of opportunities for upward mobility in the early 1990s sought out the help of bilingual Korean Chinese ethnic minorities in setting up their entrepreneurial firms. But before long, co-ethnic relations between the South Korean immigrants and their Korean Chinese workers became wrought with tension and conflict. Today, the Korean ethnic enclaves in the PRC are institutionally and socially bifurcated.2 This is rather unfortunate considering the fact that the damaged relations between the South Korean immigrants and the Korean Chinese rural migrants present significant barriers to upward mobility for both parties.