[KS] Korean-Chinese mostly descendants of "independence fighters"?

[Frank Hoffmann]

Dear T.N. -- you've pretty much answered your own question in your posting.

As for more concrete information and numbers, any major Korean 
bookstore has books on the history of Koreans in China, and I am sure 
Google will help -);

There are also many histories published in China itself (in Korean 
and Chinese), several of which where reprinted in South Korea. There 
are even entire journals about Korean emigration that have published 
detailed studies. Many of these publications give us a pretty good 
outline of how and when Korean immigration to China happened ... in 
several waives, starting during the late Qing Dynasty. Also note that 
U of Hawai'i Press published a volume of articles on _Koreans in 
China_ (and another volume about Koreans in the USSR), including 
texts on the history of these groups. No Korean historian I know of 
claims that the majority of the Korean population in China are the 
descendants of independence fighters. It is quite true, though, that 
most of those that you might call active independence fighters did 
gather in China and the Soviet Far East. It is also quite true that 
the Chinese central government in Beijing has from the very beginning 
tried to control minorities by various means. A Korean autonomous 
prefecture was established early on, but Han-Chinese farmers where at 
the same time offered to migrate to the Yônbyôn area, with the very 
clear goal to have at least a 50 : 50 balance between ethnic Koreans 
and ethnic Han Chinese. ....... As for total numbers of ethnic 
Koreans in China: this is indeed hard to say, in Yônbyôn and Paeksan 
County these numbers are taken into consideration in every census, 
and declaring oneself Korean has been of advantage during most of the 
last several decades. But in other Northeastern provinces, where 
there is no Korean minority government, the opposite has been true. 
It is therefore very likely that the actual population is higher than 
the official 1.9 million.

Regards,
Frank