How many koreans are there in the world

Civil organizations and social movements flourished around the issues of the environment, women, human rights, and social welfare. In addition, social conflicts intensified with economic development and social change. Cleavages have grown between generations in the patterns of behavior and thought, the distance between rich and poor has widened, tensions between groups of different regional backgrounds have heightened, and business-labor relations have improved little.

Koreans nowadays tend to portray their society as problem-mounted and conflict-ridden. The proportional increase of the urban population began in the early colonial period, but urbanization in its modern sense had to wait until The primary destination of these migrants was Seoul.

It was also noticed that other big cities like Pusan and newly-installed industrial cities like Ulsan showed big population gains through migration. Rural-to-urban migration was the major component of this rapid urbanization in the earlier stage, but its contribution has dwindled sharply with the shrinking size of the rural population. Instead, urban sprawl and the installation of new cities in rural hinterlands account for most of the urban population growth since Also, industrialization and modernization assumed an increasingly important role in both migration and urbanization in more recent years.

The tendency of the population to concentrate in Seoul has lessened greatly since , and in the s population gains through migration almost ceased in metropolitan areas. This does not indicate an emerging trend of population decentralization among cities, but rather the spatial expansion of the functional governance of Seoul proper into nearby areas and satellite cities, a process which has formed Greater Seoul, or a Seoul megalopolis, consisting of Seoul City, Inchon, and cities in neighboring Kyounggi Province.

This tendency of concentration had weakened during , but has greatly strengthened since Since the division of Korea in , South and North Korea have been hostile to each other and followed different paths in every field of life. The population of North Korea was estimated at 9,, at the time of liberation. North Korea had almost no population gain through migration across borders during , and then lost more than one million people during the civil war, due to heavy casualties and a large refugee migration to South Korea.

The pace of population growth was reduced sharply in the s due to fertility reduction. In other words, fertility transition started there in the early s. North Korea disseminated contraceptives in the s, but banned them afterwards.

Nevertheless, the trend of fertility decline could not be controlled and it appears to have dropped below the replacement level in the mid s, as was also the case in South Korea.

The major driving force for fertility transition was poor family living conditions. It is said nowadays that young people avoid marriage and young couples decline to have a second child as measures to cope with poverty and starvation caused by the collapse of the national economy. The North Korean government has banned the distribution of contraceptives and encouraged births, but various evidences suggest that fertility has plunged far below the level of replacement.

Concerning the economic situation of North Korea, there is little consensus of opinion among researchers and analysts. It is undoubted, however, that the country achieved a considerable economic growth during , and the socialist economy entered into a long period of stagnation in the late s. The per capita GNP was estimated to be in the range of dollars for and to increase to dollars by After reaching dollars in , the economy revealed a very slow growth until , followed by rapid deterioration in the s.

The food situation is known to have worsened greatly since the early s. Shortage of food is known to have brought about overall malnutrition, as indicated by a continuous shrinking of the height and weight of children since Considering the economic situation, mortality is believed to have declined marginally in the s and then risen substantially in the s, particularly during , when a series of famines hit the country hard. Unlike the official figures provided by North Korea, which show the same levels of mortality as South Korea, the South Korean government projected the North Korean life expectancy at birth as The same projection revealed a reduction of population in the later half of the s.

Concerning the future of Korean society, there are certainties and uncertainties. Demographic pictures are relatively certain, but people are uncertain of economic prospects. Population will increase to the peak of slightly more than 50 million in the mid s and will decrease rapidly afterward.

Population aging will proceed more rapidly during the next three or four decades, until the proportion of the elderly reach one quarter of the total population. A similar trend is expected in North Korea. Korea will face a new demographic situation that contrasts sharply with what prevailed throughout the twentieth century. For example, the labor force situation will be reversed.

The Korean economy has been aided greatly by a growing labor force during , but will be burdened by the population aging and a shrinking labor force in the coming years.

North Korea and the national reunification might be crucial factors in evaluating the future of Korea. It is widely believed that the two Koreas will be reunited sometime in the earlier part of the twenty-first century.

The timing and method would have tremendous demographic as well as economic implications for both Koreas. More immediate concerns in this regard might be the prospects of political relationship, economic cooperation, and labor migration between South and North Korea. Unsupported Browser Detected. Population Change and Development in Korea. Background Korean society has undergone a major transformation since Economic Development Profound changes have been noticed in every field of life since The main foreign contacts officially sanctioned by the Choson Dynasty were diplomatic missions to China three or four times a year and a small outpost of Japanese merchants in the southeastern part of Korea near the present-day city of Pusan.

Few Koreans left the peninsula during the late Choson Dynasty, and even fewer foreigners entered. Japanese Colonial Period During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Korea became the object of competing imperial interests as the Chinese empire declined and Western powers began to vie for ascendancy in East Asia.

It took Japan, itself only recently opened to Western-style international relations by the United States, to impose a diplomatic treaty on Korea for the first time in Japan, China, and Russia were the main rivals for influence on Korea in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and after defeating China and Russia in war between and , Japan became the predominant power on the Korean peninsula.

In Japan annexed Korea outright as a colony, and for the next 35 years Japan ruled Korea in a manner that was strict and often brutal. However, Japan also brought the beginnings of industrial development to Korea. Modern industries such as steel, cement, and chemical plants were set up in Korea during the s and s, especially in the northern part of the peninsula where coal and hydroelectric power resources were abundant.

By the time Japanese colonial rule ended in August , Korea was the second most industrialized country in Asia after Japan itself. In the final days of the war, the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to jointly accept the Japanese surrender in Korea, with the U. However, by , the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, combined with political differences between Koreans of the two occupation zones and the policies of the occupation forces on the ground, led to a breakdown in negotiations over a unified government of Korea.

On August 15, , a pro-U. Both governments claimed to legitimately represent the entire Korean people, creating a situation of extreme tension across the 38th parallel. On June 25, , North Korea, backed by the U. Under the flag of the United Nations, a U. In July , after millions of deaths and enormous physical destruction, the war ended approximately were it began, with North and South Korea divided into roughly equal territories by the cease-fire line, a Demilitarized Zone DMZ that still forms the boundary between North and South Korea today.

Since , North and South Korea have evolved from a common cultural and historical base into two very different societies with radically dissimilar political and economic systems.

The differences between North and South Korea today have little to do with pre regional differences between northern and southern Korea. North Korea developed into perhaps the most isolated and controlled of all communist states, and even 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, showed little sign of political and economic liberalization despite severe economic hardship.

South Korea, on the other hand, has been greatly influenced by the United States and, in a more subtle way, by Japan. The U. While South Korea has often been less democratic than Americans would like or the Korean leaders claimed it to be, since the fall of its military dictatorship in the late s democracy appears to have become increasingly consolidated in the R. South Korea recovered rapidly from the Asian financial crisis of and is currently the third-largest economy in Eastern Asia, after Japan and China.

As in many other countries, American popular culture is an important presence in South Korea. To a lesser extent, Japanese popular culture is influential as well. However, South Korea has developed its own distinctly Korean forms of popular culture, while traditional Korean culture has undergone something of a revival in recent decades.

By the late s and early s, South Korean pop music, film, and television dramas were becoming quite popular in other parts of Asia too, especially China and Vietnam. Despite the general cultural homogeneity of Korea, regional sentiment has become an important factor in South Korean politics and in other areas of contemporary life. By , the population of ethnic Koreans settled around , These Koreans and their descendants are commonly referred to as Zainichi literally "residing in Japan" , a term that appeared in the immediate postwar years.

Ethnic Koreans who remained in Japan did so for diverse reasons. Koreans who had achieved successful careers in business, the imperial bureaucracy, and the military during the colonial period or who had taken advantage of economic opportunities that opened up immediately after the war—opted to maintain their relatively privileged status in Japanese society rather than risk returning to an impoverished and politically unstable post-Liberation Korea.

Some Koreans who repatriated were so repulsed by the poor conditions they observed that they decided to return to Japan. Other Koreans living in Japan could not afford the train fare to one of the departure ports. For ethnic Koreans who had ethnic Japanese spouses and Japanese-born, Japanese-speaking children, it made more sense to stay in Japan rather than to navigate the cultural and linguistic challenges of a new environment.

Although Koreans in Japan prior to World War II suffered racial discrimination and economic exploitation, the Japanese authorities nonetheless counted ethnic Koreans as Japanese nationals and sought to fully assimilate Koreans into Japanese society through Japanese education and the promotion of intermarriage. Following the war, however, the Japanese government defined ethnic Koreans as foreigners, no longer recognizing them as Japanese nationals.

The use of the term Zainichi , or "residing in Japan" reflected the overall expectation that Koreans were living in Japan on a temporary basis and would soon return to Korea. By December , Koreans lost their voting rights. In , the Alien Registration Law consigned ethnic Koreans to alien status. The Nationality Law stripped Zainichi children with Japanese mothers of their Japanese nationality; only children with Japanese fathers would be allowed to keep their Japanese citizenship. As of , former colonial subjects—the majority of whom were Korean--whose homeland was not recognized by Japan as a legitimate nation-state including Korea were rendered stateless.

In , a law required that all registered foreigners be fingerprinted. Ethnic Koreans were even excluded from the rights granted to non-nationals in Japan's postwar constitution. Employment policies excluded Koreans from all "Japanese" jobs after Barred from all public and private-sector employment, Koreans pursued jobs in the informal-sector and engaged in illegal or marginal economic activities such as illegal alcohol production, scrap recycling, and racketeering.

Postwar ethnic Korean organizations provided economic assistance and fought for ethnic Korean rights. In addition to providing loans for ethnic businesses, Soren established ethnic schools that taught Korean language and history to prepare students for eventual return to Korea. In contrast to the miserable status of Zainichi in Japan and the lagging economy and autocratic dictatorship in South Korea, Soren projected North Korea as a Communist paradise to which all Koreans would one day return, a vision that seemed viable in the s given the Communist Party's support for Koreans before and after World War II and the economic success of North Korea over South Korea during that period.

Throughout the s, Soren won the support of more than 90 percent of ethnic Koreans in Japan. In the late s, Soren launched a repatriation project that dispatched a total of 93, people to North Korea, including 6, Japanese.

Approximately 70, Zainichi repatriated during a two-year period from through The numbers dropped dramatically the following year, however, and the repatriation project effectively ended in the early s Officially, the project ended in When North Korean poverty, corruption, and autocracy became apparent, Soren membership began to decline.

Membership declined even further when Japan established formal diplomatic relations with South Korea through the Normalization Treaty. The treaty provided incentives for Koreans in Japan to seek South Korean citizenship, including a functional South Korean passport, freedom to travel, and access to Japanese medical and welfare benefits. Large-scale repatriation to South Korea, however, did not occur.

Many Zainichi living Japan—a democratic country that had just entered a period of rapid economic growth and prosperity—found life in South Korea under the autocratic military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee in the s and s an unattractive alternative. Also, Zainichi Koreans had by then become too entrenched in Japanese society.

Ethnic Koreans in Japan were culturally and linguistically Japanese. In addition, Zainichi Koreans who returned to North Korea in the late s and early s during the repatriation project or to South Korea in the late s following the Normalization Treaty experienced suspicion and rejection by the respective governments as well as homeland compatriots. In the North Korean class system, Zainichi were treated as second-class citizens and suspected as spies for the South or Japan.