Becoming Hanhwa: Floating Chineseness Among Chinese Youths in Cold War South Korea

This paper examines the emergence of Hanhwa (韓華) as a cultural identity adopted by second-generation ethnic Chinese in South Korea (ROK) during the early Cold War. Born to Shandongnese families, raised in South Korea, and often educated in Taiwan (ROC), this cohort’s Chinese citizenship was destabilized following the PRC-ROC split and the Korean War. Oriented toward mainland China, they rejected identification as PRC citizens under the shared anti-communism of the ROC and ROK, while finding ROC citizenship increasingly untenable as it was redefined around Taiwan rather than the mainland. Meanwhile, South Korea’s ethnonationalist developmental project intensified exclusion toward foreign populations, leaving Chinese youth in a condition of deep civic precarity.

Rather than treating ethnicity as a derivative of citizenship, this paper argues through the coinage of “Hanhwa” identity a tactical redefinition of Han-Chineseness itself, or a floating ethnic identity that could endure across the instability and fragmentation of Chinese citizenship in the Cold War. This paper draws from Chinese-language community publications from the 1950s and 1960s, including the newspaper Hanhua ribao, which first used such endonym and civic positioning in South Korea, and the magazine Hanhua Chunqiu, which captured generational shifts and transnational aspirations within the Hanhwa identity through opportunities within the ROC diplomatic networks and educational initiatives. Conceptually, the paper builds on Byungil An’s notion of “floating ethnic identity” on contemporary Chinese diasporas in Korea, while extending it back to the 1960s to foreground non-elite strategies of survival under exclusion, distinguishing these everyday maneuvers from elite forms of mobility often emphasized in studies of flexible citizenship. I show how Hanhwa identity emerged as a resource for cultural continuity and social survival: neither fully Korean nor securely Chinese, Hanhwa bound together han (Korean) and hwa (Chinese) as a precarious yet generative form of Cold War Chineseness forged from below.