South Korea is going to hold two important elections next year, the presidential election in March and the regional elections in June. These elections will decide the fate of the country for years to come. With this all hanging in the balance, an increasing number of Chinese people are acquiring voting rights in Korea, raising questions about how they will affect the election.
Thae Yong-ho, a former senior North Korean diplomat and current lawmaker from the main opposition People Power Party, acquired statistics from the National Assembly Budget Office last week on the number of foreigners eligible to vote as of the end of June this year. According to the data, there are 122,148 foreign nationals who are eligible to participate in regional elections. The number of Chinese was 95,767, or 78.4 percent of the total. It was followed by Taiwanese (8.9 percent), Japanese (5.9 percent), Vietnamese (1.2 percent), and Americans (0.8 percent).
South Korean election law allows foreigners who have held permanent resident status for over three years to participate in regional elections, as they can be considered residents of the region. However, they are not allowed to vote in the presidential or National Assembly elections, which are seen as representing the entire country.
The foreign nationals’ voting rights law was adopted in 2005 and first implemented in the 2006 regional election. At that time, the number of foreign nationals who were eligible to vote was only 6,727. This rose nearly 15 times to 106,205 in the 2018 regional elections. It is expected to surpass the 120,000-mark in the 2021 elections for the first time.
“It is meaningful that foreigners who hold permanent resident status participate in the local elections, but we need a thorough review on the fact that people from a certain country account for a huge portion of the total and that they can distort how (the broader population) actually thinks,” Thae said.
Although the number of foreigners who are eligible to vote accounts for a small portion of the total number of eligible voters in the country, it is controversial since they can influence an extremely tight race.
In the 2018 regional elections, candidates from the ruling Democratic Party (DP) won 7 out of 8 mayoral elections. In Seoul, the DP candidate won 52.79 percent of the total vote, and the DP candidate who ran in Ulsan won 52.88 percent of the votes. These elections can be considered close races.
It was similar in the elections for governor. The races are often won by very small margins. DP candidates won 7 out of 9 provincial gubernatorial elections in 2018. Current Gyeonggi Governor Lee Jae-myung, who is leading the DP presidential primary polling, won the election with 56.4 percent of total votes. President Moon Jae-in’s close ally Kim Kyoung-soo won the South Gyeongsang gubernatorial election with 52.81 percent of the vote. In July, the Supreme Court sentenced him to two years in prison for manipulating online public opinion to help President Moon win the 2017 presidential election. He has been jailed since then.
There is another example show how foreigners can alter elections. Ahead of the mayoral elections this June, the National Election Commission announced that there are 42,246 foreigners who were eligible to vote. Among them, 38,126 resided in Seoul. The NEC did not release specific data categorizing them by country of origin. However, when considering the fact that Chinese nationals mostly live in the Seoul metropolitan area, it was fair enough to believe that a significant portion of them resided in the region. The 38,126 voters were only 0.45 percent of total voters eligible to vote in the Seoul mayoral election and one could dismiss their role in affecting the election results. However, mayoral elections can be determined by a very small number of votes, as seen during the 2010 Seoul mayoral election when conservative Oh Se-hoon beat liberal Han Myung-sook by just 26,412 votes.
Even though there has not been any thorough research on the voting patterns of Chinese nationals in South Korea, many conservatives believe they are favorably disposed toward the DP because of the Moon Jae-in administration’s pro-China stance.
Recently, Chinese nationals living in South Korea were divided over the government’s recent decision to exclude them from another round of stimulus checks of 250,000 won ($210) per person paid to those in the bottom 88 percent of income. This has also intensified the growing anti-Chinese sentiment in the country.
In South Korea, there is a group of people who are often dubbed naturalized Joseonjok (Chinese-Korean). They were born and raised in Chinese territory and hold Chinese citizenship but have Korean heritage. If a Joseonjok’s parents or grandparents held Korean citizenship, the government provides them with an F4 visa that allows them privileges short of voting.
The South Korean government excluded them from the stimulus program, which caused backlash from the Joseonjok community.
Online users on an internet blog that is used mostly by the Joseonjok community included many comments, such as, “We are paying taxes and healthcare insurance bills but why are we excluded from the stimulus checks?” Some people went further by arguing that “this country is so small, and you can see it by their spending” and “let’s bring our axes and hammers and visit the government office.”
As the issue went viral, many South Korean nationals revealed their anger towards the Joseonjok community’s history of alleged freeloading. “They are receiving healthcare benefits and they are now even trying to receive stimulus checks,” one comment read. “They are Chinese [nationals] so why do we have to give them stimulus checks?”
The Moon administration continues to be submissive to China, as was recently observed in the visit by the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi last week. However, anti-Chinese sentiment continues to grow among the South Korean public. According to a joint survey by the polling company Hankook Research and the Korean newsmagazine SisaIN, anti-Chinese sentiment has grown so much this year that China has replaced Japan — that colonized Korea between 1910 and 1945 — as the country regarded most unfavorably in South Korea. South Koreans said they favored the United States over China six to one. Over 58 percent of 1,000 respondents called China “close to evil” while only 4.5 percent said that it was “close to good.”
South Korean leftists have a tough choice to make – alienate an increasingly aggressive China or risk losing the support of the public, which is clearly aware of the China threat.
