Market Focus : Chinese Workers Face Frustrations in South Korea : Most are ethnic Koreans, but they often don’t feel at home. Low pay, long hours and culture shock are common complaints.

Choi Hyon Chul was born in northeast China, but he’s an ethnic Korean and used to root for the Korean team whenever China and South Korea faced off in international sports competitions. He felt he was Korean.

That was before Choi left his factory job in China’s Jilin province, which abuts the Korean peninsula, and came to South Korea to work illegally on construction sites. Here in Korea, despite his fluency in the language, Choi found his identity in crisis again.

Working in the land of his Korean ancestors did not make him want to stay on and try to assimilate. To the contrary, he was soon backing the Chinese side when athletic teams from the two countries met.

“This was our ancestral home, but we were born and grew up in China,” he said of himself and other ethnic Koreans from China. “Although we speak the language, our habits aren’t the same. There’s no problem with daily life, (but) hunting for work, doing business--these are the things we don’t understand.”

Even though wages here vastly exceed what they could earn at home, life for most is a constant struggle.

Choi is one of more than 31,000 Chinese citizens--80% of them ethnic Koreans--now in South Korea. Nearly all have come to work, some legally, with work permits under euphemistically named “training” programs, but the majority illegally, coming in on visitor visas and overstaying the time limit.

The flow of Korean Chinese to South Korea reflects a slowly spreading diplomatic thaw in northeastern Asia that could eventually lead to Korean reunification. But frustrations in the exchange of workers like Choi provide a warning: Any sudden integration of North Korean workers into South Korea’s far more prosperous system would be fraught with difficulties.

Like North Koreans, the Korean Chinese laborers grew up under communism and can speak Korean. A key difference is that they also have experienced China’s past 15 years of market-oriented reforms. Yet even with that experience, few fit in here. Most yearn to save up money and go home.

About 78,000 foreign laborers, including the Korean Chinese, are now working in South Korea. Nearly all have tough or unpleasant jobs that most South Koreans disdain. This increasingly prosperous country has even adopted into the Korean language the label “3-D” jobs--shorthand for the English words “dirty, difficult or dangerous”--to describe the work the foreigners do. Whether they have come as contract laborers or are working illegally, their pay is usually less than that of their South Korean counterparts.

Choi earns more than $1,250 a month in Seoul, a princely sum compared to the $50 a month he earned in China, but several hundred dollars less than his Korean co-workers here. The money, however, does not completely make up for painful attitudes.

“The treatment here isn’t equal, so most (Korean Chinese) are unhappy,” Choi said. “The bosses think China is underdeveloped, and they treat people from China as lower-class. It creates bad feelings.”

Yoo Jung Ho, a scholar working with the South Korean government’s Economic Planning Board, said that labor-intensive industries that are facing competition from low-wage nations are urging the government to let in even more foreign workers. But this can be only a short-term solution, and it risks creating social problems at home and diplomatic troubles abroad, he said.

“It helps some businesses temporarily, but it creates all sorts of other problems,” Yoo said. Some Koreans treat the foreigners badly, he explained: “They may try to give them as little money as possible and try to extract as much time as possible from them. That’s already happening.

“Some of these people are from China, Korean descendants, and they not only get disappointed in the South Korean government, sometimes they hate South Korea for treating them like that. They go back to China and they talk with North Koreans. I don’t think that’s good for reunification. For South and North Korea eventually to be able to successfully reunite, there should be no hatred or no misgivings about each other, but we are exactly creating that by maltreating Korean workers from China.”

South Korean Minister of Labor Affairs Nam Jae Hee acknowledged in an interview that resentment is sometimes created because foreign trainees “are paid far less” than regular workers. “Some policy changes may be in order to pay them equally as the normal workers, after the training period is over,” he said.

But the minister doubted that the situation could affect perceptions of the two Koreas. Ethnic Koreans in China still “are very much envious of the economic development in South Korea,” he said, and Seoul does not consider it a serious security problem to have so many ethnic Koreans here from China, despite that country’s Communist government and close ties to the north.

“Because North Korea is such a failure, nobody fears the ideological connection,” Nam said.

But sometimes trouble arises from a complex clash of expectations rooted in differences between the two societies.

Employers often think foreign workers should accept their position at the bottom rung of the employment ladder and be thankful for the opportunity to save up far more money than they could at home. Long hours of overtime are not unusual in South Korea and may be welcomed by some workers seeking to boost their incomes.

But factory workers in China generally work an eight-hour day, and while pay may be low, demands usually are not too high. Many are shocked to discover how hard they are expected to work in South Korea.

Fairly typical is the experience of a 54-year-old Korean Chinese woman from a village in Heilongjiang province. She quit her first job, at a restaurant in Seoul, after just one month.

“It was too tiring,” explained the woman, who wished to be identified only by her surname, Jin. “You’re standing for 12 hours a day. Your legs hurt. It’s very hard to find an eight-hour job if you’re not a South Korean citizen.”

Jin later found work as a live-in maid, earning almost $900 a month. But she recently quit that job too. “There was too much work: ‘Do this! Do that!’ I wasn’t willing to listen to them anymore,” she said.

Jin said she is looking for other work, and meanwhile her husband is earning $1,900 a month as a construction worker. They expect to return to China after two years in South Korea with enough money to buy homes for their two sons, she said.

“In China, you can’t earn this much money in 10 years,” she said. “I’m happy I came. It’s just that the work is so hard I can barely endure it.”

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A 48-year-old Korean Chinese man from Harbin, who asked to be identified only by his surname, Li, said that, before coming here nearly three years ago, he thought of Korea as his “motherland.” But now he looks forward to going home to China.

“Our blood is the same, but the background is different,” he said. “China is Communist and South Korea is capitalist. Our thinking is different. There are lots of difficulties in living here. Materially it’s fine. But in terms of people’s attitudes, it’s very difficult. They have a class system. Rich people can mistreat poor people.

“In China, although I am of Korean ancestry, I was never discriminated against this way. Then I came here, and although I’m of the same blood, I’ve been mistreated very badly.”

Li, who has bounced from one job to the next, complained bitterly about newspaper advertisements that he said describe jobs that sound reasonable but actually entail much more severe demands.

But some, like Jin Zhenghua, 25, a Korean Chinese peasant woman who solders sensor parts, accept their situation philosophically.

“Of course we wish we had higher wages, but that’s impossible,” said Jin, 25, who now earns about $300 a month at the Dong Kwang Sensor Industrial Co. in Seoul. “The reason they want us here is so they can save money.”

Times researcher Chi Jung Nam in Seoul contributed to this report.