Interpreting Wangjing:

Recently, over a hundred thousand South Koreans, mainly of lower middle class backgrounds, migrated to a suburban town in Beijin Waning. In terms of size and migrant population density, Wangjing is emerging as one of the largest oversea Korean communities in the world. Conventional theories of migration, however, do not have appropriate tools to categorize Koreans in Beijing. Majority of them are not entirely up-rooted from South Korea, as many of them still have prope야ies and persona1 /busi-ness connections in Korea. Having middle-class backgrounds, they are not transnational capitalists. Neither are they one of skilled or unskilled migrant workers waiting to be recognized as a citizen by their host country, China. π life style is fluid and flexible, though not being very rich. The difficulty of using conventional야leoretical frameworks to understand Korean middle class move to Beijing stems from a very simple reason; studies of migration do not imagine migration of a middle class family from a developed country to a developing country. The town is not a kind of migrant ethnic enclaves in which the sense of insecurity is compensated by cohesion of migrants. Neither is Wangjing a foreign concession in a developing wor1d where laws and citizenship of global capit떠 supercede local claims of sovereignty. Overall, the nature of the new Koreatown in Beìjing is radica1ly different from other foreigners communities in Beijing and from Korean communities in other countries as it pertns a deep sense of ambivalence in their relations with identity, citizenship, sovereignty and rights. 까ùs essay is an engagement wiùs deep ambivalence through a close look at the emergence of a Korean middle-class town in globalizing Beijing. By delinea19 key driving forces su as Chinese socialist state’s urban reorgaIÙZation and crisis of South Korean middle class in the age of neoliberalism, 1 will interrogate with the natures of trans-migrant middle class in East Asia.