Incheon’s Chinatown looks like a fun day out – but culture researcher Park Mi-Sook argues it’s one of the most revealing sites in Korea for understanding how the state has long displaced, suppressed, and then commercialised its Chinese community.
On any given weekend, Incheon’s Chinatown draws crowds. Tourists pose beneath red lanterns, read plaques about the origins of the globally beloved noodle dish jjajangmyeon and declare in front of dragon sculptures that the place “feels like China”. It is one of Korea’s most visited “exotic” destinations – familiar, photogenic, and apparently uncomplicated. Culture researcher Park Mi-Sook, writing for Slow News, wants to challenge this assumption.
Her piece takes as its entry point a term long attached to Incheon’s Chinatown: “voluntary ghetto.” The phrase is, as Park immediately notes, a contradiction. A ghetto implies coercion – historically, the forced concentration of a marginalised group into a bounded urban space. To call it voluntary is to dissolve that coercion into something more comfortable: community, choice, autonomy. Park uses this contradiction not to resolve it, but to pull it apart. The phrase, she argues, is doing ideological work – and understanding what that work is tells us something important not just about Chinatown, but about how Korean society constructs and consumes its relationship with the “other”.
The history Park traces is one of accumulated structural pressure, not free settlement. The original concentration of overseas Chinese in the area during the imperial-era concession period was not the product of communal desire but of imperial spatial logic – the Qing and Japanese empires carved Incheon into administrative zones designed to demarcate and monitor. After Korean liberation, anti-Chinese government policies and economic suppression pushed residents further from the city centre. Decades of decline followed: Chinese schools shuttered, commercial districts contracted, and a community found itself inhabiting a space that was, in Park’s words, “neither Korean nor Chinese” – caught between periphery and centre, belonging fully to neither.
Then, in the late 1990s, came reinvention. Incheon City designated Chinatown a cultural and tourism special zone, introducing Chinese-style sculptures, red colour schemes, and Chinese character signage. The problem, Park argues, was not the renovation itself but what it prioritised: the China tourists wanted to see – mythology and stereotypes over the lives of the people actually living there. Residents became, in effect, backdrop. Their histories, their precarity, their community networks were subordinated to an exportable image. The result is what Park calls “a China without the Chinese”: exotic enough to attract visitors, controlled enough not to unsettle them.
This dynamic has only intensified with the rise of platform capitalism. Today, Chinatown’s character is increasingly shaped not by city planners but by food delivery apps, Naver Maps ratings, and Instagram algorithms. Certain restaurants and streets are amplified by recommendation systems; others quietly disappear. Speculative capital follows tourist traffic, driving up rents and displacing longer-term residents. The district is being reorganised, Park writes, around “Instagram hotspots” rather than community – transforming what she calls a “city of memory” into a “city of images.”
What is lost in this transformation is substantial. In Park’s own words, “All of this has transformed Chinatown from a “place to live” to a “place to show.” What gets erased are the histories of hardship – the communities whose lives were shattered by post-liberation anti-Chinese policy, the immigrants navigating precarious labour and housing conditions today, the everyday texture of a life lived between cultures. Urban regeneration projects across Seoul follow similar patterns, from Euljiro to Seongsu to Gyeongridan-gil: certain memories are displayed, others quietly buried.
Park is clear that this is not merely a problem of misrepresentation. The myth of the voluntary ghetto has active political consequences. It transfers responsibility for spatial exclusion from the state onto residents themselves, turning discrimination into “community preference.” It justifies continued neglect by suggesting that people have chosen their conditions. It renders invisible the structural forces – imperial legacy, nationalist policy, tourism capital, algorithmic reorganisation – that have in fact shaped this space across more than a century.
To truly understand Chinatown, Park suggests, one must ask whose imagination is being served, whose choices are genuinely free, and whose memories have been selected for display. The place most Koreans associate with a bowl of jjajangmyeon is, she concludes, one of the most revealing sites in the country for examining how Korea has constructed – and continues to construct – its relationship with migration, otherness, and the past.
The original article by Park Mi-Sook ‘인천 차이나타운, ‘자발적 게토’라는 신화’ was published in Korean on 24 November 2025 on Slow News.
It is available here.
Slow News is a South Korean digital media publication that focuses on “slow journalism,” providing in-depth analysis, commentary, and long-form articles rather than breaking news.
Summary by TMH
