“Koreanness” as a cultural capital: Ethnic educational aspirations of Korean families in Northeast China

Ethnic Koreans in China have been widely recognized as an academically successful “model minority” with a strong maintenance of Korean identity through ethnically-based education. This article examines how twenty-seven Korean families with children attending a national Korean school construct their ethnic educational aspirations of “Koreanness” as a cultural capital in the context of their living and working experience. Research results indicate that Korean families with varying demographic characteristics shaped distinct attitudes of deep-seated ethnicity, distilled ethnicity, and globalized ethnicity toward schooling children with ethnicity for upward social mobility. This article argues that there is no unique pattern of Korean families’ desire to pass down to children with ethnicity through schooling. Homogenizing Korean families with fixed “Korean” experience may ignore crucial variations in their attitudes toward ethnic education. Copyright © 2007 The Authors.