page_title: Ethnic minorities in North Korea
section_title: Ethnic minorities
hierarchical_section_title: Ethnic minorities in North Korea / Ethnic minorities
caption_attribution_description: English: Korean women of Jaegaseung ethnicity
context_page_description: While North Korea is ethnically and linguistically homogeneous, some minorities in North Korea exist. They include groups of repatriated Koreans, small religious communities, and migrants from neighboring China and Japan.
  The historical Jaegaseung ethnic group of descendants of Jurchen people used to inhabit villages of their own, under lay monastic orders, until the 1960s. These monastic communities were perceived as antisocialist and the Jaegaseung people were assimilated with the Korean people.
  There is a community of ethnic Chinese people, known as huaqiao, that is in decline due to migration to China. While in the 1980s Chinese people living in North Korea enjoyed privileged access to trips abroad, today many of them have permanently moved to China.
  Some 50,000-70,000 ethnic Koreans living in China migrated to North Korea in the wake of the famine following Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward and repression of ethnic minorities during the Cultural Revolution. The influx forced the North Korean government to construct refugee camps to house the immigrants.
caption: Korean women of Jaegaseung ethnicity
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