South Korean Island Grows Wary After Welcoming the Chinese

DAEJEONG, South Korea — Not far from Shin Yong-kyun’s strawberry farm are the crumbling remains of an airfield that Japanese colonialists built in the 1930s, to launch air raids against China, and the coastal caves they gouged out to hide their warships.

Chinese tourists in Shanghai board a ship headed to the South Korean island of Jeju. While the influx of Chinese money has benefited many on the island, others worry about exploitation

The Japanese imperial era is long over, but Mr. Shin and many residents of this subtropical resort island say they are now worried about what some call a new foreign “invasion” — waves of Chinese tourists and investors sweeping into Jeju, famous for its honeymooners, palm trees and golf courses overlooking a turquoise sea.

“Planeload after planeload of them arrive, some buying up land around here,” Mr. Shin said, as he and his wife packaged strawberries in their greenhouse. “I sometimes wonder whether this island this time is not turning into a Chinese colony.”

The sudden influx of Chinese — and their money — has been driven in part by the Jeju government’s own policies. These included letting foreigners visit without visas, and offering permanent-resident status for condominium owners and allowing them access to the same medical and employment benefits South Koreans enjoy without having to give up their citizenship.

The rush of money has been an economic bonanza for many, like the duty-free shops jam-packed with Chinese tourists looking for luxury items that are more costly at home and those hoping new hotels and condo developments will boost Jeju’s reputation. But the growing Chinese presence has also raised fears of big-power exploitation that is never far from the surface in a country that has been invaded numerous times by its stronger neighbors.

Of the 6.1 million Chinese tourists who visited South Korea last year, nearly half visited Jeju, a fivefold increase from 2011. The Chinese have also become Jeju’s biggest foreign investors. They recently broke ground for what was billed as Asia’s largest family theme-park and casino complex. And Chinese business people are building or have announced plans for several high-rise hotels and condominium developments, which local people fear will be snapped up mainly by Chinese.

Although Chinese-owned land in Jeju is still less than 1 percent, it has grown to 2,050 acres last year from just five acres in 2009. More than 70 percent of $6.1 billion in foreign investments in Jeju announced between 2010 and last year came from China.

Feelings about China — one of the countries that invaded Korea in past centuries — are especially complicated. While many South Koreans are unequivocal in their continuing anger at Japan for its colonial and wartime history from last century, there is more of a sense that China is too powerful to shun.

China is the largest trade partner for this export-driven country, and President Park Geun-hye of South Korea has cultivated closer ties with China, meeting President Xi Jinping several times. Some in Jeju who welcome Chinese investment have even worried that a naval base under construction here will be used by American warships and chase away Chinese investors.

But China’s aggressive moves to declare control over nearby seas has also worried many South Koreans, who fear China will eventually be such an important economic partner that it could dictate policy. Of particular concern is that it could drive a wedge between South Korea and the United States, which most South Koreans still consider their best national security partner.

“Jeju is South Korea’s front line of contact with the Chinese,” said Kim Nam-jin, an official with the Jeju provincial government in charge of cooperation with China. “What we do here is a test bed for how South Korea shapes its relationship with and policy on China.”

Until tourism transformed Jeju, it was a sleepy island dedicated mainly to farming and fishing. So many men left the island for better jobs that the predominance of women was one of the three things the island was most known for. The other two were wind and volcanic rocks.

As South Korea’s economy exploded, the island became a favorite destination not only of South Korean honeymooners, but also for school trips. (Most of the 304 people killed in a ferry accident last April were students headed to Jeju.)

For a time in the last several years, Jeju was especially welcoming to the Chinese, whom officials thought could help vault the island from a regional destination to an international one.

Although South Koreans have long ensured that Chinatowns did not form in their cities, Jeju became the first province to give one of its busiest shopping districts a Chinese name. Baojian Street was named after a Chinese health care product company that brought 11,000 employees to Jeju on incentive tours in 2011.

Lisa Xue, 60, a Chinese tourist on a recent visit, said she and others were attracted to the island by its proximity — just a two-hour flight from Beijing — while wealthy Chinese saw it as a good place to buy property.

But in the last year or so, local news media and critics began accusing Chinese real estate investors of “encroaching upon” Korean land. They also complained that most of the Chinese tourists were brought to Jeju by Chinese tourist agencies and not only violated some social mores, but often stayed, ate and shopped in Chinese-controlled hotels, restaurants and shopping centers.

In a survey of 1,000 islanders last year, 68 percent said the growing number of Chinese tourists did not help Jeju’s development.

“There are sometimes so many of them crossing a coastal road that you have to stop your car and wait for them to pass like a herd of cattle.” said Kim Hong-gu, a Jeju businessman, who also noted that some Chinese spat and smoked on the street, practices Koreans have increasingly given up as the country has become an economic powerhouse.

Mr. Kim accused China of “wielding its big money” to turn Jeju, prized among Koreans for its distinct dialect and traditional customs, into “a Chinatown.”

Hong Young-cheol, head of the civic group Jeju Solidarity for Participatory Self-Government and Environmental Preservation, suspected Chinese tourists disregarded public etiquette “because they look down on Koreans as a small nation.”

As real estate prices have risen, fears have grown that South Koreans will find it more costly to live in Jeju. The mood soured so much that those selling land to Chinese were compared to “national traitors,” Koreans of the early 20th century who helped Japan colonize the nation. One restaurant even took out a newspaper ad to dispel rumors that it had been taken over by Chinese.

Jeju officials warned against “close-minded patriotism,” noting that some of the projects the Chinese had taken over had been abandoned or shunned by local investors.

“The wisdom is not in trying to stop the Chinese from coming and antagonizing them but in enticing them to spend more here,” said Cho Eui-hwan, an executive at Raon Private Home, a condominium where half of the 934 units have been bought by Chinese since the permanent-residency offer was introduced in 2010. “Speaking of unruly tourists, wasn’t it only a few decades ago that ‘ugly Koreans’ were accused of the same behavior abroad?”

In an apparent gesture to ease local resentment, the casino operator Genting Singapore promised this month to hire thousands of islanders at a $1.8 billion resort it is developing with a Chinese partner, the developer Landing International. The 618-acre complex includes a casino, premium hotels and a theme park.

Mr. Shin, the farmer, said his village was divided in its feelings. Some people were happy that the Chinese-driven investment boom had raised land prices. Others were upset by the rising cost of renting farms and what some see as environmental degradation caused by so much building.

For Mr. Shin, history is too intensely alive around his village not to fear what a rising China might mean for islanders like him. He says his grandfather was one of the islanders conscripted by the Japanese to build their airfield and caves.

“This is a land of pain,” he said. “The sudden sight of so many Chinese adds to that pain.”