Jeyup S Kwaak for The Wall Street Journal
    Seoul’s Daerim-dong neighborhood, where many ethnic-Korean Chinese immigrants live.

    As the world stresses over how to de-escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula, one group with the closest cultural ties to North Korea is shrugging off the war of words.

    Ethnic-Korean Chinese immigrants who hail from the Chinese provinces that border North Korea, discount the chances of war, with many expressing indifference to the emotive confrontation.

    In Seoul’s Daerim-dong neighborhood, the largest quarter for the country’s hundreds of thousands of Korean Chinese migrant workers and families, people follow but downplay the seriousness of the North Korean regime’s threats.


    “It’s a path to mutual destruction,” said Lee Dong-yul, a community newspaper publisher. “Would they really go that far?”

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