Yanji (; Korean: ; alternately romanized as Yenki or Yenji) is a county-level city in the east of China's Jilin Province, and is the seat of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. Its population is approximately 400,000 of which a significant portion is ethnic Korean. Yanji is a busy hub of transport and trade between China and North Korea. The city is home to Yanbian University, a comprehensive university and the only Project 211 university in Yanji.
History
Yanji and its environs were largely unpopulated until the 1800s when Qing dynasty rulers of China began to encourage migration there from China proper as part of its Chuang Guandong policy to populate Manchuria in an effort to stem encroaching Russian expansion.
The city was the seat of Jiandao Province in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo from 1934 to 1943. In 1943, the city itself was renamed Jiandao (Chientao) and made a part of the Dongman Consolidated Province (东满总省).
Following World War II, the city (again called Yanji) was nominally part of a new Songjiang Province but with the communist seizure of power in 1949, Sonjiang's borders were changed and Yanji became part of Jilin Province.
Yanji is now part of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, which is situated in eastern Jilin. Yanji City is centrally located, surrounded by five other county-level cities and two rural counties (see map); it is the administrative seat of the prefecture.
International incidents
The North Korean military detonated its second nuclear test in May 2009 close to the Chinese border, and the blast set off an earthquake of magnitude 4.5 with an epicenter only from Yanji. The mutual goodwill of the Chinese and Korean populations in the region was put under severe strain, and many in Yanji expressed newfound feelings of dismay and insecurity regarding their North Korean neighbors.
A South Korean pastor, the Reverend Kim Dong-shik, was kidnapped in Yanji in January 2000, one of numerous well-publicized North Korean abductions of South Koreans: a suspect of mixed Korean-Chinese descent, said to have been trained in Pyongyang, was arrested and charged with the crime in December 2004.
Yanji was the starting point of an international dispute in 2009 when two American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling were detained by North Korean border guards when, after leaving Yanji, they overstepped the nearby demarcation line. The two were freed only after intervention at the highest level, by former US President Clinton.
Crystal meth seeping across the border from North Korea has led to a drug problem. According to a Brookings report, "Jilin Province is not only the most important transshipment point for drugs from North Korea into China, but has itself become one of the largest markets in China for amphetamine-type stimulants." Yanji had registered nearly 2100 drug addicts in 2010 compared to just 44 in 1990; local officials admitted that the actual number was possibly five or six times higher.
Geography and climate
Yanji is situated among foothills, with the main metropolitan area contained in a small, very flat area. It is ringed by mountains dotted with small, remote farming communities. It has a four-season, monsoon-influenced, humid continental climate (classified in the Köppen system as Dwb), with long, very cold winters, and short, but very warm, humid summers. Spring and autumn constitute very short transitions with some, but usually not heavy, rainfall. The monthly 24-hour average temperature ranges from in January to in August, while the annual mean is and a total precipitation of , most of it falling during the summer. Sunshine is generous but falling far short of the central and western parts of Jilin; with monthly percent possible sunshine ranging from 39% in July to 62% in February, there are 2,280 hours of bright sunshine annually.
Administrative divisions
Yanji has six subdistricts and four towns.
Demographics
The Korean diaspora in China has significant populations in at least eleven major Chinese cities, but none larger than Yanji: official Chinese census reports from 1990 placed the city's ethnic Korean population at over 170,000. In 1994, the estimated total population of Yanji was 343,600. Official census reports from 2000 have not yet been released publicly, but current estimates place it between about one third of the city's total population to more than one half. Both Chinese and Korean are considered "official languages" of the city: all official signs are in bilingual text.