North Korea’s Unfinished Diaspora Diplomacy in Central Asia
During his September 2026 state visit to South Korea, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev highlighted the role of the country’s ethnic Korean community in ties with Seoul. His talks in Seoul covered cooperation in energy, technology and critical minerals. North Korea had pursued its own diaspora outreach decades earlier. In Kazakhstan, Pyongyang sent Korean-language textbooks and funded a community association in 1989. Some community exchanges continued after its Almaty embassy closed in 1998. Despite North Korea’s efforts, however, its relations with Central Asian countries remain limited, falling behind the extensive educational and commercial relationships associated with South Korea.
The experience of Central Asia’s Koryo-saram (Korean people) suggests that the shared ethnic ties created a basis for cooperation to form with both Koreas but was not enough to sustain a robust relationship on their own. North Korea’s financial difficulties and subsequent sanctions constrained its activities and ability to build out its relations in robust or multi-faceted ways. South Korean institutions, meanwhile, connected cultural engagement with study, training, and business opportunities. For many Central Asian governments and Korean community organizations, these relationships, however uneven, did not require choosing one Korea over the other. Instead, they have managed both relationships according to the levels of effort that either Korea invested into building meaningful ties to the local populations beyond shared ethnicity. As North Korea expands its cooperation with Russia, this may create new opportunities for Pyongyang to reengage with Koryo-saram communities in Central Asia, although the extent to which it can translate these opportunities into meaningful relationships will depend on its ability to offer sustained and tangible forms of engagement.
A Diaspora With Its Own History
Koryo-saram should not be described as a North Korean community. As historian German Kim explains in his account of Koreans in the former Soviet Union, migration to the Russian Far East preceded the Peninsula’s division. Many settlers came from its northern provinces, but those origins do not establish present-day nationality or political allegiance. Stalin’s deportation of Soviet Koreans to Central Asia in 1937, followed by decades of Soviet education and social life, further shaped a distinct diaspora experience.
The communities remain substantial. Kazakhstan’s 2021 census counted 118,450 ethnic Koreans, about 0.6 percent of the population. An official Uzbek estimate report in August 2021 put the country’s Korean population at approximately 174,200. Together, these figures indicate about 293,000 people in the two countries at that time who, despite their origins and ethnic ties, do not necessarily reflect or support present-day North Korea.
For this article, that distinction matters more than the size of the population. A family connection to a place now part of North Korea may make visits or language study meaningful. It does not establish a preference for Pyongyang over Seoul. Nor does participation in a South Korean educational program demonstrate a rejection of North Korea.
Outreach That Outlasted the Embassy
In a study available online since 2004, Kim records that Pyongyang sent 3,000 Korean-language textbooks and primers to Kazakhstan in 1989, alongside the arrival of a language professor and a taekwondo instructor. A North Korean-funded association facilitated visits by approximately 1,000 Kazakhstani Koreans during its early years. These were concrete attempts to engage a community, not merely diplomatic protocol.
The activity did not simply end with the Almaty embassy’s closure. Kim also describes a small organization subsequently known as Kotonryon and a North Korean cultural exhibition it helped organize in Almaty in August 2000. South Korea’s ambassador attended the exhibition. That episode complicates any account of a diaspora divided into mutually exclusive North- and South-oriented camps.
Later contacts are documented in Kazakhstan’s official account of bilateral relations. A delegation including lawmakers, businesspeople and the Association of Koreans of Kazakhstan visited North Korea in October 2008. The following month, senior North Korean official Choe Thae Bok visited Kazakhstan, including the association and the Korean theater. Association president Roman Kim stated that it was willing to work with both Korean states.
These records do not establish a large or continuously funded North Korean network, but they do highlight that embassy closure and the disappearance of community contacts were different processes.
The association’s stated willingness to engage both sides also cautions against treating Koryo-saram simply as a resource claimed by competing governments.
Diplomatic Relations on a Smaller Scale
All five Central Asian republics established diplomatic relations with North Korea in early 1992. Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry dates the Almaty embassy’s operation to 1992–1998 and shows that a North Korean trade office remained until November 2000. In Uzbekistan, Yonhap reported the Tashkent embassy’s closure in August 2016, citing a diplomatic source who described a restructuring of Pyongyang’s missions in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
These events should not be assigned a single cause. The Almaty trade office closure preceded the United Nations (UN) sanctions regime established in October 2006. Kim’s historical account links the withdrawal to North Korea’s economic crisis. Tashkent’s embassy closure occurred in a different sanctions environment, but the report of diplomatic restructuring does not establish how financial pressures, host-government decisions or South Korean diplomacy contributed to that particular decision.
The surviving channels could still support official discussion. Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry recorded a meeting with Ambassador Sin Hong Chol in April 2021. A separate Health Ministry report explicitly identified him as ambassador to Russia, concurrently accredited to Kazakhstan. It also recorded Kazakh interest in learning about traditional Korean medicine. The report demonstrates contact and a subject for possible cooperation, not that a medical program was subsequently implemented.
Concurrent accreditation provided an official channel to Kazakhstan after the Almaty embassy closed. The record includes reciprocal visits in 2008 and political consultations in 2015, as well as meetings with Kazakh officials in 2021. These establish continued contact, but the sources cited here do not show whether the traditional-medicine cooperation discussed in 2021 was implemented.
Where South Korean Engagement Accumulated
Education offers a clearer measure of continuity. South Korea’s Almaty Education Center, opened in August 1991. In 2025, Busan’s municipal government reported more than 3,000 annual enrollments in the Center’s language courses, alongside language testing, scholarship-related activities and education fairs. The center links cultural interest to practical routes into further study. Its programs are not a measure of exclusively Koryo-saram participation, but they demonstrate institutional activity sustained over decades.
The wider relationship extends beyond diaspora programs. A June 2024 Uzbek presidential account reported 726 joint ventures with South Korean participation across several industries. It also described functioning vocational-training centers established with Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) assistance in Tashkent, Samarkand, Shakhrisabz, Fergana and Urgench. These are concrete points of contact in employment and training, not simply expressions of shared heritage.
Kazakhstan’s customs-based figures put merchandise trade with South Korea at approximately $6 billion in 2023. The embassy’s economic overview identifies crude oil and metals among Kazakhstan’s exports, and machinery and vehicles among its imports. That composition is a reminder that bilateral commerce rests on economic complementarities as well as personal connections. It would be misleading to attribute the entire relationship to diaspora diplomacy.
Uzbekistan’s official annual country series provides a direct comparison between the two Koreas. For 2023, it records approximately $1.18 million in turnover with North Korea and $2.37 billion with South Korea. Relative to the country’s total foreign-trade turnover, the shares were about 0.002 percent and 3.7 percent. This national series includes goods and services, rather than merchandise alone. It also recorded $15.7 million with North Korea in 2015 and $864,000 in 2024: the relationship was small and variable, but still meaningful.
These aggregates do not identify the participants in every transaction, distinguish diaspora-led business, or capture all indirect activity. Nor can they establish the legality of particular transactions. Their narrower value is to show the scale of recorded engagement, rather than treating a small number as nonexistence.
The comparison points toward a difference in the range and continuity of institutions connecting people to each country. A language course with testing and scholarship pathways offers possibilities beyond a one-off cultural visit. Training centers and businesses create additional reasons to maintain contact. It is not to say that cultural affinity caused investment, or that Seoul displaced Pyongyang through a coordinated campaign, but shows how cultural contact could be reinforced by opportunities outside the community itself.
Continuity Without a Large Partnership
For North Korea, despite closing down its formal diplomatic offices in Kazakhstan, the relationship is clearly still valuable. Its Foreign Ministry records political consultations in Pyongyang in 2015 on nonproliferation and cooperation in international organizations, as well as North Korean support for Kazakhstan’s UN Security Council candidacy and EXPO 2017 bid. Such exchanges had a diplomatic purpose even without extensive commerce.
Closer relations with Seoul did not require severing those channels. The 2024 Kazakhstan-South Korea joint statement recognized the contribution of ethnic Koreans to bilateral ties while also calling for North Korea to comply with UN Security Council resolutions. The coexistence of these positions is more informative than a simple account of Central Asia choosing one Korea and rejecting the other.
For assessing North Korea’s regional presence, the practical question is whether occasional contacts develop into recurring activity: regular programs, identifiable organizations, funded exchanges or sustained commerce. Embassy counts alone cannot answer that question. Neither can the existence of an ambassador accredited from Moscow demonstrate that Russia is organizing a wider North Korean return to Central Asia.
The historical record supports a limited conclusion. Pyongyang did establish connections with Central Asia’s Korean communities, and some survived diplomatic retrenchment. What it did not develop on a comparable scale was the continuing access to education, employment and institutions associated with South Korea. Understanding that difference requires attention to what diaspora members and host-country organizations could do through each relationship, rather than assuming that ancestry determined their allegiance.
Data note: Demographic figures refer to 2021. Uzbekistan’s trade comparison uses the national statistical portal’s annual country series and total-turnover series; both cover goods and services. Shares are calculated from unrounded 2023 values. Kazakhstan’s $6 billion figure is a separately reported merchandise-trade total. The two national series are not used to calculate cross-country trade shares.