A Chinese guard, left, patrolled a border crossing to North Korea near Yanji, China. Increasingly North Koreans have been secretly entering China.
If measured by such indicators as life-expectancy and infant-mortality rates, Koreans are the second-most-prosperous ethnic group in China. Their educational achievements are also well above average.
However, nowadays things are not that rosy - at least if judged from Korean nationalist perspectives. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the ethnic Korean population of Yanbian began to shrink, with its share dropping to 36.3% in 2000 (from 60.2% in 1953), and is still falling.
http://www.nkeconwatch.com/2007/08/16/the-gentle-decline-of-the-third-
korea/