ROK plays down visa crackdown after tourists vanish

The South Korean Ministry of Justice (MOJ) told the Global Times Friday that the disappearance of 19 Chinese tourists in the country will not lead to a change in visa policies.

Back in December, a group of 19 Chinese tourists went missing in South Korea after their first night's stay in Incheon, a port city in the northwest of the country, after they arrived on the morning of December 29.

The cruise liner they had arrived with left the Chinese city of Dalian, Liaoning Province on December 28. They all held 15 day visas for South Korea and none of them had visited the country before.

However, there has been no update as to their whereabouts since they disappeared.

The group's guide, a Chinese citizen of Korean ethnicity, reported the incident to the police, which triggered a search by the Korea Immigration Service.

A preliminary investigation has ruled out the possibility of the guide's involvement in the incident, but the role of other potential intermediaries is being investigated.

There seemed to be some debate as to the group's place of origin. The MOJ said the group was comprised of men from North China's Shanxi Province.

However, the Xinhua News Agency reported Friday that the Shanxi Provincial Tourism Administration claimed none of the 19 came from the province and that neither Shanxi's foreign affairs authority nor entry-exit department found exit records or identification information about the 19 men.

The Chinese travel agency behind the trip was the Jilin Global International Travel Agency based in Northeast China's Jilin Province, the Shanxi Provincial Tourism Administration told the Global Times Friday. The agency could not be reached for comment Friday.

The Jilin Provincial Tourism Administration confirmed that they were looking into the matter, and that the tourists were introduced to the Jilin agency via a Shaanxi Province-based travel agency in Northwest China. The passports of the tourists were processed in Shaanxi.

It seems possible that confusion between the names of Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces was behind this odd mix-up.

However, a Korean MOJ spokesperson told the Global Times Friday that the tourists were suspected of having used forged identities with the help of the Chinese travel agency that helped organize the trip.

The travel agency that received them in South Korea is also suspected of collaborating with the Chinese agency to help the tourists stay in the country illegally.

One percent of all Chinese tourists handled by this very Korean agency vanished and overstayed their visas in South Korea, according to the MOJ.

"There have been a few cases in which people went to South Korea in the name of travel and went missing. Most of them were from the Korean minority," Lü Chao, a researcher with the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences told the Global Times. "This time, 19 is a fairly large number. These people would find it very difficult to work in Korea if they don't understand the language."

According to a 2010 report by the Korean Yonhap News Agency, of all the 600,000 Chinese nationals in the country by December 2010, 12 percent were there illegally.