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PageNorth Korea: A Crack in The Wall
Far Eastern Economic Review
April 29, 1999
By Shim Jae Hoon
along the China-North Korea border
Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc deprived North Korea of its economic lifeline, Pyongyang has resorted to strong-arm tactics, using the threat of missile and nuclear-weapons proliferation to wring aid from the international community. But too little aid is reaching ordinary citizens. As a result, they are taking matters into their own hands. Driven by hunger, growing numbers of North Koreans are crossing into China--breaching the wall of isolation and ignorance that has allowed their Stalinist system to survive. They see the success of China's market reforms, and are helped by Christian aid workers. When they go home, they carry food, money--and dangerous new ideas.
Back home in what used to be North Korea's rice belt southwest of Pyongyang, Ri Sang Nam commanded respect. He was a member of the ruling Workers' Party and an official at a collective farm. Today Ri, 39, is an illegal refugee in Hunchun, a cold and grimy city less than 20 kilometres inside the Chinese border, using a false name to elude security agents and protect the wife and two children he left behind 15 months ago.
"Men and women, the young and old, they're all deserting North Korea to look for food in China," says Ri, a slight, thin figure wrapped in a heavy overcoat and wearing glasses. He hopes to win asylum in South Korea or the United States. Meanwhile, he spends his time helping South Korean aid groups covertly distribute food to fellow refugees. On a recent late-winter day, he guided aid workers to a mud hut in the hills outside Hunchun, where nine new arrivals huddled on the floor. They had trekked for several nights from their homes to reach China; their cheeks and eyes were sunken from hunger and exhaustion.
They are part of one of the world's most unusual migrant movements--unseen and for the most part unacknowledged by both the North Korean and Chinese governments. The Koreans flit like wraiths across the Chinese landscape, coming and going in growing numbers as the food shortage at home enters its fifth year. No longer are Korean border guards much of an obstacle: Hungry themselves, they let the migrants pass for a share of the food and money they bring back. On the Chinese side, few guards are in evidence.
This surging migration is testimony to North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Il's faltering ability to control his people, five years after he succeeded his father, the charismatic Kim Il Sung. When the famine began in 1995, mainly peasants and factory workers foraged for food in China. Now they are joined by party members and other elites--teachers, doctors, even security officials and a few soldiers. For Kim, the flow is an embarrassment to be covered up. But it may turn out to threaten more than his prestige: The migrants are carrying back new ideas about the world, cracking the hermetic seal that has enabled North Korea's Stalinist regime to survive the end of the Cold War that spawned it.
The impact may take years to be felt, but the seeds of change in North Korea are being sown. Even a short stay in China's thriving border region makes plain to the hungry North Koreans how badly their own system works. Some are becoming passionate advocates of reform.
"On arriving, they marvel at the amount of food available on the Chinese marketplaces and blame Kim Jong Il for keeping them ignorant about the outside world," says a medical doctor from the North Korean city of Chongjin who fled in January. He opens his mouth to show big gaps where teeth are missing, and blames malnutrition. "My heart burns with fire whenever I think of my abject life condition," says the doctor, sitting in a restaurant run by a Chinese of Korean descent.
Some long-staying refugees, such as the doctor and Ri, hint that underground groups may spring up in China to destabilize the Kim regime, although there's no evidence that any such group yet exists. One call for action came from a former North Korean university professor interviewed in hiding in China by the authoritative South Korean magazine Monthly Chosun. "We refugees in China must unite and open a second front against the Kim regime," the magazine's April edition quoted him as saying. "The North Korean people are not simply dying from hunger. Kim Jong Il is starving them to death."
Nor is criticism voiced only on Chinese soil. "People are openly criticizing Kim Jong Il in North Korea," says the doctor, smoking a cigarette hand-rolled in a scrap of newspaper. A South Korean academic based in China who closely monitors developments in the North agrees that the protracted famine may be eroding Kim's legitimacy as leader. Food rations used to be a key tool for rewarding loyalty and restricting population movement. But the government has been unable to provide regular rations since 1997, the refugees say.
"The first people to die were the sick and the handicapped," says a party member who escaped in March from North Hamkyong province, directly across the border from Hunchun and home to most of the migrants. "Others were good, honest party members who were repeatedly told: 'This hardship is temporary. Food is on its way; trust us and wait.'" But food never arrived. People who defied internal travel restrictions to go foraging survived, while loyal party members stayed put and died, says this refugee, a man in his 40s who is hiding in Yanji, another Chinese border city.
Outside estimates of the death toll range from 1 million to 3.5 million, out of North Korea's pre-famine population of about 24 million. Estimates of the number of North Koreans crossing illegally into China are equally broad: Western and South Korean experts put last year's outflow at 100,000 to 400,000. A similar number are expected to cross this year, says the Seoul-based Christian Council of Korea. The World Food Programme, which stations aid workers in the North, warned in April that stocks from last year's harvest are already running out.
Most North Koreans only spend a few days in China, a team from South Korea's Yongnam University concluded after conducting interviews last year along the border. The migrants beg or steal food or are helped by relatives among the region's large ethnic-Korean community. Only about 100,000 have stayed on as illegal refugees, says the Christian Council, which sends food aid through underground networks such as Ri's.
South Korean charities and churches have quietly taken the lead in helping the Northerners. China allows outside aid groups to visit the border region and purchase foodstuffs for shipment to North Korea. But helping illegal migrants on Chinese soil is banned, so the groups' members use various pretexts to carry out their work. Some come on short-term tourist visas; others take jobs with South Korean businesses in the border cities and carry out their aid work by night.
The South Korean government wants the United Nations to step in and set up refugee centres, but the world body says China must first declare them refugees and ask for help. Beijing refuses, unwilling to offend the North.
"We've raised the matter with Beijing several times from humanitarian concern, but to no avail," says a Foreign Ministry official in Seoul. He says Beijing argues that "they come for food and return home after getting food," so they don't qualify as refugees.
A South Korean aid worker says Beijing has another reason: "It will open up the floodgates if China hints at accepting them as refugees. That can shatter the regime in Pyongyang." East Germany's communist regime collapsed quickly after it lost control of its borders in 1989, he noted.
China has responded to the human flow--by moving to tighten the traditionally relaxed security along its most friendly border. It also has built camps to collect the migrants before sending them back to North Korea, say South Korean aid workers who have seen the camps, located inside military facilities. About 10,000 North Koreans were forcibly returned last year, the aid workers estimate.
But the 1,300-kilometre China-North Korea border is hard to effectively patrol, meandering in places through steep hills and thick forest. The Tumen River that marks the northeastern boundary sometimes narrows to just 30 metres. One such place is at Nanping, a small Chinese town where cattle graze peacefully near the water. Visitors can look across and see North Korean trains pass with hundreds of people clinging to the carriage roofs, apparently defying internal travel restrictions to search for food.
During the long winter, North Koreans can easily walk to China on the thick ice. "I walked over the frozen river in darkness," admits a soldier from the Korean People's Army, interviewed in a hiding place near the border.
Once inside China, the North Koreans stand out with their often-gaunt frames, ragged clothing and inability to speak Chinese. Most shun the cities and shelter in ethnic Korean farming villages. Even there, hiding has recently become more difficult as Chinese and North Korean security agents step up patrols under a special agreement to control the migration, local ethnic Korean residents say.
In one village near the city of Yanji, a family of five spends most of its time hiding inside a benefactor's home, performing odd jobs in return for shelter and a bit of money. They are among the new elite refugees: The father worked as a technical designer, and the daughter recently graduated from university. The famine barely affected them, says the daughter, but they decided to try to join her grandfather in the South. They arrived in January, and are saving up money to pay human smugglers to take them the rest of the way.
In sharp contrast to this well-fed family are the North Korean orphans who can be seen begging at many border-area marketplaces. Local officials seem to ignore them out of pity. One such child outside Yanji says she's 13 years old but looks closer to seven, so stunted is she by malnutrition. Her hands and face are covered with scabies; she looks frightened. "My mother died and my father disappeared," she says.
Many young women find a way out by marrying Chinese men. The less fortunate fall prey to human traffickers and end up in brothels in large Chinese cities such as Shenyang, Harbin and Dandong, according to locally born ethnic Koreans in Yanji. Even those who marry run into problems because they can't register their unions; this, in turn, means children can't be registered and often leads to family break-ups, the community sources say.
Their uncertain life, with the constant fear of expulsion, causes many of the North Koreans who stay to turn to Christianity for solace. Some South Korean aid workers are missionaries, while local Christian churches run by ethnic Koreans also reach out to the refugees. Such contacts worry North Korean officials, says the party member from North Hamkyong province.
Authorities routinely ask returning migrants if they met any South Korean missionaries in China, intensifying their interrogation if the answer is yes, he says.
But as the number of people crossing the border soars, North Korean authorities only hold most returnees for a few days of questioning, in contrast with the past when such people faced jail terms or execution. The regime may simply have decided to focus on suspected opponents: South Korea's National Intelligence Service says the North recently has begun moving unemployed or politically unreliable persons from cities to the countryside, in an effort to prevent anti-government outbursts.
A Chinese man of Korean descent who often travels to North Korea to trade says he has heard that prisons are filling up with people accused of political crimes, such as advocating independent political parties. The significance of such reports is hard to gauge, so little is known about the inner workings of North Korean politics.
Give the North three to five years, predicts a university professor in Yanji who has spent years watching Pyongyang's behaviour, and North Korea will be rocking with dissent. Others are more cautious, noting that rapid change is unlikely after 50 years of one-party dictatorship enforced by bloody purges.
"North Koreans are not going to rebel against the system if they get two meals a day," says Ri, the former collective-farm official. "That's because they haven't had a third meal for a long while now."
Nor is China likely to allow North Korean refugees to use its soil as a base for subverting Kim's rule. Beijing wants to encourage economic reform in North Korea, not violent upheaval, say South Korean analysts in China.
Even so, there's no denying that visiting China is slowly changing the way many North Koreans look at their regime. The border has always been a useful keyhole on the deeply secretive nation. Now it is playing a second role as well--as the gateway for bringing new ideas to a nation starved for them.
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