Category: China

Why North Korea dispatching workers abroad

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China is North Korea’s only major trading partner, and roughly 70% of all the goods that pass between these neighbors comes across Dandong’s rickety iron bridge, or on the ships that chug between the riverbanks. But following Pyongyang’s recent barrage of nuclear and missile tests, Beijing signed up to unprecedented U.N. sanctions in March. Chinese imports of coal — North Korea’s main cash cow — and exports of building materials and assorted household goods have been slashed.

Because of the ramped up sanctions, North Korea now relies heavily on dispatching workers abroad to earn foreign currency — most commonly to China, but also to Russia and the Middle East. There are around 50,000-60,000 laborers working abroad in factories, fields and restaurants. Their below-standard wages are collected directly by the authorities, with only a tiny fraction kept for the workers themselves.

Different North Korean government departments also run around 130 restaurants in foreign cities such as Beijing, Rangoon, Dhaka, Vladivostok and Phnom Penh. Dandong has many such enterprises — the largest employing more than 200 North Korean staff; others just a handful.

Waitresses typically remain for three-year stints and hail from Pyongyang. Working abroad is deemed a mighty privilege in North Korea, and citizens permitted to live in the capital are considered the most loyal. Security is tight, nonetheless: girls reside together in dormitories under the watchful gaze of minders, who sit in the rear of restaurant during their shifts, conspicuous by their dour demeanors and gleaming Kim Il Sung pins.

[TIME]

South Korea continues questioning North Korean defectors

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South Korea’s intelligence agency will continue to hold 13 North Koreans at the heart of a bitter dispute between the rival countries. South Korea says they defected of their own free will, while the North claims they were abducted.

Intelligence officers want longer to question the group of 12 waitresses and a manager at a North Korea-run restaurant in China, who arrived in Seoul in April. The move came ahead of a South Korean court’s decision to delay a request for a hearing by a group of lawyers. The lawyers want to question the group about whether they defected freely, after the intelligence agency refused to present them in court.

The National Intelligence Service has held the group since they arrived in South Korea on April 7 at a facility it runs on the southern outskirts of Seoul. More than 1,000 people from North Korea stay at the facility each year in the initial stages of defection. For up to 180 days, they are screened and questioned on their lives in the North.

The agency’s decision to extend the women’s stay means they will not be moved to a resettlement complex where defectors spend 12 weeks learning about life in the South.

[The Guardian]

Details on latest North Korean defectors to have made it to Seoul

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The North Korean propaganda website Uriminzokkiri on Tuesday alleged that three North Korean women who fled from China to South Korea were “abducted” by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. The website also published the photos, identities and passport numbers of two South Koreans and a Korean-Chinese man it accuses of “luring and abducting” the women at the orders of the South Korean “National Intelligence Service” (NIS).

But Yoon Jae-hong, one of the men in the photos who helps North Korean defectors in China, denied the claims. “They were anything but kidnapped,” he told the Chosun Ilbo. “They were the ones who asked us to rescue them.The NIS has nothing to do with this.”

According to Yoon, two of the women worked in a restaurant in Shanghai for two years until late 2015. They were senior employees and had their own cell phones and were allowed to leave the restaurant freely. They became friends with two South Korean businessmen in Shanghai and exchanged phone numbers.

But the restaurant closed down late last year due to financial difficulties and the women were moved to another restaurant in Weinan, Shaanxi Province. From there they continued to exchange text messages with the two South Koreans in Shanghai.

Hearing of the defections of 13 North Korean women from another restaurant strengthened the resolve of the two women in Weinan to also [defect]. They contacted the two South Korean men to ask for their help in getting to South Korea. One of the South Koreans contacted Kim Yong-hwa of the North Korea Refugees Human Rights Association in Seoul to ask for help. Kim arranged for Yoon to help them.

“Originally, three restaurant workers intended to defect, but one changed her mind at the last minute,” Yoon said. “On April 15, they left the restaurant and got in a taxi to a prearranged spot, and from there they traveled for two days by bus to Yunnan Province.”

The women crossed the border into Laos and traveled to Thailand to board a flight to Seoul.

[Chosun Ilbo]

China and US reaffirm enforcement of sanctions against North Korea

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China pledged yesterday to work with the US to enforce sanctions against North Korea.

The pledge was made as China and the United States wrapped up their two-day annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue, labelled by officials as most productive in years despite many divisions.

But they disagreed on how to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons. The US favors putting more pressure on Pyongyang, while China insists on reviving talks and strongly opposes US deployment of an anti-missile system in South Korea.

US Secretary of State John Kerry also voiced concern over China’s crackdown on lawyers and religious freedom, and a new law’s restrictions on non-governmental organizations.

[South China Morning Post]

Selling sausages to save North Korean defectors

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Youngae Ma, 53, is a North Korean defector who joined the North Korean army at 17, serving in the country’s State Security Department as an intelligence agent near the Chinese border.

She was responsible for gathering information about South Korea through collecting documents. Based in China, she was exposed to what she called “the outer world,” with radios, a wide variety of cuisine, and Christian churches. When she was found eating the free food offered at a church, she was arrested right away, she said.

Knowing that she would be sentenced to death, Ma decided to escape. She waited for the police car transporting her to slow, and when it did, she threw herself out and ran for her life in the blistering cold.

“I couldn’t feel my toes, I remember three of my toenails falling out while I was running,” Ma said. “I didn’t notice it until I realized that I was leaving a bloody track.”

Ma eventually made it safely to the South Korean Consulate General in Shanghai, where she was given a passport and was escorted to Seoul.

Ma made it to the U.S. and sells Pyongyang sausages to fund her mission to rescue North Korean defectors. She now runs The Kun Jip, in Palisades Park, New Jersey.

Ma is a U.S. permanent resident with a South Korean passport — one that she claims to have fought for more than five years to receive, citing political persecution in South Korea.  Read more

North Korean defector standing up for her faith

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Youngae Ma, who defected from North Korea in 2000, said a meal in the church that she found in China was a life-changing experience. In North Korea, Christianity is considered the equivalent to espionage, she said.

“That’s when I first saw the Bible, and I felt affection from this church community that I’ve never felt before,” she said. “It’s such an abundance I wouldn’t have even imagined existed.”

Ma now leads NK Refugee Mission, working to rescue North Korean defectors that have been detained in various parts of China and Southeast Asia during their journey to escape North Korea.  Currently, Ma’s mission is to rescue two women from China, whose identities she declined to reveal.

“I’m more than willing to be sacrificed while protesting for North Korea’s human rights. … They call me a tick, or a mite when I protest outside the North Korean office,” Ma said, recalling her experiences encountering Pyongyang officials outside North Korea’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York City. She said she would receive phone calls from a blocked or unknown number. She would pick up, she said, and there would be silence for more than three seconds. She knew what was coming next.

“I have a hunch that it’s from the North Korean diplomats, because I can hear a heavy accent. They threatened to chop my head off with an ax, take out all my teeth with a wrench, and endlessly shout in foul [North] Korean language to tell me they’re going to take my life someday,” she said.

She said that the most recent call she had received to stop her activities as a missionary was in early May.

[NBC News]

North Korea mending fences with China

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A high level North Korean delegation turned up in Beijing unannounced this week and met with Chinese President Xi Jinping — the first time a North Korean official has met China’s leader since 2013.

The meeting between top North Korean diplomat Ri Su Yong and Xi caught North Korea watchers by surprise.

On paper, China is North Korea’s closest and most powerful ally but it’s is no secret that relations between Beijing and Pyongyang have been at a low point in recent years.

According to official media reports, the Workers’ Party of Korea delegation headed by Ri Su Yong, delivered a message from North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong Un. It expressed “the hope to strengthen and develop bilateral friendship and to maintain peace and stability in the region.”

Ri reaffirmed that North Korea would continue its ‘two front lines policy” of developing nuclear weaponry in tandem with reinvigorating its isolated and stagnating economy.

Xinhua, China’s official news agency gave few details, but the landmark meeting can be interpreted as a slight thawing in the frosty relations between historical and ideological friends.

Beijing is also sending a message to the U.S. and South Korea that, despite misgivings, it is not abandoning its old ally and all parties are going to have to get used to that.

[CNN]

Young North Korean Defector remembers chasing after flyer balloons

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Kim Kyoung-ok still remembers chasing after the flyer balloons, alien care packages raining from the sky, filled with Korean noodles and letters from children like her. She did not know yet that there could be a better life than the one she was born to in North Korea.

But as the years passed, her mother, Kim Tae-hee, had experienced a comparatively better quality of life in China where she was one of the approximately 50,000-60,000 North Koreans permitted to work abroad—an opportunity granted to citizens considered loyal to the regime.

Kyoung-ok was only 12 when her mother decided to make a dream of a better life a reality, fleeing with her youngest daughter to China. Now 21, Kyoung-ok detailed the treacherous journey of defecting from North Korea.

It was 2007 and Beijing was preparing for the 2008 Olympic Games. Kyoung-ok explained that the crackdown on North Korean defectors had intensified ahead of the games, with China repatriating those suspected of attempting an escape to South Korea. She and her mother were forced into hiding, living in Chinese caves before traveling through Vietnam and Cambodia with the assistance of a paid broker. The pair sought asylum at a Cambodian Christian church before arriving in South Korea in 2008.

Kyoung-ok has adjusted well to her life in the South, and has developed a close friendship with a fellow refugee she met at resettlement camp and who asked not to share her last name. The relationships built in her new home have proven vital to Kyoung-ok, who has lived on her own in Seoul to attend school since age 13, while her mother, a music teacher, worked in the southern part of the country.

[Excerpted from TIME]

Second group of North Korean defectors expected in Seoul shortly

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A second group, as yet an unspecified number, of North Koreans working at a restaurant outside North Korea have escaped their workplace and will come to South Korea, South Korean officials said Tuesday.

The announcement follows earlier South Korean media reports that two or three female employees at a North Korean-run restaurant in China fled and went to an unidentified Southeast Asian country.

It’s the second known group escape by North Korean restaurant workers dispatched abroad in recent weeks. In April, a group of 13 North Koreans who had worked at a North Korean-run restaurant in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo defected to South Korea. After the 13 workers – a male manager and 12 waitresses – arrived in Seoul in April, Pyongyang claimed they were kidnapped by South Korean spies and repeatedly demanded their return. South Korea said the workers chose to resettle in the South on their own.

New Focus, a Seoul-based online news outlet run by a North Korean defector, was among the first to break the news Monday. It said the group comprised three women in their 20s who had worked at a North Korean-run restaurant near Shanghai.

[Associated Press]

North Korean Congress does little to win over a frustrated China

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Beijing played along with North Korea’s political theater: Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a letter to Kim Jong-un, congratulating him on adding another title to his name – chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said China hopes to enhance its ties with the North.

However, in an editorial Wednesday, the state-run China Daily opined that North Korea’s economic and nuclear goals conflict with each other, and that Kim Jong-un doesn’t seem to care.

“He appears unaware that his nuclear ambitions are poison for his country’s economy,” stated the strongly worded editorial.  “They will not only exhaust his country’s very limited resources, but will further isolate his country from the rest of the world, politically and economically.”

Fearful that economic collapse in North Korea could dangerously destabilize its own border regions, China is wary of squeezing the errant Kim too hard. Shi Yinghong, a professor of international relations at Beijing’s Renmin University, says that China’s leaders have no choice now but to recognize Kim as North Korea’s unchallenged leader.

China’s reasons for opposing North Korea’s nuclear program have only partly to do with fears of an accident or rogue attack. China worries that North Korea’s nuclear weapons give the United States an excuse to bolster its military presence on the Korean peninsula, part of a larger policy of “containment.”

Since Kim came to power in 2011, Beijing and Pyongyang have barely been on speaking terms. Neither Kim nor China’s Xi have paid state visits to each other’s country. China last week did not send a delegation to the congress, as it did in 1980, apparently because it was not invited.

[Christian Science Monitor]