Category: China

Former army officer defects from North Korea

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The man is polite, but clearly anxious. He has asked us not to show his face, and to conceal his identity.

After more than two decades serving in North Korea’s military, he escaped from the country last year. He had to leave his wife and his two daughters behind.

His defection was driven by desperation. His family was struggling for food, and the only way he could see to provide for them was to cross the border to China and earn money to send back. During his first attempt he was caught, but before it was clear he intended to cross the border. He says he was beaten for 15 days, his family rounded up and questioned, the friend he had been traveling with taken away.

He resolved to ‎try again, but this time he knew it would be his last chance. He told his family to deny all knowledge and blame everything on him. He set out in the dead of night, inching his way down a 150-metre cliff and wading a‎cross a river in the dark. “Where the water was deep, the surveillance wasn’t so strong. … I sat down and cried for an hour, thinking my wife and children would be in jail.”

Now, in his immaculately tidy flat in South Korea, he has one of everything: one mug, one bowl, one soup plate. Dinner time is the worst, he said, eating alone. He hasn’t been able to speak to his children since he left and has only occasional, brief phone contact with his wife.

In the corner is a piggy bank. On it he has written, “Thinking of my Kyung-Ae” ‎- his youngest daughter. He’s working long shifts and saving up to try to get his family out.

He knows they are alive, and has managed to get some money to them, but he ‎misses them terribly, and constantly re-lives how he said goodbye.

[Sky News]                                                                                      Read more

North Korean defector trafficked and raped hopes her story raises awareness

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A young North Korean defector who was trafficked and raped at the age of 13 after fleeing to China said on Friday that she hoped going public with her life story would shine a light on “the darkest place on earth”, her homeland.

In her memoir, Park tells how at age 13 she was sold, kidnapped and resold, ending up with a trafficker who made her an offer. If she became his mistress he would buy her mother who had been sold to a farmer but if she refused he would hand her to the police who would deport her to North Korea where defectors are sent to labor camps or even executed.

“For a long time I thought of it as a business transaction, not rape,” she writes. “Only now can I accept what happened in all its terrible dimensions.”

Park describes a hierarchy of gangsters who specialize in the trafficking of North Korean brides in China, which has a shortage of women as a result of its one child policy. Park said sometimes women asked to be sold into prostitution so they could make money to send home. She was told about brothels in Shanghai and Beijing where North Korean girls were injected with drugs so they couldn’t run away.

In her memoir, Park urges China to end its policy of repatriating North Koreans as it fuels trafficking and slavery. “I wish it had all never happened, and I never had to talk about it again. But I want everyone to know the shocking truth about human trafficking,” writes Park. “If the Chinese government would end its heartless policy of sending refugees back to North Korea, then the brokers would lose all their power to exploit and enslave these women.”

[Reuters]

Grim fate for women repatriated to North Korea after forays into China

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North Korea has been detaining an increasing number of women in the past few years for crossing the border into China in search of food and opportunities to work for their families’ survival, according to a human rights report on the country’s gulag-style penal system issued Friday.

Authorities have been forcibly repatriating the women and jailing them in a network of political gulags, or kwan-li-so (labor camps) and kyo-hwa-so (political prisoner camps), according to the report issued by the nonprofit Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK). Once repatriated, women are subject to extreme privation and repression while in detention, the report said.

The report, titled “Hidden Gulag IV: Gender Repression & Hidden Disappearances,” is the fourth in a series of reports on arbitrary detentions and forced labor in North Korea issued by HRNK since 2003.

It cites the post-2007 expansion of the women’s section at labor camp No. 12 in Jongo-ri, North Hamgyong province, in the northernmost part of the country, to hold a large number of forcibly repatriated women from the province. Inside labor camp No. 12, young women detainees were forced to work as wig and eyelash makers, while older women performed heavy labor such as agricultural production, animal husbandry, tree felling and log cutting. Former prisoners said the facility housed more than 1,000 people.

Women who have been forcibly repatriated have been subject to systematic torture and beatings during interrogations, severe food deprivation, and naked strip searches and compulsory exercises to dislodge money or valuables hidden in inside their bodies, the report said. Those who were pregnant when they were repatriated have been forced to undergo abortions if authorities thought they were carrying babies fathered by Chinese men, it said.

North Korea has between 80,000 and 120,000 prisoners detained in political prison camps, or about one of every 200 citizens, according to a report issued in February 2014 by a United Nations Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea, which documented the network of such prisons and the atrocities that occur inside them.

[Radio Free Asia]

China attempts to mitigate North Korea’s nuclear move

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China has called for denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula and the avoidance of any actions that could escalate tension in the region. The move follows Pyongyang’s decision to reopen nuclear facilities and its threats to launch long-range rockets.

Experts said Pyongyang’s tactics are aimed at spurring talks with the United States, but they have also struck a blow to relations with China.

China is planning an international seminar in Beijing on Friday with parties involved in the six-nation talks on ending North Korea’s nuclear programme, hoping to bring the issue back to the negotiating table. The six-nation talks have been stalled since early 2009.

Zhu Feng, director of the Institute of International Studies at Nanjing University, said Pyongyang’s decision to reopen its nuclear facilities will aggravate tensions on the Korean Peninsula and compel the UN to consider new sanctions against the country. “If so, China is very likely to support the sanctions,” he said.

Shi Yongming, an Asia-Pacific studies research fellow at the China Institute of International Relations, said, “China could offer a packaged denuclearisation plan, including measures to help economic development, as a solution to the problem.”

[China Daily]

North Korea’s stay-at-home leader Kim Jong Un

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When China celebrates its World War II “victory day” in a spectacular parade of military might Thursday, President Xi Jinping’s “true friends” will be there.

That includes Xi’s closest Korean friend. Not Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, a country once described as being “as close as lips and teeth” with China.

No, it’s South Korean President Park Geun-hye who will be in attendance as 10,000 Chinese troops march through Tiananmen Square and fighter jets roar overhead, celebrating the Allies’ victory on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Kim Jong Un also didn’t attend the equivalent celebrations in May in Russia, North Korea’s other main ally, prompting speculation that the scion of a personality cult didn’t want to share the spotlight with other world leaders for his first overseas foray.

That same logic could apply in the case of China’s commemorations. Or, it could be the latest sign of the political chill between the neighbors.

The bonds between the countries weakened over the decades as China opened up and North Korea resolutely did not. But the cracks turned into chasms at the last change of leadership, with Kim succeeding his father at the end of 2011 and Xi becoming the leader of China about a year later.

“In the past, North Korea was like a dog that we raised. China could just feed it some meat and it would behave and listen to us,” said a taxi driver here in Yanji who gave only his family name, Cui. “But now the dog has turned into a wolf and it bites. It doesn’t listen to China anymore. Meat won’t keep it under control.”

[Washington Post]

North Koreans’ access to TV and DVD players

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During a famine in the North in the mid-1990s, the Kim regime began to tolerate illegal trade because it was the only option to feed a starving population. Since then, black-market commerce has been nearly impossible to stamp out. And some of the hottest commodities—particularly for young people who don’t even remember a North Korea before that underground trade existed—have been foreign music and movies, along with the Chinese-made gadgets to play them.

A 2010 study by the US Broadcasting Board of Governors found that 74 percent of North Koreans have access to a TV and 46 percent can access a DVD player. Thanks to the flourishing black market, the jangmadang generation’s technology has advanced well beyond radios and DVDs. Despite North Korea’s near-complete lack of Internet access, there are close to 3.5 million PCs in the country and 5 million tablets, according to North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity.

North Korean defector Kang Chol hwan, holding a notel.

Perhaps the most important piece of hardware in North Korea today is what’s known as a notel—a small, portable video player sold for $60 to $100 and capable of handling multiple formats. It has a screen, a rechargeable battery to deal with frequent blackouts, and crucially, USB and SD card ports. In a surprise move in December, the North Korean government legalized the devices, perhaps as part of a bid to modernize its propaganda machine, according to Seoul-based news outlet Daily NK. The result is millions of ready customers for the USB sticks smuggled across the Chinese border.

In one of North Korea’s bustling markets, a buyer might quietly ask for something “fun,” meaning foreign, or “from the village below,” referring to South Korea. The seller may lead him or her to a private place, often someone’s home, before turning over the goods. The foreign data is then consumed on a notel among small, discreet groups of mostly young people, friends who enter into an unspoken pact of breaking the law together so that no one can rat out anyone else.                                                    Read more

Why North Korea’s disregard of its international relations?

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If one looks at recent trends in North Korean foreign policy, it is becoming increasingly clear that the North Korean government is not all that interested in improving its relations with the outside world.

Relations with China are as bad as they have ever been in the last 20-odd years. While China remains North Korea’s major supplier of aid, as well as its main trade partner, the North Korean side has taken a number of deliberate steps that have offended China and kept it at a distance. Very recently, one has to admit, North Korea has demonstrated some interest in improving relations with China. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether these half-hearted attempts will produce any results.

The last two years have been marked by unusually vocal diplomatic overtures to Russia. It seems that the North Korean side wishes to attract Russian trade and investment as a potential substitute for Chinese money. It is highly unlikely though that they will succeed. Russia has neither the desire, nor the ability, to subsidize North Korea on the scale that Pyongyang would consider sufficient.

What are the reasons for [North Korea’s] attitude? To some extent, it might reflect the personal style of the new, young leader [Kim Jong-un]. However, to a much greater extent, this change of line might be connected with the recent improvement in North Korea’s economic situation. In 2013-14, North Korea’s harvests were nearly sufficient to feed the population. Now, in spite of the widely-reported drought, there are no immediate signs of a food crisis.

[North Korea’s] improvement in economic fortunes may be fragile and could be short-lived, but it may have led North Korean leaders to believe that for the time being, they do not need to squeeze more aid from the outside world. However, if they do not need aid, they are likely to take a more isolationist stance, since interactions with the outside world are often seen as politically dangerous.

[Radio Free Asia]

Smuggling the outside world into North Korea

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On a cloudy, moonless night somewhere in northeastern China, three men creep through a stand of Japanese Clethra trees. They carry no flashlights, and the sky is so dark that they hear the sound of the rushing Tumen River before they see it: They’ve arrived at the North Korean border.

Earlier in the evening at a nearby restaurant, they treated the local Chinese police chief and head of the border patrol to a blowout feast.  Following an after-meal session of pricey Chunghwa cigarettes and shots of Moutai liquor, the officials made phone calls telling subordinates to abandon their posts for several hours.

A middle-aged North Korean defector named Jung Kwang-il, steps into the tall weeds of the riverbank. He pulls out a cheap laser pointer and flashes it across the water. Then he waits for a response: If he sees an X slashed through the air by a laser on the opposite bank, the operation will be called off. Instead, he’s answered with a red circle painted through the darkness.

USB drives about to be smuggled into North Korea, across the Tumen River

Soon after, a compact man dressed in only a hoodie and boxer shorts wades out of the waist-high water and onto the riverbank where Jung and his companions stand. Jung arranged the meeting earlier in the day using coded language over walkie-talkies. Jung hands the man a tightly wrapped plastic bag containing a trove of precious black-market data: 200 Sandisk USB drives and 300 micro SD cards, each packed with 16 gigabytes of videos like Lucy, Son of God, 22 Jump Street, and entire seasons of South Korean reality television shows, comedies, and soap operas.

The man in the hoodie slings the bag of digital contraband over his shoulder. Then he says good-bye and disappears back into the world’s deepest black hole of information. Continued

China still betting on North Korea as business gamble

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At China’s very farthest limits, a town sandwiched between North Korea and Russia stands at the heart of Beijing’s plan to revitalize its bleak, frigid northeastern rustbelt. Less than 70 kilometres away in North Korea, the port of Rason offers access to the sea and a shorter trade route to Japan, one of China’s biggest trading partners, than almost any of its own harbors. But the ambitious plan relies on Russian and North Korean co-operation and implementation, making it a monumental gamble.

Hunchun has a population of only 225,000 but received investments totaling more than $16 billion last year from government and private sources, according to the commerce ministry. A high-speed railway running 225 miles and connecting it to the Jilin provincial capital Changchun is slated to open by October. City officials have budgeted to build a tri-national tourist zone enabling visitors to play golf in Russia during the day, dine in China and then gamble at a North Korean casino for the evening. But North Korea can be a difficult business partner.

China’s biggest joint economic project with the North so far has been in Rason, a special economic zone where it invested in two ports. But visitors describe little shipping and only a handful of operating businesses, while many Hunchun locals say relations with North Korea have been frigid in recent years.

Two Chinese entrepreneurs who have done business in Rason said their confidence was deeply shaken in 2013 when Pyongyang purged and executed Jang Song-Thaek — previously its point man on relations with China. In the article announcing his death and branding him a “traitor”, the official Korean Central News Agency said Jang sold “off the land of the Rason economic and trade zone to a foreign country for a period of five decades”.

“Doing business in North Korea is completely unpredictable, they’re really irresponsible,” Peter Wu told AFP. He has been negotiating for almost a year to build a factory in North Korea to make a medicinal herbal drink for export to China, but after spending more than 100,000 yuan has nothing to show for his efforts. “There’s silence for months on the North Korean side and then finally, just when you think you’ve reached a deal, all the rules change and you need to start over.”

[AFP]

Eun Kim’s thousand-mile journey to freedom

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Many [North Koreans] died because of malnutrition, including my grandparents. In 1997, my father passed away too. [When I was 11] my mom sold or bartered everything from our apartment until we had nothing left. So she decided to go to the city to search for food. She left me at home, but took my older sister who’s two-years-older than me. She said she would be back in three days, but if she got food earlier she would be back sooner. She gave me 15 North Korean chon—enough to buy just one piece of tofu—and left.

Three days passed, then four, then five. I was waiting for her to come home but on the sixth day I had no energy left and thought maybe today is my last day. I wasn’t afraid of death. I had seen so many people dying during that time. What made me sad was that I felt my mom didn’t want me.  She took my other sister but didn’t come back for me.

So I decided to write a will, at 11 years old. … But on the sixth day she came back. I was happy even though she arrived empty-handed. But she didn’t give up. She didn’t leave me alone. The first words she said were, ‘let’s die together.’ But I was still happy.

We lived in Hamgyong province, in a village called Undok in the northern part of North Korea. The first time we escaped during wintertime. The river was frozen hard and we made it across. In China, we were bought by a human trafficker then repatriated to North Korea. We were regarded as traitors, so we lived as beggars on the street, sleeping under bridges or in the market.

But we had tasted freedom. Two months later, in springtime, we escaped again. My story is a common one among North Korean refugees. Many North Korean women experience human trafficking in China. But we weren’t separated, even though we were sold to a Chinese man. So we could share the sadness and challenges, even when we were in China. Even when we were repatriated to North Korea, I was with my mother. That’s why I say, we were lucky. We didn’t become separated.

Eventually, we made it to Shanghai, where we lived for almost four years. Then, through friends, we found a way to go to South Korea.

Escaping from one’s home is not a simple thing to describe in a few words. Even though I really hate the North Korean government and the Kim family, I miss my hometown, because it’s my hometown. But I had to leave to survive.

[National Geographic]