Category: China

Hyeonseo Lee now knows how naive she was

Posted on by
1

When famine struck in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the North Korean government initiated a wide public education campaign — “Let us eat two meals a day” was the slogan, accompanied by information on how eating less was healthier.

As food distribution worsened and after the death of her stepfather, who had been arrested by military police on suspicions about his business deals and apparently killed himself while in hospital, the intense impact of famine became obvious.

“I saw people dying on the street. I was shocked. If we went near the train station or under the bridge we can easily see those dead bodies everywhere and the smells of decomposing bodies,” she says.

It troubled Lee not just emotionally, but intellectually. All her education and the propaganda told her North Korea was the greatest country on Earth, its leader could change the weather and her homeland was a beacon of light in a world immersed in darkness.

Across the river, there were the lights, twinkling in the Chinese town of Changbai. “I wanted to find out the answer myself by seeing the real life in China with my own eyes and I was very young, naive girl at the time so I was brave. I took the huge risk by crossing the border.”

The frozen river was narrow near her home and could be crossed with ease. She intended a “sneak visit,” she says, to see China, visit her father’s relatives there and return. She did not intend to defect.

But in China she saw her upbringing had been a lie. For the first time, she heard people speaking openly about the North Korean regime. She heard Kim Jong-un called a “bastard” and the country’s starvation blamed on his failed economic policy.

“It was shocking to me; how can you make fun of our Dear Leader like that?” she says. And at first it was hard to accept, she still wanted to respect her country — a common thing, she learned, for those who have just fled North Korea.

She says now she knows how naive she was, about that as well as how hard her journey would be. Walking across the river was perhaps the easiest part.

[National Post]

China set to try jailed US missionary near North Korea border

Posted on by

On July 28, China will begin the trial of a Korean-American missionary, Peter Hahn, arrested last year over a non-profit school he ran near the sensitive border with North Korea, his lawyer said. Supporters of Hahn said he was being targeted because of his Christian faith and because of the small vocational school he ran.

Authorities have dropped three of the four charges against Hahn, 74, probably for lack of evidence, his lawyer, Zhang Peihong, told Reuters, leaving only the least serious charge of counterfeiting receipts. “I wouldn’t call my attitude optimistic,” Zhang said by telephone. “After all Peter has only done good works, so he shouldn’t face any punishment. I do hope the court will act impartially.”

Hahn could receive a maximum of two years in prison, Zhang said, but he expected authorities would simply deport him back to the United States instead.

Hahn, who was formally arrested in December after months under house arrest, will be tried in Yanbian prefecture, near the North Korean border in northeast China, Zhang added. Hahn has diabetes and has suffered strokes, his wife has said.

A sprawling crackdown by the Chinese Government forced hundreds of Christian missionaries out of China, most by having their visas refused, sources told Reuters last August.

Last year, a Canadian Christian couple who worked with North Korean refugees and ran a coffee shop in Dandong on the Chinese border were accused of espionage by the Chinese government.

[Channel NewsAsia]

Andrei Lankov on China and Kim Jong-un’s purges

Posted on by

The following are excerpts of a RFA interview with Andrei Lankov, a native of the former Soviet Union who lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s: 

RFA: What has been the extent of [Kim Jong-un’s] purges?
Lankov: He’s been purging not only military officers but also security officials on a scale not seen in North Korea since the late 1960s, when his grandfather Kim Il Sung was consolidating power. … It means that he wants to be taken seriously. And it means that he wants a docile and obedient military.

RFA: We’ve seen reports of some senior officials defecting to South Korea. Do all of these purges indicate instability at the top of the Kim regime?
Lankov: The common assumption at the moment is that the purges point to instability. I’m not so sure about that….But if the current policy continues, it might increase the chances of a military coup.

RFA: Let’s talk about China. One of the officials executed in 2013 was Jang Song Taek, who was Kim’s own uncle. He was accused of being a traitor. This became a source of tensions with China, since the Chinese considered Jang to be a trusted negotiator and go-between. What are some of the other sources of tension?
Lankov: First, China is seriously unhappy about North Korea’s continuing development of nuclear weapons. China absolutely doesn’t want a nuclear North Korea. And some Chinese officials had pinned their hopes on Jang Song Taek as the man who could introduce Chinese-style economic reforms in North Korea. That hasn’t happened. North Korea’s missile launch and nuclear test in 2012 and 2013 were major causes of tension.

RFA: What are some of the other sources of tension?
Lankov: Finally, Xi Jinping may be the first Chinese leader to have only a faint memory of the Korean War. He has no sentimental links with North Korea. And there’s a great deal of mutual dislike on both sides. … many Chinese officials who didn’t grow up with direct experience of the Korean War, such as Xi Jinping himself, consider North Korea to be not a younger brother in arms but a strange, bizarre, irrational, and very stubborn country that creates lots of problems for China.

RFA: Some U.S. experts are disappointed that China hasn’t applied many of the sanctions called for by the U.N. against North Korea following its nuclear test and missile launch. Why does China choose to apply sanctions against only a few North Korean banks or companies but not against many of the others?
Lankov: China has a vested interest in keeping North Korea afloat. China needs a relatively stable North Korea. They don’t want to deal with the fallout from a North Korean collapse, which would likely be a messy situation involving thousands of refugees. They don’t want a North Korea under South Korean control. And North Korea serves for China as a buffer zone against the Americans and South Koreans.

[Excerpts of Radio Free Asia interview]

Diplomats state international pressure the key to change in North Korea

Posted on by

Maintaining international pressure on Pyongyang is crucial in moving North Korea to improve its behavior and to better human rights conditions inside its borders, diplomats from the United States, the Republic of Korea and Japan said at a Heritage Foundation forum this past week.

Speaking at the Washington, D.C., event, Ahn Ho-young, South Korea’s ambassador to the United States, said, “Much of the leverage is held by China” in addition to the three allies and Russia.

The U.N. Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea “shocked the international conscience,” Ahn said, when it released its report on conditions there in February 2014. He added that only 17 of the 108 non-aligned nations in the United Nations supported Pyongyang by not approving the report’s recommendations for inspections, further isolating the regime diplomatically.

U.N. inspectors “need to be given access to North Korea” to understand how dire the situation is,” Sasae said. International concerns about the regime’s actions “are not only limited to nuclear and missile issues.”

[USNI]

Information the most powerful weapon against North Korea

Posted on by

Beijing has the power to dramatically alter the course of history in North Korea. Because of this, the west needs to put pressure on both capitals and create a new vector of power: information.

New platforms and forms of communication are necessary to reverse a campaign of brainwashing that dates back three generations. Pirate videos, thumb-drives and smuggled phones spread the truth, that in the outside world, people lives unimaginably better lives than they do inside North Korea. Critics of the state rely on hot-air balloons to carry anti-regime information across the border, but it’s not enough.

Interviews with defectors reveal that many listen to news from shortwave radios, despite fear of severe punishment, and despite the government’s best efforts to isolate its population.

The BBC, hard-pressed as it is, must seriously consider broadcasting into North Korea. According to BBC internal estimates a Korean service would cost around £1m a year to run and a shortwave transmitter would cost about £300,000 a year. North citizens need to understand more about the true working of their own country.

This regime, that looks so strong, is weaker than you think.

[Excerpts from John Sweeney’s book “North Korea Undercover”, as published in The Guardian]

North Korean defector: Leaving North Korea is like leaving another universe

Posted on by
1

Hyeonseo Lee left North Korea at the age of 17 and began to discover the propaganda the government had fed her since birth.

In a memoir published in London on Thursday, Lee gives a rare insight into the bizarre and brutal reality of daily life in the world’s most secretive state. “Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe,” she writes in The Girl With Seven Names.

Lee, now a human rights campaigner living in South Korea, grew up in Hyesan next to the Chinese border. Her family was well regarded and her father’s job in the military meant they were not short of food. As Lee entered her teens, however, her world was turned upside down when her father was arrested by the secret police. He was later released into a hospital. He had been badly beaten and died soon afterwards. The circumstances remain unclear.

One winter night in 1997 she slipped out of the house and crossed the narrow stretch of frozen river to China. But China was not safe either. Lee lived in fear of being unmasked and deported back to North Korea, where she would have been imprisoned or even killed.

To survive she changed her name numerous times – hence the book’s title. She had many close shaves: she narrowly escaped an arranged marriage, almost became enslaved in a brothel, was kidnapped by a gang of criminals and caught and interrogated by police.

After years on the run she reached South Korea where North Koreans are given asylum. But she missed her family desperately. In a daring mission she returned to the North Korean border to rescue her mother and brother and guide them 2,000 miles through China into Laos and from there to South Korea – a journey beset by disaster from start to finish.

[Reuters]

North Korean refugees endure rape and starvation

Posted on by

Rape and repeated sexual abuse of female North Korean refugees is extremely common. Many defectors have testified it was common for military men to rape women in North Korea and then shame them for being sexually assaulted. Many were forced to abort children conceived through these rapes.

This echos the tale of Park Yeonmi, a refugee who has traveled the world to create awareness and alarm regarding the situation in North Korea. A Chinese soldier raped Park’s mother in front of her; her mother had sacrificed herself to prevent her young child from having to endure the rape herself.

Another woman, Song Kyong-ok, lost her mother, whom the local government chose to execute when the girl was ten-years-old. She had been caught praying, which UPI describes as “an act of treason.” During her time as an orphan in North Korea, Song “was forced into the streets to beg for food, finding it in the unlikeliest of places–such as unpicked fecal matter containing edible kernels of corn.”

The allure of escaping the yoke of Kim Jong-un is enough to attract thousands to try to escape, triggering increased vigilance on the part of the North Korean government.

China has also pressured North Korea to keep its people from using China as a bridge to South Korea. Many who defect from North Korea have experienced severe trauma, and some have raised the ire of the Chinese government.

[Breitbart]

Following North Korean defectors on their exodus

Posted on by

Much of the information we get about North Korea comes from people who’ve escaped the regime and sought refuge in South Korea, or from the people who do business along the river border that separates China and North Korea.

Lee Hark-joon, a journalist for the Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest newspaper, sheds new light on the ordinary lives of North Koreans with his extraordinary book “Crossing Heaven’s Border,” in which Lee focuses on everyday people, telling stories of “common hardships,” as he puts it. It grew out of a documentary he made with the same name, which was broadcast on PBS in 2009 and was nominated for an Emmy in 2010.

To get these stories, Lee did something unprecedented – he “embedded” with North Korean defectors. Between 2007 to 2011, Lee lived among North Korean defectors in China, enduring some of the same hardships that these terrified escapees endured. He takes incredible risks to tell these stories; the book at times reads like a thriller as Lee makes a perilous, 12,000-mile journey through China, across into Laos and then Thailand.

Lee’s book is compelling because it offers a fresh perspective on the puzzle that is North Korea. He writes about the challenges he faced in reporting on this story and the ethical questions he encountered, and the toll it took on him as a person.        Read more

North Korea the problem child of Asia

Posted on by

Despite needing Beijing more than anyone else, North Korea, the nuclear-armed problem child of Asia, has frozen out its only real friend.

China’s new ambassador, the high-flying diplomat Li Jinjun, was appointed in mid-March yet has not met North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un nor had his credentials accepted. It is an unprecedented snub from the hermit kingdom to its powerful friend – and the latest sign of a growing impulsivity that has Korea watchers and seasoned diplomats deeply worried.

Stability under the 32-year-old Kim, who took power in late 2011, is shakier than it has been in a long time, prompting fears the Korean peninsula could crumble in ways that cannot be predicted or managed at a time when the region has enough flashpoints to worry about. Speaking of Kim Jong-un, one seasoned Asian diplomat commented, “Kim’s father and grandfather were as tough as you can get, they were ruthless dictators, but they were not reckless. This guy has the same brutality but with more recklessness.”

Determined to stamp his ruthless authority, Kim has shrugged off Beijing’s restraining hand and embarked on bloody purges. This included the execution of his own uncle, Jang Song-thaek, the final straw for Beijing because Jang was the point man on economic co-operation between the two countries. The purges have escalated in recent months.

Pyongyang also abruptly cancelled a planned visit by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon – which would have been the first by a UN leader since 1993. Three weeks earlier, Kim cancelled a planned visit to Moscow – reportedly annoying Vladimir Putin.

China’s biggest worry is that North Korea will collapse and unify with the south in a democratic, pro-Washington state. While Kim’s brutality is probably making some North Korean elites jittery, nobody is game to predict an internal collapse just yet.

[Sydney Morning Herald]

China willing to help drought-stricken North Korea

Posted on by

China’s Foreign Ministry said on Thursday that the government was willing to help drought-stricken North Korea, after the isolated country said it was suffering its worst drought in a century.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a daily news briefing, “China is willing to provide the aid that is needed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” he added, without providing details.

China’s ties with North Korea have been strained over Pyongyang’s banned nuclear program. North Korea is under United Nations sanctions because of its nuclear tests and missile launches.

Beijing is Pyongyang’s last major ally, but relations have soured in recent years, while Beijing has grown closer to Seoul.

However, China is still a significant source of aid to North Korea, much of which happens off book.

[Reuters]