No country is an island. Whether out of reluctance or active willingness, the number of North Koreans coming to China has been growing at a high rate in recent years. These North Koreans in China are not only engaging with China, but are actually engaging more with the international community through China. This may be the beginning of North Korea’s reopening after the Cold War.
Southern Weekend Reporter Qin Xuan Intern Hu Xinyi Jiang Xiaoya
Editor: Shi Zhe
Data source from China Tourism Administration. (He Seed/Photo)
Editor’s note: Whether it is the United Nations, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, data on North Korea is often only available through projection and deduction. As a result, the Chinese National Tourism Administration’s records on the entry of North Koreans over the past eight years have also become a valuable window into Sino-North Korean relations.
There are some creatures in nature that regularly run along a fixed route every year, which is called migration or migrations. The turn of March and April every year is the beginning of the migratory season for North Koreans traveling to China. Since 2005 or even earlier years, North Koreans with big bags have been appearing at Raffles Hotel in Dandong, stores, or similar places at other ports of entry every time this time of year.
March and April 2013 were a bit of an anomaly. North Korea has been happier than usual to show their high fighting passions, with a nuclear test on one side of the Yalu River, then preparations for war, then a missile to be launched, then a complete evacuation of South Korean companies from the Kaesong Industrial Park ……
And on the Yalu River side, some unusual signs were quickly noticed. Several North Korean students at Yanbian University did not return to school on time; a North Korean laborer who was scheduled to cross the river in early April sent word that he could not come this year because of a change in the situation; and, at midnight, night swimmers on the Dandong side of the river would be advised not to stay on the shore. ……
Once mid-April rolled around, however, the tension dissipated as soon as the North Korean vendors and their large bags showed up as expected.
April 2013 was normal in an abnormal time. China and North Korea have a lot of normal and abnormal things going for them, always seen as an “alliance” with a 1,400-kilometer border, but the number of North Korean arrivals in 2012 just exceeded 180,000, while South Korea, which is across the sea, recorded 4.07 million in that year. However, China and North Korea do appear to be strengthening their people-to-people contacts, with the global average growth in arrivals to China in 2012 being 0.29 percent, but North Korea’s growth in arrivals to China was 18.56 percent.
In the DPRK, ordinary people are not free to leave the country. Therefore, the rapidly growing number of people leaving the country often carries some political connotations. Every North Korean who is able to cross the border could be a signal connecting the world to North Korea. Compared to the borderers and defectors who smuggle across the Yalu River, these 180,000 are perhaps the widest bandwidth of North Korea’s connection to the world.
After President Kim Jong Il’s visit to China
For a long time, the number of North Koreans coming to China stabilized at around 100,000 per year. Fluctuations between two adjacent years were as high as 14,000 or 15,000 and as low as 2,000 or 3,000. The jump came in 2011, when the number of North Koreans coming to China exceeded 150,000, an increase of about 36,000 over the previous year.
It was Kim Jong-il, the former supreme leader of North Korea, who facilitated the jump.
At the end of 2011, Kim Jong Il died. A year before his death, in May and August 2010, he had visited China twice. His one earlier visit to China dates back to January 2006, on the other hand. In fact, Kim Jong-il has rarely traveled since he took power in the 1990s, and it is even rarer for him to make frequent visits to a country in a short period of time.
We may be able to penetrate the high-level influence on China-North Korea civil interaction by the subtle wording changes in Xinhua’s reports on these visits.
For that January 2006 visit, Xinhua’s account was that the two leaders, in a warm and frank atmosphere, had an in-depth exchange of views on the further development of China-Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) bipartisan and inter-Korean relations and international and regional issues of common concern. In May 2010, on the other hand, it was the two leaders who warmly discussed a range of views on exchanges, mutual trade and other issues, with the word frank moved to the end of the story. In August, only the word “warm” was used in the report, and the word “frank” disappeared.
In diplomatic discourse, “frankness” often implies considerable disagreement between the two sides. Between the two frank dialogues of 2006 and 2010, the number of North Koreans coming to China showed a downward curve.
Another observation in this range is the public evaluation of “reform and opening up”. In reports of Kim’s visits to Chinese companies, it is common to see him express his approval of “China’s reform and opening up”. But North Korea’s Labor News has always insisted that “reform and opening up” (translation) is a revisionist and imperialist plot.
In fact, the jump in the number of North Koreans coming to China was preceded by a series of events: 2009 marked the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and North Korea, named the “Year of Sino-North Korean Friendship”, and in September Wen Jiabao visited North Korea, bringing a series of big gifts with him. The most crucial of these was the construction of a new cross-border bridge between China and North Korea in Dandong. During the year, China and North Korea held more than 60 activities in various fields, including politics, economy, culture, sports, science and technology, and education. However, the number of North Korean visits to China this year saw limited growth over the previous year, with 1,000 more visits.
The loosening of the DPRK’s attitude toward China also came in early 2010, judging from the keen reaction of border businessmen. The development plan for the islands on the Yalu River, together with a year-round concession for the port in the special city of Rason, became model projects to attract domestic businessmen to invest in the DPRK. President Kim Jong-il, for his part, offered to welcome Chinese companies to invest in North Korea during his visit to China in May.
Although there have also been issues of North Korea’s exports of Chinese anthracite coal always being out of weight and the North Korean version of the high-fidelity renminbi being counterfeit, they have not stopped the momentum of relations between the two countries.
During their exchange of visits in May 2010, Hu Jintao and Kim Jong-il made special mention of strengthening youth exchanges in the fields of culture, education and sports. This has had an almost immediate effect, with the number of DPRK youths aged 15-24 coming to China increasing 3.2-fold from 2009 to 2012, reaching 18,900 trips per year.
Some of these teenagers are North Korean students coming to China to study. The South Korean media outlet DAILY NK had already noticed a sharp increase in North Korean students in northeastern China in September 2010, when Chinese universities started their semester. Most of these students are said to be the sons of cadres from North Korean party organizations or foreign trade units. They are between 19 and 23 years old and generally come to China to study after graduating from foreign language colleges (middle school level) or while attending Kim Il Sung Comprehensive University or Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies. In addition, in November 2010, Tohoku University in Liaoning started a new program to accept North Korean students.
The largest number of people coming to China are labor workers
Among the Koreans coming to China, the proportion of those who come for the purpose of labor and crew is the highest, more than 40% and sometimes more than 50%, a proportion that is characteristic of the DPRK.
Working in China in an official capacity requires permission and organization by the DPRK government. Therefore, this data is also highly consistent with the trend of the overall number of North Korean people coming to China. That is, there was a significant dip from 2005 to 2010, followed by rapid growth and record highs.
It has long been no secret that the DPRK exports labor to foreign countries in exchange for foreign currency. in 2006, Kim Tae-san, a former DPRK diplomat in the Czech Republic, revealed the existence of about 70,000 official DPRK laborers in the former Soviet Union region and the Middle East, including 10,000-20,000 lumberjacks in eastern Russia to pay off DPRK debts to Russia after the 1960s. In Qatar, North Korean laborers are mostly engaged in masonry. According to Kim, these laborers usually sign four- or five-year work agreements, with the vast majority of their earnings going to the North Korean government.
According to informants in Dandong, there were already North Korean laborers in Dandong at least before 2000, mainly in the restaurant industry, and later also working for Chinese companies. For Chinese companies, the biggest advantage of North Korean laborers is not yet the low price, but the fact that they are very well disciplined and easy to manage.
When negotiating with Chinese companies, the DPRK’s chief in charge of exporting laborers is most concerned about food and housing in addition to wages – food needs to be taken care of by the Chinese side, while housing cannot be decentralized.
Each time the laborers came to China as a collective, there was one individual that the Chinese could not refuse – a figure similar to a delegate and head of the group. One afternoon a week, the laborers would concentrate on their studies. During breaks, the laborers could go out on the streets, but only if several of them were together. North Korean laborers in the Yanji area are similarly centralized and live together, according to Kim Qiang-il, director of the Institute of Northeast Asian Studies at Yanbian University.
According to informed sources in Dandong, restrictions on the movement of North Korean laborers who came to China 10 years ago were so strict that laborers working in Dandong were generally not allowed to go abroad. If a Chinese company needed a North Korean laborer to travel on business, it had to be at least two people together. Still, North Korean laborers have slowly multiplied, expanding from Dandong to Shenyang, Dalian and Beijing. Now, North Korean laborers are also starting to appear in second- and third-tier cities in the Northeast, such as Tumen.
Yu Chung-sik, a South Korean scholar, told the Southern Weekend that a conference of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was held in Seoul, South Korea, in September 2012 under the title of “Solidarity for the Human Rights of North Korean Overseas Workers”. Participants estimated that there are more than 60,000 North Korean overseas workers, 40,000 of whom are concentrated in the Yanji area of China. At the same time, the conference concluded that the number of laborers exported from the DPRK will double in a year or two.
“I believe North Korean official laborers or illegal immigrants in China will grow fast.” Yu Chung-sik said. He believes that North Korea is seen as an unstable factor in regional security and that free trade with foreign countries will be more restricted by the global community, while North Korea internally needs to export labor in exchange for foreign currency.
Figures from the China National Tourism Administration more or less confirm Yu’s judgment. 2011 saw an increase of 21,000 North Koreans coming to China for labor and service purposes compared with 2010, a rise of nearly 40 percent. In 2012, there were 4,000 more than in 2011.
Yu also said the presence of more and more North Korean laborers in China will surely draw the attention of the international community, especially human rights organizations, and that these people will also make local law and order more difficult. However, Kim said the laborers’ families are in North Korea and nothing should happen to them in China.
Flooding affects North Koreans coming to China, but not nuclear test
According to data obtained from the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) on the arrival of Koreans in China over the past eight years, the “migratory season” of Koreans has similar annual fluctuations. Generally speaking, the “migratory season” begins in March and April, with peaks in the second and third quarters and troughs in the three months from the end of the previous year to the beginning of the next.
However, the three years 2006, 2007 and 2012 were somewhat different from other years in that the peaks in all three years occurred in the second quarter, while the third quarter saw a decline. These three fluctuations were caused by natural disasters, often referred to as floods.
Based on known sources, Wikipedia has counted records of over 50 deaths in human history since the Dutch flood of 838 AD. North Korea ranked 82nd with more than 800 deaths in the 2006 flood, 92nd with more than 600 deaths in the 2007 flood, and 141st with more than 200 deaths in the 2012 flood.
Wikipedia’s statistics may not be accurate, but both official North Korean reports and third-party statistics, such as those from the United Nations, indicate that the three floods were costly.
In terms of the impact of the three floods on the number of North Korean arrivals in China, 2006 saw the largest change. In the third quarter of that year, there were about 23,000 arrivals from the DPRK, a sharp drop of more than 7,000 arrivals from the second quarter, with the largest decrease in arrivals being in the form of laborers. If one looks more closely, one can further see that these three fluctuations were particularly large among young adults aged 25-44.
In August 2006, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that the floods had caused huge human and material losses. The Japan Federation of Korean Communities, which has close official relations with the DPRK, released information that 549 people died, 295 were missing, nearly 10,000 houses were damaged or collapsed, and hundreds of roads, bridges and railroads were damaged. This means that the DPRK needs a large number of laborers to be put into flood control and flood rescue activities, thus reducing the number of people coming to China.
In contrast, the massive waves created by North Korea’s two nuclear tests have had a weak impact on the arrival of North Koreans in China.
In early July 2006, the DPRK test-fired a missile without warning, and three months later, the DPRK conducted a nuclear explosion. After the nuclear test, despite the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s criticism of the DPRK’s “brazen” nuclear test, China and the DPRK held the customary commemorative events to mark the 45th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance between China and the DPRK in July, and the 56th anniversary of the entry of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army into the DPRK for the war in October, which was the same month as the nuclear test.
Both before and after the October 2006 and May 2009 nuclear tests, the number of North Koreans coming to China did not fluctuate significantly. The nuclear test did not cause inconvenience to North Koreans coming to China.
No country is an island. Whether out of reluctance or active willingness, the number of North Koreans coming to China has been growing at a high rate in recent years. These North Koreans in China are not only engaging with China, but are actually engaging more with the international community through China. This may be the beginning of North Korea’s reopening after the Cold War. Predictably, most of the North Koreans coming to China will need to be careful about what they say and do when they return home, but the subtle influence cannot be avoided. However, it remains to be seen what kind of impact this will have on the future of North Korean society.
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