Escape from North Korea

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kim lived in China, where he oversaw the manufacture of chairs that he sold to Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and other retail clients in the United States. He was based in an industrial area near the southern boomtown of Guangzhou. On Sundays he would get up early, pack his passport, and drive across the border to Hong Kong to attend a church in Kowloon that had a Korean-language worship service. The round-trip took most of the day, but the inconvenience was worth it. As a Christian living in China, he had few opportunities for worship. The former British colony of Hong Kong, although formally part of China since 1997, was an enclave of freedom. Under the terms of its return to Beijing, Hong Kong guarantees freedom of religion.

Then one day a more convenient alternative presented itself. Kim happened to hear about a secret church not far from his apartment. The church catered to the South Korean businessmen who worked in the Shenzhen industrial zone. It wasn’t registered with the Chinese government, as required by law, so it operated underground, billing itself as a cultural association. There was no sign on the door and no cross on the roof. The hundred or so congregants learned about the church by word of mouth.

Kim was soon a regular attendee. One Sunday he noticed two shabbily dressed men seated in a corner of the room. After worship, he went up to them, said hello, and learned to his astonishment that they were from North Korea. They had escaped across the Tumen River to northeast China and then traveled two thousand miles south to Guangdong Province. It took them two months. They hoped to find a way to slip across the border into Hong Kong.

That was the start of his rescue work. Kim began to assist North Korean refugees clandestinely. He provided safe houses in southern China; he gave them food, clothing, and money; and, eventually, he organized secret passage across China to third countries. He tried unsuccessfully to find them jobs in the furniture factories with which he did business, but the Chinese factory managers were afraid to help. They knew that hiring a North Korean was a serious crime.

It wasn’t long before Kim gained a reputation along the new underground railroad as someone refugees could count on for assistance; some started coming south to seek him out. Pastors of churches in northeast China would call him and ask him to take in refugees. Many of the people he helped were women fleeing from the Chinese men who had purchased them as brides.

By his count, Kim helped more than one hundred North Koreans get out of China before he was arrested in 2003. It was a warm afternoon in late September, and he was leading a prayer meeting in his apartment. He and nine North Koreans—three men and six women—were seated in a circle on the floor. There was a knock on the door, then police burst in. Convicted of the crime of helping illegal migrants, Kim spent four years in a Chinese prison. He was released in 2007. He now runs an American nonprofit dedicated to rescuing trafficked women by spiriting them out of China on the new underground railroad.

In China, Kim named his rescue mission Schindler’s List, a reference to the 1993 movie about Oskar Schindler, the Czech businessman who saved more than one thousand Polish Jews from the gas chambers at Auschwitz during World War II. Kim sees himself and other Korean-Americans who help North Koreans as modern-day Schindlers, committed to saving North Koreans from the depredations of two authoritarian governments, North Korea and China. When he worked in China, many of Kim’s furniture clients in New York were Jewish, and he would ask them quietly for money to support his work helping North Koreans escape from China. “They understood what I was doing,” he said simply. Later he changed the name of his organization to 318 Partners, after Article 318 of the Chinese criminal code, the law under which he was convicted.²

Today, Kim works out of his home on a quiet street in suburban Long Island about an hour’s train ride from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. It is a luxurious contrast to his prison accommodations in China, where he slept on the cement floor of the cell he shared with a dozen felons.

His office is set up in a corner of the family room, where a computer sits on a small desk. But the nerve center of his operation is his cellphone, which rings repeatedly on the morning we meet. Calls come in from contacts in South Korea, China, and Southeast Asia regarding a rescue operation that is in the works. It is not until lunchtime, when most of Asia is asleep, that his phone finally goes quiet.

North Korean women are “commodities for purchase,” Kim explains. The process of recruitment, transfer, and delivery of the brides has become systematized. He describes a network of human traffickers who operate as “suppliers,” “wholesale providers,” and “retail sellers.”

The supply chain typically begins in the young woman’s hometown in North Korea and ends when she is delivered to her new husband in China. The most popular marketplaces for North Korean women are in the three Chinese provinces that border North Korea—Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang—but North Korean brides are sold throughout China. The buyers are Chinese men, both ethnically Korean and majority Han. Many are farmers. Some have physical or mental disabilities that make them unsuitable as husbands in the eyes of Chinese women. In almost every case, the men are buying the one thing they want most in life: a wife.

Why would a Chinese man go to the trouble and expense of buying a North Korean bride? The answer has to do, above all, with China’s long-standing population policies.

For more than three decades, China has pursued one of the world’s strictest family planning policies. Most couples are allowed to have only one child. The one-child policy became part of China’s constitution in 1978 and went into effect in 1979. Since then, the government has enforced it through fines, imprisonment, forced abortion, sterilization, and even, human rights groups charge, infanticide. The fertility rate has dropped to fewer than two children per woman today compared with close to six children per woman in the early 1970s.³

The one-child policy has had its intended effect of slowing the rate of expansion of China’s population. But there has been an unwelcome side effect: an unnaturally high male-to-female ratio. A scarcity of young women is a fact of life in China today. In 2009, according to research published in the British Medical Journal, the number of males younger than twenty exceeded the number of females by more than thirty-two million.⁴

Left to herself, Mother Nature will bring more boys than girls into the world. The sex ratio at birth is roughly consistent worldwide: It’s between 103 and 107 boys for every 100 girls. But boys tend to be less healthy than girls and have a higher mortality rate during infanthood. By the time the newborns reach their reproductive years, the sex ratio is about even.

This pattern does not hold true in China, where sex ratios are grossly lopsided. In 2005, the birth ratio was 120 boys for every 100 girls, according to the British Medical Journal. In some rural provinces, more than 140 male births were reported for every 100 female births.⁵ “Gendercide” is how the Economist magazine characterized the problem in a 2010 cover article.⁶ The word appeared in bold letters over a photograph of a pair of pink-bowed baby shoes. The shoes were empty.

The obvious result of the gender imbalance is a surplus of bachelors. The Chinese have a euphemism for permanently unmarried men: guanggun. They are “bare branches” on the family tree. The unmarried men are often desperate—for companionship, for sex, for household help. In rural areas, the bride problem is exacerbated by young Chinese women’s preference for urban life and modern-minded husbands. Young women are fleeing the farm in droves, attracted by well-paying factory jobs and more comfortable urban lifestyles. In the three provinces bordering North Korea, the ratio of young men to young women is a staggering 14-to-1, according to an estimate from the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.⁷

One former North Korean bride, now living in the United States, has a matter-of-fact explanation for the appeal of North Korean brides. North Korean women have a reputation of being clean and submissive, she told me. In a society that is modernizing as quickly as China is, such traditional wifely virtues are prized, especially in rural areas, where contemporary notions about women’s roles have not penetrated. Brokers take “orders” from Chinese bachelors or their families for North Korean brides.

Women may hold up half the sky, in Mao Zedong’s famous phrase, but they are still treated as second-class citizens in much of modern China. Today’s gender imbalance gives the lie to Mao’s dictum. Chinese families’ traditional preference for boys lives on. Many couples still favor sons, both to carry on the family name and support them in their old age. In rural areas, sons are prized for the value of their labor. The birth of a son heralds the arrival of an extra farmhand as soon as the boy is old enough to hold a hoe.

Not so long ago in China, an unwanted baby girl might be drowned in a bucket at birth or left unattended to die. Such atrocities might still be occurring. But abortion is the preferred method of getting rid of unwanted baby girls. “Sex-selection abortion accounts for almost all the excess males,” the British Medical Journal concludes. Because of the one-child policy, abortion is both widely available in China and widely accepted as a means of contraception.

Many couples take pains to make sure their one permitted child is male or, if they are allowed to have two children, that at least one is a boy. That is increasingly easy to do, thanks to ultrasound technology that allows a couple to determine the baby’s sex early in the pregnancy. The first ultrasound machines were introduced in China in the early 1980s. They reached county hospitals by the end of that decade and rural hospitals by the mid-1990s. Since then, ultrasonography has become very cheap and is easily available even to the rural poor. The popular test costs about $12, well within the means of most couples. China has laws forbidding the use of ultrasounds to determine the sex of the unborn children, but they are ignored.⁸

China’s sex imbalance has reached epic proportions. Steven Mosher, of the Population Research Institute, calls it a tale of “marital musical chairs” in which tens of millions of young men will be left standing. He paints a bleak picture of social disruption. “Rates of prostitution and homosexuality will increase as these unwilling bachelors seek alternative outlets for their urge to mate,” he cautions. “Rates of recruitment for both the People’s Liberation Army and for criminal gangs will increase as these ‘excess’ men seek alternative families. Crime, which is mostly committed by unattached males, will skyrocket.”⁹

Mosher is not the only observer who is worried about the growing disparity between the sexes and how it could reshape Chinese society. Even the Chinese government has initiated programs to teach citizens about the value of girls. For now, however, one of the responses to the shortage of young women comes by way of North Korea, through the buying and selling of female flesh.

In what Steve Kim calls Stage One of the supply chain, the supplier, or recruiter, lures a woman away from her home with promises of a lucrative trip to China. Recruiters are either North Korean nationals or Korean-Chinese, and usually male. They typically hang out around urban train stations in the border regions and chat up attractive young women who pass by. Their marks are often rural women who have come to the city to sell an agricultural product they grew on an illegal private plot or scavenged from the forest.

Sometimes the recruiter targets a pretty young woman, follows her home, and tries to enlist her parents in his persuasion game. The recruiters travel from village to village, keeping an eye out for potential brides.

Kim explains what happens next. “When they see a widow with a beautiful daughter they say: ‘Why do you leave your daughter like that? If you send her to China, then she can get money and have an education. Why don’t you send her?’ They keep talking and gain trust, and then—‘OK,’ the mother says, ‘I trust you. Take her.’

The recruiter’s pitch is usually a variation on one of three themes: Come to China, and I’ll introduce you to someone who will give you a good job. Or, I’ll take you to a Chinese market where you can sell your goods for more money than you can get in North Korea. Or, I’ll help you find your relatives in China.

He makes a tempting promise: You can come home after a few months with more money than you could make in a year here. For a young woman with no job prospects and whose family may be destitute, or nearly so, it can be an irresistible offer.

There is also a gullibility factor at work. In the northern reaches of North Korea, near the border with China, stories abound of girls who have gone to China and never returned. But even if they have heard such stories, many women are young enough, inexperienced enough, or desperate enough to believe that “it won’t happen to me.”

One former bride I interviewed—she called herself Naomi—described how she was befriended by a traveling salesman from China who offered to guide her to the address where relatives of her father lived. She left home in the middle of the night.

“I didn’t want my parents to know I was leaving,” Naomi told me. She knew she was taking a risk and didn’t want them to dissuade her. “I thought I would go for a few days and come back.”¹⁰

It wasn’t until she reached China that she realized that the wares her salesman-friend were selling were human, and female. She was delivered to a Chinese farmer, exchanged for the North Korean wife he had purchased a month earlier but who had turned out to be ill. The unwritten contract under which the first woman had been purchased apparently contained a damaged-goods clause.

If trickery doesn’t work, recruiters have been known to resort to kidnapping. Hannah, another former bride, described how she had been abducted and taken to China. She was a teacher in Pyongyang, and during the school vacation she accompanied the mother of one of her pupils to the border region. Hannah hoped to make a little extra money by helping her friend carry back the fashionable Chinese-made clothing she was planning to purchase from a Chinese salesman and resell in the capital.

On the evening they concluded the deal, the Chinese salesman invited the two women to dinner. The food was drugged, and the next thing they knew, both women woke up in a dark room, hands and feet bound, heads groggy from the narcotic.

As Hannah struggled to come to, she heard her friend cry out, “Teacher, I think we’ve been sold.”¹¹ They were in China, destined for forced marriages. They never saw each other again.

Sometimes the pseudo-marriages are voluntary—at least in the sense that the woman has the theoretical option of turning down a man’s offer. It is not unusual for a North Korean woman to agree to live with a Chinese man as his wife. But it is wrong to consider it a true choice. It is “a means of survival or livelihood,” says Lee Keumsoon, a senior researcher with the Korean Institute for National Unification in Seoul. Lee has interviewed hundreds of North Korean women who have settled in the South. In many cases, she says, a voluntary marriage is indistinguishable from a forced marriage.¹²

Marriage is almost always a better option for a North Korean woman than prostitution or online sex work. A woman who cannot speak Chinese would not be able to work in public places such as a restaurant or a store because the risk of arrest would be too high. The North Korean woman “would quickly realize that there was no alternative but to establish a ‘live-in’ relationship with a Chinese man to avoid a police roundup,” Lee observes. “She would have to choose to ‘live-in’ as a relatively safe means of staying in China.”¹³

The supplier’s job ends when he delivers the women to the Chinese side of the Tumen or Yalu River. His fee, Steve Kim says, runs between $80 and $300 per woman, depending upon the quality of the “product” and the difficulty of the crossing. Out of that sum, the supplier is expected to cover any bribes he must pay to North Korean border guards for information about safe crossing points or for an agreement that they’ll look the other way at a prearranged time. North Korean officials themselves sometimes get into the business of trafficking women, Kim says. He cites the case of a twenty-two-year-old woman he helped who identified her recruiter as a retired military officer.

Stage Two of the supply chain begins on the Chinese side of the border, where “wholesaler providers” are waiting to receive the women. The wholesaler’s job is to escort the women from the border region, past Chinese ID checks, to a safer place farther inland. That is typically somewhere in the Yanbian area of Jilin Province, one of the three provinces that border North Korea. Yanbian’s full name is Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, and it is home to a large number of ethnic Koreans. It’s a good place for North Koreans to hide in plain sight, or in the case of the North Korean brides, be hidden.

From there, some of the women are sold directly to Korean-Chinese men who live in the region. From the woman’s point of view, this is usually the better option. Life with a Korean-Chinese man, in a community where the Korean language is spoken, is preferable to life with a Han Chinese man who speaks only Mandarin and whose culture and food will be unfamiliar to the woman.

Other brides move on to Stage Three of the supply chain and are resold to “retailers” for between $500 and $800 each. The retailers then sell the women directly to their clients, usually Han Chinese who live in other parts of the country, Steve Kim says. The price ranges between $1,200 and $1,500 per woman, depending upon her age and appearance.

There are variations on the pattern Steve Kim describes, but the basic outline, as also described by aid workers, remains the same: recruitment, transfer, and delivery.

In some cases a North Korean woman will cross the river on her own before linking up with a broker. Traffickers prey on women in the border regions using the same sorts of pitches they use to recruit women in North Korea. According to the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, trafficking networks of Korean-Chinese and North Korean men operate in northeast China and along the Chinese–North Korean border, “where they seek out North Korean women and girls.”¹⁴

By the time a woman arrives in China, she is more vulnerable than she was at home. Listen to the voices of a few such “brides,” as compiled by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Sometimes the woman is talked into living with a Chinese man for her own “safety.” Sometimes she is threatened with exposure if she doesn’t comply. Sometimes she is told nothing; she is simply sold.

Case 11: “Only when we arrived in a village in Heilongjiang did I hear that I was going to get married. I didn’t have a choice because I didn’t even know where I was.”¹⁵

Case 13: “We met with one ethnic Korean man by chance, and he said we should get married to a Chinese citizen to be safe. While I was not sure whether I should follow him or not, he took me to Mishan in Heilongjiang and sold me to a Han Chinese man.”¹⁶

Case 14: “I crossed the Tumen River with three other people, and we all went to the house of ethnic Koreans nearby. This household had an orchard. They let us work there for a while, giving us food and shelter. One day, three men, including one dressed in a soldier’s uniform, came in a taxi and took me to Longjing, where I was sold to an ethnic Korean man.”¹⁷

At some point along the supply chain, the North Korean woman wakes up and realizes what is happening to her. She then has two choices: Go through with the marriage, or try to escape. This is not really a choice. The woman is on her own in a strange country. She knows no one. She doesn’t speak the language. As she quickly finds out, in escaping to China from North Korea, she has exchanged one form of bondage for another. Most accept the inevitable and agree to be sold. They reason, not illogically, that life with a Chinese husband, even an abusive one, is preferable to arrest, repatriation, and imprisonment in North Korea.

The rule of law—to the extent that it prevails in China and to the extent that a North Korean with no exposure to such a concept is capable of understanding it—doesn’t apply to North Korean refugees. If a woman has relatives in China, they often urge her, not without reason, to strike a bargain with a Chinese man who will feed and house her in exchange for her labor and sexual favors. If she contacts the police or other Chinese officials, she can expect worse treatment. If the police abide by the law, they will arrest her and send her back to North Korea. If they are corrupt, they will sell her to another bride broker.

Bang Mi-sun’s story is typical. Bang Mi-sun crossed the Tumen River, motivated, she later said, by one thought: “I might find refuge in China.”¹⁸ Her husband had died of starvation in North Korea. Her elder daughter had disappeared, and her two younger children needed her help. She hoped to find work in China.

Instead, on the other side of the river, she found the police waiting for her. The Chinese police “were getting ready to apprehend me and send me back to North Korea,” she said, unless she agreed to be sold. Speaking at a press conference in Washington, D.C., she described what happened next: “My first buyer sold me to another buyer, and then that buyer sold me in turn to another buyer, each buyer for additional profit. “

“I was being sold like a beast,” she said. “I remember these Chinese brokers would call us, those who were being sold, ‘pigs.’ Well, I was the best pig they had. I was sold at top price.” Her first husband told her he paid 7,000 yuan for her—the equivalent of about $850. “He told me he would kill me if I did not listen to him.”

A few days after Bang Mi-sun started living with her new husband, she won a reprieve of sorts: Brokers abducted her and sold her to another man. “I found out that there are brokers who would take the people who had been sold and take them away and sell them again to a third party,” she said. “I never knew that this buying and selling of people existed. . . . I was sold again and again.”

After her last marriage, Bang Mi-sun was arrested by Chinese police and deported to North Korea. She was beaten and sent to a labor reeducation camp. She eventually escaped again to China and made her way to South Korea. At the Washington press conference, she stood on a chair, lifted up her skirt, and displayed the deep furrows in her thighs, scars of where she’d been tortured.

North Korean brides are “thrice victimized,” says Ambassador Mark Lagon, former director of the U.S. State Department’s human-trafficking office. “They have fled starvation and human rights abuses in North Korea,” he notes. “They are subject to abuse as undocumented migrants in China. And if they are sent back to North Korea, they face severe punishment, even execution in some cases.”¹⁹

According to the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, which Lagon headed, more than eight hundred thousand people are trafficked worldwide across borders every year. The vast majority—80 percent—are women and girls. That is roughly the same percentage of North Korean refugees in China who are female, according to human rights groups.

Lagon describes the plight of North Korean women in China as different from that of trafficked women elsewhere in the world, or even in China, where Southeast Asian women also are sold as brides. North Korean women in China experience the “usual vulnerabilities of undocumented migrants, who are subject to manipulation by employers, debt bondage, and so forth, worldwide,” he says. But China’s treatment of North Korean women is worse. “There’s a particular cocktail here of an insensitive and arguably cruel immigration policy in China that make them even more vulnerable.”

Lagon is referring to China’s policy of treating trafficked North Korean women as criminals or deportable aliens, not as victims. Chinese law recognizes North Korean refugees only as illegal immigrants. There is no screening process to determine whether a woman is a victim of sex trafficking, that is, whether she has been forced into prostitution or marriage with a Chinese national. She has zero recourse under Chinese law.

Every North Korean bride I have interviewed used the words “marriage” and “husband” when describing her personal situation. That was true even if she had another husband and family back home in North Korea. But in the eyes of Chinese law, the living arrangement of a North Korean woman with a Chinese man has no legal status. The marriage cannot be registered with the Chinese government because the woman has no official identity papers. If a man tries to register his marriage, he runs the risk that his wife will be exposed as an illegal migrant and subject to arrest and repatriation. At the very least, the husband will open himself up to bribery from officials who want money in exchange for ignoring his wife’s illegal status.

Like most of the Christians who are in the business of rescuing North Korean refugees, Steve Kim and 318 Partners rely on information from women who have escaped to seek out more people to help. Just as the widespread use of cellphones and the Internet has streamlined the export industry in China in the past decade, so, too, have high-tech communications media streamlined the escape industry. A ticket on the new underground railroad often begins with a cellphone call.

He lifts his hand to an ear, pretending to be a rescued North Korean woman making a phone call to a friend in China. “ ‘Yeah, I’m here. It’s so-o-o good. Why don’t you come?’ ” The bride who has escaped then gives her friends in China Kim’s phone number or the number of a colleague in Seoul.

The next step is a phone interview with Kim. Does the woman fully understand the risks of escape? Is she willing to take the chance that she could be arrested and repatriated? If she has children with her Chinese husband, is she prepared to leave them behind?

Some women decide not to leave. “Many women have adjusted to their new lives even though they were trafficked,” he says. They have enough to eat. Their living conditions are far better than anything they experienced in North Korea. Their neighbors help shield them from arrest when security officials come snooping.

“The husband is happy and they’re not complaining,” Kim says. “They’re taking it as destiny. They tell me, ‘Don’t bother our family.’ They are living peacefully.”

If a woman wants help, and Kim agrees to do so, he goes to work quickly. He figures out how much the rescue will cost and begins to organize his network on the new underground railroad. If the woman is still living with her Chinese husband, the first step will be to arrange for her to get to a secure location from which she can begin her journey.

Then he sends out a plea for money to his email list of supporters. Typical is an appeal from a January 2010 newsletter: “We have received another call for help from three trafficked North Korean women in China,” the newsletter states. “They are all from the same hometown in North Korea. According to the older woman named Choi, they have escaped from the captors [and are] hiding in a northern city of Jilin province. We ask your support in prayers and financially.”²⁰

The basement price of one of 318 Partners’ rescues is $1,300. Most cost much more—$3,000 or above. Money is so tight that Kim sometimes asks the rescued women to pledge to pay back $1,000 of the costs once they get to Seoul and receive financial help from the South Korean government.