It makes me wonder if the fragmented landscape of critiques of Chinese human rights will ever result in the kind of inquiry you propose — the Tibetans with one grievance, the Uighurs with another, children’s advocates, and artists crying foul about post-earthquake cover-ups… I don’t know what it says about our own domestic debate, such as it is, about interrogations and torture (I’d rather not comment on that), but within the vast landscape of human rights issues in China, I suppose that the North Korean refugee component is just one fragment. Perhaps the North Korean Human Rights Act changes the equation or elevates this issue further, in spite of the fact that I think the Chinese government is really, really not listening and the Chinese people are putting virtually no pressure on their own state (because they certainly do have a proven capability to apply pressure to the state on any number of issues). But, as with the links you’ve provided, I obviously have some reading to do before anything intelligent issues from my little work station in this big quest. Thanks again for the response and the resources.

China marches 5,000 North Korean defectors a month back to their country across the Tuen Bridge in the northwestern Jilin Province, sometimes with wire passed through wrist and nose, according to rights groups.

This 2003 report, which may also be sourced to the Christian NGO, Voice of the Martyrs, states:

“We have reports that these refugees had wires driven through their wrists and noses. By these wires they were led back into North Korea,” said Thomas White, head of the U.S. section of the organization Voice of the Martyrs.

I recently heard a reporter for a major news organization tell me he’s heard the same reports from defectors, but of course, the Chinese never let anyone observe it first-hand.

Would you at least agree with me that in a just world, the U.N., the ICRC, and the rest of the Human Rights Industry would be making at least as big a deal about “getting to the bottom of this” as how many times we had to waterboard KSM to make him reveal what sequels he had planned after 9/11?

As to the issue of North Koreans operating in China, multiple reports confirm that China allows it. Please begin with this report from the Congressional-Executive Committee on China, and then read this from the Daily NK. How on earth did the North Koreans kidnap Rev. Kim Dong Shik, a wheelchair-bound senior citizen and U.S. resident, and spirit him back across the border without the Chinese being complicit? Of course the Chinese knew. South Korea actually captured one of the North Korean agents who took part and convicted him for it.

It’s an absolutely great article and I appreciate your linking it (and everything else on this prodigious blog, for that matter).

However, just for accuracy, I think you are incorrect in using that particular NYT article as the basis for asserting that North Korean refugees are strung through the nose with wires in China before they go back to North Korea. Here is the small excerpt from the article on which you appear to be basing your assertion:

As lucky as Heo and his housemates said they were to be here, they clearly hadn’t yet escaped the specter of the recent past. Living life on the lam in China had been its own discombobulation. They had no schooling or structure to their lives, except maybe fear. They slept in caves, arcades and safe houses, drifting from meal to meal — sometimes days apart — hoping at all costs to avoid detection. For they knew how well their homeland doled out its punishment. There had been reports of refugees being returned to North Korea, all of them strung together with a wire through their noses.

What we have here, presumably, since it is a paraphrase by the author rather than a direct quote, is “Heo” relaying to the reporter something he had heard about rather than seen himself. And, this is where you misrepresent the quote. It doesn’t appear that the refugee himself even implies that the nose-stringing happens in China; in fact, it appears that if it happened at all — and the reporter does such a nice job putting this in the passive voice and making relatively clear that it’s a rumor — the action would have taken place on North Korean soil.

As odious as the whole thing is (and I agree altogether that wires or not, it is sick business sending the refugee North Koreans from Manchuria by force back to sure punishment in the DPRK), the vision you imply with your own powerful prose is one of North Korean agents moving through Chinese territory along the border with a bunch of captured hogs/human beings strung along in train, and that, ergo, China is even more complicit with the regime of torture and beatings and killings and mistreatment of these people than heretofore known. And I don’t believe this is accurate.

While the Daily NK reports recently on North Korean agents in China in the late 1990s and a sexually-frisky defector was reportedly on the lookout for South Korean ministers in Manchuria much more recently, the implication of your quote goes beyond.

Allow me to explain what I mean:

According to my observations in the border region, talking to Chinese experts, and reading of the Chinese press, the PRC leadership and certainly the PLA is, to the contrary, not at all eager to see North Korean troops on their soil and in the past year has even issued somewhat demeaning press reports in mainline nationalist journals like the Global Times/Huanqiu Ribao [环球时报] about individual North Korean border guards gone rogue, and by extension, the force and effectiveness of the Chinese border guards (of whom there are to my recent observation, not so many, with one exception the five or so AK-47 wielding PLA/bianfang in camouflage valiantly defending a karaoke island from intrepid North Koreans in little Linjiang, Jilin province — but there are others, of course) in tossing such intruders into the relevant mobile prison/big fat paddy wagon near Kaishantun.

Additionally, the basic issue which seems to be raised by your quote — North Korean security forces in China — applies equally to the Ling/Lee/Koss debacle. Throughout the spring, the specter of North Korean troops/agents crossing the border was implied in Western media but never substantiated. It was certainly not asserted in the Chinese media, who were presumably getting their facts straight with the help of testimony from Mitch Koss, his remarkable camera, and local Chinese-Koreans.

Does no one care, or find consequential, what China’s attitude would be in such a highly-publicized incident in the event that it were true that KPA troops hunting for foreigners walked into Jilin? In analyzing things should we not be aware of Chinese sensitivities about “territorial integrity” in a chuck of territory (one no less where Koreans in the early 1930s were overwhelmingly seen by Chinese as the spearhead of Japanese imperialism, not guerrilla fighters) which go way deeper than Tibet ever could? What is the functional linkage between KPA border guards and those on the Chinese side? Neglect of the basic issue — China’s response to the idea of KPA on Chinese soil — has, regrettably, been a completely unexamined facet of the whole CurrentTV affair.

Finally, as to your liberal interpretation of the original quote: this is not to say that the PRC has never allowed North Korean agents on its territory in pursuit of refugees and/or the South Koreans (and ethnic Koreans) who help them, and it is certainly not to say that the PRC is not deeply complicit with the return of refugees to the DPRK. And it is also not to obfuscate the fact that the Chinese government condones and participates in gross violations of human rights in the name of state security. But in spite of our disdain for the policy that returns refugees against their will to North Korea, we should be staunchly factual in describing the methods of the inhumane policy, whose inhumanity really does not need to be embellished in order to garner effective support.

If other sources assert that North Koreans are strung together by their noses with wire in China before being forcefully repatriated, I would of course be interested (though not happy) to learn of their existence.

Koss was detained by Chinese police, and besides, even if he wasn’t, running away would be a smarter choice over fighting with armed border guards.

And I take issue with people saying that Ling and Lee “illegally.” I find this ridiculous since North Korea is an illegal state in itself,

Is it? How so? However heinous the North Korean regime is, the country holds a seat in the UN and its sovereignty is recognized by most other nations.

especially if turns out they were arrested on a sandbar that North Korea only claims and not physically across the actual border.

Disputed territorial claims are found the world over. I suspect any foreign nationals landing on Dokdo would be promptly arrested by the ROK navy.

What’s more, I think some of the negative/critical online comments about Ling and Lee over this have been malicious and cruel, particularly because those same commenters would think differently it were a female relative of theirs who had been in the same situation. But I do agree with kushibo that Euna Lee isn’t really to blame in this.

And I take issue with people saying that Ling and Lee “illegally.” I find this ridiculous since North Korea is an illegal state in itself, especially if turns out they were arrested on a sandbar that North Korea only claims and not physically across the actual border. The North Korean position on the matter deserves no sympathy.

But either way, let’s see what Laura Ling has to say in her upcoming op ed.