China’s Cleansing Campaign

I want to begin this post by congratulating the Nobel Committee for awarding the Peace Prize, for once, to a person who has actually made sacrifices to improve the lives of others in a way that is likely to frustrate a belligerent state and prevent war. More precisely, by selecting someone who is not a terrorist, an unaccomplished politician, or a proven failure at making peace, Nobel may have extended its residual relevance a while longer. Better, it has returned some attention away from the malice of the Chinese government toward foreign nations, and back to its malice toward its own people. But then, these topics are more interrelated than many of us tend to acknowledge. One of the topics where they intersect seamlessly is the subject of North Korean refugees in China.

Ethan Epstein, who is now also blogging at The New Ledger, incidentally, has just returned from a visit to Seoul the Chinese border with North Korea. He writes (this time, at Slate) that a joint Chinese-North Korean crackdown on refugees has been a grim success at closing off the flow of refugees. So thanks to our friends the ChiComs, North Koreans must now die in place. There is a special zone in hell for these people, but justice would be better served if they were sent to Camp 12, where so many of their victims have perished. It bears repeating that those victims are guilty of no greater crime than wanting to live.

In spite of the success of China’s cleansing campaign, the number of North Korean refugees in South Korea is about to hit the 20,000 mark. What’s not mentioned in CNN’s report is how many of those people are recent defectors from North Korea, and how many are fleeing China after hiding out there for years.

China, realizing that it has revealed too much of its arrogance and malice since the Cheonan attack, now wants us (and the South Koreans) to think that its sponsorship of North Korea’s terrorizing of its neighbors is simply misunderstood. It doesn’t bother trying to explain its sponsorship of, and active participation in, North Korea’s terrorizing of its own people. How could it? You simply can’t defend sending women and kids to die in gulags and before firing squads. Those things are evil — crimes against humanity — in any honest person’s lexicon.

How can the behavior of the thugs who run China be reconciled with the natural aspirations of people not to be slaves? What evidence suggests that it’s amenable to moral suasion? That it’s amenable anything but coercion of variable subtlety? One more subtle form of coercion would be to make it clear to China that its commercial access to post-unification Korea will depend of the amount of hostility it earns from the Korean people now (strictly for the safety of Chinese investors and for the preservation of public order, mind you). Another would be to raise the idea of “odious debt,” suggesting that China’s investments in North Korea will not be honored by any post-Kim government.

But if you were a North Korean refugee in China now, all of this would probably sound much too subtle. When would you finally decide that fighting back was your only real option? And would such an eventuality be a greater tragedy than the status quo?