Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
ASIA / PACIFIC
January 1, 2018
Rough times for smugglers who knitted North Korea to the world
Tim Sullivan and Hyung-Jin Kim
The Associated Press
IAN, China — The former smuggler
sits on the floor by a muted TV set,
smoking cheap North Korean
cigarettes one after the other. His hands
are rough from years of hard work. His belt
is knotted to keep his pants from slipping
around his pole-thin waist.
The mountains of North Korea, his
homeland not even a mile away, fill the
room’s only window.
He spent nearly all his 50-some years in
those mountains, sometimes earning more
than $1,500 in just one trip along the
secret trails and quiet river crossings of
the China-North Korea border. He
smuggled everything from TVs to clothes
into North Korea, a nation shaped by
decades of repression and isolation. He
smuggled out mushrooms, ginseng, and
the occasional bit of gold.
“I could bring in 10 televisions at once,
the same thing for refrigerators,” he says,
smiling broadly. “In the past, I could bring
in so much stuff.”
But no more.
North Korea is changing, quietly but
powerfully, with the rise of the young ruler
Kim Jong Un echoing even to those secret
trails. Increasing international sanctions
have left a handful of well-connected Chi-
nese businesses now controlling much of
the trade — legal and otherwise — along
the frontier. That’s bad news for the small-
time smugglers who long dominated the
border.
“It’s the smaller traders who are feeling
the heat. They’re going to lay low,” says
John Park, director of the Korea Working
Group at Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government. “But this becomes an
opportunity for larger companies with
North Korean clients.” In North Korea,
smuggling is far more than a crime. For
two decades, smugglers have secretly
knitted the isolated country to the outside
world, bringing in food during a brutal
famine and, later on as a small consumer
class began to grow, everything from Chi-
nese car parts to DVDs of South Korean TV
shows. They ferried in TVs and ferried out
families looking to escape life in the North.
Smuggling became a respected profession,
offering thousands of poor villagers a road
to the emerging middle class.
The troubles of this underground
community today reflect the immense role
that the frontier plays in the country’s
economy, and offer a window into a secret
world that outsiders almost never see. In
rare detailed interviews, nearly a dozen
people tied to smuggling networks, most
either former smugglers or black-market
traders, say their world has been thrown
into turmoil in the years since Kim Jong
Un came to power in late 2011.
The 870-mile border is the lynchpin of
North Korea’s economy, with China
accounting for 90 percent of its trade.
While North Korea has faced interna-
tional trade sanctions for over a decade be-
cause of its nuclear and missile programs,
China only began significantly ratcheting
up enforcement over the past year, amid a
surge in Pyongyang weapons tests. Trade
has declined amid the Chinese crackdown,
but analysts say a range of products, from
laborers to cellphone parts, still flow
across the frontier, the path smoothed by
bribes and powerful politicians in both
countries.
As sanctions have tightened, the trade
machine has simply grown more complex.
When North Korean coal exports were
forbidden, shiploads were channelled
through Russia to hide their origin, U.S.
officials say. When North Korea’s overseas
businesses faced scrutiny or closure, they
opened front companies or hired Chinese
middlemen. When buyers objected to
J
clothing made in North Korea, factories
reportedly began adding “Made in China”
labels. Goods are sometimes transferred
from one ship to another at sea, investiga-
tors say, to camouflage trade with the
North.
As this peculiar form of globalization
reverberated along the border, many
longtime smugglers simply couldn’t keep
up.
“I used to make a lot of money,” says
another ex-smuggler, a gravel-voiced
Chinese man in his mid-40s now working
as an occasional laborer in South Korea.
“But it’s not like that today.”
It’s lunchtime in Ulsan, the industrial
city where he has lived since leaving the
border last year, but he’s sitting in a
restaurant nursing both a bad hangover
and a beer. For years the smuggling
process had been straightforward, he says,
with North Korean border units allowing
him to bring his goods across in exchange
for bribes. “These guys would just let the
smuggling happen.”
The man, like all those interviewed with
ties to smuggling, spoke on condition of
anonymity, since he was admitting to
breaking numerous laws. He is Chosonjok,
from China’s ethnic Korean community.
Many early smugglers were either
Chosonjok or Chinese residents of North
Korea, known as Hwagyo.
He made his career running scrap cop-
per into China, communicating with his
North Korean partners on Chinese mobile
phones, which are illegal in the North but
work sporadically in border areas.
Once a shipment was arranged, cars
would be dispatched carrying tons of metal
to isolated stretches of the Yalu River,
which marks North Korea’s northeastern
border with China.
Much of the region is deeply rural, with
small mountains flanking the river and
very few roads. Surveillance is often light
outside the handful of cities. “Don’t
accommodate border trespassers,” a sign
warns in a small Chinese town. Even in
security-obsessed North Korea, where
getting to the border requires a special
permit, guardposts are still sometimes
more than a quarter-mile apart.
There’s plenty of space for illegal work.
The copper smuggler would arrange for
hired North Korean soldiers to haul the
metal in 110-pound sacks to the Chinese
shoreline, carrying the bags through
shallow water or floating them on rafts
made from inflated inner tubes. Cars
waiting in China would then whisk the
copper away.
For every shipment, he would send
takeout meals, bottles of beer, and snacks
— especially pig’s feet — for the soldiers.
“I’m a kind-hearted person so I’d bring
them lots of good food,” he growls.
On his best days, he says, he could move
six tons of metal across the border, earning
him upward of $3,600. He could do that a
few times a year.
When demand dropped for copper he
switched to North Korean rabbit fur,
which he could sell to Chinese clothing
manufacturers. Then, about two years ago,
things grew increasingly difficult. North
Korean border guards grew wary. Rumors
spread of harsh punishments: “Anyone
caught (helping smugglers) would be
killed.” Eventually, his partners refused to
work with him. “They told us they were too
scared to do it any longer, no matter how
much we were willing to pay.”
Smuggling has been part of life here for
centuries, but began growing exponen-
tially in the mid-1990s, when North
Korea’s economy broke down and famine
savaged the country. As government
control loosened amid the turmoil,
desperate Northerners began crossing the
border into China, searching for food,
work, or something to trade. While the
famine and the turmoil eventually eased, a
quietly budding market economy held on.
As did the smugglers.
“When I was young, everyone wanted to
be a soldier, a doctor, or a teacher,” says a
refugee in her late 40s, a former North
Korean radio propagandist and black-
market trader now living outside Seoul.
“But later on, after the famine, every child
began dreaming of becoming a smuggler.”
At the house overlooking the North
Korean mountains, the ex-smuggler says
poverty pushed him into running goods
illegally. He had a government-assigned
job, like nearly all North Koreans, driving
a truck in a small city. But official salaries
can pay as little as 1,000 North Korean
won — less than $1 — a month.
“It was the kind of money that would let
you eat out — once,” he says, leaning back
SMUGGLERS STALLED. North Korean men
ride on a makeshift raft to transport logs down the
river that divides North Korea from China near the
Chinese city of Lingjiang in northeastern China’s Jilin
province. North Korea is changing, quietly but power-
fully, with the rise of the young ruler Kim Jong Un
echoing even to secret smuggling trails. (AP Photo/
Ng Han Guan)
against the wall.
He began using his employer’s truck to
ferry merchandise for small traders, who
would buy goods from one of the growing
number of semi-underground markets,
then sell them in another.
“I travelled everywhere,” he says.
“Something that was sold for 10 won here
could be sold for 20 won at another place.”
Eventually he began crossing into
China, buying TVs, stereos, refrigerators,
and clothing, then arranging for boats or
rafts to ferry everything back home.
In an area where the line between trad-
ing and smuggling can be almost impossi-
ble to parse, where nearly everyone pays or
takes bribes, he describes his work as an
“authorized business,” since he’d paid
officials to let him move his merchandise.
“From the outside it doesn’t look
legitimate, but to the people on the inside,
that’s just how the marketplace in the
border region works,” said Park, the
professor with the Korea Working Group.
He has studied how a handful of Chinese
companies have come to dominate the
border as trade sanctions tightened, acting
as intermediaries for North Korean firms
and profiting from the increased risks.
While U.S. law effectively forbids
American trade with North Korea, China
has only selectively restricted commerce
with the North. Pyongyang also does
business legally with countries from
Pakistan to Thailand, trading in
everything from textiles to seafood.
The pressure on the small-time
smugglers didn’t come all at once. Some
trace it to the final years of longtime
dictator Kim Jong Il, who died in
December 2011. Others say it began under
his son and successor, Kim Jong Un.
The younger Kim has launched a series
of purges since coming to power, ousting
and sometimes executing a series of
powerful officials. The domino effect of
those purges, with ever-lower officials
being pushed aside, eventually reached
the border.
“When your business depends on bribing
Continued on page 13
DOWNSTREAM DIFFICULTY. Students from India’s northeastern Assam state hold placards by the
Brahmaputra river during a protest against the contamination of the river, in Gauhati, India. Officials in India’s
northeast are complaining that Chinese construction activity on the upper reaches of one of the largest rivers
that flows into India are likely turning the waters downstream turbid and unfit for human consumption. (AP Photo/
Anupam Nath)
India says Chinese river construction dirtying water
GAUHATI, India (AP) — Officials in
India’s northeast are complaining that
Chinese construction activity on the upper
reaches of one of Asia’s largest rivers that
flows into India are likely turning the
waters downstream turbid and unfit for
human consumption.
Sarbananda Sonowal, the chief minister
of India’s Assam state, said the Brahma-
putra river was contaminated with bacte-
ria and iron, with laboratory tests declar-
ing its waters unfit for human consump-
tion. Sonowal asked that the Indian gov-
ernment take up the matter with Beijing.
The Yarlung Tsangbo river originates in
the Tibetan Himalayas and enters India as
the Siang in far-eastern Arunachal
Pradesh state before flowing downstream
to Assam as the Brahmaputra. The river
finally empties into the Bay of Bengal
through Bangladesh, where it is called the
Padma.