Page 1 of
2 North
Korea's busy border By Andrei
Lankov
North Korea is often seen as a
modern-day "hermit nation", inscrutable and opaque
for outsiders. While not completely wrong, the
image is certainly much exaggerated. Among other
things, it is often overlooked that the country's
border with China, about 1,400 kilometers long, is
far more porous than normally assumed. Actually,
this has been the case for well over a century.
If there were times when the border was
almost impassable, it was before the 1870s. In
those days a Korean border-crosser would
immediately find himself in serious trouble. The
adjacent parts of China were off limits for all
permanent agricultural settlers who happened not
to be ethnic Manchu (no exception was made for the
majority Han Chinese, either). This ban was easy
to maintain: The agriculturalists would be
immediately noticed and
apprehended by the
authorities, who could rely on support of the
locals, overwhelmingly Manchu.
The
migration ban was lifted between 1870 and 1881,
and soon outsiders began to flood the areas now
known as the Chinese northeast, but which were
then referred to as Manchuria. Koreans came from
the east, while far more numerous Chinese settlers
moved in from the south. Both Koreans and Chinese
were attracted by the abundance of arable land,
but Korean farmers, more experienced with cold
climates, soon discovered that their methods of
rice cultivation were better suited to the
conditions of Manchuria, so they became remarkably
prominent as rice growers in the region.
The migration increased after the Japanese
takeover of Korea (1910) and the Japanese invasion
of Manchuria (1932) - in fact, the colonial
administration encouraged Korean migration to the
newly acquired Chinese lands. Wartime statistics
are murky, but it seems that by 1942 the Korean
population of Manchuria slightly exceeded 1.5
million, about 4-5% of the total population of the
region at that time. In the areas along the
border, the proportion of ethnic Koreans was much
higher, at about 90%. In most cases, Koreans
formed their own villages, with interaction with
Chinese neighbors rather limited.
Nowadays, most Korean historians claim
that those migrants were staunchly and
overwhelmingly anti-Japanese. This was not the
case, since pro-Japanese feelings were known to be
strong among many settlers, who often saw the
Japanese imperial authorities as protectors
against the Chinese. Nonetheless, many Koreans
were indeed hostile toward Japan, so Manchuria of
the 1920s and 1930 became a hotbed of both Korean
nationalism and Korean communism. Even Kim
Il-sung, then commander of a tiny guerrilla
detachment, began his career in the forests of the
region. When in 1946 the civil war in
China began in earnest, many local Koreans
volunteered or were pressed into the Chinese
Communist army, where some ethnic-Korean units
were created (an important measure, since most of
the recruits had only a very basic command of
Chinese). After the Communist victory of 1949,
some of these units, including two fully equipped
infantry divisions, were transferred to North
Korea, where these ex-Chinese troops played a
decisive role in the first stages of the Korean
War. In fact, the infantry forces that took over
Seoul in late June 1950 largely consisted of these
experienced veterans of the Chinese Civil War.
Apart from the not-so-voluntary transfer
of military forces, some half-million ethnic
Koreans chose to move back to their homeland in
the late 1940s, after Korea's independence from
Japan. Nonetheless, many more stayed, so nowadays
the ethnic-Korean population of China is about 2
million.
Most of the Korean migrants to
Manchuria originally came from northern Korea,
often from the areas immediately adjacent to the
border. Actually, in the 1930s and early 1940s
when both Korea and Manchuria were parts of the
Japanese Empire, most locals simply did not
perceive the move west as an act of international
migration. The border rivers were spanned by
numerous bridges (most of these were deliberately
destroyed later, when cross-border traffic
decreased, to facilitate border control). So a
significant number of the North Koreans in the
border areas have relatives on the other side of
the border.
In 1948 a communist state
emerged in the northern half of the Korean
Peninsula, and the following year the Communists
took over China. Initially, relations between the
two states were friendly, even though some hidden
frictions existed from the very beginning. It
appears that until the mid-1950s the border
remained almost completely unregulated.
Checkpoints existed, to be sure, but pretty well
anybody could cross the border with little chance
of being caught. It helped (and still helps) that
the two border rivers, the Yalu and the Tuman,
though they look large and impressive when they
meet the sea, upstream are both narrow and
shallow.
Only in the late 1950s, when
relations between North Korea and China began to
cool, some semblance of border control began to
emerge. Nonetheless, even in the 1970s, when such
control was probably at its harshest, some
low-profile cross-border traffic existed. People
secretly visited their relatives and even went
shopping across the border. In those days, one
could buy in North Korea many goods that were
unavailable to the Chinese (now this sounds quite
strange, but until the early 1980s North Korea had
significantly higher living standards than China).
One of my ethnic-Korean acquaintances in China
told me how his grandfather in the 1960s would
disappear for a few days and then return with a
small bag of sweets for the kids (in those days
sweets were still sold in North Korea). Everybody
understood that the old man simply visited his
brothers in the towns on the other side of the
border.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s,
a number of ethnic Koreans moved to North Korea
permanently. In those days Pyongyang actively
encouraged the return of Koreans living overseas.
The return of about 95,000 ethnic Koreans from
Japan in the early 1960s is the best-known example
of this policy. It is less known, though, that
around the same time a comparable number moved to
North Korea from China.
Some of these
people relocated to North Korea legally. In the
1950s, Chinese authorities usually issued an
emigration permit when a Korean applied for
permission to go. Among such returnees there were
some highly skilled technicians and professionals
who wanted to help their motherland while also
avoiding the increasingly irrational policies of
China. In 1958, a few hundred repatriates were
sent as a group. They were met with an orchestra,
given North Korean citizenship and allocated jobs.
Soon afterward, the Chinese government
refused to allow further mass repatriations.
Obviously, it was judged that China's reputation
would be damaged by any massive migration from
Chairman Mao Zedong's earthly paradise, even if
this happened to be a migration to another
communist paradise, presided over by another,
similarly minded strongman. Nonetheless, large
numbers of Korean-Chinese fled to North Korea
illegally.
In the early 1960s, the rural
areas of China were hit by a disastrous famine.
Discrimination against ethnic Koreans also became
more visible, reaching its peak in the early
1970s. Therefore, tens of thousands fled to North
Korea. The Chinese authorities tried to prevent
this exodus, and even reportedly ordered border
guards to shoot at escapees, but these measures
had little if any impact on the situation. In
essence, in the 1960s the border situation was
almost a mirror of what it would become in the
1990s.
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