by David Eimer
Neither of the men conformed to the popular image of starving North Koreans. Years of famine over the last two decades have left many in the countryside stunted, or with the large heads and spindly legs that are evidence of malnutrition. But these two didn’t look like they had skipped any meals. One was stout, the other over six foot tall. I asked them about the man whose face stared out from the small badges they were wearing. ‘It is our great leader Kim Il-sung,’ said the taller one.
Kim Il-sung was the first president of North Korea, installed with Soviet backing after the Second World War, and its absolute ruler until his death in 1994. Still known as the ‘Eternal President’, he was succeeded by his late son, Kim Jong-il. Now his grandson Kim Jong-un, the ‘Great Successor’, is the leader of the DPRK, the only country in the world where a hereditary communist dictatorship maintains power. As with Lenin and Mao, Kim Il-sung’s godlike status in his home country is such that his body was embalmed and is on public view in Pyongyang, while hundreds of statues of him are dotted around the country.
Asking about their badges was just my opening gambit. I offered each a smoke to keep them from fleeing. ‘North Korean cigarettes are cheap and very strong,’ said the taller man, fingering the one I handed over. He revealed that they were returning from a two-day holiday in Beijing. I wondered if Pyongyang was similar to the Chinese capital. ‘No, it’s not very much like Beijing.’ He asked me where I was from. ‘England? I’ve never met anyone English before.’
He and his friend were living temporarily in Dandong, the city on the border with the DPRK I was bound for. ‘I like Dandong. There are lots of new buildings and restaurants and many Koreans living there,’ he said. I asked what they did there. ‘We are working in the electronics business.’ Just when I thought he was warming up and would talk on, his silent stocky partner muttered something to him in Korean. ‘We have to go,’ he said, shaking my hand and turning away quickly.
They were the first North Koreans I had ever met, citizens of what is perhaps the world’s most reclusive country. The DPRK’s twenty-four million or so people live in a rigidly controlled society largely closed to visitors, pounded by propaganda into believing they are blessed to be under the benevolent rule of the Kim dynasty. A vast army and the Workers Party of Korea, the North Korean version of the CCP, are the sharp teeth behind the dictator’s smile, and the state intrudes into every aspect of life, a means of making sure no one questions, in public at least, why this Cold War relic of a country still exists in the twenty-first century.
In many ways, North Korea is reminiscent of China before the death of Mao in 1976. There is the same cult-like worship of the leader and an all-powerful ruling party that has to be obeyed no matter what. A belief in the country’s supremacy results in an extraordinary insularity, while an archaic, barely functioning economy ensures the vast majority of the population don’t live but merely subsist. Food is rationed, like it was in China until the late 1980s, while fridges and TVs are luxury items, just as they were in China before Beijing embraced capitalism.
My brief companions on the train were part of the select few: well-fed party members who live in Pyongyang and are trusted enough to travel overseas. Ordinary North Koreans are not allowed to leave the DPRK, in case they abscond after being seduced by the home comforts which are now taken for granted in China and elsewhere. Worse still is the possibility that they might return to challenge the state’s insistence that life in countries like neighbouring South Korea is a hell of American-sponsored repression and depravity.
Just as most North Koreans can’t get out, so westerners can’t get in to the DPRK except on brief, restricted tours that make Beijing’s rules on travel for foreigners in Tibet look lax. Dandong was as far as I could go on the Pyongyang express. After an overnight ride, I emerged from Dandong’s train station on a blustery and cold late-October morning, while the K27 prepared to rumble on across the bridge that links China to North Korea here.
Almost every visitor to Dandong heads first to the Yalu River, which separates the city from North Korea. I joined the Chinese tourists, and a few South Koreans, snapping away with their cameras at Sinuiju, the North Korean border town a few hundred metres away on the opposite bank. There is little to see. A solitary factory with no smoke emerging from its chimneys, some functional one-storey buildings and a stationary Ferris wheel, a remnant of an amusement park built in the 1970s, are the only signs of life.
‘It looks like a village,’ said one of the Chinese. Another was more scathing. ‘It looks like China thirty years ago.’ Such disparaging comments are the typical reaction of Chinese tour groups when they assemble in Dandong and first see the DPRK. But the lack of progress in North Korea is also part of its attraction for many Chinese. The fact that it is frozen in time, a throwback to the China of the Mao era, makes a trip to the DPRK a nostalgic experience, as well as enabling the Chinese to crow over how their country has changed for the better.
Evidence of that was all around. Dandong spreads west, south and north of the Yalu, and for the North Koreans who can occasionally be glimpsed pottering around on the other side of the river, it stands as a sobering reminder both of their country’s stalled development and of the sheer lack of vitality in the DPRK. The regime in Pyongyang can bombard its people with as much misinformation as it likes, but North Koreans living along the border with China only have to lift their eyes to see how very different life is outside their country.
Music was bellowing out of loudspeakers on the river promenade as old ladies danced in keep-fit classes. Lines of people waited to board the boats that run their passengers within twenty metres of North Korea for a close-up view of stagnant Sinuiju. Cars and trucks crowded the road that runs parallel to the river, which is lined with newly built apartment blocks. In the distance, giant cranes were hoisting seemingly unlimited quantities of raw materials to construct yet more of them.
When I returned to the promenade at night, the contrast between Dandong and Sinuiju was far crueller. A yellow moonbeam shone down on the river like a searchlight, but the buildings along Dandong’s waterfront were already lit up by thousands of watts, a riot of multi-coloured neon. Over in electricity-starved Sinuiju, there were only a few isolated lights. They looked like torches vainly trying to stab through the impenetrable darkness that has enveloped North Korea for decades.
China’s border with the DPRK runs for 1,416 kilometres along two rivers. The Yalu marks the boundary in Liaoning Province, where Dandong is located, and in the south of neighbouring Jilin Province until it gives way to the Tumen River. That waterway winds slowly north-east across Jilin and then turns abruptly right and flows south along the DPRK’s far northern border. Eventually, it reaches a tiny sliver of land where the frontiers of China, North Korea and Russia meet, before running into the Sea of Japan.
Along with Heilongjiang further north, Liaoning and Jilin make up the three provinces known collectively in China as Dongbei: the north-east. Surrounded on three sides by Mongolia, Russia and North Korea, it is a region of climactic and geographical extremes. In the winter temperatures can drop to -40 degrees Centigrade. Summers, though, are baking hot and humid. Forests that are home to a dwindling number of Siberian tigers cover much of Dongbei, but it was also China’s heavy manufacturing base until Beijing turned off the money tap in the 1990s and began denationalising many industries.
To the rest of China, the north-east is still a place of grim and grey cities, its factories the Chinese equivalent of the dark satanic mills of the English industrial revolution. Its people are typecast too. The men are regarded as rough and ready with an appetite for alcohol and fighting. They are bigger than most Han, and a disproportionate number of China’s soldiers and nightclub bouncers are what the Chinese call Dongbeiren, or north-eastern people. The women, too, are taller than average and many have the milky white skin and big eyes that are the ideal of beauty in China.
Dongbei, though, is also the place where China is most likely to push its bou
ndaries again, as it seeks to take advantage of its neighbours’ frailty and geographical isolation and turn them into de facto colonies. Sitting opposite the north of Dongbei is the Russian Far East, a vast, little-populated, underfunded region rich in natural resources that many Russians believe Beijing can’t wait to snap up.
North Korea is in an even worse position as it stubbornly sticks to its own unique version of an authoritarian state-controlled economy, a model that has been abandoned everywhere else in the world. A political pariah unable even to feed its own people or power their homes, the DPRK can only look to Beijing for support and is already little more than an economic vassal of China.
That Dongbei is the new front line of the Chinese empire is a historical irony, because until the seventeenth century it was not even part of it. Before then, the north-east was known to the Han as the ‘Land of the Northern Barbarians’. Just as the fort at Jiayuguan in Gansu Province marked the end of the Chinese realm in the west, so the Great Wall in Liaoning separated Han China from the untamed lands to the north. Outside Dandong, the remains of the Wall stand as a reminder that this was once the far northern frontier of China. Everything beyond it was Manchu territory, known in the west as Manchuria.
Originally, the Manchu were semi-nomadic tribes who roamed across what are now Dongbei, the Russian Far East and eastern Mongolia. Subdued, like everyone else, by Genghis Khan, the various Manchu clans were later allied to the Ming dynasty. But in the early seventeenth century they unified themselves under one leader and began marching south. In 1644, they seized Beijing and established the Qing dynasty. The Manchu were to be the last of China’s emperors, ruling until 1912.
Uniquely, the Manchu are the only one of China’s fifty-five minorities to have run the country, although various Mongolian dynasties displaced the Han throughout the country’s early history. That they did so for almost 300 years is all the more remarkable. But their reign came at a huge cost to the Manchu. It is a supreme paradox that the Qing extended the Chinese empire further than any Han dynasty, establishing the borders of what is essentially the China we know today, while losing much of their own homeland. Not only that, but their very identity was steadily diminished throughout their rule.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Qing emperors had begun to lose control of provincial China to warlords and rebellions. As they retreated further into the fantasy land of the Forbidden City, Russia appropriated much of northern Manchuria and absorbed it into the Russian Far East. At the same time, millions of Han were moving north to the then under-populated lands of Dongbei, a result of the Qing lifting their two-centuries-old ban on Han emigration to the region.
As the Qing grew ever weaker, Han resentment of their Manchu conquerors became far more pronounced and the familiar disdain and hatred of minorities began to emerge. In 1903, the proto-revolutionary Zou Rong made that explicit. He called for ‘the annihilation of five million or more of the furry and horned Manchu race, cleansing ourselves of 260 years of harsh and unremitting pain, so that the soil of the Chinese sub-continent is made immaculate’. Zou’s extreme theories on racial purity were espoused by Han intellectuals of the time including Sun Yat-sen, who became China’s first president in 1912.
But the Manchu weren’t wiped out in some Chinese precursor of the Nazi’s Final Solution. Instead the Han migrants to Manchuria began to marry the Manchu and make them Han. The Manchu tongue, which was always subordinate to Mandarin, became redundant, while their tribal culture and customs faded away until they were no more than a distant memory. So successfully were they assimilated that the number of pure Manchu left in China like Fei Fei, the woman I met in Urumqi, is tiny. Now, it is estimated that barely 100 people can speak their language.
Yet, in a contrary example of some Chinese opting to be classified as a minority, more and more people are claiming to be Manchu. Since the early 1980s, their numbers have doubled to over ten million, making them the third largest of China’s minorities. The increase is due to Han with Manchurian roots choosing to be registered as Manchu. They do so to avoid being subject to the one-child policy, or so their kids can score fewer points on the gaokao, the university entrance exam, and still win a place at college.
One of my former Chinese teachers defined herself as Manchu and liked to boast that her family had been friends with Puyi, the last of the Qing emperors, who ended his days as a humble gardener in Beijing. She believed that the Han still look down on the Manchu, making life difficult for them. But if that was the case, their numbers would surely be dropping. Becoming Manchu is regarded as a positive choice: a way of benefiting from the state’s preferential policies for minorities while knowing that nothing else, like language, religion or culture, marks them out from the Han.
A similar phenomenon has occurred in Guangxi Province in the south-west, where the Zhuang minority has increased to well over sixteen million people in recent years, making them the most numerous of all China’s minorities. Intermarriage between the Zhuang and Han is common, allowing people of mixed ancestry to claim to be Zhuang. But deciding to become a minority viewed as no threat by Beijing is very different from identifying yourself as Uighur or Tibetan. I have never heard of any Han choosing to do that, despite the opportunity to have more kids or go to university.
Around half of the new Manchu live in Liaoning in the five autonomous counties named for them, one of which is outside Dandong. But they are an irrelevance in the area, just like Manchuria is as dated a name for Dongbei as Formosa is for Taiwan. In Dandong, the Koreans are the only people of any significance who are not Han. The city has a large population of both North Koreans and ethnic Chinese Koreans, a result of it being China’s official gateway to the DPRK – a position which gives Dandong an importance out of all relation to its size.
Dandong is a springboard that allows China to plunge into the DPRK and expand its influence beyond its borders. Pyongyang has no choice but to acquiesce, because without Beijing’s support the Kim dynasty could not survive. China is its closest ally and regards the DPRK as a bulwark in a region where Japan and South Korea are firmly aligned with the United States. So Beijing props up North Korea, supplying it with up to one million tonnes of food aid annually, as well as a similar amount of crude oil and other essentials to keep the country from total collapse.
Virtually everything of any value in North Korea originates in China, and it mostly reaches the DPRK via Dandong. North Korean officials and businessmen, like the men I met on the train from Beijing, coming cap in hand on state-sponsored shopping trips are everywhere. Easily spotted by their badges proclaiming their loyalty to the various Kims, at night they haunt the Korean restaurants and karaoke bars within view of the DPRK itself. During the day, they congregate on the street by the border post beneath the bridge that leads to North Korea.
From the early morning to the late afternoon, the line of trucks waiting to cross into the DPRK tails back down the road. There are warehouses and wholesale shops all along it and a constant procession of North Koreans going in and out of them. They buy spark plugs and coils of wire, generators and tyres, household appliances and kitchenware. The goods are destined for North Korea’s armed forces, more than a million strong, for the few industrial concerns still working, or for the Pyongyang elite.
Other less legitimate trade opportunities abound in Dandong too. Photocopied sheets of paper taped to lampposts offer the chance to invest in dubious business schemes inside North Korea, while the smuggling of everything from mobile phones to rice is rampant. These illicit enterprises are largely controlled by the 5,000 or so North Koreans who live permanently in China and their equivalents across the border: the few thousand ethnic Chinese who are residents of the DPRK.
Some of China’s two million ethnic Korean citizens are also involved in trading with North Korea. Almost all of the Chinese Koreans, who mostly live in Jilin and Liaoning, have their roots in the DPRK and many still have relatives there. As such, they have the right to cross the nearby frontier, j
ust as the minorities in Yunnan can travel to Myanmar and Laos. It is an easy matter for them to bribe the DPRK guards with a carton of cigarettes, so a blind eye is turned to what they bring in with them.
With China playing such a dominant role in the DPRK economy – the yuan has already superseded the North Korean won in some border areas – North Korea is on its way to becoming just another province of Dongbei. In return for Beijing’s aid shipments, Chinese companies have been allowed to set up joint ventures in the DPRK that are busy plundering some of the world’s largest untapped reserves of coal, iron ore and an assortment of minerals. New roads, almost certainly funded by China, are being built in North Korea too, despite the fact that hardly anyone in the DPRK owns a car, simply to facilitate closer economic ties with Dongbei.
Beijing does not even bother to treat North Korea as a country in its own right any more, much to the fury of South Korea, except when the DPRK is being targeted with sanctions by the United States or the UN and China is forced to offer public support to Pyongyang. Relations with North Korea are handled not by the Foreign Ministry, which deals with all China’s other neighbours, but by a combination of the CCP, the PLA and the Ministry of Commerce, as if the DPRK had already been absorbed into the Chinese empire.
Pyongyang is in no position to complain about Beijing’s blatant disregard for its sovereignty. So hungry is it for Chinese cash that a number of official North Korean restaurants are located in Dandong, as well as one in Beijing, their profits being remitted back home to the government. Despite my misgivings about helping to subsidise the Kim regime, I decided that a North Korean meal could be justified in the name of research. One night, I walked into one of the restaurants close to the Yalu River to be greeted by an attractive waitress in a red, flight-attendant-style uniform.