The Emperor Far Away

by David Eimer

  Around 10,000 South Koreans live in Yanji. ‘I’d say about half are missionaries,’ said Paul. He was one of them, a youthful forty-nine-year-old from Seoul in jeans and a check shirt with a broad face and bushy hair cropped close at the sides. Paul had followed his sister, a teacher and fellow missionary, to Yanji a couple of years before. Now he owned a restaurant popular with students, a way of disguising his real purpose in China.

  ‘Most of us in Yanji run businesses or teach because we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves,’ said Paul. ‘We do worry about the government’s attitude to us, but we’re not doing anything political. We think the Chinese understand that, but we also know they are watching us. You have to be careful. People who’ve been here a long time know what you can do and what you can’t. Officially, we don’t spread the gospel. But we try and show people what a Christian life is and introduce them to the Bible.’

  Paul gave up his job as the manager of a foreign trade company to come to Yanji. ‘A lot of South Koreans feel the Chinese need faith as China develops. If they have no faith and a western economic system, then people will just become corrupt,’ he said. ‘It’s easier for us to spread the gospel here because the people are Koreans and we speak the same language. Then the Chinese Koreans can go on and spread the word to the Han Chinese.’

  Sentiments like that ring alarm bells in Beijing. The very idea of South Koreans disseminating Christianity, a creed the CCP associates with its traditional enemies in the west, to Yanbian’s Koreans feeds Beijing’s belief that religion serves only to foster separatist tendencies among its minorities. Tibet and Xinjiang are glaring examples of how the power of faith unites the peoples of those regions against the Han. For the CCP, it is one small step from China’s Koreans being converted by South Koreans to them starting to regard their shared religion as proof they are part of a greater Korea.

  South Korean nationalists believe that already and advocate the incorporation of Yanbian into one super-Korea along with the DPRK. They point to the way the Koguryo Kingdom, the most powerful of the three dynasties that ran ancient Korea until the seventh century ad, stretched into what is now Jilin Province. South of Yanji in Jian, the ruined pyramids and tombs of a former Koguryo city are a permanent reminder of how this part of Jilin was once Korean territory.

  Reinforcing Yanbian’s claims to be part of a larger Korea is the way it is so culturally intertwined with South Korea. ‘I think there’s very little difference between Chinese Koreans and South Koreans,’ said Paul. ‘Actually I think Chinese Koreans get a more traditional Korean education in Yanbian than they do in South Korea. The family relationships are closer and more traditional too. The different generations of Korean families all used to live together, but nowadays in South Korea parents and children live separately. It’s not like that here.’

  Almost sixty years of a divided Korea has drawn Yanbian and South Korea closer together, so they now have far more in common than the South does with the DPRK. ‘There’s a much bigger difference between us and the North Koreans. We still regard them as brothers – we are one nation – but there’s a wall between us and them now. They’ve been brainwashed and think their leader is a god, and breaking down those barriers takes a long time,’ said Paul.

  Yet, despite their ties to South Korea, the overwhelming majority of Chinese Koreans are not Korean nationalists – at least not in the sense of wanting to be part of one Korea. But, for Beijing, the activities of missionaries like Paul are seen as bringing the day closer when the Chaoxianzu will no longer be content with just being culturally Korean. House churches can be found across all China now, but only in Yanbian does Christianity pose a real threat as a potential vehicle for separatism.

  During my time in Yanbian, I encountered only one Chaoxianzu who regarded himself as Korean rather than Chinese. ‘Call me Piao, like mai piao,’ he told me when we met. Mai piao means ‘to buy a ticket’ and, as I got to know Piao, I came to think of his nickname as an astute, self-mocking comment on his sad life. He was in his early thirties: chubby-faced with longish hair, the beginnings of a pot belly and always dressed in a leather jacket and jeans. We were introduced by an acquaintance of mine from Beijing, a Han woman who had run a bar in the capital before returning to her hometown of Yanji to open a place there.

  Her customers were mostly ethnic Koreans, proof perhaps of their reputation in China as party people. ‘We think differently from the Han,’ Christina said often. ‘Korean people like to play, to enjoy life. I think the Han just like to work and save money. They don’t have as much fun as we do.’ It is a common belief among China’s minorities. I never met one who wasn’t convinced they are more gregarious than the Han, and mostly they are.

  Fun for Chaoxianzu men involves downing beers and baijiu. Even among the hard-drinking males of Dongbei, Chinese Koreans stand out for their love of alcohol. Their tippling was the reason Christina wanted to marry a Han man, and Piao spent his evenings traversing unsteadily across Yanji’s many watering holes. One night, I bumped into him as I was leaving a bar in the centre of town. Piao was already half cut. He put his arm around my shoulders and insisted I stay for another drink.

  Other friends of his joined us and Piao got progressively drunker. It was then that he revealed his patriotic streak. ‘I am a Korean man,’ he kept telling me, ‘a Korean man.’ I asked if he meant he was Chinese Korean. He shook his head and started to draw a rough map in the beer spilled across our table. ‘This is the DPRK, this is Yanbian and this is South Korea,’ he said, slurring as he sketched the outlines of the borders. ‘We are the same people, whether you live in North Korea, the South or here. You know, a long time ago this was all one big powerful country, not two countries and a bit of China.’

  Not even Piao’s friends agreed with him. They all defined themselves as Chinese Koreans, rather than as Koreans living in China. Piao ignored them and became increasingly aggressive and maudlin, repeating ‘I have no country’ over and over again. He perceived himself both as an exile in a foreign nation and as someone living in territory which rightfully belonged to Korea.

  Later, I learned why he was so angry. He told me how six years before he had met and married a North Korean refugee. Most of those who escape the DPRK are women, with some sources claiming they make up around 80 per cent of all people who defect. The gender discrepancy in rural Jilin Province, where females are in short supply and farmers have always looked to North Korea as a source of brides, means some of the women are trafficked or tricked across the frontier. But many come of their own accord.

  That is a direct result of the famine that gripped the DPRK for much of the 1990s. While men remain tied to their work units – the system by which Pyongyang regulates North Korean society – it was women who scrounged what food they could and set up tiny business operations in the makeshift markets that sprang up in place of the inert state economy. Out of necessity, North Korea’s females grew more resourceful than their husbands, sons and brothers, and that newfound spirit propelled many across the border in search of something better.

  Piao and his wife had a son, now five. But soon she began pressing him for help to leave for South Korea. ‘It was too dangerous for her here. She was afraid of being caught and sent back,’ said Piao. Initially, China turned a blind eye to the refugees who started coming to Yanbian from the early 1990s on. Then, as food became scarcer, more and more arrived. Senior DPRK defectors have revealed that Pyongyang itself put the number who died during the famine at between one and two and a half million, or around 10 per cent of North Korea’s people. In the regions close to Dongbei, it may have been as high as 20 per cent of the population.

  Faced with an ever-increasing influx of North Koreans, Beijing grew uneasy and began hunting down the refugees and returning them to the DPRK. They were seen as a threat to the stability of Yanbian, their presence redressing the decline in the number of Chinese Koreans caused by their low birth rate and emigration to other parts of Dongbei. The CCP feared also the im
pact of the migrants on Yanbian’s already precarious economy, as they were prepared to work for lower wages than the locals.

  Beijing’s nightmare scenario in Yanbian is the sudden and total collapse of the DPRK. Inevitably, that would lead to people coming across the border in far greater numbers than ever before. One of the unspoken reasons why the CCP prefers to keep the Kim regime in power is the risk of the Han becoming a minority in Yanbian, which would only support the claims of the South Korean nationalists who believe it is part of a greater Korea. Returning the refugees was a tacit admission of Beijing’s determination to keep the Korean peninsula divided.

  Border patrols were stepped up on both sides of the frontier. As the grandmother I met near Tumen recalled, the authorities started descending on villages checking identity cards and searching for North Korean women married to local men. The Chinese allowed plainclothes DPRK police into Yanbian to assist in the round-up as well, while rewards were offered to those who turned people in.

  As they were fleeing both a desperate famine and a despotic regime, the North Koreans qualified for protection under the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. But Beijing insisted they were just illegal economic migrants and so had no right to stay in China, a position it continues to maintain. North Koreans who are caught in China end up in detention centres like the one in Tumen, and face a prison sentence on their return to the DPRK.

  North Koreans reacted to China turning on them by following the dispersal of the Chinese Koreans across Dongbei and beyond. Many of those who cross the border now leave Yanbian quickly and make for the big cities, where the police are not looking for DPRK refugees and they can blend in by claiming to be Chaoxianzu. Others, like Piao’s wife, try and escape to South Korea. There are two routes used to reach Seoul: either via Mongolia, which deports all North Korean illegal immigrants to South Korea automatically, or across China to Yunnan and then on to Thailand.

  Both the escape lines are run by the South Korean missionaries in Yanji. They fund them by raising money at home and from the American Korean community. One day, Piao’s wife was spirited south-west to Kunming, then to Laos and Bangkok and finally to Seoul. Piao had seen neither her nor his son for four years. After hearing that, I understood why he was out every night getting so drunk, as well as his unhappiness with Korea being divided while he was stranded in China.

  Nevertheless, I wasn’t sure if Piao was telling me the whole story. Some North Korean women marry Chinese Korean men, but stay in Yanbian only until their Mandarin is fluent enough for them to pass as Chaoxianzu elsewhere in China. There is an orphanage in Yanji full of children who have been abandoned by their fathers, after their North Korean wives decided it was time to move on. Perhaps Piao’s wife used him just to hide from the police before she could leave for South Korea, or maybe she was more scared of being sent back to the DPRK than she was in love with him. Either way, Piao is on his own now.

  No one knows exactly how many North Koreans are living illegally in China. Most rational estimates settle on a consensus of somewhere in the region of 30,000 long-term refugees. What is certain is that DPRK citizens continue to come to China, even if their numbers are down from the time of the 1990s famine, despite the increased security presence along the border. Food remains desperately scarce, with ordinary people surviving on around 1,500 calories a day, according to the few NGO workers allowed into the DPRK. More than half of all defectors say it is the shortage of sustenance, rather than the lack of freedom, that drove them to leave.

  What has changed is that some of those crossing the border are no longer staying permanently. Instead, they come to Yanbian in search of assistance, or to work illegally on a construction site or farm for a month or two, before returning home. In Yanji, most make for the churches or the undercover missionaries like Paul. ‘People in North Korea know they will get help if they go to a church,’ one ethnic Korean Catholic priest told me. ‘They ask for rice, clothes and money, the things that are essential for life. I don’t give them anything personally, but I’ll make sure a member of my congregation does.’

  When I first met Paul, he told me he wasn’t involved in assisting refugees either to escape or to find supplies. Yet I knew North Koreans came to his restaurant, which suggested that people on the other side of the frontier were aware he could help them. ‘DPRK people do come here,’ he conceded one day. ‘But I never give them money, only food and clothes. If they get caught by the Chinese or the North Korean police, they’ll ask where they got the money and then I’ll get into trouble.’

  It was a matter of national pride for Paul to be there for the North Koreans. ‘If I see a fellow Korean, a brother, who is hungry then of course I will help him.’ But it was also another way of fulfilling his messianic mission. Now Bibles have joined the long list of goods being smuggled into North Korea. Its people are too preoccupied with finding their next meal to be ideal converts just yet, but given what is happening in South Korea and Yanbian it is perfectly possible that Pyongyang will be a city of churches again one day.

  A Protestant revival apart, Paul had no doubt that the Kim dynasty will not last. ‘I think there’ll be huge changes in the next five to ten years. People live such a poor life and are so hungry that I don’t see them agreeing to go on the way they are. I don’t see Kim Jong-un being able to maintain power for as long as his father did. Years ago, North Koreans thought their leader was a god. Now they don’t. They know it’s wrong they have no food. Only a few people are against the system now, but their numbers will increase,’ he stated.

  If and when the regime goes, it won’t be with the help of Beijing. Not only will the fall of the Kims threaten China’s strategic interests and the DPRK’s current status as little more than an ancillary province of Dongbei, but it will result in increased uncertainty in Yanbian. The people of the third Korea come from North Korea, but have been cut off from their roots for the last sixty-odd years. Given the opportunity to rediscover their ancestral homeland, allied with their solid cultural ties to South Korea, more Yanbian residents could well join Piao in claiming to be citizens of one Korea. But, unlike Piao, those people are likely to be Christians as well.

  24

  The Arctic Borderlands

  The full force of the Dongbei winter had been unleashed by the time I left Yanji. It was cold even inside the bus to Harbin, travelling through the west of Yanbian before veering right outside Jilin City and entering Heilongjiang, China’s northernmost province. We ploughed along a two-lane highway bordered by snow-covered fields and rivers freezing over, spraying slush over the farmers passing in the opposite direction on their tractors.

  Snow was thick on the ground in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, and fell every day and night, turning it into a monochrome city. The giant green onion dome atop St Sophia, a former Russian Orthodox cathedral and the city’s most famous landmark, was dusted white, while cars churned along roads of black sludge. People slithered along the treacherous pavements, despite the efforts of the teams of workers who chipped away at the ice with hoe-like implements or shovelled the snow into neat piles which bulldozers removed at night.

  Shrugging off the weather, the tall Harbin women strode out in short skirts, leggings and knee-length boots, although a fair few still tapped along in high heels. I was wearing multiple layers, thick gloves and a woolly hat pulled low over my ears. The contrast between the toast-warm interiors of apartments, hotels and restaurants and the freezing conditions outside ensured I spent much of my time either stripping off clothes or putting them on.

  Heilongjiang was the Manchu heartland, the place where their forebears the Jurchen tribe hailed from. It is still home to a dwindling number of minorities such as the Oroqen and Hezhen who straddle the border between Heilongjiang and the Russian Far East, just as they did when those lands were part of what was then known as Outer Manchuria. Harbin, though, is essentially a Russian creation. Disused churches like St Sophia and pockets of European-style buildings stand as test
imony to how the tsar’s empire absorbed much of Manchuria, even while a Manchu emperor sat on the Dragon Throne in the Forbidden City.

  In 1858, the Treaty of Aigun formalised the division of Manchuria. Everything north of what the Russians call the Amur River and the Chinese the Heilongjiang, or Black Dragon River, was assigned to Russia. Two years later, more Manchu lands went north under the Treaty of Peking. In all, Russia acquired a million square kilometres of Outer Manchuria. It is a massive area. Stretching from the present Sino-Russian border to the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, it includes what are now the major cities of the Russian Far East – Vladivostok, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk – yet the tsar’s army barely had to fire a shot to attain it.

  Faced with internal rebellions and in the midst of the Second Opium War with the British and French, the Qing dynasty was so enfeebled by the late 1850s that Russia was able to take Outer Manchuria simply by threatening Beijing. The once mighty Manchu, who had expanded China’s frontiers in the west and south-west, conceded the territory in the bitter knowledge that they were now unable to defend even their own homeland.

  With the western colonial powers establishing themselves in China’s major ports in the aftermath of the Opium Wars, Russia’s takeover of northern Manchuria was supposed to be the prelude to it conquering all of Dongbei. The extension of the Trans-Siberian Railway, first to Harbin and then south to Port Arthur, now known as Lushun, was another step towards that goal. From 1897, Russian workers started arriving in Harbin, then not much more than a fishing village on the Songhua River, to build the new rail line. So many Russians came over the border that they dominated Harbin for the next couple of decades.

  Russia’s dreams of turning Dongbei into a colony were dashed by its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Instead, it would be Japan which occupied Manchuria from 1931 until the end of the Second World War. But Harbin remained primarily a Russian city. Like the Koreans who escaped the Japanese occupation of their country by moving to Yanbian during the same period, Russians sought refuge in Harbin from the chaos at home.