China: The hundreds of thousands who are fleeing the North are creating problems for South Korea and China, reports Jasper Becker in Beijing
China is angry after South Korea shut down its consulate in Beijing this week, saying normal work could not continue as it was swamped by a flood of North Korean refugees seeking to leave through China.
More than 200 people, including women and children, are camping out in the consulate, hoping the Chinese authorities will allow them to leave for South Korea.
Up to 300,000 North Koreans are thought to be living in China, many seeking an opportunity to escape to the South where they are entitled to citizenship and resettlement grants of over $25,000.
China has ringed all foreign embassies and consulates with barbed wire and guards in an effort to keep the refugees from claiming asylum and has sent troops to patrol the border.
It even stationed a Chinese policeman inside the consulate, but if a refugee with fake Chinese or South Korean identity papers makes it to the application counter, diplomats are bound to grant them asylum in what is legally South Korean territory.
Refugee support groups in Seoul say Chinese troops have been seen digging bunkers along parts of the 1,000-mile border and combing the woods for refugees.
Washington is trying to encourage an exodus from the North by offering to resettle the refugees in the United States under a programme which may start next year. The idea is to pressurise China to open refugee camps and thus precipitate the North's collapse just as the exodus of East Germans forced the GDR to open the Berlin Wall.
More than 4,000 North Koreans have already made it to South Korea since 1998, and many refugee support groups say the South Korean government is deliberately underplaying the issue so as not to antagonise Pyongyang.
Since 1998 Seoul has been trying to allay the North's suspicions of the South's real intentions as it pursues an engagement policy designed to reduce military tensions and encourage official trade and investment.
The South Korean government is anxious both to appease the North and avoid antagonising China, which is playing a key role as midwife to the Sunshine policy and the six-nation diplomatic talks.
Some claim Seoul is hiding the true number of defectors in the South, and there could be 6,000, including high-ranking officials from the North whose defections have not been publicised.
Fifteen years of economic collapse are forcing the Stalinist regime to abandon central planning and tolerate free markets. The rationing system has collapsed, and people are being paid wages so that commercial deals are no longer illegal.
All this, say defectors, has brought rampant corruption which is making it easier to smuggle people out of the country. Defectors in the South are now able to use mobile phones to liaise with contacts in the North and negotiate the release of their relatives.
"It now costs around $1,500 [about €1,270] to smuggle a person out of the country. It is a dollar economy, and you can now bargain directly with local state security officials," said a South Korean who has taken part in such negotiations.
North Korean party officials have all been set targets to collect as much foreign exchange as possible and deliver it to President Kim Jong-il. "The priority is now to meet these foreign exchange quotas," the source said.
This marks the beginning of a dramatic change. Earlier defectors were crippled by guilt because they had abandoned loved ones and could do nothing help them. In North Korea whole families are collectively punished for the crime of one member and incarcerated in brutal labour camps.
"They suffer severe psychological problems and are in a lot of emotional pain," said Dr Sophie Delauney of Doctors Without Borders which has set up a programme to help 900 adjust to life in the South.
Unconfirmed reports say 2,000 people were rounded up after Hwang Jang-yop defected in 1997. His daughter reportedly threw herself off a bridge as she was being taken to a penal colony.
Hwang, who is now aged 78, was the highest ranking defector in 50 years. He had been the former tutor of Kim Jong-il and after 1958 was charged with inventing the nation's governing ideology called Jucheism. He is due to visit Washington next month and urge the US to push for regime change in the North.
The largest obstacle to mass defections from North Korea is China. Since 1997 it has ignored its commitments under the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees and organised manhunts to track down the refugees and send them back to North Korea.
It has even offered bounties for every refugee captured, and local police officers who fail to meet capture quotas have had their pay docked.
Last year in an effort to pressure China, a coalition of South Korean and international NGOs organised a series of highly publicised events where refugees sprinted into various embassies and foreign schools.
However, in order to move large numbers of refugees, activists are exploring other ideas such as establishing an official refugee camp in Mongolia because the fenceless border between China and Mongolia runs across the Gobi desert and is hard to patrol.
Some refugees have managed to make their way to Cambodia and Russia unaided, from where they are applying for political asylum.
Another venture which failed after it was betrayed by a Chinese informer was a plan to send more than 80 North Koreans by boat. They were caught in January as they were preparing to board a boat from Yantai in China's Shandong province which juts into the sea directly opposite South Korea's west coast.
In the confusion a few of the refugees managed to escape, but the majority were caught and forcibly transported back to North Korea. At the time China gave assurances that they would not be sent back against their will.
One of the organisers, Pastor Chun Ki-won of the Durihana Mission, says that since then five refugees have managed to escape or bribe their way and cross back into China. They carried information, which has not been verified, that a number of the captured refugees were executed.
The treatment of captured defectors varies considerably. Generally serving military soldiers or party officials are given the severest punishments, as well as those bringing back Bibles and other materials from the outside world which are considered subversive.
Chinese courts imprisoned a number of the organisers of the boat trip. Several Japanese citizens were quickly released, but seven South Korean citizens are still in prison, and some have been given sentences of up to five years.
Many NGOs in the South still hope that they can organise a boat-people exodus from North Korea modelled on the flight of Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon in the 1970s.