The Economist-China is sending escapers back to North Korea Graphic detail

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WHEN NORTH KOREA said on August 27th that its citizens could return home for the first time since the start of the pandemic, those trapped in Chinese detention centres must have known their luck had run out. A Chinese prison is an unpleasant place, no doubt. But it pales in comparison to the gulag state to which they were about to be forcibly returned. On the night of October 9th as many as 600 of them were reportedly bundled into heavily guarded buses and prison vans, driven to the border and handed into the clutches of the North Korean state.

The South Korean government said the reports were credible, though it could not confirm the number of people involved. Using a combination of video, open-source evidence and information gathered from “reliable sources”, the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG), a South Korean NGO, says it located five points on the border where Chinese authorities handed detainees over to the North Korean authorities, and estimated how many were moved through each (see map). At one crossing, between Tumen in China and Onsong in North Korea, 300 North Koreans were sent back that night.

The prisoners, often detained just for being in China, are likely to suffer greatly in the hands of their new captors. Typically, says the TJWG, the first stop will be a border facility run by the Ministry of State Security (MSS), North Korea’s secret police. After being strip-searched they will be interrogated, sometimes for days or months, to establish what they were doing in China. Sleep deprivation, being forced to adopt stress positions and beatings with an oseungogakja, a thick wooden club favoured by MSS officers, are common. Cells are overcrowded and flea-ridden. Eventually they are sent to an MSS jail in their home region, sometimes via a regional holding-centre, for further torture, investigations and eventual sentencing. A lucky few may enjoy the “lenience of the supreme leader” and get released. Most will serve time in a labour camp, or even be executed.

TJWG thinks that at least 1,100 North Koreans may still be in Chinese custody. Yet neither the North Korean nor the Chinese government admits that this deportation took place—or that there would have been anything amiss if it had. China has long insisted that North Koreans who secretly enter its territory are economic migrants rather than refugees. So it is more than happy to send them to the gulag.■