Home GRASP GRASP/Korea Smugglers who worked North Korea-China border seeing tough times under Kim, sanctions

Smugglers who worked North Korea-China border seeing tough times under Kim, sanctions

238
0
SHARE

The former smuggler sits on the floor by a muted TV set, smoking cheap North Korean cigarettes one after the other. His hands are rough from years of hard
JIAN, CHINA – The former smuggler sits on the floor by a muted TV set, smoking cheap North Korean cigarettes one after the other. His hands are rough from years of hard work. His belt is knotted to keep his pants from slipping around his pole-thin waist.
The mountains of North Korea, his homeland not even a mile away, fill the room’s only window.
He spent nearly all his 50-some years in those mountains, sometimes earning more than $1,500 in just one trip along the secret trails and quiet river crossings of the China-North Korea border. He smuggled everything from TVs to clothes into North Korea, a nation shaped by decades of repression and isolation. He smuggled out mushrooms, ginseng and the occasional bit of gold.
“I could bring in 10 televisions at once, the same thing for refrigerators,” he says, smiling broadly. “In the past, I could bring in so much stuff.”
But no more.
North Korea is changing, quietly but powerfully, with the rise of the young ruler Kim Jong Un echoing even to those secret trails. Increasing international sanctions have left a handful of well-connected Chinese businesses now controlling much of the trade — legal and otherwise — along the frontier. That’s bad news for the small-time smugglers who long dominated the border.
“It’s the smaller traders who are feeling the heat. They’re going to lay low,” says John Park, director of the Korea Working Group at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “But this becomes an opportunity for larger companies with North Korean clients.”
In North Korea, smuggling is far more than a crime. For two decades, smugglers have secretly knitted the isolated country to the outside world, bringing in food during a brutal famine and, later on as a small consumer class began to grow, everything from Chinese car parts to DVDs of South Korean TV shows. They ferried in TVs and ferried out families looking to escape life in the North. Smuggling became a respected profession, offering thousands of poor villagers a road to the emerging middle class.
The troubles of this underground community today reflect the immense role that the frontier plays in the country’s economy, and offer a window into a secret world that outsiders almost never see. In rare detailed interviews, nearly a dozen people tied to smuggling networks, most either former smugglers or black market traders, say their world has been thrown into turmoil in the years since Kim Jong Un came to power in late 2011.
The 870-mile (1,400-km) border is the linchpin of North Korea’s economy, with China accounting for 90 percent of its trade.
While North Korea has faced international trade sanctions for over a decade because of its nuclear and missile programs, China only began significantly ratcheting up enforcement over the past year, amid a surge in Pyongyang weapons tests. Trade has declined amid the Chinese crackdown, but analysts say a range of products, from laborers to cellphone parts, still flows across the frontier, the path smoothed by bribes and powerful politicians in both countries.
As sanctions have tightened, the trade machine has simply grown more complex.
When North Korean coal exports were forbidden, shiploads were channeled through Russia to hide their origin, U. S. officials say. When North Korea’s overseas businesses faced scrutiny or closure, they opened front companies or hired Chinese middlemen. When buyers objected to clothing made in North Korea, factories reportedly began adding “made in China” labels. Goods are sometimes transferred from one ship to another at sea, investigators say, to camouflage trade with the North.
As this peculiar form of globalization reverberated along the border, many longtime smugglers simply couldn’t keep up.
“I used to make a lot of money,” says another ex-smuggler, a gravel-voiced Chinese man in his mid-40s now working as an occasional laborer in South Korea.

Continue reading...