30,000 North Korean children living in limbo in China

Up to 30,000 children born to North Korean mothers who have fled the regime are living in China without access to schooling, health care or citizenship, MPs have heard.

North Korean human rights advocate Sungju Lee, a defector from the DPRK, said many of these children were born to women who had been sold to Chinese men by traffickers.

“These children, with no basic human rights, live as if they are not existing,” he told the parliamentary group on North Korea.

He described the life of a seven-year-old boy in Jilin province. “The child was supposed to start going to school like other kids, but he wasn’t able to because he had no citizenship. He had no eduction and no friends.”

“Even when he felt sick, [his mother] couldn’t take him to hospital,” said Lee, “and she said that was the most painful moment for the mother to watch.”

The Korea Institute for National Unification estimates there are around 30,000 stateless children in China, based on a research conducted in 2012. Exact figures are hard to detemine as North Korean refugees are forced to live below the radar in China to avoid deportation.

Forced marriage

Jihyun Park is another defector who left North Korea for China in 1998, where she was forced into marriage. She says brokers approach recently arrived women, promising to provide food, shelter, employment and protection.

“But they are in fact trying to earn some profits for themselves by selling us to Chinese men where shortage of women persists in rural north-eastern China,” she said.

Park gave a birth to a son, Yong-joon, but when he was four she was caught by the Chinese police and deported back to North Korea, where she was sent to a prison camp. Yong-joon was left with an abusive Chinese father until Park was able to escape and return six months later.

The Parks now live in London, but many children like Yong-joon remain separated from their mothers who have been repatriated to North Korea.

Famine

The country’s refugee crisis started in the 1990s when it experienced a severe famine, killing around three million people. Hundreds of thousands illegally crossed the border to China in order to survive, a practice that continues today.

Women make up the vast majority of defectors from North Korea, and are particularly vulnerable to abuse and sex trafficking.

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Their children are not recognised as citizens of either China or North Korea, despite legislation declaring that anyone born in China with at least one Chinese parent should be eligible for citizenship.

The law is not implemented because for parents to register the child’s birth the mother’s identity would have to be revealed – and she would be deported back to the North, said Sylvia Kim, the policy advisor for the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea.

“The issue of stateless children is one of the symptoms of human rights violation in North Korea,” she said. “So far, there’s not much being done about it. But we shouldn’t forget the very root cause of why women had to flee after all.”

Crackdowns

Under international law, China has an obligation to protect refugees. But Beijing says it considers defectors to be “illegal migrants”.

“We don’t use the term defectors here,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chuying told the Korea Times in December.

“Those North Koreans have illegally crossed the border due to financial hardship in their homeland. They did not go through normal immigration procedures and also disrupted public order in our border regions.”

Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, an ngo operating in China, says it rescued 112 refugees (82 women and 30 men) from China last year – the oldest a 60-year-old woman and the youngest was a month-old infant.

But with few resources and increasing crackdowns by Beijing, campaigners have appealed to the international community to intervene to help the stateless children living in China.

Jihyun Park says she still feels guilty about leaving her son when she was sent back to North Korea.

“The emotional wound he received was enormous,” she said. “It wasn’t until eight years later when he plucked up courage to ask me why I abandoned him back then.

“It wasn’t my intention to leave him, and I didn’t know he thought in that way for such a long time. I was devastated. I still feel guilty whenever I look at his eyes.”