Global Courant
The North Korean software engineer was at his wits’ end.
He had been sent to northeast China in 2019 to earn money for the North Korean regime. After working long hours under the constant supervision of his sitters, he has found an email address on a website and sent a poignant message in 2021: “I am writing at the risk of losing my life,” the engineer pleaded.
A young woman who was smuggled from North Korea to China by human traffickers in 2018 contacted the owner of the same website early this year. She planned to defect to South Korea, but was instead held captive in a Chinese border town and forced to monetize cybersex. “Please help us escape this house,” she wrote.
The website belonged to Reverend Chun Ki-won, a Christian minister in Seoul who is widely known for helping North Korean refugees flee through China, the route nearly all defectors take. He has been frequently condemned by Pyongyang and was once imprisoned in China for helping hundreds of North Koreans reach South Korea or the United States.
But now helping North Korean defectors in China has become “virtually impossible,” Chun said.
China imposed strict limits on border crossings and even internal travel during the pandemic. As those restrictions began to ease in recent months, Mr. Chun and other aid workers received a wave of calls from the thousands of North Koreans stranded in the country.
Yet the price of hiring a trafficker has skyrocketed because of the increased risk of being caught by Chinese police. Beijing’s ever-expanding surveillance state has made it more difficult to evade authorities. The number of North Koreans who reached South Korea in 2019 was 1,047. Last year, that number dropped to 63.
“The decrease in apostasy is not due to a diminished desire among North Koreans to escape their oppressive regime,” Hanna Song, a human rights activist who monitors refugees, said at a conference last month. a congressional hearing in Washington. “Rather, it reflects the mounting difficulties imposed by China’s ubiquitous surveillance measures.”
Mr. Chun shared hundreds of text messages, audio files, bank statements and other documents with The New York Times to help reconstruct his efforts to help software engineer and cybersex worker Ms. Lee. He asked The Times to withhold the engineer’s name and the woman’s first name, as well as other details, to protect their identities.
Stuck in China
Ms. Lee and the software engineer did not know each other, but they both found their way to Mr. Chun for the same reason: to leave China without being sent back to Kim Jong-un’s repressive regime.
“They’re watching everything I do,” the software engineer said in his first email to Mr. Chun in 2021.
He arrived in China with thousands of young North Korean computer specialists who, before the coronavirus pandemic, were regularly sent abroad to earn money for Mr. Kim, either through IT work or through cybercrime.
North Korea keeps itself cut off from the internet and sends these highly trained specialists to China, Southeast Asia, among others, to avoid international sanctions against the country because of its nuclear weapons program. The specialists usually live together in dormitories, where they are instructed to spy on each other. Their North Korean escorts look for signs of infidelity, such as watching K-dramas.
Speaking to Mr. Chun through the messaging app Telegram, the software engineer compared his life to “a bird in a cage.” From morning to night, he roamed online platforms such as Work up looking for coding jobs to earn money for the regime in Pyongyang.
Video footage he sent to Mr. Chun showed him and his North Korean colleagues at work under a wall-mounted security camera and a slogan that read: “Let’s show our loyalty to respected leader Kim Jong-un with high business results !”
But the workers struggled to meet the monthly earnings quotas — $4,000 to $5,000 — set by their manager. They often had to buy fake identities because international companies are not allowed to employ North Koreans under the sanctions.
When he first arrived in China, the software engineer had no plans to flee to South Korea. But last year, he sent Mr. Chun video footage of his bruised face and said he was beaten for disobedience. “I want to live a free man, even for one day, even if I try to die,” he wrote.
Human rights groups have criticized China for the slavery-like conditions of many North Koreans in the country, but their calls for a crackdown have been largely ignored. When Beijing catches North Koreans trying to flee south, it often treats them as illegal migrants, not refugees, and sends them back to the north to face punishment.
China uses its surveillance technology to deter people from fleeing or foreigners staying in the country without permission.
Ms. Lee arrived in China five years ago and her plan all along was to defect to South Korea.
She said the broker who smuggled her from North Korea to China told her that if she worked for a boss for three months, she would be sent south. Instead, the broker sold her to a North Korean woman who was married to a Chinese police officer in Baishan, a town near the border.
Women like Mrs. Lee are often sold to men in rural China who can’t find wives, or to pimps and traffickers who force them to work in illegal cybersex rings. The woman in Baishan loved Ms. Lee trapped in an apartment and forced her to perform sexual acts in front of a webcam for male clients.
In January, Ms. Lee contacted Mr. Chun and said she and two other North Korean women were about to be sold to another trafficker and needed urgent help.
On the way to the safe house
Helping North Korean refugees requires hiring traffickers or “brokers” who can be trusted, said Lee Hark-joon, a filmmaker who has directed two documentaries about North Korean refugees.
But “the broker’s priority is often money, not the refugee,” he said, citing cases where brokers abandoned North Korean refugees after collecting their fees or held them hostage to extort more money in exchange for not alerting the authorities.
The problem has only gotten worse since the pandemic. According to rights activists, the cost of transporting a North Korean defector through China rose from thousands of dollars before the pandemic to tens of thousands of dollars.
In January, Mr. Chun to raise funds to complete the operation for the software engineer and Ms. Lee and her two roommates. He hired a broker in Thailand who worked with brokers in China. The plan was to transport the North Koreans to a safe house in Qingdao, a port city on the east coast of China.
Once they all met at the safe house, the next step was for everyone to be smuggled through China to Laos and then to Thailand, where North Koreans can seek asylum in South Korea, a common route for many refugees. They would travel around China by car as identity checks, which became ubiquitous during the pandemic, made public transport unworkable.
Mr. Chun divided the route to Qingdao into several stages for both the software engineer and the three women. At each stage, the brokers switched cars to thwart any attempt to track them using facial recognition or other surveillance technology.
Mr. Chun asked the software engineer and Ms. Lee for photographs of the head and descriptions of the clothes they would wear if they slipped out of the apartments they were being held captive in.
He asked the brokers to send pictures and license plate numbers of the cars they would use to pick up the North Koreans. He exchanged the details with everyone and put the plan into motion.
“It’s all clear. I’m leaving now. I’m putting on my clothes now,” the software engineer texted Mr. Chun shortly before fleeing.
Tracked and recorded
Mr. Chun’s operation began to unravel when the traffickers took the software engineer not directly to Qingdao, but to a home in northeastern China’s Jilin city, making another unplanned stop along the way.
After ushering the software engineer into the house, the realtors contacted Mr. Chun asking for extra money to buy him food, new clothes, and shoes.
The next morning, the brokers left the house to pick up the three women in Baishan when they were stopped by the police in Jilin. The police also arrested the software engineer.
The software engineer had been reported missing by his North Korean escort, and the car the brokers used to pick him up had been identified on a surveillance camera during the unscheduled stop, according to what Mr. Chun was told by relatives of the brokers , they are now in prison, he said.
Mr. Chun hurried to find several brokers to get the three women back before it was too late.
“The brokers will wait for you at the designated place at midnight. It’s a purple car,” he texted Mrs. Lee. He told her to hold an umbrella in her right hand so the realtors could identify her.
In early February, the new brokers took the three North Korean women to the hiding place in Qingdao. But a few days after arriving, her kidnapper’s husband, the Chinese police officer in Baishan, broke down the door and stormed into the house with thugs, Mr. Chun said, saying the women called him amid the chaos.
One of the brokers must have made a deal with the husband to exchange the three wives for a monetary reward, Mr. Chun said. “There is no other explanation,” he said.
The software engineer is now in a Chinese prison waiting to be repatriated to North Korea, Mr Chun said. In the north, those who have tried to flee south become prison camps or worse.
Mrs. Lee’s whereabouts remain unknown.
“I’ve been helping North Koreans for 23 years,” said Mr. Chun. “I’ve never felt so sad and helpless.”
