This article was originally posted on Foreign Policy.
China plays a crucial role in sustaining North Korea’s horrific human rights record.
The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics were notable for the absence of Western politicians and officials, the result of a diplomatic boycott to protest China’s reprehensible treatment of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group in its Xinjiang province. What the boycott ignores is that Beijing is complicit in North Korea’s horrific human rights abuses as well. Because the two countries’ abuses are inextricably linked, it is essential that U.S. North Korea policy focuses on China’s role in sustaining the crimes of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s family against the North Korean people.
For example, China is complicit in the fates of thousands of North Koreans who try to flee across the 882-mile border between the two countries each year. Escapees travel an arduous path and, in most instances, start their journey in China before eventually settling in a friendly country, such as South Korea or the United States. Yet Beijing is not a safe haven for defectors fleeing the brutal Kim regime. China does not grant North Koreans refugee status, treating them as economic migrants instead. If Chinese authorities discover them, they are forcibly deported back to North Korea.
China has also done little to crack down on the human traffickers who prey on North Koreans. These traffickers, as the U.S. State Department described last year, “lure, drug, detain, or kidnap some North Korean women upon their arrival” in China. Soma are promised employment, but the State Department warned that women and girls are subjected, to “physical abuse and sexual exploitation by their traffickers, forced into commercial sex in brothels or through internet sex sites, or compelled to work as hostesses in nightclubs or karaoke bars.” North Korean women are also sold to Chinese men in forced marriages. If China repatriates the women to North Korea, they are subjected to harsh punishment, including separation from their children, forced abortions, or even death. Through satellite imagery and victim testimony, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) confirmed that around 800 women forcibly repatriated by China were being held at Kyohwaso No. 12 in Jongo-ri, a correctional or reduction center in northeast North Korea.
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Anthony Ruggiero is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the U.S. National Security Council during the Trump administration.
Greg Scarlatoiu is the executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
