The Emperor Far Away

by David Eimer

  She spoke decent Chinese and was clearly used to westerners turning up and trying to pump her for tales of life inside North Korea. Like the businessmen in Dandong, the waitresses in the official DPRK restaurants are loyalists, otherwise they wouldn’t be in China at all. She soon became impatient with my attempts to make conversation, shoving a menu in front of me and brusquely telling me to hurry up and order.

  I chose bibim naeng myun: cold buckwheat noodles served in a spicy soup – North Korea’s one notable contribution to world cuisine. The waitress marched off, leaving me alone in the restaurant apart from two middle-aged ladies who were downing glasses of songak, a white spirit that is the North Korean equivalent of China’s baijiu. I asked where they were from, already knowing the answer. They said almost nothing but did press a couple of glasses of songak on me, a drink as vile as baijiu. Then, like every other North Korean I had met, they disappeared, leaving me to my noodles.

  Dandong’s North Koreans were not proving to be a profitable source of information. I hadn’t expected them to be. They are too tied to the regime to be anything but circumspect when a foreigner accosts them wanting to talk. Nor does Pyongyang trust even those people it allows out of the country. Agents from the State Safety and Security Agency, the DPRK’s intelligence service, criss-cross Dandong keeping a watchful eye on their citizens. Any North Korean spotted talking to a westerner would instantly arouse suspicion and face uncomfortable questions, or worse, on their return home.

  Only those who have escaped the regime are willing to talk about what really goes on inside the DPRK. It is the refugees to China, the thousands of people who each year flee the food shortages and the crushing control over their lives for Dongbei, who know better than any official or businessman what is happening outside Pyongyang. But Dandong is not the place to find them. Security on both sides of the border here is tight; the area around the city is the one part of the frontier that is fenced. The Yalu, too, is far too wide to make crossing it without a boat feasible.

  Instead, most refugees and defectors from North Korea arrive further north in Jilin Province. Not only is the Tumen a far narrower river than the Yalu but the borderlands of Jilin are part of the Korean Autonomous Prefecture, the heartland of China’s ethnic Koreans. Every North Korean knows he or she will find people there who can speak their language, and maybe even a relative. The peak times to cross the border are in June and July before the summer rains arrive, when the Tumen is easy to wade across, or in the deep winter when it freezes and escapees can walk to China.

  There is one spot near Dandong where crossing from North Korea looks easy. It lies in the shadow of the Great Wall, once the dividing line between Han China and the Manchu empire. Twenty kilometres north-east of Dandong, a steep stretch of Ming dynasty-era Wall known as the Tiger Mountain Great Wall runs parallel with the border with the DPRK. From the top of its heavily restored watchtowers, you can gaze down on North Korea.

  Like the view across the Yalu River in Dandong, the prospect offers little insight into the country. A treeless expanse of muddy land runs towards far-off hills and is empty save for a few houses and a larger building that is a barracks for frontier guards. But if you descend from the Wall, scrambling down its sides, you reach a point where the Yalu River narrows dramatically. Now North Korea is just ten metres away and the partially collapsed border fence appears in close-up. Continue walking to the left and the river tapers still further until the DPRK is right in front of you.

  Known to the Chinese as yibukua, or ‘one step across’, it is a mere long jump to North Korea from here. I wanted to leap over the water just so I could set foot on its soil. Adding to the temptation was the lack of any visible guards in the vicinity. But I knew soldiers were near by, ready to emerge from their hiding places should I do so. Yibukua is far too obvious a route out of the DPRK and no North Koreans escape their bleak lives this way. I turned back. Some borders are not meant to be crossed.

  22

  The Third Korea

  The bus to Yanji was half full, its other occupants Chinese Koreans returning to the capital of their homeland. We ran roughly parallel with the Yalu River and then the Tumen past farms and through small towns for fourteen hours, until I was deposited outside Yanji’s train station just after dawn. It was November and much colder than in Dandong. From here on, I would be moving only north, and every day the temperature dipped lower as the frigid Dongbei winter clamped the region in snow and ice, while a bitter, freezing wind blew down from the Siberian plains.

  Yanji was still the same tightly packed mass of greying apartment and office blocks, divided by the Buerhatong River, I had encountered on previous visits. But if Yanji looks like a typically undistinguished third-tier Chinese city, it feels very different from one. The first hint of its dual nature is the fact that the street signs are in same-sized Chinese and Korean characters. They are symbolic of the way Yanji’s 400,000 people are divided almost equally between Han and ethnic Korean, and how they coexist in a far more amenable atmosphere than is normal for Chinese and minorities in the borderlands.

  There is no sense that the city is segregated, as Lhasa and Urumqi are rigidly divided between Han and Tibetan or Uighur neighbourhoods. Stand at a bus stop in Yanji and you will hear Korean in one ear and Mandarin in the other until they seem to blend into one bizarre new tongue. And the longer you stay in Yanji, the more South Korean it feels. Restaurants offering Korean delicacies like dog meat outnumber Chinese eateries. The city has its own TV channels in Korean, along with newspapers and magazines offering the latest updates on celebrity scandals in Seoul.

  Security is unobtrusive here too. There are plenty of soldiers in the surrounding Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, the official Chinese name for the region, mounting guard along the nearby border with the DPRK. But in Yanji itself the main hint that the military is around are the jets from a nearby air-force base that scream over the city at regular intervals, coming in so low that the red stars on their fuselages are clearly visible.

  Yanbian, Yanji apart, is one of the least densely populated regions of China outside the high plateau of Tibet and the deserts of Xinjiang. Around 2.2 million people live in an area of Jilin Province about half the size of South Korea, which has a population of fifty million. After the packed cities and countryside of eastern and southern China, where every inch of land is utilised, the empty landscape is both a shock and a relief. Forty per cent of the residents of the prefecture are ethnic Korean, the rest Han, with the remaining million-plus Chinese Koreans mostly spread throughout the rest of Jilin, or in neighbouring Liaoning Province.

  My contact in Yanji was from Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning. Christina was tall with the narrow eyes that mark out Koreans from the Han. She was deathly pale, which I put down to the sun disappearing in the mid-afternoon during the long Dongbei winter, and a student at Yanji’s Yanbian University. Set up specifically to educate Chinese Koreans, Yanbian is unique among China’s universities in that some of its courses are not taught in Mandarin. Ethnic Koreans are allowed to study in their language as well, a privilege not granted to any other minority.

  When we met in a restaurant, Christina greeted me with a penetrating, disappointed gaze. ‘From your voice and emails, I thought you’d be younger,’ she said. No one in China, whether Han or a minority, is ever shy about commenting on the age or looks of a foreigner. Christina had been recommended to me because she spoke good English, as well as Mandarin and her native Korean. Her English was fine, but over barbecued beef, cold noodles and kimchi, the spicy cabbage that accompanies every Korean meal, she confessed that her Chinese was not perfect.

  ‘At home we speak Korean, so it’s much better than my Mandarin,’ she revealed. ‘Some Chinese Koreans want their children to speak Chinese first, but it really depends on your family. My grandmother can’t speak any Chinese and my mum’s is pretty bad, so we’ve always spoken Korean. I think I’ll do the same and teach my children Korean before Mandarin. It’s very much m
y first language. Even if I have to speak Chinese when I get a job, I’ll always talk to my friends in Korean.’

  Ethnic Koreans are known in China as Chaoxianzu, which translates as ‘North Korean race’, Chaoxian being the Chinese name for the DPRK. It is a way of distinguishing them from South Koreans, but also an accurate description of their origins because nearly all Chinese Koreans come from areas that are now part of North Korea. Christina’s roots were in North Pyong’an Province, the region across the Yalu River from Dandong. ‘My family came to China in 1930. It was a bad time in Korea then and they thought life would be better here. I still have relatives there, although I’ve never met or even spoken to them.’

  Christina’s great-grandparents were relatively late arrivals in China. Koreans started moving across the Yalu and Tumen Rivers from the 1860s as, in a brutal harbinger of what would happen in the DPRK in the 1990s, a series of famines struck what was then the north of the undivided country of Korea. Others left after 1910 when the Japanese invaded. Among the emigrants was the family of Kim Il-sung, the future founding father of North Korea. His parents moved to Jilin City in 1920 when he was eight, and Kim didn’t return home for twenty-five years.

  By the time he did, there were 1.7 million Koreans living in Dongbei. With Japan occupying Korea, almost all supported or fought for the CCP in its battles against the Japanese and the nationalist armies, including Kim Il-sung who would later wildly exaggerate his success as a guerrilla leader, despite having spent much of the Second World War living safely in the Russian Far East. Even after the defeat of Japan in 1945, most Koreans in China chose to stay on, with only half a million returning to their homeland.

  As Korea was plunged into the war that formalised the division of the peninsula into two separate countries, another Korea was being created. Beijing didn’t forget the sacrifices of the Koreans in Dongbei during the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War. They were given land and, in 1952, became one of the first ethnic groups to be granted their own official region. Now Yanbian is a third Korea, only one inside China. With its people hailing from North Korea but bound culturally to South Korea, it presages what a reunified Korea might be like.

  China’s Koreans enjoy advantages denied to other minorities, which only reinforces the sense that Yanbian is more like a mini-state than just another autonomous area. The most notable of these is the right to education in their own language at school as well as college. Unlike in Xinjiang, where the government has closed down Uighur-only schools, or Xishuangbanna and Tibet, where the only way to study Dai or Tibetan is to become a monk, the Yanbian government actually funds schools that teach in Korean.

  Nor are the Koreans as obviously subordinate to the Han as most other ethnic groups, being well represented among local officials. Apart from during the Cultural Revolution, when the Chaoxianzu suffered along with all the minorities, the Han have always maintained a mutually respectful relationship with the Koreans. On the surface at least, the Han approach in Yanbian seemed to me to be a model which if followed elsewhere would certainly reduce, while not eliminating, tensions between the Chinese and the most restive minorities.

  In Yanbian, there is no conflict between being Chinese by nationality and Korean culturally and that gives the Chaoxianzu little reason to resent the Han. Christina’s family epitomised the way they exist in a cosy space alongside the Chinese, speaking Korean, eating Korean food, following Korean traditions and watching South Korean soap operas. Yet her father, a teacher, is also a CCP member.

  Few Han care that the Koreans maintain their language and separate culture. ‘Some things are different with the Chaoxianzu,’ one Chinese businesswoman in Yanji told me. ‘The food obviously but also how they don’t think New Year is as important as we do. Weddings and birthdays are more important to them. I think maybe in the old days there were more differences because Han and Koreans never married then, but now they do. Actually, I think Korean men are quite handsome.’

  Like the Manchu before them, it is intermarriage which poses the greatest risk to China’s Koreans and to Yanbian’s status as the third Korea. With many moving away to the big cities of Dongbei where the Han are the majority, more and more are marrying Chinese. The number of ethnic Koreans is dropping anyway because they have a lower birth rate than the Han, even though as a minority they are not constrained by the one-child policy.

  Christina was under strict instructions to marry a fellow Korean. ‘My dad said our relationship would be over if I marry a Han guy,’ she said, giggling. ‘It’s because my sister married a Chinese.’ Christina, though, wasn’t happy with her father’s stricture. ‘I want to marry a Han man. They’re kind and do housework and drink less than Chaoxianzu men. I think Korean men feel they have to be the king. They want to provide for the family, but they don’t want to do the small things.’

  But it was her father who raised Christina, after her mother left for South Korea to work in a restaurant when she was eleven. ‘She stayed there for eight years and didn’t come back to China once,’ said Christina. ‘When she did come back, I cried because I didn’t think she was my mum any more. Eight years away was such a long time. I didn’t feel angry with her because I knew she did it to earn money for my university education. I just felt sad she’d been away so long.’

  Many ethnic Koreans leave China in search of better-paid jobs. At any time, one in ten Chinese Koreans are working overseas, mostly in South Korea but also in Japan. Obtaining a passport is easy for them – another sign of how trusted they are. Yet that freedom of movement is also contributing to their declining population because, inevitably, some of those migrant workers never return to Dongbei.

  Assimilation with the Han is why Koreans now make up only 40 per cent of Yanbian’s population, down from two-thirds when the prefecture was established. Many Korean schools are shutting down, both because there are fewer children to attend them and due to the fact that the offspring of Han–Korean couples tend to be raised speaking Mandarin and so are sent to Chinese schools. And with the Koreans increasingly spreading to other parts of Dongbei, or even further afield, a Korean education is now regarded as less useful than a conventional Chinese one.

  A highly emotive example of how the closing of Korean schools and mixed marriages are diluting Chinese Korean identity can be glimpsed on the football fields of Yanbian. Just as the Koreans are the only minority who still have their own education system, so they are the one ethnic group with a soccer team. Yanbian Baekdu Tigers FC started life in 1955 as Jilin Three Stars, and for much of its history was famous throughout China as one of the country’s top clubs. More than forty of its players have graduated to the Chinese national side, an astonishing number given how few of China’s people are ethnic Korean.

  ‘Football is like the calling card of Yanbian. Koreans are known in China for football in the same way that some minorities in Yunnan are known for singing or dancing,’ said former player Jin Guangzhu. ‘When I was playing, we’d pack out the stadium in Yanji. There’d be 50,000 people watching us. We all felt very proud when we were the number-one team in China. All the players were Chaoxianzu and we were the only minority to have our own football team, so we were really representing Yanbian and our people.’

  Those glory days are long gone. Yanbian haven’t won the Chinese championship since 1990 and are now marooned in the second division, attracting a crowd one-tenth of the size they used to draw. I met Jin Guangzhu in the concrete block of a building that is the administrative home of the Baekdu Tigers. Paint was peeling off the ceilings and walls of the unheated corridors, while a few men in tracksuits sat in offices smoking. Old Trafford it wasn’t.

  Slim and still fit at forty-three, Jin was a defender for Yanbian in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as representing China between 1993 and 1995. Born in Helong, a town south of Yanji close to the border with the DPRK, he believes the popularity of soccer in Yanbian is an expression of a wider, pan-Korean identity. ‘Football is the traditional game for Koreans,
whether you’re from North or South Korea or Yanbian.’

  He traced Yanbian FC’s decline to the way more ethnic Koreans are going to Han schools. ‘They don’t care about football in the way Korean schools do,’ he said. ‘It’s our biggest worry. If the young people go to Han schools then we won’t get the players, and then we won’t be a Chaoxianzu team any more. You know, there’s a lot of financial pressure in China now. Parents think their kids will get better jobs if they go to Han schools, so even if they are good at football their parents will stop them playing because they want them to study hard instead.’

  To make up the shortfall in numbers the club takes North Korean footballers on loan. ‘The DPRK sometimes offers us players and we’ll always sign them if they have good skills. They speak the same language as us, so they fit into the team very well,’ said Jin. ‘But what we really need is a proper sponsor, so we can make playing for Yanbian an attractive option for Chaoxianzu. At the moment, we can only pay the players 7,000 yuan [£700] a month.’

  Professional football players everywhere are usually from urban areas and Yanbian FC’s struggle to attract fresh talent reflects the divide between the cities and the countryside in the region. In Yanji, ethnic Korean children are going to Chinese schools and are much more likely to end up marrying a Han partner. But out in the rural areas, along the border with the DPRK, Korean schools still flourish and there are far fewer Han. The grandmother of one of Christina’s classmates lived in a village near Tumen close to the frontier with the DPRK. When she told me she was due to make a visit, I asked if I could come along.

  We caught a local bus to Tumen, travelling past fields where corn, the main crop in the area, had been harvested for the winter and then through hilly, thickly wooded country; the lack of people in Yanbian means much of the land has yet to be cleared for farming. From Tumen, it was a taxi ride down back-roads to the village, a collection of single-storey brick buildings populated entirely by Chaoxianzu and overlooked by an unsightly natural-gas plant.