The Emperor Far Away

by David Eimer

  Granny was waiting for us at the end of the path that led to her house, a tiny, smiley, bright-eyed widow standing by a neatly stacked pile of firewood. She was excited at seeing a fresh face, showing me the herbs and vegetables she cultivated in a small plot outside her front door. ‘I’ve only met Russians before, never a westerner,’ she told me. She was seventy-two and first-generation Chinese, born in Heilongjiang to Korean immigrants, but her Mandarin was worse than mine and she spoke in Korean.

  Inside, the two-room house was spotless and compact, the walls covered with photos of her children and grandchildren, some of whom were living in South Korea. The house was heated in the traditional Korean way: a wood-fired oven under a raised platform, known as a gudeul, which covered much of the main room. We sat on it to eat a delicious lunch of soybean soup, cold fish, beef and rice, along with Granny’s homemade kimchi.

  She had moved to Yanbian after her marriage. It was the time when China was in the throes of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s catastrophic attempt to transform a then overwhelmingly agricultural country into a modern industrialised economy in a few short years. As harvests shrank because people were taken off farms to work in backyard factories, two years of severe drought further reduced the amount of food being produced.

  Officials doctored the grim statistics, too scared to report the truth. Mao’s egotistical policy of continuing to export grain to Russia and Africa, in an effort to convince the world of the superiority of the Chinese communist system, only accentuated the food shortage. Instead of turning China into a manufacturing nation, the Great Leap Forward resulted in up to forty-five million people dying in one of the world’s worst famines.

  ‘It was 1959. I worked on the farm, growing corn and some vegetables. But we had no rice or meat to eat,’ recalled the grandmother. ‘Life was so hard then and in the early 1960s that there was no time to do anything but survive. From sunrise to sunset we worked on the land and often we would work into the night. We were always hungry. Some people died of starvation, or they were so hungry they ate weeds that caused them to die.’

  Death denuded the village of many of its residents during those years, but some just disappeared. ‘At that time, many people left. They ran away to North Korea. It wasn’t just that they had more food there, but because it was their country. They are regretting it now,’ said Granny with a grim chuckle. ‘I never thought about it. I was born here and feel totally Chinese, even if I don’t really speak Chinese and all my family and friends are Korean.’

  Since the early 1990s, the movement of people across the Chinese–DPRK border has been exclusively one way as North Koreans escape for Dongbei. But before then it was almost entirely in the opposite direction. Unknown thousands of China’s Koreans returned to North Korea during the Great Leap Forward, and more followed once the Cultural Revolution started. Some may have been motivated by a desire to return to their ancestral homeland. Most, though, left because until the mid-1980s North Korea was a more prosperous place than China.

  Propped up by China, the old Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe, North Korea had access to both cheap imports and markets for its goods. The fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 and the demise of the USSR in 1991 brought that support to an abrupt end, just as China was opening up to the world. Around the same time, the DPRK started investing huge amounts of money in developing nuclear weapons, a further drain on its dwindling resources. Unable to pay for oil imports, North Korea’s economy collapsed and people started to go hungry.

  From 1992 on, a famine began to take hold in the DPRK that was as devastating as the one Mao had inflicted on the Chinese countryside during the Great Leap Forward. It lasted for almost a decade and was especially severe in the north of the country, the regions bordering Dongbei, resulting in an estimated 100,000 North Koreans fleeing to China. Granny remembered it well. ‘About ten to fifteen years ago, there were people coming to the village from North Korea. None come now – they know it’s too dangerous because the police will find them and send them back.’

  Her reaction to the North Korean refugees was a mix of sympathy and fear. ‘I felt very sorry for them and I wanted to help them, but I was too scared. I was afraid they would be a burden,’ she confessed. ‘We never told the police there were North Korean people living here, but they always found out. There was one woman married to a man from the village and they came and sent her back. We got into trouble if we helped them.’

  Nearby Tumen houses a detention centre where captured North Koreans are held before being repatriated to the DPRK. It lies north of the bridge across the Tumen River that divides Tumen from the North Korean town of Namyang. The DPRK is far closer to China here than it is in Dandong, but the view from the river bank is no more inspiring. Namyang is a series of decaying apartment blocks separated from each other by wasteland, criss-crossed by a few roads mostly empty of traffic. Behind the town, barren brown hills rear up and just like Sinuiju, the town opposite Dandong, there is little obvious sign of life.

  Chinese tourists can pay to be escorted halfway across the bridge that leads to the DPRK to take photos. I was waved away when I tried to buy a ticket. There are a few souvenir shops on the river bank, selling badges of the various Kims, as well as North Korean stamps and cigarettes. Wavering over buying a pack of DPRK smokes, wondering if they were real or Chinese-produced fakes, I noticed a middle-aged woman eyeing me curiously. I asked her if they were genuine and she looked at them and nodded.

  Mrs Lee was a primary school teacher in Pyongyang with alarming bridgework on her upper teeth. Dressed in what was the height of fashion in rural China two decades ago – a pink windbreaker, black polyester trousers and pointy black shoes – she was about to cross back into North Korea after visiting her aunt, who was married to a Chinese Korean. Mrs Lee told me I should come to Pyongyang. ‘It’s a better place than Tumen.’ I wasn’t so sure. Tumen is tiny but at least I was allowed to walk around it unescorted.

  Both her children were in the army and she proudly showed me her royal-blue DPRK passport. Mrs Lee was a true believer – faithful to her country and leader and no fan of China. ‘The country is too free and the people are too free. It’s because there are so many countries with such free ways that we are poor,’ Mrs Lee said sternly. Christina, who was translating, began to look bewildered. ‘In North Korea, healthcare and education is free. You can go to the hospital with no money and they will still treat you. Even if there are just three children in a village, there will be a teacher for them. It’s not like that in China.’

  Telling her that the reason there might only be three kids in a village could be because all the others had died of hunger or disease seemed a little harsh. I compromised by saying that surely there is more to eat in China than there is in the DPRK. Mrs Lee paused before replying, as if she was trying to remember her lines. ‘Nowadays, we have enough food. We’ll have even more soon.’ She made it sound like a warning.

  Before Mrs Lee left, she tempted me again to visit North Korea. ‘The young people are all good at singing and dancing.’ I had a momentary flashback to my time in Yunnan, and the beautiful Dai girls performing their fake dance rituals for Han tourists in Jinghong. Conjuring up images of sultry and sexy North Korean women seducing me with a glance proved impossible, though. It was too much of an imaginative leap, with desolate Namyang over my shoulder and the desperate inmates of Tumen’s detention centre down the road.

  23

  Spreading the Word

  Christina had a secret life. I had noted the wooden cross around her neck when we first met, but in China some people wear them as a fashion accessory rather than as a sign of religious devotion. Then one day Christina asked me what I believed in and I realised that being a Christian was the most important thing in her life. Answering such a deceptively simple question was not easy. I settled for saying that I didn’t know if there was a God and maybe I’d find out later.

  She is one of many Christians in Yanji. Although they probably now
outnumber the eighty million-plus members of the CCP, followers of Christianity are not spread evenly across China. Instead, they tend to be concentrated in regions which were exposed to foreign influence before 1949. Many of Yunnan’s hill tribes were converted by missionaries who slipped across the borders from then British Burma and French Laos. Missionaries were active in Dongbei and neighbouring Korea too, and Yanbian and Jilin Province have always been strongholds of the faith.

  Yanji is full of churches, mostly Protestant but some Catholic, and nor are they small or tucked away out of sight like many houses of God are in China. The largest is an imposing redbrick building in the centre of town by the banks of the Buerhatong River. Two giant white crosses are etched into the brick, visible from hundreds of metres away. The main Catholic church is less impressive, a grey pebbledash affair in the east of Yanji, but its tall steeple still overlooks the surrounding apartment blocks.

  Those churches are official ones, part of a network across the country controlled by Beijing. The CCP is an atheist organisation and dislikes religion to the point where none of its members are allowed to follow one. But it is more suspicious of Christianity than any other creed, principally because it perceives it as an alien, western faith. Even Islam raises official hackles only in Xinjiang, and that has more to do with it being a rallying point for the Uighurs than its origins overseas.

  Catholicism is particularly problematic, because the party believes the allegiance Catholics owe the pope is a direct challenge to its authority. Beijing severed diplomatic ties with the Vatican in 1951 in an effort to assert its control over China’s Catholics, ordering them instead to join the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. That organisation does not recognise the primacy of the pope, and instead it is the CCP which anoints China’s Catholic bishops. Since 1954, Protestants have been monitored in similar fashion.

  The majority of Christians, though, perhaps as many as three-quarters of them, do not attend the churches overseen by Beijing. Instead, they worship in house churches: underground gatherings of the faithful who meet in apartments, empty offices or the back rooms of restaurants. Christina did the same. Her house church, which Christina referred to as a ‘family church’, was made up of university students and recent graduates, all of whom were ethnic Koreans.

  Neither of her parents knew that Christina was a Christian. ‘My dad would probably be angry,’ she said. ‘He’d say I should be concentrating on studying. I’ll tell them after I graduate.’ She was taking a risk too by attending a house church. Tolerated to some extent by the authorities, they are also regularly raided and their pastors arrested and members of the congregations detained.

  I had been to a house church in Beijing and was keen to see Christina’s. She wasn’t sure I would be welcome but after consulting with her preacher, it was agreed I could meet him and some of Christina’s fellow worshippers in a neutral setting. Early one evening, I joined them in a café near Yanbian University. The pastor was in his late twenties, short with thick round glasses. He told me to call him Mr Kim. Two young women, both fellow students of Christina’s, were with him.

  None had been brought up as Christians. In the past, Christianity tended to run in families in China and was more prevalent in the countryside than the cities. Now, urban young people are discovering religion for themselves and large numbers of them are university educated. At the house church I visited in Beijing nearly all the congregation were under forty and many were students or new graduates.

  Mr Kim traced his conversion back to his first year at college. ‘I started to think about the life I was going to live. I thought if I buy an apartment for my parents, I’ll have to save for twenty years. Then if I want to buy one for myself, I’ll have to save for another twenty years. I’d be sixty and would have spent my life just working to buy two homes. I thought it was a depressing, meaningless way to live. I talked to one of my friends about it and he suggested I go to church with him, one of the official ones in Yanji. I felt more peaceful after the service. That’s when I started to realise there was more to life than work and money.’

  Like her pastor, Christina was dissatisfied with the prospect of an existence centred only on her material needs. ‘It was when I went to university that I realised I really wanted to believe in something. A lot of people don’t want to believe in anything, or they just believe in the CCP, but that wasn’t enough for me. I knew when I was eighteen that just studying, playing and going to karaoke didn’t make me happy or bring me any peace,’ she said.

  For the CCP, the rise in faith among educated people like Christina, the daughter of a party member, is an unwelcome development. Not only are they the demographic it traditionally recruits its future leaders from, but their turning to religion is proof of a widening disillusionment with the party’s credo of the last two decades, which has been to allow people to make money as long as no one questions its right to rule. More disturbing still, the increasing number of Christians is a challenge to Beijing’s unspoken assertion that there is no need for God when the CCP already acts as if it is one.

  Although Christina and her friends were breaking the law by attending a house church, it didn’t concern them. ‘Every church has its own vision and I was called to this one,’ stressed Mr Kim. ‘In this region there are lots of churches so Christians have a choice, but in many parts of China a house church is the only option. We don’t worry about the police because we’re not such a big church. If there are less than thirty of you meeting regularly, you’re normally OK.’

  Far more dangerous is how Mr Kim and his congregation believe it is their duty to evangelise. It is one thing to be a Christian in China, but proselytising verges on what the CCP regards as organised dissent. Beijing has a longstanding antipathy to western missionaries – who are viewed as yet another example of outsiders meddling in China’s internal affairs – and is equally unhappy with its own citizens doing similar work. ‘It’s OK for me to talk to a fellow student about Christianity, but we’d get into trouble if we did it on a big scale and started handing out Bibles,’ said one of Christina’s friends.

  Despite the risks, they still roam across Jilin Province trying to convert people. ‘We went to Tonghua for ten days earlier this year to spread the gospel. We just walked the streets, stopping people and trying to talk to them about God,’ said Christina. ‘We’d say “have you heard of Jesus Christ?” Lots of people said “no” or “I’m not interested” or “I don’t believe”. But a few people were prepared to stop and listen. It’s about spreading the word, sowing the seeds of faith.’

  One of Christina’s classmates had gone as far as Ningxia, the Hui autonomous region in the north-west, to seek converts among the local Muslims. Mr Kim had come close to arrest when he travelled to Guizhou in south-west China to preach to people from the Miao minority. ‘I supported myself by teaching, and I’d meet some of my students after school and tell them about God. I got into trouble when the parents of one of the students found his notebook with his thoughts about the Bible. He was a policeman. Luckily, I’d already left Guizhou but now I can’t go back. I’ve been much more careful since then,’ he said.

  Rather than traditional Catholicism or Protestantism, it is evangelical Christianity which is surging in popularity in China. Many house churches are similar to the Pentecostal churches found across the Bible Belt of the USA, where worshippers raise their hands to heaven, cry ‘Hallelujah’ during sermons and pray aloud for the Holy Spirit to enter them. It is a tradition that has also taken hold in South Korea which, along with the Catholic Philippines, is the most Christian of all nations in Asia.

  But long before Seoul became known as a spiritual centre – the home of the extraordinary Yoido Full Gospel Church with its million-strong congregation – Pyongyang was the heartland of Korean Protestantism. The many missionaries who came to the north of the still undivided Korea in the late nineteenth century met with such success that in 1907 Pyongyang was dubbed the ‘Jerusalem of the East’. It was a city o
f churches, and almost a third of its population were Christians.

  They included Kim Il-sung’s parents. His mother and father were both devout Protestants, and his maternal uncle was a pastor. But when Kim became president of the new North Korea he launched an all-out assault on Christianity. It was reviled as an American import, its ministers and priests no more than CIA-backed Fifth Columnists out to subvert his glorious regime. Soon after the end of the Korean War in 1953, North Korea’s churches were burned down and an estimated 100,000 Christians were imprisoned in the DPRK’s notorious gulags.

  By then, many of the north’s Protestants had fled south to play a major role in turning South Korea into the stronghold of evangelicalism it is today. Now South Korea sends out more missionaries than any other nation apart from the United States. Yanbian is one of the principal regions they operate in. Not only is it home to almost a million ethnic Koreans but it is adjacent to the DPRK, the country whose people were once such fervent believers until their devotion was forcibly transferred to its new leader – a twisted exorcism performed by the state, one that mimicked the way Mao was presented as a godlike figure to the Chinese.

  With so many Chaoxianzu working in South Korea, or having relatives who do, awareness of Christianity is far higher among Yanbian’s Koreans than elsewhere in China. But more often than not, it is missionaries who reel them in. Many work as teachers, just as Mr Kim did during his time in Guizhou. A high proportion of the members of his house church were converted once they started college. ‘Some of my lecturers at university are South Korean and they are all Christians,’ said Christina. ‘God and Christianity is a big part of South Korean culture now, and so we always talk about it.’