The air on the Chinese side of the Tumen River felt no different from the North Korean side—just as cold, just as crisp—but for a young woman named Ji-young, it was the breath of a perilous, fragile hope.
She wasn’t heading south to Seoul’s promise of guaranteed freedom and citizenship; her path lay North, across the border into China. For Ji-young, like many others, the decision was not a choice between a repressive state and a democratic one, but a stark difference between immediate starvation and the potential for life-sustaining work. Her primary motivation was purely economic survival and the ability to send remittances back to her family.
To the outside world, the journey to South Korea via a third country like China, Cambodia, or Thailand is the clear path of “defection.” But China, with its long, porous border, represents a closer, more immediate, and often more manageable first step. Up to 200,000 North Koreans and their children may reside in China, many without legal status, as of 2024.
Ji-young’s hope, what she sought in China, was multi-layered and desperate:
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Work and Money (The Immediate Hope): China, with its thriving economy, was a place where she could secure low-paying jobs—in agriculture, catering, or factories—jobs that would allow her to save a small amount of money. This money, sent back home, could save her younger brother and aging parents from the pervasive hunger that had tightened its grip on their province. The economic contrast between North Korea’s tanked economy and China’s development was the powerful “pull” factor.
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Safety and an Invisible Existence (The Illusion of Hope): She hoped to blend into China’s vast population, especially in the northeastern provinces where the Korean language was spoken by the ethnic Korean community. This was the hope of “hiding”—to be one of the “thousands or tens of thousands of North Koreans” the Chinese government allowed to “hide” in their country.
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The Stepping Stone (The Ultimate Hope): For some, China is just a transit country, the first difficult leg of the journey to South Korea. Once financially stable, or through the help of a broker, they would continue the dangerous underground railroad through Southeast Asia to eventually seek asylum in Seoul.
What China Looked Like to Her (The Harsh Reality):
China, however, was not the haven she wished for; it was a treacherous purgatory.
To the Chinese government, Ji-young was not a defector or a refugee fleeing political persecution, but an “illegal economic migrant”. This is China’s official, long-standing policy, one that it explicitly rejected changing during its 2024 Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council.
The specialized knowledge that shadowed Ji-young’s steps was the terrifying, up-to-date reality of forced repatriation:
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The Constant Threat of Arrest: She knew that she could be apprehended and deported at any moment. As of late 2025, Chinese authorities have shown “no letup” in this practice, forcibly returning at least 406 people to North Korea since 2024, and over 1,000 since 2020. These returns have included mass repatriations of detainees from provinces far from the border.
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The Risk of Trafficking: As a woman, she was particularly vulnerable to sex trafficking and forced marriages to men in rural China—a brutal reality for many North Korean women.
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The Fear of the Return: Most terrifying was the knowledge of what awaited her if caught. Repatriated individuals face a high risk of torture, imprisonment, sexual violence, forced labor, and even execution back in North Korea, where they are labeled “enemies of the state” for the crime of leaving.
Ji-young walked into China not seeking a political paradise, but a temporary pocket of air to breathe, a chance to earn a meager sum, and the hope that her invisibility would last long enough to save her family. Her pursuit of asylum was a gamble where the stakes were not merely a better life, but survival itself, with the odds heavily stacked against her by the two states that controlled her fate.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
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