China must work with South Korea to solve the refugee issue

The long-festering problem of North Korean refugees in China is threatening to get out of hand, despite Chinese authorities' efforts to control their inflow in border cities like Yanji, Tumen and Hunchun. The problem is not so much that of China failing to stem the tide - it has largely succeeded in reducing the number. Rather, it is the growing desperation of those already in China trying to escape to South Korea or any other third country by whatever means possible.

The recent incident in which Chinese police rounded up 78 illegal refugees in various places, including the port of Yantai in Shandong, shows how alarming the situation has become. According to international relief workers, dozens were caught shortly before boarding a fishing boat for travel to South Korea and Japan by way of the Yellow Sea. They were prepared to repeat the daring example of the Vietnamese boat people, who risked their lives to reach shores of freedom in the 1970s.

Certainly, this is not the kind of advertisement that China needs. By failing to provide adequate protection under international law, China is seen as a large nation but hardly a responsible power living up to global standards of behaviour. It considers border-crossers to be people in search of food, not political refugees fit for protection under the UN charter.

North Korea blames the outflow of its people on South Korea and the US, saying this is a conspiracy to bring down the regime of leader Kim Jong-il. South Korea is torn between humanitarian obligations and its policy of diplomatically engaging the North.

The situation only exacerbates the condition of refugees, whose number in China is estimated to be anywhere between 30,000 and 300,000. Despite their number, politically they are non-persons, a phantom group that exists only as a statistic. Mostly unseen and unacknowledged, they roam all over China looking for safe havens, sometimes walking thousands of kilometres from the northeastern border to China's Kunming province, next to Vietnam. If nothing else, theirs is a saga of extraordinary tenacity.

After eight years of an unending flow of North Koreans coming across the border, China can no longer pretend its policy of repatriation can halt them. In the past few months, thousands have been rounded up and sent back under a 1986 protocol signed with the North requiring repatriation of 'counter-revolutionaries' and unauthorised border-crossers.

Back in the North, first-time escapees are mostly set free; but repeaters are banished, often with their entire families, to Soviet-style concentration camps. Those who come into contact with missionary workers from the South are executed, to prevent them from sowing the seeds of revisionism.